STONE SOUR's ROY MAYORGA Says He And His Bandmates 'Have Natural Chemistry Together'

Russia's Darkside webzine recently conducted an interview with STONE SOUR drummer Roy Mayorga. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Darkside: How did the record process of [STONE SOUR's new album] "Audio Secrecy" go? I know that you were in Nashville…

Roy: Yeah, well… We all took some time; we were away from each other for the last couple of years and just wrote separately. Then we got together in December in Iowa for a brief rehearsal and then went to Nashville, as you know, [where we] did like a couple of months worth of pre-production, living in a house together which worked out great.

Darkside: So what are the perks of living in the studio? It was in the same house, right?

Roy: Well, not the recording studio, the demo studio, that was in the house. The perks: this is more convenient. Everyone's in the same place together and it's just more intimate, people get to know each other a little better and it's just a better environment for collaboration, I think, for any band. We gotta get along first. Luckily, we do and there's chemistry between all five of us, so it worked out great.

Darkside: How did it feel to get back together after the break, when Corey [Taylor, vocals] and Jim [Root, lead guitar] were with SLIPKNOT?

Roy: It was great. We basically picked up from where we left off three years before that. It's like we didn't miss a day. It's pretty wild, you know. We've been apart from each other for three years and then walked into a studio together and came out with this record. I mean, to me, it's pretty incredible. We didn't know each other from Adam when I first joined the band either, so that was a sign that we have natural chemistry together.

Darkside: What were your motives to be in a rock band?

Roy: Just growing up and listening to the bands like ZEPPELIN and THE WHO. When I was a kid, I was more instinctually a drummer. I wasn't really a drummer yet in my mind; I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. Though my parents knew what I was doing, so they kind of stirred me in the right direction. And my older brother, who is more of a rock 'n' roll guy in the family, he is 10 years older. He would just show me all these records, play them and he'd wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me, "Oh, LED ZEPPELIN and KISS are on TV at 11:30 at night," and I'd watch and he was like, "That's what you should be doing," and I was like, "Yeah, I wanna be that." So seeing it for the first time definitely propelled me into wanna really go for it and be a part of a rock band when I was older. I started playing in bands by the time I was 13-14, just punk rock, hardcore bands and then I just evolved from there. As I got older, I started getting into other things, I started getting back more into metal and rock and ended up here, you know — fast-forwarding 25-some years later.

Darkside: Nowadays many bands, no matter how popular they are, seem to prefer indie labels to major ones. But you seem to be quite happy with Roadrunner.

Roy: Yeah, Roadrunner has been a part of my life for 15-16 years now. I've been in four different Roadrunner bands, including this one. They've always done right by me and what I love about Roadrunner the most is that they're a world-class label. I mean, they are all over the world and the bands that they have, they really know how to market them everywhere. I think their bands have always had a better exposure than most bands coming out of the States that are on major labels. Because major labels focus on just the States and don't give a shit about the rest of the world. But now I think it's a little bit different, now they are starting to wise up to the situation that there is, you know, more out there, especially for not-so-bigger bands. Roadrunner was like the label that was more about not being indie, but being worldwide.

Read the entire interview from Darkside.