TRIVIUM Guitarist Talks About Covering IRON MAIDEN

TheMetalWeb.com recently conducted an interview with TRIVIUM guitarist Corey Beaulieu. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

TheMetalWeb.com: Along with the standard edition of the album, you'll also be releasing a CD/DVD special edition of "Shogun" that includes three bonus tracks, behind the scenes footage and an instructional video. Can you tell us a little bit about the bonus tracks?

Corey Beaulieu: The CD/DVD comes out the same day the record comes out so you have a choice. You can either spend more money, get bonus tracks and a DVD, or you can get the normal standard record. It's two versions and you can pick and choose which one you want. It's pretty cool. It has some extra original tracks that we wrote for the record. There's an IRON MAIDEN cover that we did and then the DVD is a "making-of" of "Shogun", which includes all the studio stuff and talking with the band. It's very entertaining. You get a behind-the-scenes look that most people don't get to see. You get our perspectives of what we're looking to accomplish. I think people if they want the special edition, it's a really cool thing because the DVD came out really awesome and they also get three extra songs. If you're a big fan and you want as much as you can get, that's it! (Laughs)

TheMetalWeb.com: Just curious, what made the band decide to include the cover of IRON MAIDEN as opposed to other songs?

Corey Beaulieu: Near the end of our recording process, the record label called us up and said, we need extra songs for bonus tracks. We were like, oh, shit! We had two original songs that we had in our back pocket that we didn't decide to record because we didn't think they totally fit with the overall vibe of the rest of the songs. So, we said, fuck it, we won't record them. But, the label wanted more songs. So, we scraped those together and did some touch up work and tracked them. The label wanted three songs and we didn't have time to go through the process of trying to do an original song. Way back Kerrang! [magazine] had asked us to do the "Maiden Heaven" tribute album for IRON MAIDEN and we initially wanted to do it, but we said no because we were still in the process of doing pre-production for the record and we didn't have time to go into the studio to record a song and take time out of our schedule. So we kind of put that off. When we needed extra songs, we were like, "Fuck, let's do a cover song," and we had talked about that song previously. That's the song we had originally wanted to do in the first place. We through it together, rehearsed it, tracked it and then eventually the final product was included on the "Maiden Heaven" [tribute] thing they had. With the response from the song, we decided to throw it on the record.

TheMetalWeb.com: Musically, it was done flawless. I listen for everything. I'm very analytical with things. I pick things apart and you guys did it well. (Laughs)

Corey Beaulieu: We definitely try to do the song justice. We don't fuck around with much. We don't change much. We might add some things here or there because it's our little touch to it. But, we try to do an accurate representation of the song. Do it justice, but, also make it sound like us at the same time. We were listening to that song and making sure we had all the stuff that was in the song and then we threw in some layers and cool little extra stuff to beef the song up because the original recording quality of that song is not that great. We've heard the song so many times live from touring with them and how powerful and rocking the tune is, that we wanted to make it so when people heard it they say, holy shit, I didn't realize how bad ass that tune was. They'll get the modern day sound quality of it. We were stoked when we heard the final product of it. It's a great song.

Read the entire interview from TheMetalWeb.com.