Garza Podcast - 182 - WARBRINGER | John Kevill: Thrash, Weapons, War History & Pressure of Succeeding

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Garza sits down in-person with John Kevill. Vocalist for the thrash metal band WARBRINGER. New album “Wrath And Ruin” out now! https://linktr.ee/warbringerSPONSORS:Sweetwater - https://imp.i114863.net/rnrmVBDistroKid - https://distrokid.com/vip/garza 30% OFF!CHAPTERS:00:00 - Morning Whiskey04:19 - Moving to Florida Country17:26 - Beginnings // Lineup Changes25:56 - Warbringer // Suicide Silence Tour30:17 - Younger vs Older Band Etiquettes31:58 - Lady Gaga37:30 - World History, Wars & Weapon Technology49:35 - Russian Gulag // Prison Industrial Complex53:18 - Writing Lyrics // POV Storytelling55:05 - Kurt Cobain, Commerce & Neoliberalism1:00:22 - Mental Health, Depression & Society1:04:57 - Pressure of Succeeding in Music1:10:12 - Medication, Anxiety & Imagination1:17:54 - Brave New World // Aldous Huxley1:22:03 - Atheism, Religion & Life After Death1:30:10 - Faith in Humanity // Human Atrocities1:36:13 - Class Warfare // Corporate Propaganda1:43:22 - Perspective // Social Anxiety1:45:21 - Art, Expression & Purpose1:46:49 - Best Thrash Band1:48:19 - Doubling Down

We can't fucking hop in this, dude. Let's just hop in, man. All just hop in, dude. Hop in. Well, cheers, Chris. Thanks. Hey, John, real quick. John from Warbringer, this goes out to you and still after seven records still being here, man.

So, congrats brother. Thank you very much. Cheers. Mm-hmm. That's whiskey. Yep, that's the morning whiskey right there. Let's go. That's whiskey at 1128.

Yeah. It's shotgun. It's whiskey from a shotgun-shaped bottle, which is pretty, you gotta love it, man. I know, yeah. So yeah, this is the machine head of whiskey that they literally just dropped like this week. Hey, Jake, can we, uh, any. All right, cool. Yeah, but it's a freaking good, uh, it's a good whiskey, man. Yeah, it was solid, dude. Nice. Yeah. Hell yeah. How's, how the guy's doing, man? Guys are doing pretty well. We're just starting up rehearsals and we're gearing up. We got like a sort of test run show in Oxnard. Everybody's kind of gathering and I just trucked across the country.

So I actually drove from Nashville to L.A. with the van and then landed at the studio and did four or five songs in rehearsal. It was some of these Rath and Ruin tunes that we haven't played before. So I'm just like drive for two days straight, land, start screaming. And I'm like, that's good prep right there. Yeah, man. That's a long drive, dude. I hit some crazy conditions. What happened?

Well, so around Amarillo, Texas, the whole I-40 was closed down because there was extreme high winds due to a fire, apparently. And so there was like four or five miles of Big Griggs just backed up. I ended up, it held me up like three, four hours. I ended up taking a detour like 50 miles to the north or something, made it to Amarillo and was able to keep going. And then in Arizona, like, there was actually a snowstorm, like, proper Nordic-looking blizzard and shit. There were trucks all turned off, and I even saw it, I shoot you not, maybe like 6.30 a.m.

I'm half delirious driving out of there. And there's, like, this majestic elk with a single horn, this huge fire. One horn, not one horn. Okay. Yeah, it's like, you know, you, Grace Killil, you could put him on an album cover if you're playing the right vibes of music. He's record. He was cool. Well, I mean, probably something more like grim and atmosphere.

Yeah, that, exactly. Whoa, I didn't see all the burning trucks like you got on there. Is this it? Yeah, it was crazy, though. You know, I couldn't go through Flagstaff. I had to go south, but when I was getting it, I was like making that juncture or whatever. It looked all snowy like that, minus the burning. Oh, fuck, dude.

But it was crazy. So I'm hoping I just used up all the bad weather on that run, and that means it's going to be smooth sailing while we actually do this lap around the USA that we're about to do. Good, man. When do you guys start? We start what we do like the warm-up show tomorrow, and then the tour proper starts, I think, Tuesday, March 18. Nice. And we go to April 12th.

We start in San Diego. We end in L.A. and we do a loop. I think we hit damn near everything except no New England, as everyone in the comments is letting us know. Of course. Yeah. They always let you know. They always let you.

You suck. Yeah, and we actually did go to Brazil this last year, but we still see come to Brazil. So there's no... Of course. Yeah. Never stops, man. What, uh, when does the, uh, when does the snow stop? The snow stop?

Yeah. I thought, I thought it was March, but I guess it's still going. I mean, Arizona is not a place I would expect to see snow on the pingo card, but it was there. Uh, we didn't get any snow where I'm at this year. Got like a little below freezing, but it's pretty warm. It's like warm. It's like warm. I don't know.

I'm in L.A. now, so it's like, I, this guy's sunny. I have no idea when it might. It might snow on the trip or not. Hopefully not too much. But if it does, it's nothing we haven't seen before. Yeah, so you're living in Florida, right? Yeah, so I moved from, I lived in L.A. pretty much my whole life, for those who don't know me. And then about two years ago, my wife and I, we took all the money we saved and we got the hell out of there.

And we moved to the center of nowhere, basically. Hawthorne, Florida, since about halfway between Tampa and Orlando and North Central Florida. We're about two hours from each hour and a half south of Jacksonville. and I straight up live in the swamp and it's glorious dude it's really the only thing that sucks with the bug bites which are legitimately horrible but everything we found this house

it had been abandoned for 13 years 13 years? The guy who built it had died his wife had died then he went off to like a nursing home and his two brothers apparently they were jerks or something and they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do with it so they fought over it and didn't do anything for like 13 years

and then finally said screw it sold it and so we got three acres like for like 300k something we could actually afford because we couldn't like afford a house LA where everything costs like twice that um we we could and uh we were able to actually get it it's three acres on a private lake and everyone else who lives there is freaking old so when we go out on the lake we're the only ones there and this lake's like a mile across it's like ours it's fucking beautiful so i we lucked out super hard i kind of i'm the kind of guy who only does like safe reasoned moves and this wasn't that So I just kind of went with what my wife wanted on this one, and it turned out so great.

But yeah, we have cats and chickens, and I shit you not, a wild bird from the forest, befriended our chickens and now lives in the coop with them. We unintentionally domesticated a guinea fowl, which looks kind of like if you're- What's a guinea fow? It looks kind of like if you took a flamingo. What's a guinea fow? It's like an ugly flamingo. It's like a flamingo that's the color of a cinder block.

So it's an ugly Flamingo It's kind of cute It runs surprise Is it? Yeah it's something like that Ours is a little lighter gray More like that one on the bottom left

Is how the one we got looked But I don't I'm like I was talking to my wife The other day I'm like I want to know What this bird's story is Because it would come out It lives in the coop now But for maybe five months or something

Every single day in the morning This freaking bird comes out of forest And just hangs out outside our chicken coop Because I guess it like wants to be best friends With our chickens And eventually it just started living with them, which is, so we unintentionally domesticated a wild bird, which is some like snow white and the seven dwarf shit to me, you know?

What do you feed it? Same stuff, the chicken, that we feed the chickens, which is like meal worms and like seeds and corn and stuff and whatever left seeds. Corn and kitchen leftovers, you know. Kitchen leftover, yeah, dude. Dude, at a time that have chickens when like eggs are fucking crazy right now. Our, okay, we had our hen, our prize hen is named anthrax and it's, And the rooster's name is thrasher.

You would, John. I would. Thrasher the rooster is a real thrasher. That guy is screaming every morning, and he's aggressive as fuck, even though he's like a really little guy. You know, he's great. But anyway, a fox was eaten our chickens, and we weren't, like, good at keeping them because we hadn't owned chickens, certainly not in L.A. So we lost, like, three of them. And my wife actually caught the fox holding anthrax the hen, like, like, ripped the scy. like ripped the skin off her neck.

We thought she was going to die. Really? And she came back and then after that got real fat and started laying an egg damn near every day. And they're good. She's like a prize-winning blue ribbon hen that one. We don't really, just her alone is like all the eggs we eat. And we got like three more that are younger that are growing up. And we're like, dude, we're not going to know what to do with all these eggs.

So I guess that's the solution to all the price of eggs, the economy stuff. Because we bought eggs like once or something since she started laying. And that's something we, wanted to do is kind of just like, you know, as you see on the record that we wrote here, I don't have a optimistic viewpoint of where society and civilization is headed. Wrath and Ruin out now. Wrath and Rewin Out now. Yeah, it's a bang.

It's a boy. But anyway, it's a dystopian, cynical, depressive record in a lot of the lyrical themes. And that's how I actually do feel. So that's why it's on the record. But trying to move out into the middle of the forest and, uh, grow plants and raise chickens and just like not hear as much mechanized stuff you know like you do in the city yeah like like like like the freeway right it's funny if you just if you sit if you sit where it's like especially in the morning like morning it's quiet you just listen like oh that's the freeway it's loud as fuck it's like one of the things I know is is you know when you do go like camping or hiking or whatever and someone will say like oh it's so quiet and peaceful here and and occurred to me that what they're noticing is that they're noticing is that you know that the absence of the constant mechanical hum. Yes.

And if you notice the absence and you notice like, oh, it's so nice to have that absence, then you can logically conclude that the presence of that is somehow bad for you, like mentally emotionally. I think it is. It must be, I definitely just feel a little better where I'm at now. You know, the bank still owns my ass and stuff at least probably for another 10 years or something. But like, I'll actually get out of it on the other end and that's really exciting. And the other exciting part, I gotta say my biggest concern, just fucking off to the other side of the country, was like my band and being able to continue music.

And so it's encouraging that like, well, I'm here. I'm in L.A. we're doing it. I can get my ass out here, even if it's, you know, by plane, trainer car. And we can book tours all the time and just keep doing it. And I can live in my forest and still play my metal. So I'm really happy about that. Dude, I've always wondered something I want to do. I mean, you're kind of living what I want to do.

I've always wanted to like kind of live somewhere where I could own chickens. I do want my own chicken coop. That's like a goal. I'm 39. So maybe like when I get like my own like house, you know, like how do those eggs taste? They're great. They're great. They're a little better.

You know, I like brown eggs, but in white eggs. Ours is a copper moran, which is apparently prize is fat as hell. And, you know, anthrax land good eggs all the time. Anthrax laying good eggs all the time. All the time. That's a quote. Nice. Yeah.

We had others. We had two chickens named Slayer that both were killed by foxes, so we're not going to name another one Slayer. But, yeah, we've been naming our chickens after. And we had a little tiny, silky hen with like a fro over its face that looked hilarious. And that one was called Skull Taker. All the chickens get brutal names. Yeah. Yeah.

How do you saw the problem with the foxes? Basically, the problem with the foxes was that we were a lot. letting the chickens out of their coop and not putting them in soon enough. So we're just a lot more vigilant on that. When it's starting to become dusk, in they go, and we don't let them out when we're not, like, out in the yard. So they stand, I was just letting them out all the time, partially because I wanted him to hang out with the freaking guinea fowl who we call Blockhead. They all have names. Yeah.

That a boy. And so we just wanted him to hang out because we were like, this is magical. A fucking wild forest bird is hanging out with our chickens. Let's let them do it. It's so cute. But that got a couple of them killed because I would just let them out and let them walk around the yard all day and sometimes while I'm like inside doing stuff and you can't do that apparently. There's just too much shit that wants to eat them. We got hawks, vultures, ospreys, foxes, raccoons, all this shit.

Our chickens do look delicious, I do have to say. Yeah, it's mostly just like we don't let them out unless we're out doing stuff. And we're always doing yard work. It's endless, dude. It's dense jungle, get your machete, get your pickax. Like, I'm clearing away to our dock right now. And it's thick, dense vines. I learned how to use a chainsaw.

Like, oh, yeah, it's cool. You got a chainsaw? Well, I don't have a lot of tools. We got a neighbor, old couple called Doug and Heather. And they were super nice. And Doug was in, like, construction building his whole life. So he's like a sage for anything I need to know about, like, my property or home. I'll usually hit him up.

And so in return, like, he borrower, you know, we borrow each other's shit. He's borrowing my a wheelbarrow all the time. And I got to borrow this chainsaw for a few days. And, you know, I cut down a whole bunch of stuff. And I'm splitting logs with an axe. It's pretty nice, dude. It feels nice to just do that stuff a little every day. Yeah, it's like, because when I was living in an apartment in L.A.,

like, sometimes you wouldn't want to leave too much or I wouldn't go further than, like, the grocery store on the corner or whatever. and yeah sometimes we go walking we're on a dirt road we'll go walking down it like in the middle of the night and we won't see a soul yeah it's great dude um it gets you know sometimes i'll spook myself because it's it gets dark in a different way out there that was scary me it did at first like when i at first at night when i was like there alone it was so goddamn like just utterly pitch black at night because we're not there's no city light yeah there's no it's really different it's really different like dark in the forest if the moon's not out it's straight up you can't see your

hand in front of you. We got some like solar lights up our driveway so like our immediate area is nice. Looks really pretty at night actually. But yeah, going down the road, you can't see shit. And we'll like sometimes even walk with the flashlight off and stuff just to try to get used to it. Because we know consciously that we're safe. Like there's nothing there. We think we may have had a bear in our yard once because we heard something real big moving. And you hear stuff there. But the critters don't want to screw with you. They just want to like stay away. So as long as you don't aggravate them, it's fine. Yeah, you don't. I'm always like if I'm like around like If it's dark, I'm around like a bush,

I'm like, especially, you're like, high. You're like, oh, there's like creatures in there. Oh, yeah. But they won't, but they won't fuck with you because you're like, to them, you're like big. Also, so I remember one time, too, I heard a rustling in the bush. It sounded like scary. I was getting kind of scared. It was all loud.

And it turned out to be my cat Zoomy. And so the thing I noticed from that, the thing I learned was the sound, the rustling in the bush sounds like the animal weighs 10 times as much as it does. Because I was thinking of the size, something like the size of a large dog or whatever. And it was my little freaking skinny black cat that made this, you know. And so every time I hear a Russell, I don't know what it is, I'm like, that thing probably is, like, way smaller than I think it is. But there's definitely stuff out there. We have armadillos, you know, like, it's kind of wacky, dude.

We caught a four-pound bass from the lake and learned how to cook it up. It turned out good. I found some way to, like, purify the fish. You soak it in, like, salt and apple cider. vinegar and cold water for like 20 minutes. If you're wondering, because our lake is muddy, you know, we're in Florida. So swampy as hell. Swampy Lake.

Yeah. And so, like, been learning a lot of that stuff. And I got a lifetime of learning that because basically my goal now is keep doing the band and like lock down this house. I want to stay there. I love it. The only concern I had for touring was like, damn, I really like being at home now. It's great.

You know, my wife and I are doing good. The land is pretty. I got every day that I'm not like working. I'm making progress on it. So that's like exciting. When we got there, dude, holy shit. I had to cut down like 40 trees or something just to like clear the perimeter, not even to get like make a path to the dock or, you know, any of the other place in our land.

Just to clear the side of the house. And I raked so many. I raked leaves for like two, three weeks straight. Like every day out there for hours, just piles of leaves. I made like a 50 foot. wall that became mulch and we like planted a bunch of shit in but like ungodly unbelievable amounts of stuff i have this burn barrel that was like it's just the fires of mordor going for days and days the first summer it was like really rough i got to say um but we kind of got it to a nice equilibrium now

um but it's cool it feels like because of we did all that work it's like this is ours and we really have that connection to it now so it was your wife's idea to move there yeah i don't get any crazy the idea is I'm always like the well here's the budget and we have to be practical and reasonable and like there's value to that kind of thinking too there's also value to taking leaps so you know it's kind of my inclination usually to like not change anything pretty much and so it's nice that I have someone who like push me in different ways and my role is to kind of rein her in so she doesn't do anything fucking crazy you know that's cool man it sounds like you really found your sounds like you really found your spot.

It's awesome, man. Congrats. I appreciate that, man. Yeah. I'm a band too. And dude, you're 39. I'm 38, so I hope you land such a thing, too. It's real nice.

And the encouraging part for me is that, like, here I am. I'm doing the band. It's happening. I didn't have to sacrifice it for it. You know, and I still talk to a bunch of my friends from L.A. too. So that's, and I end up here a fair amount thanks to the band, actually. Yeah. Yeah.

You're here now. Yeah. It's awesome, man. And so Warbinger started in 2004, correct? End of 2004. And what this looked like was I had basically just been getting into first rock music, then heavy metal. Then like, first it was like a mixture of like classic rock and like new metal, which I was in high school at that time. Oh yeah, yeah.

That was my gateway. No, like I did start with that. If you take like a certain era of new metal stuff from basically the time I was in middle and high school, I know all of it. Oh, wow. So, you know, we could, um, okay. And I still enjoy, a lot of the songs are catchy and well written. You know, I'm an old cross-your-arms and scowl-hesher, riffs solos or get out. You know, I am that guy and I play in the Thrasch fan.

But like, no, that was absolutely my gateway for it. And, uh, you know, it was really cool. My first big concert was Ozfest 2001. And that was like right in the midst of that. So it was like, it was like taproot, disturbed, Papa Roach, Lincoln Parks, and Slipknot, and Maryland Man. So it was like all of that, you know. Cool. So, oh, yeah, hey, it was a cool show, man.

You were there? Gradytown? Mudveen, Black Label Society. Yeah, it was cool. Yeah, Crazy Town was there. They were like the weakest live band of the day, I got to say, you know. But, no, Link and Bar, Popper Roch were really, I really liked those fans a whole lot. Still know, like, the records of that era, I know those records front to back, I do have to say, yeah.

Because that's just what I was into. And then from there, I kind of ended up, because, like, I saw Black Sabbath, and I don't already like known it um and then that's and then from there in my metal journey i kind of just went forward i went from my sabbath to your like maiden priest to your like thrash to your death and black and uh at the same time too i knew like this russian kid victor mccalovitch who i was in like some summer school program with and he was into metal like so we knew like painkiller and stuff and then he was like in all into like children of bodum and like winter sun and everything that shredded and he was like a kind of weird guy

he introduced me to John Locke in Newbury Park where he was from I was from like 30 minutes away and that's how Warbringer started and so I date the founding of the band at the end of 2004 to where I showed up at John Locke's house and we had like a line six practice amp

and no P... Of course we did yeah like everyone else and we had no PA and we did like peace cells and from Megadeth of course and people alive from creator, like guitar and vocal only with no VA. And that was the first stuff we ever played. He had been in one, John Locke's had played in one band so far,

which was like, I think something pop punk leaning called Aquatic Barn Owl. The name was funny, so it's stuck in my head. Cool name. Yeah, it was. And so it was my first band and his second, and we really started. Victor McHalsevich, I have to tell the story of how he got fired. We couldn't get him to practice one day because he had to mine, He said he couldn't do it because his runescape guild had told him he had to mine 10K lobster.

And the phrase mining lobster just cracks me up to this day because I just imagine someone like swinging a pickaxe at a rock furiously and a bunch of lobsters are flying out. And so, you know, that got him sacked. But he was the point of connection. He introduced his role in the band's history was he introduced me in the loxes and also Adam Carroll who lived in Ventura. and like the rest of us were kind of dorks and Adam Carroll like you know like smoked pot and rocked when he was younger and stuff so and like skip school and stuff and we were all like goody too the rest of us were all like goody two shoes suburban kids and so like Adam Carroll played our drums and that was the first Warbringer demo lineup right there we wrote like that was by end of 2005 we have a demo it took us probably like three four months of practice before we could finish one of our own songs we were like straight from the ground up. So we got signed really, yeah, that's the second EP right there. There's one, this one we can like kind of play by it. There was-Myspace.com slash Warbinger.

Oh, yeah, that we were in the, that's right. That was what was around there. So we used that. We put out our music there. Both of these we recorded in like a day. Oh, yeah, that's at a wall by the train tracks in Ventura. That's, we had, so for a minute, there was two bands running parallel. There was Warbringer, which was like me and the loxes.

And then Adam Carroll. and Adam Carroll on drums and Warbringer and Adam Carroll played guitar in a band that you can find on metal archives with a big yellow logo called Zombie which actually that's pretty good riffs man and that did a split with like another underground band Sacrificial Blood

and that was the only other band I've ever been in and eventually before we did that EP that you just had there the one by one the Wicked Fall which has total war on it and stuff I kind of was like well we have I wanted to take the two halves of the band kind of like make a stronger lineup out of it and so

That's what we did. Adam, like, quit for a while, and I kid you not, like, went off into the forest to live for a time. Like, that actually happened. Yeah, Adam quit twice. Adam, well, he didn't quit the second. So much as he had to, he had to go, like, care for his grandmother. Oh, okay. So it wasn't because he didn't want to do it.

The first time he was pissed at us, because I think he was, like, pissed off at me. What you do? I tried to, like, basically sabotage zombie by merging it into Warbringer. I think he was pissed about that. Oh, that's not a bad thing. I think it's for the best in the long run. time it was like that was his thing and warbringer was my thing so you could see how he wouldn't lie like i understand that he ended up uh and he ended up so in that picture you had amelio

host shit in uh in adam carroll's spot um and then adam carroll joined for war without end that's the line so war without end lineup was basically zombie and warbringer together it was those guys there with uh bottom right amelio host chate adam carroll was there and that was the first album um yeah so we had lineup changes you know even in the demo days. It's just something we had to juggle. Yeah, we all do. It's tough. Warbringer's had more than its fair share. We're almost spinal tap level. Yeah. And I think on one hand, I kind of bemoan that because I'm like, I've had to deal with way too much of this as the guy who's always there. Yeah. And on the other hand, I'm like, it doesn't matter. We're an unstoppable tank, dude.

We can... That's what's up, John. The band is there. That big freaking spiky logo. That's the soul. It's there. Whoever's there is we will not have anyone there who's not a solid player who doesn't believe in it who can't do it and so it the the band itself will like exist in some form or another as long as i'm there doing it uh yeah yeah yeah i was saying uh yeah it's cool to see uh yeah i was looking at like the lineup so i'm like it's really cool to see adam back and it's also cool to see uh carlos oh yeah back carlos i mean well adam and carlos we've kind of had a real stable phase since 2017 there's kind of like two eras in the band's history which you could call the century media era and the napalm records era but

There is a full, like, collapse of the band in between those two. Yeah. The locks is quit. And so, like, locked. Over the years? So, like, 2000, you know, records-wise, I guess, 2008 to 2014, first four albums is the first half. And then, Woe to the Vanquish to Present is the second half. So it's four and three right now.

Yeah, yeah, because if you don't know who Carlos Cruz is, he now plays drums also in Nails. Yes. Cool. A really awesome drummer. I got the jam with them a couple months ago. He's fucking sick, dude. Playing some slip-mot tunes. Oh, it was rad.

Sweet water. When the band needs anything for a tour or winning something here for the podcast, Sweetwater is where we go. You're the number one online retailer for pro audio and music instruments. So if you need any music gear fast, click the link in the description below so they know you came from this podcast. That's Sweetwater, your number one place for pro audio. instruments. I'm here to tell you about distro kid. The easiest way to get the music you or your band

wrote on all streaming platforms. Get your songs onto iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube music, and more. Check it out at distrokid.com slash VIP slash Garza and get 30% off your membership. That's distrokid.com slash VIP slash Garza. to get 30% off. Yeah, so I met you, John, in 2009. Yes. We did that tour together, and was it with Megadeth, correct? Well, that was later.

We did, so we toured with suicide silence in, I believe it might have been 2008. It was like our, I think it was actually the second Warbringer tour ever. We did like, okay, so our touring history, we did like a week when we got our record deal, We did it like a week on the West Coast with suffocation just because they really wanted us to get some experience, which we desperately needed. Yeah, yeah, of course. In 2008 and 2009, we just, like, launched off and basically weren't home those two years. Yeah, I saw it 2009. You played, like, 300 shows, and you guys pretty much almost killed you guys.

Yeah, we full-on had, like, fist fights in the band and everything. It was bad. We did it, though. And that made us into the life. man we are today. We just had the reps. But we had been a garage band that had, it was like my first band. I had no experience with touring. And it's just a whole, as you know, it's a whole different thing. Sure. The tour we did with Suicide Silence was our second tour ever actually, our second like full length tour. Because we did Exodus, Arsusus, goat horror, like very beginning

of 2008. And then after that was Nile and Suicide Silence. Yeah. And I remember the thing I remember, like, I remember this one kid outside. It was like somewhere in the Midwest. And he was like sitting outside talking shit about, he was there, he was suicide songs. He was sitting there talking about shit about Nile. He was like, I just want to hear breakdowns with no fucking guitar solos. And that quote stuck in my head.

Well, hey, you know, if that's what you like, that's what you like. And so at the time, I was just like that, you know, the vigor with which he said that, it was like, for me, I'm a fucking metal. So I'm like, no guitar solo. And Warfinger is there and it has 30 guitar solos. We have so many guitars. The total war has like five guitar solos. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. So that's it. That was a great tour though. And you know, you guys were cool as hell to us. And it was cool. And we brought like a variety of different metal styles to the people. I remember to the later, we played a show a bunch later with Nile.

And from the stage, I was like, it's an honor to open up for Nile and all their fucking gear. Because they wouldn't strike a single piece even though we're in this tiny place. I'm like, God damn it. Guys, you know, come on. Of course, man. Yeah. They were not always, like, the easiest to deal with from, like, a logistical level. Yeah.

That's the thing with just all these bands. It's like, dude, you're in a small club. Like, don't pretend. If you're at a festival, that's one thing. Play it there. But you're not. So, like, adjust, you know. Yeah, man, that was, it was, I will say now, John, it was very pleasant and an honor

to always share a little Casey Beard with you and always share. our Little Caesars. We had our Little Caesars hot and ready, aka what I started to call the Little Seasers Hot and Ready. If you get that from a club, we call that the fuck you meal. Yeah. We have decided you.

So we do owe you dinner on the writer, and we're going to fill that obligation as cheaply as possible, hot and ready pizza, you know, so. But you know what? I was 20, I fucking, I ate so much Lil Seasers. Lil Seasers and Papp's Blue Ribbon. That was like lived on that for at least a couple years, I would say.

Yeah, we would get Papp. and Little Caesars for a fucking mum straight. I had joined. And share it with three bands, three, four bands. Yep. Here's the bounty of the road. Paps and Little Caesars. You know, it was great, man.

And you guys were young, too. You guys were, like, blowing up then. So it was really cool to see, like, the reaction you guys got and everything. And, you know, it was just cool. It was, like, we got exposure to a bunch of different music, musicians, and learned a lot from the road there. So that was the first one we did. That was like OG van touring times. And then we did that Megadeth run later.

And I got to say, you guys were really nice to us on that because we were coming off. We were like still vanning it. And you guys had a bus then. And you guys would let us like cycle out sleeping on the suicide silence bus. And so we did appreciate that because we're like these guys don't, you know, you don't have to do that. You don't owe us anything. So we really appreciated that. We learned that from the Nile Tour or whatnot, how not the treat band.

Yeah. No, it's a weird thing. I don't know what it is, but everyone who's like, I guess now, 20 years later, who's below 40 years old, like gets it on that level. And everyone who's older than that doesn't. And I don't understand why. True. You know, not everyone, everyone, but most, yeah. Yeah, man.

Like, you meet any band below, like, a certain age, you know, I guess like millennials and younger or whatever. And they're like, yeah, you know, it's tough on the road. We all got to help each other. That's the collective thing. We got to, everyone's got to make the show happen. and you go like with older men's and they're like you know uh you're not allowed to do you know strict limitations on everything can't use my shower dude can't use my shower i got chewed out but i won't name names but i got chewed out by someone once because like i went and took a shower after i got off

stage in the backstage bathroom and the dude had to take a shit and it's like okay so he goes he makes me like get out of the shower and stand there by like not by like off this you could like see me from the crowd but there's like a walkway and people going by got stand there in my towel well this guy takes a shit, stinks up the room, and I gotta go back in. Man. I understand, like, okay, you know, using the public bathroom is not like ideal

if you're about to go on stage, but like you can do it. I've done it. Like, you know. I still do it. Yeah, it's like, it's not gonna hurt you. You know, you might have to greet someone in the bathroom, oh no, you know.

Yeah. So, like, you're willing to do that. Like, and chew. And then after I, they were trying to get me to apologize. I'm like, I'm not gonna fucking apologize to you. I don't care. You know, like, yeah, fuck.

Yeah, I don't care if you're, fucking headliner like you know like so what you're the future pile of you know one future pile of dust said to the other i'm so fucking great you know like yeah screw you man get some perspective yeah man uh i i had a really pleasant uh memory with adam uh we were we were drinking and then just we're listening to uh lady gaga yeah and we're like did we just become best friends Dude, if you, okay, if you listen to thrash and metal and you don't like the song, just dance, you're a poser. That song is fucking sick.

I mean, I just remember, like, we bonded during that, that song. It was, I think that song just came out. It was fucking sick. Just drinking. Dude, I got to say, I got to say her, a lot of her arrangements and stuff are really catchy. And I think if you're writing metal, you absolutely should have an eye open to what people do to make music. work in different ways. In her case, she does all these vocal hook layering. She's really good at that. And I look at that and I'm like, so I'm not going to have that, that's, you know, we're not a pop

group, but I can look and be like, oh, the hook works because this, I can learn when I try to make my hooks. And how can I, what can I do? So I'm screaming and the, the band's playing 200 BPM and up and stuff. Like, what can I do to get hooks into there? And if you look at bands, it's like her where it's like, it's all hook, basically. It's like, okay, you can learn about hooks and how to craft them from looking at stuff where that's like their speciality. So I absolutely think, like, I often think that my goal when writing some of this extreme thrash hit is to be as hooky as I can while still kicking your teeth in, you know. It's hard to do. It is, but like, it's worth, you know?

And that's what, that's part of what drew me to a lot of the older stuff is because it still has that, like, old rock and roll hookiness to it, even though the guitars are cranked and whatever. thrash I think is like I think the more extreme end of thrash is like as extreme as you can get while still like basically being a rock band and then somewhere in early death metal it crosses over to where like not anymore which I like a lot too

like some early death metal still like basically rocks and then some of it gets super like esoteric and like dense and stuff and it's like something else altogether and I like both sides of it but it's just an interesting thing is like old metal still is so rooted in basically just like hard rock music and I like that

and it draws me to it, you know. You're right, yeah, a lot of like the 80s death metal or thrash early 90s, barely early 90s. I didn't realize that it has like the more like simple vocals. Simple vocals and, you know, if you listen to, I don't know, like Massacre or something,

like Cryptic Realms verse riff, that's basically fucking like a rock groove, you know. It's just like with dense ass chintech, chichita, chichichichich, chit, chita, jatna, jatna, to the nether world. you know like yes so when to stop when did what stuff that the uh just just just just just the rock pattern vocal what i don't know man i think sometime in the 90s and i don't think there's like

a year because you can find releases before after that go one way or the other but i think by a certain point that like uh death metal in particular like black metal goes its own way and then death Metal in particular, I think kind of like you end up where it becomes a lot about like some of the technical aspects, I suppose. And I don't know. So I think that there's some cool stuff that exists there. But I tend, I'm like just old school heshire in my taste. So, you know, that's not talking about anyone else's taste, just my own.

But like I feel like you almost lose more than you gain in a lot of cases. And that depends. I like some tech death. I like some like brutal stuff. But it's usually for me, that's like a shorter thing. But I can go back to like, I don't know, like the old morbid angels or fucking massacre, like death, leprosy or that. I can go back to that a whole bunch because I hear hooks everywhere. And at the end of the day, like we're talking with Lady Gaga, I fucking like hooks, dude.

I do, you know. So I try my best to have them. You'll notice if you listen to Warbringer, I almost, I like never don't rhyme. Adam has a term for that. He says, I'm a mother goose motherfucker because I can't even write without just rhyming couplets. Rhyming's sick, dude. D rhymes are sick, man. And that's, you can look at all kinds of music

to see just the power of that. Here's my thinking. So if I'm screaming, right, so music, as you know, has two basic elements, there's melody, there's rhythm, right? Okay. And if you're a singer, you got this third element, which is the language you're singing, words. Okay.

So if you're gonna be an extreme vocalist, you're basically leaving melody off the table. You're like, I'm not gonna use that tool, right? I don't. I think I've sing two pitch notes in my career. Okay. in one dimension that's pitch. And everything else is just rasping, you know. So I'm like, okay, I'm leaving melody off the table.

I can't leave words off the table too, or I'm just like limiting my toolkit too much. There's some examples. So, for instance, I live obituary, and he's literally not saying words half the time. So that you can, there's exceptions to every rule. But I'm just saying for me, I'm like, okay, I want you to, if I'm not going to be giving you,

you know, melodic pitches in there and giving a vocal melody on top of the riffs or whatever, It's just a rhythm pattern. I want the words to be up front and be decipherable and be catchy and stuff and have cool rhymes. So I do my best at that and that's something that's important to me and my style, I think. Nice. So just curious, because obviously you mentioned earlier that you got into first middle school, high school, you're into the new metal. You're at Osfest.

But when you were younger, your father would. would tell you stories about war. Yeah. Right? How old were you? Young. I remember when I was learning to read in kindergarten, because my dad would play like war games on the,

like early 90s DOS war games on the PC and like had like model tanks and stuff. And I thought all that was cool. So like I was pretty young when I could tell you the difference between like, you know, like a Sherman and a Persian, a Panzer 3 or a Panzer 4 or whatever. Like I could recognize all that still. But I just got into all that stuff as a kid. You gotta know there's the early short barrel Sherman And then the longer barrel Sherman

The EZ8 they call it Where they have this long barrel 76 on it You see the two variants next to each other on the top I can get into that stuff Like my dad will just Oh okay We'll be here all day if we want to talk tanks But yeah basically the short barrel Sherman

Has like a gun that's well suited To like infantry support Like blasting a position or a bunker But it can't handle like heavy enemy armor very well So that's why you see like the movie Fury or something. It takes like three Germans to fight a tiger and they lose two. Okay. You know, that kind of stuff was real.

And, you know, it's, so my dad just like, kind of like me is like low end borderline, a little autistic, not in the sense that you can't like socialize, but. He knows a lot of detail about certain subjects. The obsessive detail about certain subjects. I have a little bit of that too. And he visited recently. I didn't see my dad for a very long period of my. life. He actually visited my house like a month ago. Oh wow. It's dope. And he's the same

freaking way. If you're like, talk about like the battles in Russia in 1942, 43 or something. You'll just be there forever. And the detail is endless. Oh, war tour, right? Yeah, correct. But any of them. Like you can go second war war war. You can go First World War. You can go Alexander. You can go Caesar. Like there's all of it. And I know more than anybody I know. And then my dad knows way more than me. And I'm like, wow. That's like, you're a serious nerd. That's impressive, you know. But he got, he got me into that,

because the way he talks about, people who have that hyper fixation, their passion comes out of them when they speak. Totally. And so I thought it was just fascinating because, like, you know, battles are fucking crazy. Like, you can't believe, you know,

looking at it now, I'm like, I can't believe humans did all this. I know. If you look back in history, it's fucking, humans are still dark now, but back then you're like, damn, it was just fucking even more ruthless of war and how they fought.

Oh, well, I don't know if there's been a time where that's not entirely ruthless. And the record of it when you look at it in the big picture is sort of like a damning indictment of the human race. You might say that my conclusion from looking at all this stuff is if we get the asteroid, we'll deserve it. You know? Sure, sure. That's where I end up being a pacifist too. Like, that's where I end at looking at all this shit for years and reading about Napoleon and the Panzer divisions and the fucking bombing raids and all of it, you know.

But it's a – so my dad got me into that definitely. when I was very young. I remember when I was five years old, I'm in kindergarten, I'm learning to read, and I bring in something about Pearl Harbor, and the lady, the remedial helping your kid learn to read lady counselor that they had. I was like reading that, and it talked about, you know, like, plain strafing people with machine guns, and I'm like five, and she's like, we need to put this way. I'm like, what, we're getting to the good part. So I was like a weird five-year-old, you know? But no, I got into that really young. I played chess when I was really young. It's like strategy games and stuff. Oh, really?

Yeah, they got me on, I was pretty good for a, I was able to beat like a third grader and stuff. I haven't played in a while, but like I'm a pretty good, like, strategy game player. Probably, like, okay at best at chess, but other ones I'm pretty good at. And, like, that's just a hobby I've had forever. So all that kind of, like, trickles into what's floating around my head when I write for my band and how I got the name it has and the themes it has in the first place. I'm just like, if you're a metal band and you want to write about the most brutal thing, that's it, just period.

History. History and the present. Because the whole reason you even give a fuck about history is to give context to what you see in the present. That's the entire use of it. If anyone says, what's the use of knowing this? There it is. That's my answer. Because without it, you don't get any straight answers from history, but you get context.

And so you can understand, you know, there hasn't been, I've never lived in global peacetime and neither has anyone else. No one has to us. Yeah, basically no one. and that's a tragedy. It absolutely should not be that way, but it is. And so you try to understand that, and the only thing you can look at is since the present is already gone,

it's a second long, and the future is unknown. The past is all you got as a lens of analysis, and that's the point. When I tell students and stuff, because I've done some teaching, and they give me the what's the point of this? I have to have an answer. That's my answer.

Okay, so you've done some teaching? I've done some, yes, so I went and got a history degree, and for four years out in L.A. I did that around Woe to the Vanquish, so that's when I got kind of more formalized with my understanding because my dad taught me about what tank was what and what was happening, which year of World War II or whatever. And that's not like super serious.

That's interesting, but like proper historical analysis is something deeper and you get more into sociological and economic causes and cultural history. And it all, it's this fast web of stuff, basically, And the question you're trying to answer is, why did the stuff that happened happen? Yeah. You know, why is the world outside me look the way it does and not some other way? That's the question you're ultimately trying to answer by looking at any of this, whether ancient or modern.

I mostly know, like, French Revolution forward, which we'd call basically modern Western history. That's the thing I know the most. But I've dabbled in all kinds of things. It's just endlessly fascinating. There's more than I could ever know. And it's rich ground for, like, writing metal. because there's all these dramatic and crazy events. There's all this stuff that's been written on.

It's all just laying there for you to pick up and grab and write about it. And it can lend you some of that gravitas where like I'm not making up some random violence. This is real stuff and you can even draw on sources. I've used like poems and stuff from time periods. And I think that's something after I went and studied that because I was like, is this too nerdy?

Should I do this? I'm like, no, this is going to make the work more like artistically valuable to draw real stuff. And I think it does. And the records we've done since I kind of did that have been our most critically acclaimed and stuff. So I think it was the right move for us.

But yeah, it's just a great source of things. And it does come from my dad, you know? So it's that just kind of got stamped on me and I was responsive. And when my dad came over to visit, we're talking all this stuff. And I'm like, you know, there's a part of me that's like, look, dad, I freaking know this. You know, like, you know, right? Like, I can tell you what happened in the same thing. Second War and how that shaped strategic doctrine moving forward into the early 20th, you know,

like, and how the British Army reformed as a result of their experience fighting the commandos. And then he's like, yeah, and if they hadn't had that, they probably would have got massacred by the Germans in 1914, you know, like, and so because they were not fighting correctly for what happened with modern firepower. In case you didn't know, one of the most interesting periods for, like, battles, is between about the middle of the night, like 1850s to World War I. because every strategic thought that the commanders had basically became obsolete because firepower didn't increase by like twice. It increased by like a hundredfold.

You have a cannon in like the Civil War and you could put out like a couple shots a minute. The French 75, the first like modern artillery piece, is made in 1897. And that sucker can fire like 40 rounds a minute. And it can shoot you like a mile away. And this is like, we're talking like mechanical, breach, low, you know, like, there's no digital anything on this. But you can, if you read something like Barbara Tuckman, the Guns of August, there's a bit that describes the effect of a battery that he's fired on a formation of, like, ranked men. And it describes them basically, they have been, they were packed so dense when they get hit by a battery of these firing shrapnel that they're like a row of them leaning to the side. The next are stacked like here.

and it described them with like a flying buttress of men just like perforated by shrapnel to various degrees. You could find these scenes that like you couldn't imagine in hell and it's real and people actually went through it. And I'm like, fuck, you know, as I read that stuff. And, you know, I go, so then I look at like what stuff could I write. And I was writing this stuff around Woe to the Vanquished Press release. I'm like, Satan's a cartoon character. This is evil. This is evil.

This is evil. This exists. And furthermore, look, look at that. That's black and white. That's like earliest possible cameras, right? That's jack shit compared to what's out there. Now, if you think about it on that level, it's terrifying. That's what, like, our song Firepower Kills was about.

It's like, dude, in 1914, you got a Maxim gun. You could put a, the British Army did an experiment with an 1897 Maxim, where they put a million rounds through it, nonstop, just, just, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, as long as you. It's going towards people, too. It's going towards humans. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's like, Moines. And now we have more of that.

And the biggest difference isn't so much the rate of fire because we hit a point like 100 years ago where it's almost pointless to increase the rate of fire because of ammunition consumption and stuff. So the modern weaponry is largely about precision and targeting. Okay. Because in First World War, they didn't have that. So they would just blanket places. I shit you not with like four or five million shells at a time. You want to bring one up? Search Passiondale before and after.

I love this photo. It's a town. It's an aerial photograph of a town before and after an artillery bombardment. They shell it for like two weeks. You'd find out of their images. There's an aerial photograph and it looks like someone took a meat. Oh, it's spelled a little different. Yes, there it is. That. So there's a town and there's like, it looks like someone swung a meat. It's like God swung a meat tempterizer down like a thousand times. It's completely unrecognizable. And because they didn't have advanced. It's completely destroyed.

Not only that, the land itself is, is, like, gone. Like, it's, so they would do that because they couldn't, basically, if there's like a trench in there with some machine guns in it, you need to make sure those machine guns are out. And so they would be like, okay, we'll shell it for two weeks continue. It's like, oh my God. And then you think about that and you're like, so that means the people at home had to produce the four and a half million shells. This is just a month. This is one of many.

One of many. So if you're watching, hopefully you can see this, October 1917 to November 1917. It's a completely different land. Yeah, they turned this big 500-mile stretch of Western Europe into the surface of the moon. So this is just like, when I started reading a bunch about this, I got utterly like horrified and fascinated. I'm like, this is like some apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy, but it's not fantasy. It's real. And so a lot of the stuff.

of the band and why I try to capture what I try to take out of this for my metal music is my sense of being appalled basically because you never ever see I don't know the Kaiser or whatever never mobilized eight army groups to go and like build houses for the needy

or anything. Humans can't seem to get it together for anything good but you see their their absolute talent in organization in pushing themselves and just like getting something colossal to happen only the very worst of reasons. And so, you know, like I said, we'll deserve the asteroid when it comes.

But, yeah, does that give you a, what a, what song, I'm sorry for my memory loss, there's a song that you base out of a Russian novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan. That's Alexander Solzhen, who's a controversial and interesting character. He was the Soviet political dissident from the Cold War era, who wrote one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich It's interesting one. It describes a day in the gulag And it's brutal and harsh.

The part you remember the most is when they go So they're in a gulag in Siberia And when they go in from mealtimes, the guards will take whoever the last one in line is And beat the shit out of them. And, you know, someone might say, But isn't someone always going to be last? And then the guards would retort, yes, comrade.

And it's best that that person not be you. so you can see the logic but like that's a brutal thing now one thing to be so Solzhenitsyn isn't like you know he's interested there's a really great song too if you're into like 70s Prague the band Renaissance has a song

Mother Russia about him there's like a nine minute epic and it's phenomenal it's a great great song the part in the middle she's doing these wordless ooze is like a cry from the ancient tundra it's fucking gorgeous yeah yeah a really good gem that we found randomly somewhere. But anyway, that's about Solzhenitsyn too. But he's just a guy who wrote

about the experience of the gulag. Now, there's some asterisk to put in his book gulag archipelago. If you believe the numbers, that means the Soviet Union had like 20% of its population, the gulag. They did not. Furthermore, and there's some perspective we Americans need, we have more people in prison right now than they did under Stalin. Really? Yes. Okay. Now, granted, we're a larger population, but our prison population is very high. And, uh, It's funny because you call that right now. Jake, can we fact check that? How many people are in prison currently?

And furthermore, there was no like great exodus from the, so the Gullog was mostly during the Stalin period of the Soviet Union. They decline after. So, you know, Solzhenitsin kind of like, I learned later after the song, he kind of ends up being like a bit of a fascist, which I, you know, so a lot of, yeah, so that's not the greatest, but he was a, he's an interesting historical character. So as of a 2002, the U.S. prison population has totaled 1.2 to 23 million. That's about one.

So we got like, what, 370, 380 million people in the country? Yes. So that's a pretty good chunk. And it's increased by 2% from the year prior. Right. And so one thing to note to is the use of words you call a Soviet prison a Gulag. It sounds very scary. Our prisons, you don't call in that, but, you know, what's Guantanamo Bay, if not?

Sure. Right. So just the thought. But anyway, I try to write, so Enemy of the States, a really cool song off. Enemy to State. Okay, yes. That's the one. And it's the, you know, the idea of how we'll just imprison dissidents and stuff.

I'm worried we might get there. But there is documented history in our country of using something like the war on drugs to target the left to target racial minorities and basically put them into the prison system, which as you guys, if you don't know this, you should. The 13th Amendment, the one that freed the slaves at the end of the Civil War, said it banned slavery except as punishment for a crime. And that's one of the biggest asterisks of all history. So that's why prison labor is lucrative. And that's why we have the prison industrial complex because there's no, if you're owning any kind of business enterprise, there's no better labor than free labor. and free labor is forced labor

so it's you know you look at all this evil stuff and you go how could it happen and then the other side of that is it's entirely logical you know and that's another element I try to get in that music because usually I'm not talking about all this evil shit from like the hippie perspective of like man

this is terrible which is how I actually feel I'm always like the trying to take the persona of like the evil power that's making it happen and being like you know and kind of bring that out So in like sword and the cross, it's not talking about how unfair it is that the Lord's exploit the peasants. The Lord's going like, you idiot peasants, the God you pray to, I put them there.

I'm laughing at you as you toil for me, you know? So I really look at those kind of things. And this record in particular, I'm really trying to look at like dynamics and structures of power and get these kind of abstract things in a very like personalized voice out. So stuff like a better world or cage of air is what we might call social conditions under late capitalism or something, which is where we're at as a society right now. The way that like the loss of community, the fact that you're this isolated individual. And to try to like stab it. There's a lot of interesting stuff you can read that stabs at the basic question of like, so we have more stuff, more technology, more convenience than at any time before.

So why are people fucking depressed? You know, and just hits that that question. And the best answer I've seen is there's like social conditions. So I'll talk about the song, A Better World right now. There's a line in there that says, I swallow these prescriptions because the problem is me. Oh, fuck. Yeah, yeah. No, and that's trying, there's this.

And what I'm doing with lines like that is trying to boil down these kind of like social theory concepts. There's a book that was written in 2009 called Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. And it's social theory. So you'll hear him talking about Dorita and postmodernism and this stuff that I halfway understand. He also makes these pop culture references. Let me tell you one of the ones that stuck with me. Please. He talks about the case of Kurt Cobain.

So, and he's looking at music and cultural stuff as like a way of social forces. So he says, okay. So in the 80s, we institute what they call neoliberalism, which is basically like the beginnings of the modern economic world where everyone's an individual contractor for themselves. There's no like, we're peeling back the social safety nets. We're peeling back community and you've got to offer the market something. You can be a podcast or you can be a thrash middle singer. You can be anything you want as long as you can fucking pay the bills. The market, if you can pay your bills and you can pay for your life, the market's telling

you that you're doing right. And if you can't, the market's telling you you you're doing wrong. And the market will dictate your life. There won't be like much of a safety net for you. And you got a hustle, motherfucker. You know, that's our world, right? It starts with Reagan and Thatcher But it kind of goes through

It starts with Pinochet in Chile If you really want to look at it Under a dictatorship, not under a democracy But if you don't know about that That's a whole lot of thing But it's a big deal for the modern world I can already tell this is We're gonna need a part two and three

And you're gonna come back for your whole life dude This is unbelievable Oh dude I'm just spitting you know But like trying to just talk about some of these things So anyway Thank you John So Mark Fisher is saying, due to these conditions, the social conditions of neoliberalism are alienating. They disconnect you from community.

Like, we don't live and take care of our parents anymore. You leave the nest and you go, you're a contractor for yourself and you've got to go do something else. And if you live with your family, you're actually a loser, in fact, we think. It is true. That's not how most of history was. People typically would live in, like, multi-generational homes. there was way back when like common lands. So like if you're a person who you would find being homeless today,

you would farm the common lands and you would have, you would still be part of the community instead of not. If you're head ducks below water in the market race, you're a homeless person and no one even wants to talk to you and you don't have a life anymore pretty much, you know? Yeah. And I'll add, what's the use of the homeless? Because we usually think of them like there's no use, right?

They're useless people. But there is a use in the social system and it's this. What's the use? The use is if you're a person at the minimum wage jobs at the bottom end of the economy and you're struggling and wondering why the fuck you're showing up on time and whatever, you look at them and you're like, if I don't, that's what's going to happen to me. That's the use. Yeah.

So they're essential. That's why we can't fix homelessness is because then we wouldn't have our cheap labor. You know, dude. It's crazy that you say that because we actually have me and me and suezance and even here. Like I kind of have a joke where it's like because we're in California. So we, I mean, we're in Santa Ana. So, like, we constantly see it. I'm like, we can't fail because this is literally, we will be homeless.

Oh, yeah. And it's in your conscience. 100%, dude. You know, if you can't make 2K a month plus your car payment insurance and your phone bill and then you feed yourself on top of you can't do that every single month. It doesn't matter if you did that successfully for 10 years. If you fail on the 11th, fuck you. Boom.

You're out. That's true. So anyway. So Fisher writes about Cobain. He says in these conditions, which are alienating and depressive to many people, this guy writes this music that feels like disaffected and alienated, right? And then he said, this is Fisher's case, basically, as I'm remembering. And then he says, because all these other people are feeling these conditions,

it becomes a smash hit. It becomes this musical wave that it was, right? And now Mr. Cobain is a huge star because he is the voice of these alienated conditions. you know, in many respects. I can see it from this whole vibe. It's very different from like the 80s rock and stuff before it in that way. And then now he's a walk-in contradiction

because he was trying to be anti-consumerist, anti-commercial, et cetera, and now he is the flagship of those things because you can take... It's fucked up. You can take... You can take... Well, it's the same way you can buy

like a Che Guevara t-shirt at Target. You know, it's the same force going on here. You can take... You can take revolutionary thought. You can take anti-system thought. You can take counterculture like punk or metal, which, by the way, have been defeated by this. As artistic movements, both punk and metal have been just soundly defeated by sales, basically, you know. Reabsorbed and reincorporated it.

And you can say, fuck the system all you want, but you still want to buy, you still want someone to buy your t-shirt. And that's the contradiction that makes you artistically impotent, in my opinion. So anyway, so now Fisher says, because of this contradiction in his life, Cobain shoots himself in the head, and now because he did that, buy the t-shirt, her Cobain voice of a generation.

You know, the artistic movie, this guy is a case study in it. Unbelievable. I thought that that spoke to me when he wrote that. So he gets a lot of pop culture references in there. And another thing he talks about is mental health, and that's where that line, the prescriptions line I was talking about comes from.

He says that, okay, so you go to the shrink. And you're like, Doc, I'm depressed. And the doctor is likely to tell you something like you are depressed because you have low serotonin. Your brain chemistry is wrong. In fact, if you buy these wonderful pharmaceutical products, we can fix your broken brain chemistry. Sure. Right. But that doesn't answer the question.

So why does so many people have lower serotonin? Maybe it's not a you thing, you know? So that's why that line I swallow prescriptions because the problem is me. It's like if you have a world where there isn't really a great. great economic future is not really an environmental future. And you know, you're like, and you're one month out from homelessness forever, you know, which a lot of people are because it's harder and harder to acquire a home that you actually own or whatever, which is, it's not a failure of the system.

It's success. Yes. We're going to birth a trillionaire in my lifetime. It's going to be a great, right? Like at the expense of the many, the few will do great. Yeah. Dude, it's fucking scary out. in 2000 i think it was 2014 uh i was in therapy for like a few months

i mean he was a therapist he was he was a cool guy he was a nice gentleman gay guy was not very very sweet but there was a time and at literally only like a few months prior i was already reading books on uh on health food uh uh pills and stuff so it was so the time i was kind of creepy i kind of already had like experience and And then he, about halfway through my session, he, he basically, now I look back, maybe kind of try to sell me on, hey, maybe you should try to take these pills for like, anxiety or, or ADD. Mm-hmm. And luckily, like, I just fucking, I was just in this, you know, I was just reading a bunch of books about brain health. I was kind of like, oh, no, I'm fine.

Yeah. Man, imagine if I didn't have that knowledge, and I would have taken him. I almost did, too, because I was, like, a little after our last record, I was, like, stuck in COVID. They jacked up our rent because they could. Yeah, yeah. And so we were already, like, head barely above water. Now you got to swim a little faster, you stupid fucking peasant, you know. Turn the wheel, you motherfucker.

We're going to turn the screws on you. And I felt it, and I knew that's what was happening. So I went to the doc and I'm like, Doc, I'm depressed because I don't think I have like an economic future. I don't know if I'll ever be able to retire. Like, I don't know if I'll be able to like give my wife a kid that I could actually pay for it. All this stuff. Yeah, those up, dude. This, this abstract shit like neoliberalism or whatever sounds like the super abstract thing.

But it affects you in the argument you have with your girlfriend. Like it's probably about money. You know, there you go. So like this stuff hit this shit hits you at the most intimate level at your, a personal core of your being. Oh, in regards to, like, whether I regard myself as a success or failure. I'm in one of the coolest thrash bands there is of my whole time. I really think so.

And I feel, like, depressed about it a lot because, like, it doesn't pay the bills. And so I'm like, the market is telling me I should do something else. And that's me, like, you know, and my parents who never super supportive are always like, when are you going back to school? And I'm like, God, fucking damn it, I did something really cool with my. life. Like, why do I feel like we got the one in a million? My garage band actually got signed. We got to tour with all these great bands, most of our influences, you know, we've played a million shows and most of them are great and people love our records. Like,

why am I even questioning that? You know, so honestly, like, I have this weird inner emotional journey about my own work where I'm like almost feeling like, dude, I'm like a giant teenager. I'm not even a fucking man still because I don't make a strong paycheck doing this. It's like that's the wrong value. That's not what I value, but I internalize it because that's the social logic around me. And sometimes like it goes into, you know, of my wife's like, I have to make more of the money you do like that sucks for her. That's real. That's legitimate. And I feel that and I'm like, I'm a failure. I'm not a fucking proper man or whatever. And that's like the voice of society sort of being the market forces, impersonal,

mathematical shit being like the devil on my shoulder making me hate myself you know yeah yeah but uh it's especially like the like the like the kind of music that we're involved in it's like you always hear like well you got to do it until you're 40 or 50 and then when you're 40 or maybe even 50 that's when that's when you cross over so i got i got two years left and then i'm gonna fucking make it that's right because i'm not gonna i don't know if i'll still be around by 50 if i can't do you know really well why do you say that because i i i I basically can't do, you know, Warbringer's playing old school thrash. It's a niche thing.

We're one of the biggest of our time, but not the biggest. And even if we were, like, you know, I probably, I basically got a sinker swim right now. Fucking swim, oh, I'm doing it. I'm on these tours. But, like, I need these tours to, like, like, I can't, I got to, like, take some money home and, like, pay for my house and show myself and my wife. Like, yo, I can support us with the work. I do. The work I do is legitimate. It is valuable. And the market has to agree with me. And I have limited control over that. I can play a better show. I can put out a cooler t-shirt or whatever.

But I need that to actually work. And that's just where I'm 38. I have a house. I have a wife. She probably will be disappointed in the long run if we can't have a kid. And that'll be like a festering wound. And I can't let that happen. So I have to, I'm going to bust my ass and do my best. but like I have to like I'm worried I'm a lot's riding on this my my future my life is I need to be successful and by successful I don't mean that we get a great review on our record I'm like I got to fucking pay the mortgage with this and that's something I've never been able to do it's always been I'm managing to skate by in spite of this you know it's kind of like that do you is there for you and a war bringer is there any like little like at the end in the tunnel do you see anything

You know the weird one is, I think our best strategy is to hang around until all our influences quit. Dude, it's a real thing, man. It's honestly, it's a real thing. No, it is. And that's a, it's like, it's a two side coin. Because I'm really happy to see a lot of the great bands from the 80s still playing. And many of them, I think, are still doing valuable work on the stage and in the studio. Not all, but, you know, like, that's my own critical opinion.

but to put it one way I'm looking at it I'm like okay Black Sabbath is about to play their last show that's the first metal band so you're not just competing against every band of your own time

you're competing against every metal band that ever was basically the last 50 years of it and I'm like that's and one of the things that if you ever want a trip for anyone who's in a band if you put out a record or any release go on metal archives for the day it comes out

and you'll probably find yourself on the second page of releases for just that one day. And that's like an, oh, fuck, you know. The world is so vast and so many people make records that- It's going, dude. It's fucking nuts. You're like, how do you stand out in that? It's utterly crazy. And doing that as, like, a business model to try to live off of is, like, straight insanity.

I must be insane because I love it. I'm still doing it. But I think of that, and I'm like, fuck, dude, we got no chance. sometimes I feel that way. I'm going, when we're doing this, I'm taking the opposite attitude. I'm going, I'm telling everyone, like, it's going to work, we're going to do it,

we're going to fucking conquer the world, because you have to. You have to. You have to feel that way. But I struggle with that. And so going back to the therapy, I'm going and, like, wonder, you know, I was thinking of, like,

well, do I need to quit this? Do I need to, like, because I could get, like, a real proper teaching job instead of doing, like, I had a good gig in L.A. I moved, so now I'm just doing part-time tutoring. It sucks. It's not like, like I like the work.

It's valuable work, but I can't. I'm like barely staying afloat. So it's like I, and I'm sacrificing a chance of like a stable job at the district or whatever by doing this. And by doing that, I'm asking my wife. I'm like, honey, you know, keep working hard so that I can do this. And it's just like asking a lot of her and everything. So I'm she's really supportive too This is me and like my guilt for putting that on her you know

So I'm I'm just really gonna try to rally like the best shows we can and Try to make it happen try to and work my ass off It sounds like you're under a lot of pressure and I could I could Relate when you're under an immense amount of pressure and then you got to you got to put on the face Yeah, you know because because you have you have bandmates and you got you have you had to like put down your own emotion and to kind of make sure they're all right. Absolutely.

No, I can't bring this energy to like in the van or anything. Absolutely not. Yeah, but when I'm in an interview like this, I'm like, I kind of decided a while ago. I'm like, fuck it, I'll just be entirely truthful because that's like better. You know, that's real people will know. And other people have those in their lives. Everyone in my band has those parallel struggles of their own. Sure.

And, you know, that's the kind of stuff that might make you want to take an antidepressant or whatever. They medicated the shit out of me when I was a kid, you know. Really? Oh, yeah. They had me on like, I remember like grinding my teeth

because they had me on 30 milligrams of Adderall in the fifth grade and stuff. And it was like more of that. There's like, there's something wrong with you. And I, like I said, I worked in teaching and stuff.

So I'm teaching kids. And a lot of kids are medicated because you shove them into here. You got to go sit there for seven hours and pay attention. And then do three hours on homerle. Adderall riddle in, stuff like that.

You know, all the normal shit. And it's hard when you talk to the therapist to know, like, is that the best option for me? Because there's an economic motive for them to say, yes, buy the pill. The sale is made. You know, that's good for the economy if you buy the pill. You buy the goods and services. It's good for the manufacturer. It's good for the pharmacist, you know, whatever.

So there's a, so you can't even, like, trust an honest assessment because this ulterior motive just exists. So where I ended up not when I was at therapy because I was pretty much like, Doc, I feel this way, I have these concerns about the big picture world, and then I have these concerns about the small picture world, my own life, right? And they're pretty much like all that's entirely legitimate and true. You know, it's basically real, the problems you're talking about, also the environment moving forward is a big one. Like what's, you know, I'll get to that. Okay. But they're like all that's real and legitimate. And what we can do is pretty much numb you to it.

And I'm like, I don't know if I want to be numbed to it. Because that's what it does ultimately, right? Or I have a lot of students that'll say, like, I got a freaking like eight-year-old who I'm like, who's got trouble reading that I'm working with. And he's like, he'll say, oh, I can't do it. I forgot to take my medication. So I can't do it today. I'm like, that's what you're telling yourself.

Because, and it wasn't his idea that he can't do shit without the medication. occasion. That's like that idea was put in his head, I believe. How old are these kids? I've worked with kids everywhere from like eight to like 18 to I've tutored guys that are like in their 30s doing like master's. So I'm a freelancer. You know, you need to know math, science, social studies, history or how to write a damn good essay. I'm a free, you know, I've I've hawked my services at that. Even subjects I've never taken. I help the guy get his master's in therapy because I just because I can write a good research paper

because that's what I learned how to do in history. So I didn't know as much about therapy or therapeutic techniques as he did, but I'm like, here's the paper. I can get you on that. Here's how we read this study on the mental effects of community gardening, which was remarkably detailed.

But like all this stuff we had to write and I helped him get through all the writing. And he got his degree, he's working, he's practicing in Florida now. So I've worked from everything from like basic phonics to like advanced analysis of our study on psychological effects of stuff and just I can be good at that stuff and I've kind of had to be so I can take jobs and get paid right yeah yeah so I wonder

the effects if you take that I wonder I wonder the short-term effect not even long-term but short-term effects on their creativity. That's an interesting question indeed. Because you're more focused, but you're not feeling I need to feel to write. Correct? So I've definitely, like when I was a kid, I was able to feel it wasn't that. I just felt like fucking high, strong and focus. If you want a really good, you know Calvin and Hobbs?

I would hope so Calvin, Calvin, it's, Calvin Hobbs is a really wonderful comic strip. There was a, I think it was not even done by, so it's about a. boy in his imaginary tiger and the boy is what you would call neurodivergent he's a big problem for his mom and everything and he's a weirdo basically and he's really entertaining and his imaginary tiger hobbs and him have these adventures and they'll do like discussions about philosophy while riding in a wagon and then crashing at the bottom of a hill and it's all this wonderful stuff about boyhood and growing up and life it's probably the best comic strip ever made i would say really yeah yeah for like this kind of sunday paper comic strip thing there was a last comic made for it that wasn't

I think made by Bill Waterson, the author, but there's one about Calvin gets medication and it's great. I don't know if you could find it yeah, so it's because Hobbs is a stuff, there it is yeah. Oh, we got it. So Hobbs

is a stuffed tiger who comes to life and everyone else sees the stuffed tiger but Calvin sees the actual living tiger, right? Okay. So in this basically, Calvin is finally focusing on his homework which he never, ever, ever does. And he's like, sorry, Hobbs, I can't go outside and play and, you know, ride a sled with you.

And then the panel turns gray and Hobbs is just a stuffed tiger again. And that, I think, is very, yeah, that's brutal. It's very artistic, I think, in how. And I don't think this is, I'm not. How fucking hit me, too? Yeah, it's heavy, dude. As a kid who was medicated and stuff, this hits me pretty hard, I got to say. So, you know, when dealing with kids on medication, I'm like, you know, the idea that they believe that they need this in order to succeed.

or to be a valuable person or whatever. I'm like, you got to push back against it. At one point, I was fucking heavy. Jesus. Yeah, I know, dude. Oh, I see it. Jesus, man. No, that's in it.

Dude, I feel, I see the, you know, you're getting a little leaky there. I felt, no, this made me cry too, dude, straight up. Because I experienced, I can tell. This fucking imagination is dead. I can tell from your face that you experienced, you know, you experienced. I did two men and that's, so, you know, that hit me, dude. And I see it on kids to say they don't believe that them as they naturally are is like good enough in some way and that hurts man you know yeah uh you you want

everyone to because what school's really for at least up to a point is uh is teaching you to be a good obedient worker yeah as george carlin puts it you need someone who's smart enough to run the machines but dumb enough to accept the raw the raw deal they're getting uh but yeah dude i'm sorry man that that was heavy man no it's it's a real one um i'm glad that that resonated with you i think it's a valuable thing for to think about today when there's this idea if you don't fit in the box take medication there's something wrong with you it's like no yeah the problem's outside me yeah the problem's the water not the fish yeah you know I'm fine I'm good I'm valuable you need to believe that inside like I had that's something I've been working on and struggling with myself

like and I got to say some of the reactions to like the records to the shows and have really helped me with that oh great because there's this extern and I'm sure you felt it too where like the work you put out, you're like, it was value, I did something. To like see, like the reaction, see and hear. Right. It does help. And it does. Yeah.

And like you took something that wasn't yourself as an accountant or whatever, like, right? It's yourself as a player, as a musician putting out art and doing like, in our case, heavy fucking jams and stuff. And people connect to it and they love it. And you're like, I did do the right thing. I didn't need to be fixed. I was fine all along. You know, I feel some of that sometimes, and that's a positive thing to feel, I think.

Yeah, man, you got a, there's like a, I'm not sure what I'm trying to say or how to put words to it, but there's like a part of me where like I like feeling the anxiety. I like feeling like the pressure because I know that it's good. I feel alive. A hundred percent. Yeah, and you shouldn't have to, like, medicate away every negative feeling. There's a, dude, you know, it just makes me think of this bit from Huxley, you know, Brave New World, the book?

No. Okay, okay, so you mind if I go on a spiel here? Please. Let's spiel again, number nine here or something. So Huxley wrote, there's basically two classic dystopian novels, and they're 1984 in Brave New World. And to put it simply, 1984 is the Iron Fist, where they control everyone through fear and terror and pain.

And Brave New World's the Velvet Glove. It's where they control you through pleasure and your short-term pleasure receptors and through avoidance of pain. So in their fictional world, everyone's basically a giant infant, and they all work, they all get stuff done for the evil government that's running everything in Brave New World, but no one's sad. No one feels pain because every time you would feel any emotional discomfort, whatever, they medicate you. They have a drug they call soma, which in the real world's a muscle relaxer. Yeah, yeah. But in their book, it's like a fictional wonder drug that makes you never, you know, no sadness at all. Furthermore, you don't have like real relationships.

kind of, they use weirdly infantile terms for sex, which is like they call like, they have a time, they call orgy-po-gy, and what this is... Orgy-po-G-G-G-Oh, yeah, it's fucked. But what they're getting at, yeah, it's fucked up, and this hits it some...

So that sounds screwy, but this hits at something really strong, which is if you just give everybody everything they want all the time, all the vectors of pleasure they might seek, then they don't deepen, they don't develop because it's like the loss and the pain that makes you a person.

Yeah, yeah. And they don't have it. And so in this book, the main character's a guy called The Savage, who would be like a mid-20th century educated English guy. So he knows his like Shakespeare and whatever. And he's going, and like to them, he's a savage because he's felt pain. He's felt the human experience. He knows all this triumph and tragedy.

And they just know like being basically buzzed and happy and getting, you know, getting their dick sucked all the time or whatever. And they don't know any pain. They're like a fucking, you know, grown-up baby. They work and they do that. And then they get their drugs. They get their food. They get their sex.

And they're fucking fat and happy. And they don't ever feel pain. And so there's a part in there that really hits you where the savage, like, falls in love with a girl there. And he wants to love her. But he doesn't just, he wants to actually love her and, like, know who she is and feel life with her. And she's just not capable.

And so he's trying to like tell her what he wants and he's quoting all these like You know poetic lines from Shakespeare at her and she's basically sitting there like You're weird you want to fuck and he's like no Like I want to love you but you aren't there like there's no you to love like and I'm like That's something that's one of the more powerful things I've read about like medication and its effects too Where like you almost need the pain you need the divergence you need to deal with your own weirdness and your own shortcomings and whatever and and and handle that and uh with and like do it of yourself in order to i think grow and to develop and i think by like you kind

of stunt people by giving them some shortcut so that's why personally i'm not speaking for anyone else but for me personally that's why i like as a kid actually a little before i started the band i kind of was like fuck fuck your medication there's nothing wrong with me i'm fine uh maybe they should give me more interesting shit in school and I would be interested, you know, or like, you know, so on. And another one that, too, I remember saying is I was like, everyone's always, when you're growing up, they're like, what do you want to be? They always ask you what, not who. You know, they're not like, do you want to be a kind person? How do you want to handle when someone's mad at you? It's not that. It's like, what are you going to do for the economy kid? If you tell your

dad, like you want to play guitar or something, he'll be like, well, you're fucking stupid. How about be an accountant, you know, right? So that's kind of the, and that what that may as well be like the voice of the economy speaking through your dad as a vessel or something, you know. Yeah, yeah. You have some really cool quotes, John. This might be a old belief you have, so I'm curious what you think today and if it changed. You said that you don't believe in God or the devil.

No. So you're still there? Yeah, I'm an atheist basically. Okay. If there were such a thing as a God, it would be so utterly beyond our comprehension that no existing church or book would be able to describe it to you. And then certainly, if, like, so I was raised in a church,

I say sometimes that because I more or less believe in the Christian moral code, and that's why I'm not a Christian. you know, love thy neighbor and stuff. And, you know, I maybe learned a little too much history about crusades and whatever. You know, and then also the intolerance in our own time. Like, why is it that if you go to church and you hear love thy neighbor that you end up like hating gay people or something? Yeah. Right.

Like, why is that? And I'm not saying everyone. Or like, if I talk to my mom or something, or like many people, they'll say, well, that's not like what the Bible says. That's the corruption of it. I'm like, why do we have fucking thousands of years of the corrupt? of it mainly in the you know um and the church for instance in czarist russia the church backed the monarchy to legitimate the czar's oppression of his people oh god chose him and i the serf who's being exploited believe in god so thus i will accept my condition which is like what verse two a sword in the cross is

about that idea yeah like hey you i the lords i the power structure that exists built the church that you go to that tells you that i was chosen that i'm like anointed by god this is well i'm how they did it in the Middle Ages, and actually up until like the early 20th century to an extent. But like that, that there's some legitimating ideology. And the way it's not always, but religion is so often used in service of rapacious, exploitative power that I have to, at the very least, heavily raise an eyebrow to it. And the thing is, I'm an atheist who basically holds what you might call a Christian moral ethos, too. you know love thy neighbor turn the other cheek be calm uh treat other people how you want to be treated so like i do believe all that it's the divinity stuff i raise an eyebrow to and then the the way that

that message gets used for social controller to get people to go to war or any of that that's why i can't be part of any of that um furthermore and this is just me being a bit grim uh people really really really want to believe that something's going to happen after to them after they die and i think if you want to believe something, you probably shouldn't. Okay. That's like working against your own cognitive. Like, I would love to think that there's some great destiny of me and I'll see my dead grandma and my dead cat Fatsy Klein in the afterlife and we'll be chilling on a cloud.

Like, that would be amazing. I would love to believe that and that's why I don't. Because, yeah, I would love it. That sounds so wonderful. That's sick. But yeah, no. If you just want realistic analysis, no, grave, worms, black. Wow.

That's what I'm hoping. And if anything else happens, like, great. But that's, people believe these crazy fucking stories in order to not look that in the eye grave, worms, infinite darkness. You know, you want to believe anything, anything, anything but that because that's the most painful possible thing to imagine. It's true. I think the most painful thing.

I think that's the biggest fear. It just goes black. Yeah. We got a song from World's When I Center. This is a song Shattered Light Glass that talks about mortality and the guy's basically like, I'm dying and there's nothing there. You know? Yeah.

Yeah. So I try to hit that. I am afraid of. Anyone who says they're not afraid of death is a fucking liar. Oh, of course. Yeah. There's definitely at least some fear of it. Do you think that affects your belief of where your band's going?

I think it comes out in a variety of it because I think if you go through a whole discog, you'll see sort of the grim realism that I was just expressing there. It's like, hey, I don't have faith in this. Oh, shit, is my band even going to make it? Oh, well, there's myself on the existential level and then myself on, like, the professional level. And then not totally unrelated. I would say, though, like sometimes some songs, like, the ones come to mind as like divinity of flesh off woe to the manquished, kind of hit at this, like, longing for legacy for something everlasting.

I think the best we can do as human beings is write, make art, make stuff, do something. something to affect the world, build something, or help someone, or any of that, that's how you live on. That's the only way you can, because you yourself won't, but your deeds and whatever you lay down will affect the future. Because the entire, the future comes from the past is a product of it. If you, you know, there's a, there's a cool book by Asimov, Isaac Asimov Foundation, where a guy figures out how to boil history, cause an effect into a mathematical equation. Really?

Yeah, they call it the psychohistorians. He's using laws of thermodynamics to mathematically predict history. And it's like, if we were more advanced, that probably would be doable, the web of causality and cause and effect. And that's the only way I think that we actually live on is by like affecting that, by tugging those strings in some way. And, you know, people have often talked about like how, you know, sort of butterfly effect type things, but with lives, you know, not with, you know, you can do. something that gives someone a chance or like a thought that then they go doing something that affects all this stuff and you don't know what the long-term consequences of small actions will be true um and like that song i was talking about divinity of flesh it was kind of trippy laying it down

because there's a bit where just like uh the end of the song i'm like my soul will not perish long after i'm gone my words will live on i'm like dude i actually will this record will be around after I'm dead. And so I was like, I got kind of a chill putting that because I'm like, oh yeah, that's the closest you can get to living after death, I think, is to give something to the world that outlast you. And even then, even then, everyone's doing that too. So it's, which doesn't diminish your effort. Sure. Which doesn't. But then I think of, I think of like Ozymandias or something. You know that one? No. Oh, this is a sick, old-ass-ass poem. So Ozymandius is a poem about seeing, you see this like ruined in the desert, and it's a statue, right?

And it's just out in the middle of sand, it's ruined. And on this base of the statue, it says a really sick metal sounding quote where he says, I am Ozymandius, king of kings, look upon my work, see mighty and despair. And that's just fucking awesome sounding first off. And then it's like this guy was once a great king, and now it's just a ruin in the sands. And he's like, look upon my work. and despair ye mighty, and now it's just nothing. Desolation.

And I'm like, that is a great way to think of, like, even the mightiest, the greatest stuff. It all crumbles to us. And we have to, like, kind of put that in our pipe and smoke it as human beings, you know. And even if a great king can't even keep his legacy alive, then, you know, what can we do? And the answer, I think, is just everything you can. You do the best you can. And that's the point, you know, that's all it is.

try to uh so for me i'm like i try to be good as a singer and a musician i try to write the absolute best i can i try to perform the absolute best i can and i try to be like basically kind to every person i meet to the extent that it's possible for me to not be a dick you know that's what when we get older that's basically what we're trying to do is like how my how can i be less of a piece of shit it's say hey let me let me use my blinker hey let me not let me try to recycle a little bit hey let me try to do it's like you're just trying to like because i i know i maybe for Like you made it's a good way to do it to close it off to you when you do when you do research on history or for me how I do I'll just look at fucks their videos of people like murdering people. Sure.

It it will you will lose faith in people and humanity when you see how things were and happened. Right. So have you lost faith in people? Not entirely because it is necessary for me to not do it in order to. like wake up tomorrow. You know, I have to have some left. I don't, this record is generally expressing the negative side of it. Yeah. But I look at it as like, this is my, you know, devil on the shoulder talking here. There's definitely a part of me that's way more hopeful. I sometimes describe in terms of like the war themes and the sociopolitical stuff we talk about.

I say it's hippie music in reverse. Yeah. Because like I want, I'm a pacifist. I want peace and love and a better standard of living for the global poor and, you know, and protection of the endangered species of the world and the beauty of nature to be seen for 10 generations from now. And I want all that, you know? Yeah. And I'm expressing, like, the fear and revulsion of the stuff

that works against all that, I guess. But it's not all I feel, and as much I think humanity in the big picture is kind of awful in a lot of ways. You know, The Matrix, Agent Smith, what I call the Agent Smith thesis, where he tells Morpheus how humanity is a virus, that whole speech. That's kind of true in the big picture. But in the small picture, people are fucking wonderful.

There are a lot of cool people out there, man. I haven't talked to you for years, and I'm having like a blast doing this now. It's fun. I meet all kinds of people that I just like them on the first go, and they're different from me in all these interesting ways, and they think different, and they live different stuff, and it's endlessly fascinating people. So I try not to lose that. But in the big picture, like, when you put people into, like, organized systems and they'd be, you know, yeah, it's pretty bad, dude.

Yeah, man. I always say this. I think this is my personal, like, like belief system. I think, yeah, I think there's 100% there's actual pure-hearted good people out there. I think there's actually good people out there. But as long as there's humans on this planet, there will always be rape, murder, torture, and greed. As long as they're humans on this planet and people that pretend to be civil are actually

the ones that I get like my like my my bullshit meter goat goes off. It's like it's like it's like the Joker quote. It's like all the civilized people are the ones that will eat each other. If shit goes it should hits hits the fan. Yeah, 100% it was the most, you know, it's the most civilized people have done the most barbaric things. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, hell, if you talk about, this is some very, like, colonial era thinking, but Europe once thought itself civilized while the rest of the world was barbaric and primitive, the rest of the world never did, like, the two world wars, you know, like, nothing in the history of, like, the Aztecs doing ritual sacrifice or whatever could compare to, like, a day on the psalm or something, you know, with the sheer, like, butchery at scale, you know. So it takes civilization to be organized enough to be really barbaric.

You were talking about those murder videos. I had the thought at one point. I'm like, what does Jeffrey Dahmer have on like a Panzer Division in Russia as far as like carnage and pain that he caused? It's not organized enough. He doesn't have a, you know, like a general staff and logistics commanding thousands of men in tanks to go and like destroy thousands of people's lives. Another one you said regarding good hard people.

And I think you could look at this in, you know, anytime you have like an army that fought for an evil cause or something, it's like in theory you got a few million people in like, I don't know, the Confederate army evil cause for sure, just in case any you Americans don't know that. And or like the Germans in Russia or whatever. These are fucking armies that fought for straight up evil cause

is the most clear cut that I think you can find in history. There must have been guys who, like, loved their wives or their dog or like good to their dog or whatever. Or, you know, while we're at it, there's probably plenty of police that are, like, good people in their lives. But if you're working for a systemic force that does bad things, it doesn't fucking matter if you're a nice guy. That's the thing that I think is really important to note is like the end of, and just like your landlord can be nice to you too. He still has a material motive to exploit you, whether he's a nice person or a mean person. person is almost irrelevant. Totally.

So it's like the intersection of systemic forces versus that. Since you have these Confederates on here, I'll just say one of the things about the guys who died for that cause is a lot of them in my view were basically the doaps of the plantation class, the guys who owned the slaves, got the guys who kept the slaves in line to go and die so the owners could try to keep their fucking human property. It's fucking awful. But a lot of Southerners, I'm in the South now. I see some of those flags around and, you know, I've raised an angry eyebrow at it.

And I, you know, General Sherman do it again. But anyway, I look at that and I go, like, the history you're proud of is that of being duped to fight for, like, the rich aristocrats above you. Because if your dad was at, if your great-grandpappy actually fought it, you know, Fredericksburg or whatever, he probably wasn't one of the officers. He probably didn't even stand a bit. You know, anyway, that's a, that's some. fucked up social, racial shit in America that's still so with us.

And it's like weird since I moved to the south, the level that people are like proud. I'm like, what's there to be proud of there? I don't understand it, you know. So, but it's like, that's like a fucking cancer in our history for sure. But the point I'm trying to make is the way that you could have be, like, it doesn't matter if you were a good guy individually if you're in some systemic process that's bad. you could be a really nice guy help like working human resources for am or like working on claims for a health care company denying people their care and you're doing a good job for your boss and you're

probably nice to your family and whatever uh and so what you know like uh diddo with uh with the fucking CEO who just got shot you know if he really cared about his wife and kids uh he wouldn't have been he wouldn't have been in that job where he's ruining other people. lives with their wives and kids to make it so anyone would even want to shoot him. Like no one would want to shoot me because I've never done anything like that to anybody. Yeah. And I do that because I care about myself and because I care about my family, you know. Yeah, that fool has fucking walked out to him and shot him, dude.

Yeah. He's fucking shot the guy and killed him. No tears. Yeah. Not one. In fact, you know, you know what? When they guillotined the fucking king in the French Revolution, I don't cry for that either. I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner.

Yeah. You know, that's, so that's how I feel about that. And I think we could use a few more of those now. I think I think 100%. No, no, fuck it, dude. You know how labor guys writes in the first place? Do you know what fucking labor used to look like in this country? They used to fucking shoot people for striking.

If you look at like Harlan County, Kentucky, they would straight up, I was reading shit where like guys were trying to unionize and we're talking like so they could get a fucking bite to eat so they could feed their goddamn kids. Men who worked in the mines all fucking day are just like, we don't want to be rich, we just want to live, please, and we're trying to organize for that, and people, they would hire thugs to throw like a stick of dynamite

into their kitchen. The thing is, too, the government, like the company, the companies would hire private militias, like the, yeah, but there's a bunch of stuff. The one I read was called They Say in Harlan County. There's a song perform, it's a folk song performed by Pete Seeger, whose side are you on?

It's like a labor one, but it was apparently written by a woman who like whose house was attacked because her husband was in the union. But anyway, they used to do this shit to keep labor down. When we say keep labor down, we're talking about the peasants. That means you probably. You know, you, me, almost everyone. Right. So they, it took militant action.

Like they didn't just stand around and be like, please give us more. you know, a better deal. No, there was violence. And at the end of the day, I have to applaud that violence because I'm not, I'm a passive because I don't believe in it. But we say so much about like, oh, no, this guy got shot. So when someone rich dies, it's like, oh, you know, how could they? But when someone poor dies, fuck them, we don't even notice.

Yeah. So that's, if we actually care about life, we need to look at it holistically and talk about what is just the passive turning of the gears every day doing the people. Anyway, they didn't get the eight-hour work day and, you know, retirement and all that stuff because they asked politely. It was a lot more, hey, me and the boys, we're going to fucking burn down your house if you don't give us a better deal because you're destroying our lives and there's a lot more of us than there are of you. We'll destroy yours back. And I think that the ruling class in America, America loves to pretend we don't.

have a ruling class. We do. It's actually the most successful ruling class in human history. They have done better at, the modern lords have done better at siphoning the wealth from the planet better than the medieval lords ever could. They're way better at. That's what the sort in the cross is about is the idea that lords and peasants never went away or rebranded itself. And instead of believing that the lords were chosen by gods, now we believe that the lords are the most successful smartest entrepreneurial innovators who provide effective solutions. to the market and that's why they deserve their position. Right?

It's a mythology. It's just a different one. Yeah. And if I work hard enough, if I could even be the lords, you ever, you know, Futurama, there's a bit where like they're at some political thing and some guys doing some like fuck the poor speech and Fry's like, yeah. And Lila's like, fry, but you're poor. And Fry's like, yeah, but one day I won't be.

And then guys like me better watch out. And I'm like, that is some smart right. Exactly. Exactly. exactly so this this fucking sits in the american psyche for sure um and it's pretty much if you look at history i think that america the west not just america probably the western world today is more successfully propagandized than any people at any time in history i think so uh because the here's a cold war joke uh so there's a i'll put it this way in the terms of this joke so there's

this uh cold war joke i heard that uh there's a russian and american on a flight right and they're going to America and I'm going to do some bad accents here. So the American says, hey there, sir. So what brings you to the United States? And the Russian goes, Comrade, I come here to study your propaganda. And he's like, that's ridiculous. What do you mean propaganda? We're a free country. We don't have any propaganda. And the Russian says back, exactly, comrade. And I think that's the power of it. We don't necessarily recognize our propaganda as propaganda. There's some stuff you can look at like, manufacturing consent by Chomsky, you're inventing reality by Parenti that talks about how like the

free media is a filter because, for instance, you won't see the corporate news media be anti-corporate because of course not. And it's not like they're censoring the anchor, but they just never would hire one who doesn't agree with them in the first place. It's like a filter. Okay. Yeah. So I think we are very heavily propagandized. And I think you need a certain out of your own time perspective to like understand that and be like oh fuck so i stabbed at some of these themes and songs like better world and a cage of air especially i had a thought for uh cage of air when i passed i was passing a fucking subway and i didn't see the sign i see it out the corner of my eye and i just see the green and yellow and my brain goes subway and i'm like and then i go what the fuck i saw two colors

and i associated with a brand and i did that myself yeah and you probably would too red and white Like on the level of fucking colors, right? And we don't call that propaganda, but you get a fucking person to have this almost like Pavlovian conditioning response to something like that. I'm like, that's really, really, really effective propaganda. It is. There's a bit from Zhuangze,

which is this ancient Chinese philosopher I had to read back in school. And he's pretty cool. He writes some cool stuff. But he puts a bit about like something to be effective. if you ask a toad in the bottom of a well what the ocean is, he would describe the well he's in. You know, so if we're very, I guess what I'm trying to say is our perspective

is limited by our own experience and it's like hard to get out of that. Yeah, it's in Schwangze. The frog of the, maybe, maybe. I don't know, I wouldn't know how to find it or read it back in school. There it is, yeah, yeah, okay. Oh, shit, we found it.

So it's about your perspective because you, you know, can't know what's normal or whatever how could you you know what's normal for your time and place and you might i don't know going back to earlier you might think that because everything else is normal that something's wrong with you and you need a pill or whatever but it's actually everything else that isn't normal and you're fine you know you're just having a rational response to a irrational fucked up thing outside you so totally i think i think people especially like you You definitely see it more on like the kids like middle school, high school.

Like you're supposed to feel uncomfortable. I don't fucking, I wasn't comfortable. Everyone thinks like everyone thinks that they need to feel right. I don't feel comfortable in my skin and my bones that was 35. I feel you dude. I still have moments. Like fuck what the fuck. I'm 35 and I feel good.

Yeah. Have like these feelings in high school. I'm like, no. Like that's how you're growing up. It's fucking weird. Yeah. When you wonder like, am I a loser? Am I cool enough with this girl like me?

like me or whatever it's like there's there's an element to that's healthy because you worry you're going to try to like be cool you know like good or whatever worthy in some way and that it can be like a motive and so there's definitely like a nasty side to that coin too if you internalize it too much which i i have at various points in my life but uh of course yeah no it's a i absolutely agree that like it's it's something like people like growth is painful but it's like necessary and it needs to be done and if you you can tell that to yourself and keep that in mind it makes the process a lot easier which is easier said than done but it's hard dude yeah yeah i don't have the answer for sure it took me a while you know life some crazy shit man and the good thing about that though is it means we won't run out of shit to write jams about because that's like the best we can do i think as humans is express through art whether you're a painter whether you're making films whether you're doing photos whether you're making metal or any of it yeah it's infinite man i think it's it stabs it the closest thing to like that meaning and legacy stuff we were talking about earlier too.

I think that's the closest you can really get to achieving that in your personal life. You know, I'm just fucking dude. I'm really proud that these Warbringer records will be around. People can listen to me screaming at him after I'm dead. And hopefully they do. And if they don't, well, at least I tried, you know.

And so I think it's important for anyone's life to find something you can do that gets you that sense of purpose. The band's probably the, it's like apart from the band, It's really just like myself and like my wife and my home is like a different side of that where I'm like I was, oh, I have purpose in my life because I was a good husband hopefully to, you know, to my wife. And I was a good friend to my friend and, you know, maybe one day I'll be like a good dad to a kid, hopefully or whatever. I got to do better than mine did, you know. Yeah, man. Still teach the war stuff, but not like bail or whatever, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, John, I think, I don't think we miss anything. I was about to say, like, yo, I can stop talking whenever you want, but I could also continue pretty much indefinitely, especially which is having it, this shit. No, we, anything about a war bringer that you want people to know that they may not know or anything good? Anything good. Well, if you don't know, I think we make the best thrash medal of the 21st century.

Fuck, yeah, dude. So I think that at this point, I can say at confidence, It's we're not trying to be the best modern band or whatever We're trying to be one of the greats of all time We have seven records and none of them suck You cannot find us you can't find us sucking for like a single second on disc really So like I think we we try you know when people talk true metal or whatever That's not for me that's not a particular sound because

Musical Exploration is part of what that's but like just we are playing uncompromising I was listening to a bunch of our records on the drive out here just thinking about the band and where we're going and stuff. I'm listening to the first one. I'm like, goddamn, like, we were pissed off as fucking heavy on this record. And, like, we've stuck to that. We've developed within it. I'm really proud of our work and our discography.

And I'm hoping that that leaves just a cool musical legacy, just that you can jam out for hours and hear a ton of sweet riffs, solos, ideas, songs, and just a lot of heart in it. So I'm really proud of that. And I think that we've, like, I'm just really proud of our body of work. And I think it's just that I take immense pride in it.

Awesome, man. Well, we haven't spoken in many years. And from what I gather from this conversation, I could be wrong, John. But it seems like you're kind of struggling, seeing the light in the end of the tunnel for your band. I think you just need to fucking do it, do it. And I think your band's going to be fine. I think, well, it's more just my, I mean, I'm worried about, like, just paying for shit in life. I've been there, too, but.

I've been there too, but. I'm a wildly expensive. And I worry that I'll hit a crossroads. We'll have to choose, like, do I go into, like, trying to be a teacher? Like, what I really want to do is be a professor, and that means I need to go back to school for two years. Do I go that way, or do I keep with the band? Because they feel mutually exclusive. And I want, Plan A is the band for sure.

I can do it, do it. Yeah. I am. I'm here. Rathapha Dura just came out and we got like a hundred shows on the books and there's going to be more. So that's what I'm doing and I'm, I've, that's already been chosen before I even walked in the door here. That's why I'm even in L.A. So I have chosen that way and I'm fucking hoping. On that note, I'll say thanks to everyone who ever supported my band in any way whatsoever or ever even just listen to us and enjoy it. Because that's what keeps us going. That's what keeps me going. And yeah, I'm definitely like, trying to lead the group with the energy of it will work everything will be great we're going to run a tight ship and uh we'll all go home with something for our for our hard and legitimate work that is legitimate work god damn it you know like yeah screw what the market says or you know that i should have my parents don't think i should have been like an accountant or a teacher or whatever like no no like um this is what i'm supposed to be doing and i'm going to prove it's true you know um so

so that's absolutely i appreciate your encouragement And yeah, I've crossed that bridge already in my head, and that's why I'm even here in L.A. Yeah. Good, man. All right, John. Thank you for your time, man. And good luck to you and the band. Thanks, man.

This was a lot of fun, dude. I didn't know what we'd get into. This was a really good one. It was a hot summer. Yeah, this was sick. Thanks, man. All right, everyone. That's it.

Later. That was a fucking doozy right there, man. What the fuck has happened? Yeah, that was sick. What's the whole lot just happened. Oh, yeah. You can be fucking fucking fucking, I didn't know.