FOZZY Frontman Says New Album Has Been A 'Huge Success' Worldwide

Brian Fischer-Giffin of Australia's Loud magazine recently conducted an interview with FOZZY frontman and WWE superstar Chris Jericho. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On FOZZY's latest album, "Chasing The Grail":

"We made such advances with 'All That Remains' that we really wanted to make 'Chasing the Grail' something that would take us to the next level 'cause we knew we had a chance to gain prominence, gain credibility and gain success for the band. That's why we took so much time on doing 'Grail'... the songwriting, the recording, putting together the right team to promote it and it's been a huge success worldwide. It's got the best reviews we've gotten, the most airplay we've gotten, the best sales we've had."

"It really is a diverse record for us. There's a lot of different styles of music. It's still FOZZY, but there's 'Under Blackened Skies' or 'Friday the 13th' which are very fast, thrashing songs, but you also get 'Wormwood' a 14-minute song, 'Broken Soul' is like a Southern ballad and 'New Day's Dawn' is a European, CANDLEMASS, LACUNA COIL type of a song. So there really is a lot of diversity on the record, and I think that's something else that's taken the band to a different place. I know doing a 14-minute song is not something that every band tries and the ones that do don't always succeed, so just having that track on the album put us into a good place as well. We really, really took a long time to make this record something that people would consider to be a classic, and so far so good!"

On having his vocal style compared to that of Ozzy Osbourne:

"The Ozzy influence is tremendous because I never tried to sound like Ozzy. I always wanted to try for a Bruce Dickinson-, Halford-type thing. Also we double-track all our vocals which is a classic Ozzy trick that gives you a more haunting, ghostly type of a feel. And there are a couple of tracks on this record where it was like, 'Gee, did Ozzy step into the studio and lay some tracks down?' If you're going to be compared to somebody, it's not a bad comparison. I didn't try to sound that way, it's just one of those things that pleasantly happened."

On FOZZY guitarist Rich Ward, who is also the main creative force in the Atlanta rap-metal pioneering act STUCK MOJO:

"'Chasing the Grail' is [Ward's] sixteenth record! He knows how to write a song, he knows how to produce a song and more importantly he knows the business, and more importantly after four records and ten years together he knows me as a singer. He tends to write stuff that is really challenging for me but he knows I can do it. We have a very good working relationship. It's kind of a mission of mine to get him out of this underrated category and into the forefront as a producer, as a songwriter, as a guitar player, as a live performer."

Read the entire interview from Loud magazine.

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