DEVILDRIVER Frontman: 'Every One Of Our Records Is Like A New Beginning For Us'

Brian Giffin of Australia's Loud magazine recently conducted an interview with vocalist Dez Fafara of Californian metallers DEVILDRIVER. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On the recording process for DEVILDRIVER's new album, "Winter Kills":

"I decided that I didn't want to spend more time away from my family than I have to," he explains, "so I recorded at home in my own studio. It just gave me a more comfortable place for me to work where I didn't have to be separated from them for these long bouts of time. I could go in there whenever I needed to and work for a few hours at a time, and then I could be at home spending time with the family. It just made, for me, the perfect work enviroment and made things more enjoyable and manageable for me."

On the songwriting process for "Winter Kills":

"I did this thing on this record called automatic writing. I would get the tracks from the rest of the band and then I would listen to one a dozen, fifteen times over, and then I would turn it off and just start to write. It's almost like a trance state where you don't even think about what you're doing. I just found it to be a very comfortable, very natural way for me to write and to come up with some new ideas and a whole new way of working that I think keeps with the whole theme of this record."

On "Winter Kills" representing a rebirth for DEVILDRIVER:

"'Winter Kills' definitely represents something new for DEVILDRIVER. You know, every one of our records is like a new beginning for us. We're always looking to strive for some new approach, something new to add. I think this is the strongest material we've ever done, and to me, the concept of 'Winter Kills' represents that break, that killing off what we've done so that we can move forward. That's kind of why I did the COAL CHAMBER [reunion] thing, because I felt there needed to be closure so that I could move on from that, and so in the same way I think that this new record allows DEVILDRIVER to move forward again from what we did with 'Beast', from what we did with 'Pray For Villains'.

"I'm pretty proud of the fact that no one's ever really been able to pigeon-hole our band into a particular sound. We've done thrash metal , death metal, we've had a black metal influence here and there but we've never been pinned down into a category where you can just say, ‘Well, DEVILDRIVER sounds like this or that'."

Read the entire interview at Loud magazine.