DEVILDRIVER Frontman: 'We Don't Follow Or Sound Like Anything Else'

Steve Bell of Australia's Time Off magazine recently conducted an interview with DEVILDRIVER frontman Dez Fafara. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On being renowned globally in metal circles for both their intense live shows and their willingness to write songs combining hooks and melodies with brute force and power:

"I'm really fortunate in this band to be fronting a fantastic and versatile bunch of musicians, and I'm raised on music with hook. My favorite guys in music are people like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Danzig, Ozzy, Phil Anselmo. Those guys all had hooks in their music, and what we strive for is groove and hook, and we want to make sure that our sound is defining, which means we don't follow or sound like anything else. That's really important for us right now, especially at this early stage of the game.

“I'm not into that, and it was one of the same reasons that I left COAL CHAMBER, because it started following into a scene or a category and I wasn't into it. I was, like, 'Not only are people not getting it, but I'm out of here man! I'm going to do something that's way against what you think I'm going to do.'

“With any kind of credible art — painting and sculpting are other interests of mine — I can see who's selling out to make a dime, and you can see the underground artists who are doing something different. With those sort of people I find myself gazing at their stuff going, 'Wow, I've never seen this!' I've always been intrigued by that, and I know that COAL CHAMBER did that in the beginning, and I know that DEVILDRIVER is doing that now, so as long as I can hold true to that then that's kind of my flag and my mantra right now."

On the band's latest CD, "The Last Kind Words", which is not only an expansion of the earlier DEVILDRIVER sound but also different to anything else coming out of the scene at the moment.

"We didn't want to go along with or follow what's extremely popular right now — especially what's happening in the United States — which is screamo/emo type stuff. It's all really heavy in the verse and the very predictable choruses come in with clean vocals in order to sell out and make a buck and keep the record deal.

"We didn't do that, we put our boots on and said, 'Look man, we're going to make the record that we want to hear if we're out barbecuing on a Saturday.' And we really nailed down every song and made sure that we made a record full of tunes, rather than a few tunes and a couple of extras."

Fan-filmed video footage of DEVILDRIVER performing the song "Clouds Over California" on November 12, 2007 at the Thebarton Theatre in Adelaide, Australia can be viewed below (courtesy of "metallifreak27").