SLAYER Frontman TOM ARAYA: 'For Me, The Family Side Of Things Is Priority Number One'

Kris Swales of Australia's Time Off magazine recently conducted an interview with SLAYER frontman Tom Araya. A few excerpts follow:

On what makes up a normal day in the life of a master of metal:

"I was at my kid's elementary school at a book fair! I was selling books to try to make money for the school!

"For me, the family side of things is priority number one now. The band is what I do, and what I helped create, if you know what I mean. But for anything else the family is always first.'

On whether he will be looking for new employment any time soon:

"It's still the same, I don't feel any older. Our audience definitely has changed, though. I guess 25 years ago I wasn't selling books at my kid's book fair either, but 25 years ago I wasn't married!

"I can't say that the thought [of moving on from SLAYER] hasn't crossed my mind, but everything takes its course, and you have to allow everything to take its course. I don't know how much longer the course has for us, but everything has to take its turn."

On drummer Dave Lombardo's return to SLAYER:

"We were going to start a tour, and our manager took it upon himself to call Dave and ask him if he'd be interested in sitting in while we looked for a drummer, and he was up for it. While we were doing the tour he got wind that we were going to start working on an album, and that's why we wanted to find a drummer, so we could work on some new material.

"He let it be known that he was interested in doing an album, and one thing led to another, if you know what I mean. So then we just stopped looking for a drummer, and started working on new material with Dave."

On last year's blistering "Christ Illusion" longplayer, a record that sticks so closely to the brutal SLAYER template it could have been recorded in 1985:

"The songwriting process that we went through didn't change a lot, all we did was change drummers, period. Dave helped Kerry work on his songs, and Jeff gave Dave a demo of all of his stuff which he learned and improved upon. That's the way we've always done our writing process, with Paul it was exactly the same way.

"With Dave coming back in, things hadn't changed; he helps Kerry, he works out Jeff's, then all four of us work out the tunes together musically once Dave's got it down. If we groove with it and we like it then we keep it — and if we don't, then we trash it.

"We just get together and write songs. We don't take influences from anything, we don't purposely try to put anything in there. We just try to write really great songs. And we have to like them; if we don't like them then we don't record them. And as long as we like them then we put them on an album and we hope that everyone else likes them."

On the "Christ Illusion" cover artwork, drawn once again by one-time political cartoonist Larry Carroll (who did the artwork for "Reign In Blood", "Seasons In The Abyss" and "South Of Heaven"):

"Our manager thought it would be great to get him back now that Dave was back, to kind of tie in with the original line-up thing. We sent him some lyrics that we had, because we didn't really have any song titles at that stage, and he sent back that. Or at least something that was close to that, and we asked him what it was supposed to be. It was a guy standing with his hands in his pockets standing in the water, and he said, 'It's Christ, he's a heroin addict.'

"And we said, 'Well, you should make him look more drugged-out!' So he came back with an arm missing, an eye patch, and his eyes rolling back, and these thorns on his head, and he was bleeding and stuff, and we were like, 'This looks cool!' Then he came back with another one where he was missing his other arm and there were more bodies around him.

"So we looked at it and we decided to call it 'Christ Illusion'. Like, from the song 'Cult', where I sing 'Revelation, Revolution, I see through your Christ illusion.' That's what I thought when I saw it straight away, and we had a big list of titles but eventually everyone saw things my way!"

On the fact that the art has caused its chare of controversy (32 bus-stop billboards were removed from a small Californian town after one resident complained):

"You can't please some people. It's just going to be that way, and if you raise a stink all it does is cost money. We were just like, 'Well, that's fucked,' but what are we going to do? We don't need bus stop signs — we've got the Internet, and we've got all our fans."