In a recent interview with São Paulo, Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows talked about writing their latest album, ‘Life Is But A Dream…’
The frontman also discussed the band’s journey from playing small clubs to headlining arenas and festivals globally.
“It feels like a dream, but there’s always a North Star of never having become a victim to audience capture, always writing the records you wanna write and understanding that in the long run,” he said. “If you are true to yourself and true to the music and true to your sort of North Star, which is you, then things will work out. Now, listen, people do that all the time and it doesn’t work out for them.”
Shadows, however, credited luck for the band’s success: “We’re extremely grateful. We’re extremely lucky. We’re extremely lucky that we came up in a scene of California where there was a lot of bands that had built an audience already. We’re close to L.A., where there’s a lot of record label folks. We were able to get a kickstart in a way that a lot of people can’t get.”
He added: “And we were extremely lucky to grow up together with someone that played guitar and someone that played drums and someone that wanted to write songs and sing. And so there’s so much luck that gets involved. And so I look back on it and I just go… I mean, [I’m] just extremely grateful.”
The band released ‘Life Is But A Dream…’ on July 2 last year. The album took seven years to make, and it looks into a personal struggle with the meaning and value of life.
“We were just looking for really bold moments — in life, in art, in film,” Shadows said of the making of the album during an interview with HardDrive Radio. “Things that we could sort of wrap our minds around an audio representation of how we were feeling about certain things. At this point, playing around with melody, playing around with tones, playing around with left turns, curveballs was really appealing to us.”
“I think we’ve proven to everyone, whether they like the band or not, that we kind of know the rules of music, and this record, we were able to just go break all the rules,” he added.
The band has been touring in support of their latest album. The album sold 36,000 copies in the U.S. during its first week and landed at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 chart.