During an appearance on Artist Friendly with Joel Madden, M. Shadows shared that he’s no longer the closed-off person he used to be.
Madden first mentioned, “We’re given messages about countries that are just not true and then you go you play there and you’re like, ‘Oh I could f*cking live here.’ People are great. Not that I would want to live anywhere than where I live but you start to see people are people everywhere you go. We’re all the same.”
M. Shadows responded, saying, “I was prone to be a little bit of a closed-off redneck when I was first coming up. Then, I traveled the world and I was like, ‘Whoa, everybody’s the same and everyone’s good. They all want the same thing.'”
He continued, “So traveling is what broke me out of that and now my kids are getting raised different than… My parents weren’t nothing like that but when you live in one place for your whole life and you hear everything you hear, it’s easy to get caught up in that.”
Avenged Sevenfold’s latest album, ‘Life Is But a Dream…,’ was released in 2023. M. Shadows expressed his desire to take a break before starting work on the next record. In a recent interview with Bradley Hall, he shared, “If you’re always in front of Pro Tools, and you’re always consumed by media, and you’re always playing video games, and you’ve always got a podcast in when you’re on a walk, you’re not really living a life where something can come and push you off your balance.”
He added, “The next process would really be taking long walks, go on a bike ride, and play some sports. Do some things where your mind is not being consumed by this attention economy that we live in. And then once those ideas start coming, you can jot them down.”
He went on, “Because I think it’s really hard for most people to go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna write from 2 – 6,’ and then you just go and sit down and stare at a computer, or you stare at your guitar. The best guitar riffs sometimes happen when you’re walking down the street and you hear a noise, or you have an idea… We need to live a little bit of life before we go into this next thing, and see where it takes us.”
Avenged Sevenfold will tour Europe this summer, performing stadium shows with System of a Down. Their tour begins on June 7 in Greece.
