Quotes from Zacky Vengeance

There are so many people involved in making an album, and naturally, all you want to do is show it to your friends and family. You just can't do any of that because all it takes is one morsel of information on the Internet. Within seconds, it's around the whole world.

With 'Hail To The King' - our last album - we obviously wore our influences on our sleeve, and it was a blatant attempt to turn on our younger generation of fans to more classic-sounding metal.

Everything an artist does is scary, but we do it anyway. If someone tries to steer you off-course, push them outta the way and get back on course. Never giving up - that's what I truly believe all the greatest bands have done.

On our first album, 'Sounding the Seventh Trumpet,' we were listening to more obscure heavy metal bands and hardcore bands.

I remember what it felt like when I was young, and I looked up to someone, and they would pay me just an ounce of attention. And some of the bands I listened to when I was young probably never even sold any albums, but it didn't matter to me. If I'd go up and say, 'Great show,' it would be amazing that they even would acknowledge me.

We go out there every night, and we fight the battle. We don't care about people who don't think we're true metal. We hope to change their minds. I have total faith.

We didn't say, 'Hey, we're gonna pick a bunch of cover songs,' or, 'We're gonna write an original song that has to sound like this, because we're a metal band, so we're gonna cover some metal songs.' We did the opposite. We just said, 'We're gonna have fun with these songs, and we're gonna try different things.'

That is one thing about playing with Guns N' Roses and Metallica: everyone wants to interview you.

Mike Elizondo had an incredible array of guitars in the studio, but they were all right-handed.

I love listening to Led Zeppelin and classic rock albums from the Seventies. They're just so brilliant because they breathe.

I think the most important thing to putting on a good show is to always mix things up. Sometimes we wear makeup; other times we don't. The point is, you'll never get the same Avenged show twice. I think it's really important to be theatrical. I mean, look at Iron Maiden!

We're in the business of making fans that will last with us a lifetime. In order to do that, you've gotta give them something special.

I've had the chance to watch Metallica's James Hetfield from the side of the stage night after night, listening to his monitors, and his playing is so perfect. Slash is an amazing lead guitarist, but when you listen to his rhythm playing, you can hear how he pulls everything together with such a great feel, which is the most important thing.

It's just so obscure to take a folk song in a different language and be a pretty well-respected English-speaking rock band and totally take a song and twist it around and have fun with it.

Only a world spinning out of control could inspire the music and vision we have now.

Our first radio single, 'The Stage,' was eight-and-a-half minutes long. Unabashedly, we wanted to push the limits musically, lyrically, and instrumentation-wise.

What makes Avenged so exciting to me musically is that people either love us or hate us, but nobody sounds like us.

Iron Maiden and Metallica are bigger now than they ever were. They're playing stadiums across the entire planet. Even though it seems like their heyday was back when MTV and the radio played their songs all the time, the truth is that they've gotten bigger now because they play all the time, and people know they're going to get a great show.

Not everyone is going to love you. Not everyone is going to like what you do, and you see a lot of people don't want to let go of the bands that they love. They don't want to move forward. They don't want to let new things come in; they're scared of change. They're scared of new bands taking over their genre. They're just scared of change.

We wanted to write songs that we really like that incorporate everything. It seems a lot of bands want to stick with one thing. We didn't want to be scared to do anything that we wanted to do. We didn't want anything to hold us back. We wanted no boundaries.

I'd like to think that we will have had something to do with a shift back to heavy rock. That's what we've wanted all along, and we knew there'd be fearless steps to take to achieve that.

We're trying to do something nobody else is doing right now.

We have been harnessing every aspect of what makes Avenged truly unrelenting and building off of that.

For us to dial back a little bit and have a little more straightforward, singalong appeal was a challenge. In order to do that, we had to throw away a lot of stuff.