M. Shadows to Kerrang!: Avenged Sevenfold Want To Make A Roadmap That Can Show Artists There's A Better Way...

"I have this mind-set of being put on this earth when you didn’t ask to be here,” Matt says. “There’s no real objective. But when I was with the kids in Utah… it felt like I was flying through space. You feel that you’re in it. And you think about things and you ponder things. You look at the human expression of what we do while we’re here.”

“I would say that Avenged Sevenfold is exploring new technologies,” he says. “And we’ve found things that are going to be able to help artists in the future. Because a lot of artists don’t want to help themselves – and, like I said, I totally understand that. But we want to be the people who make a roadmap and can show artists that there’s a better way to gain ownership over your own art.”

Nineteen years later, as an older and evidently wiser man, Matt takes the rough gist of these observations rather well. To the charge of being a jock back then, he admits that he “thinks that’s fair”. When asked to identify the causes of this personal evolution, he says, “Well, I got to travel the world, which has made me a much more empathetic person. I mean, it really did. I fear what my thoughts and my opinions would be if I only lived in my city and had my close group of friends or community’s opinion on world events and world problems. Going to third world countries, going to Europe, and going to other places [has taught me] to understand that people aren’t all dealt the same cards.” To this, he adds that his once towering ego “helped [me] along the way. That competitiveness of wanting to crush every [other] band, and of having that competitive drive… it actually helps you – it helped us – in a crazy way.” Here comes the but. “But then when you strip it all back, you realise how silly all that stuff is, and how crazy it was.”