Phil Anselmo

“Creating any type of art is all about mood. I've been making extreme music in one fashion or another for decades. And truthfully, Down has a big enough fan base to where I could remain content to do only that, but music is a vast territory and I am an explorer. And I'm a lover of all things considered extreme in music.”

“There has got to be a lot of unreleased video out there, live footage and whatnot. There's always going to be something extra for the Pantera fan.”

“You're always going to have detractors, and you're always going to have people who love you, and that's how it's perfectly balanced and the world spins on.”

“I guess I've never been introduced properly to Pink Floyd. I know they're great, don't get me wrong. Excellent, excellent musicians; great band; awesome harmony; great song writers; I just don't know anything besides, I guess, the popular songs on the radio.”

“I loathe rock stars. I am a music nerd, a fan, a follower... just like any fan of music might be. And although I have blood-relatives, a lot of times I feel closer to my audience than my true family, because at least my fans get what I'm doing, to a certain extent, whereas my family does not.”

“I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.”

“Communication between band-mates is imperative. Communication is the key to any healthy relationship. If I need to be checked, I expect to hear it put in plain words what my faults are, and give my band-mates the ultimate consideration by shutting up and listening, then acting on the advice given. Same goes for anyone else in any band.”

“I think anyone who suffers from chronic pain can agree with this - you feel this great significance. What I wanted to capture was that significance, and as a matter of fact I think that's one of the lyrics on 'Conflict,' on the split. I touch on the significance, and really it's a selfish thing, in an offbeat way.”

“I love to play guitar. I've been writing my own songs on the axe since I was nine years old. I suck at leads.”

“In my better sense of mind, I know that I'm far from alone and far from the worst, and the earth keeps spinning. Everything keeps moving, with or without me.”

“I went from being a kid-kid, listen to everything from The Beatles through Kiss, Peter Frampton, Jethro Tull classic rock, classic stuff into immediately, it seemed like, Iron Maiden and stuff like that. The first Iron Maiden record and then, obviously, the first Metallica record.”

“I think music is a big, big wide world, and I am voyager on this particular ship in this sea of wild music, and I'm gonna dive in and find as many fish as I can and catch them all. I love music.”

“I wasn't that wild about that. I told them basically if they were really going to want to bring back heavy metal to a program on MTV, then they are really going to have to get in touch with what real heavy metal is.”

“There it is again. Image. Once again. I get really tired of it quick.”

“You can only exist as far as your mind will allow you to exist, and I think chronic pain will stop time dead in its tracks. You feel like you're the only one, and how unfair it is, and a million different feel-sorry-for-yourself type feelings.”

“Tastes are varied, man, so much in this music world. Look, I adore the bands that I adore. On the flipside, as much as you love a 100 different genres of bands, there are another 100 I can easily say I dislike, too.”

“I don't care at all about the mainstream; I don't care about popularity contests; I don't care about who's got the biggest-selling album; and I don't care about glossy production.”

“I tried to take heavy metal... and balled it up and chopped it in half and really tried to create a new form of energy. I really tried to re-shape extreme music as I see it through my eyes.”

“To me, I'm for a band whose forefront is the music.”

“I love music. I love every kind of extreme sort of music, and many different genres, and if I were to have to dedicate myself to just one kind of genre, I would feel kind of gypped. I'd be like, man, I wish I could do this or that. And really all it takes is trying it out.”