Zacky Vengeance

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I think we are really in touch with what's going on around us in the world of music, trying to push the bar forward and try new and exciting things that our fans can react to.”

“We wanna go back to Southeast Asia and just do it right for them.”

“To be honest, we spent many years at Warner, and in the very beginning, there was a very passionate team that worked alongside us on a daily basis. Every year that went by, we would lose just about every single person that worked directly with us, to the point that I honestly couldn't have picked up a phone and gotten one person who knew me.”

“We're always talking and plotting and discussing what we can do to give our fans the best possible experience and leave everyone going home with having an amazing time and a memory that will last a lifetime.”

“I've always loved big riffs and chunky guitars.”

“When we were trying to come up with a concept for our music video for 'The Stage' we basically run through a lot of different ideas, and ultimately, I sat and studied the lyrics that Matt had written - and they really resonated with me.”

“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.”

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

“We wanna be on the frontlines of everything new and exciting. The old world order of putting out four singles before you release an album is so boring to us.”

“Everyone likes to have fun. But when I look back on my life, I'm not going to say, 'Oh, we're the crazy party animals.' I'll look back and say, 'Wow, we did take this seriously.' We had fun while we were out doing it, but it's just the only thing you read about: 'They're a bunch of party animals.' To be honest, that's not true.”

“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.”

“You always have to try new things, and that's the one thing that we've learned from all the greats - every album isn't gonna be every fan's favorite, but as long as you keep switching it up and making new fans, it's really about being persistent.”

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

“When we called each other and got the call that Jimmy had died, literally, it all ended right there. Everything we've ever known as human beings, everything we've ever known as a band, changes at that moment, and you can't think clearly.”

“A great way to get your rhythm playing together is to work with a drummer, preferably someone that has a good groove and plays solidly in time.”

“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!”