David Draiman

"I would like to thank a world that never understood or accepted me, family and friends that never believed in me, and a God with one hell of a sense of humor. You have all made me what I am today. Let that weigh heavily on your consciences."

"[I'm] Very positive about the internet, Napster. I think it's a tremendous tool for reaching many more people than we ever could without it. When you release music you want it to be heard by people... Nothing is going to do that better than Napster. I can't tell you how many kids have come up to me and said, "I downloaded a couple of tunes off Napster and I went out and bought the album."...I don't really make money off of record sales anyway."

"I think that labels are foolish in not using the Internet, instead of being afraid of it. I think that if AOL Time Warner were smart enough, they'd enter into a contract agreement with their own company — AOL — and agree on one thing: They have the ability to track anywhere that a message comes from, no matter what service you're signed up with, via an IP address. You just make sure that whenever a song is downloaded by somebody utilizing your server, whether it's AOL, or Mindspring, or anybody else, you access a minimal charge for these downloads. It could be 75 cents or a dollar, a dollar-fifty… This way, at least you're making money off it. At least this way the people who are supposed to be making money off the product still can, as well. It still gives people the opportunity to go ahead and download as much as they want. It's a standard fee for doing a service, or for having a service available to them. They'll do it, and at the end of the month, they'll have their AOL statement, or their Mindspring statement, and it will have their download tax added onto the bill. And it will keep on going. The labels don't think of this. It seems like I've been talking about this to deaf ears on this topic for the last five years. Before we even got signed, I was talking about this. It's just preposterous to me that labels, for the most part, are the reasons for their own demise. They're just so stuck in this old way of thinking, and unfortunately, the good elements of their old way of thinking have all gone away. They don't spend enough time developing artists, they throw a whole bunch of shit against the wall and wait for something to stick, and when it doesn't, they let it fall off."

"Nonsense. I think that the problem isn't with them downloading the song, the problem is when they buy the record and when they burn a million discs off their computer for all their friends. That's the reason why every single band, no matter who you are, your sales are chopped by fifty to sixty percent after your first week out. It's a huge problem, but instead of giving people more reasons to buy the product, they don't worry about that. I think you have to enhance the value of the product. Like when KISS was putting out records, their 'Alive' record sold so well because it made you feel like you were part of the concert experience. There was also an actual program in the thing, all these pictures, the KISS Army stuff… There's so much stuff that added to the value of that package. There wasn't a KISS fan out there who didn't want the whole thing, because everything that came along with the music was so worthwhile to them. It's not rocket-science, this stuff."

"This is not rocket science. Instead of spending all this money litigating against kids who are the people they're trying to sell things to in the first place, they have to learn how to effectively use the Internet. For the artists, my ass... I didn't ask them to protect me, and I don't want their protection."

"[about the name Disturbed] It had been a name I have been contemplating for a band for years. It just seems to symbolize everything we were feeling at the time. The level of conformity that people are forced into was disturbing to us and we were just trying to push the envelope and the name just sorta made sense."

"[on Phil Anselmo] I think that he's probably one of the more enigmatic frontman of our time. He's tremendously inspirational to vocalists throughout the genre including myself. I know that there's some weirdness regarding the "incident," but I certainly know that Phil would have never in his darkest thoughts ever have wanted any harm to befall Dime. You know the world is a very, very extreme place. When a fan gets so connected to a band that the demise of the band, however they want to interpret it, leads them to question their own lives and their existence... I mean it's weird. There are too many types of music that inspire that passion in people and thankfully metal is one of them. It's just unfortunate that this animal happened to take the demise of Pantera so seriously that he felt that it was justification for him to do what he did. He took the life of probably one of the greatest guitar players to walk the face of the Earth."

"I had been taking Prevacid for about four years and my body built up a resistance to it, to the point where it wasn't doing anything anymore... I had a night of drinking in London followed by a full day and night of drinking on a day off in Dublin, because what else is there to do in Ireland but drink? That, coupled with a show where I had monitor problems, and I pretty much trashed my voice."