Guitarists From The United States

"Goddamn, you half-Japanese girls do it to me every time"

"The workers are going home"

"I’m dumb, she’s a lesbian I thought I had found the one We were good as married in my mind But married in my mind’s no good."

"When we couldn’t find sleep, things were better then"

"Ooh-wee-hoo, I look just like Buddy Holly"

"I’m shaking at your touch, I like you way too much"

"I did what my body told me to I didn't mean to do you harm"

"I’ll wrap Orion’s belt around my neck and kick the chair out."

"It’s the mercy I can’t take."

"You used to be so sweet Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street"

"Hey, why do you sing with an English accent? I guess it’s too late to change it now."

"Rhoads brought a new level of virtuosity to metal guitar. [...] Carefully trained by his music teacher mom, Rhoads had a flair for modal improvisation, tapped arpeggios and meticulously doubled leads, and set the stage for the Eighties shred boom."

"Few guitarist in contemporary music have made such a monumental impact over such short a period of time like Randy Rhodes has. [...] With albums Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, Randy Rhodes’s legacy has become one of the most respected and influential of any guitarist in the metal genre."

"Rhoads infused the explosive, fleet-fingered, yet largely blues-based guitar style of Eddie Van Halen with classical music–inspired melodies and runs and an advanced knowledge of music theory. His playing on Blizzard of Ozz classics like Crazy Train, Mr. Crowley and I Don’t Know raised the bar for guitar shredders in the Eighties and beyond."

"Day-one chip on your dresser get loaded at your house"

"I let my mind get turned inside out Just to see what the kids were laughing about And it wasn't worth understanding Something I could've gone my whole life not knowing."

"A preacher in a t-shirt told me I could be a leader [...] You showed me the light All it did, in the end, was make the dark feel darker than before"

"How did they betray me? What did I do? I never touched you how I wanted to If you get married, I’d object Throw my shoe at the altar and lose your respect"

"I thought you'd hit rock bottom, but I'm starting to think that it doesn't exist You've been falling for so long and you haven't hit anything solid yet"

"Beat myself till I’m bloody, and I’ll give you a ringside seat."

"I want what we have, our beautiful life But the stillness, the stillness, might eat me alive"

"If you hadn’t come over, I would be so much colder I would be much less confused"

"I don’t want to be stoned anymore."

"What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl? Why do they gotta front?"

"You remain turned away Turning further every day"

"Wish I could write songs about anything other than death."

"You take your car to work, I’ll take my board And when you’re out of fuel, I’m still afloat."

"Everyone’s a little queer Why can’t she be a little straight?"

"I woke up in my childhood bed wishing I was someone else feeling sorry for myself When I remembered someone’s kid is dead"

"You can’t resist her, she’s in your bones [...] And so it seems, only in dreams"

"What if it’s all black, baby, all the time?"

"Sometimes the riffs, the ideas that are simpler, make a more direct connection and you can allow it to have that weight. Heaviness, doom, it’s a very elusive quality. If you get too tricky with it you lose that feeling of doom very quickly. It’s fleeting. It will run away, like a deer!"

"The 80s were a lot of fun. It was a time where everybody had disposable income so everybody was always going out. There were half a dozen places to play in my home town. You could have quite the life playing four nights a week, even as a cover band, but after a while we wanted to write our own songs. You have to start asking yourself, ‘What is it I wanna do? What do we wanna sound like?’ It was a chance meeting with [ex-Morbid Angel frontman] David Vincent while we were playing Charlotte, North Carolina, where he introduced me to this whole universe of underground death metal that I was completely unaware of. That was the poison apple that I bit and it soon infected my entire band. [...] The vibe in the late 90s was that death metal was dead. We didn’t care though, because we were going to do whatever we wanted to do, the world be damned. We were from Greenville, South Carolina, which is a nowhere town. Already we had wrestled with the idea that probably no one was going to give a fuck, so let’s just do what we like and own it. We didn’t care about the ebb and flow of whatever is currently popular. [...] That mindset has helped us over the years, remembering who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s humbling in a way that we are just some guys from South Carolina who are willing to work hard. We were happy that the timing of the universe then worked in our favour. You can’t complain - you just have to thank the metal gods."

"It became obvious to us early on that if you put in too many exotic elements, at some point it’s no longer really a metal record. Different Nile albums have had varying levels of extraneous elements to them. [...] It’s always a variable based on what each songs need. It’s the randomness of the universe."

"People radically underestimate what it takes to try and take all that sonic abuse and turn it into something that you can listen to. It eats the mix (fast double kicks), and then you add some down-tuned guitars and some low screaming, growling vocals. How on earth do you hear anything?"

"Basically, if you’re a guitar player, there’s riffs that are going to come out. It just happens. It’s part of it. So we’re not lacking in inspiration. George (Kollias) is always playing drums, so he’s always got drum ideas. You know, (guitarists) Brian (Kingsland) and Zach (Jeter) are always playing. So there are always new guitar ideas. It’s not necessarily an endless well, and not every riff that we come up with manages to make its way into a song. That is where it comes from; we love to play music, so we’re always riffing. But, as soon as you try to dictate to the muse, it goes away. You can’t force yourself to be creative. You can be disciplined and work on your craft every day. That’s a little bit different. Not always is gold just gonna fall out of the sky, like when you hear a Nile record. You know that’s not just because we sat down in 10 minutes and said, “Okay, we’re done writing the record”. No, those songs took years to put together. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into taking the inspiration that we had and crafting it into something."

"I didn’t get really exposed to metal until I was a teenager, but world history I loved from a very early age. I was in fourth grade and had to do a book report on Alexander The Great, and that just fired my brain up. My dad was always watching the epic flicks of the day like Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Land Of The Pharaohs, so it was a worm in my brain from an early age."

"I think we’re aliens. I think we’re not necessarily native to this planet. I think we came here from somewhere else, destroyed ourselves a couple of times, and what’s left after all that period of chaos, that’s what we have left, and that’s why no one knows where the fuck we came from. The early part of human history and civilisation is riddled with unknowns. Where did we come from? Where did these ideas come from? How do the Egyptians have such an advanced civilisation? Well, I think it came from before and just no one remembers. (The) last Ice Age, when the sea levels rose 400 meters. There’s a whole lot of stuff sitting out there, covered by water that we have no idea where the fuck it is. What was there? Just imagine if you took our sea level right now and raised it by 400 meters, how much of our current civilisation would then be underwater? So what happened at the end of the last stage? How do we know what was before the end of the last ice age? We only have a few things you know left. So you know, and how much shit survives 10,000 years of natural decay? Not much. Why do we still even know about the Egyptians? Well, they managed to build some shit that lasted 1000s of years, right? Otherwise, would we know anything about them? No, we wouldn’t; or it just be speculation, hearsay, and rumour."

"The kids in Europe were disappointed about [Bob Rusay's departure], 'cause [they were like], 'What happened to Bob?! He was the brutal-ist!' So I kind of had my work cut out for me, you know?"

"[Lyrical possibilities within death metal are] endless, you know. The limits are just.. [nonexistent]. There's all [kinds of] new ways to talk about maming and killing and torturing."

"It wasn’t about having or being part of a scene. [...] We believed in ourselves and our craft. We pulled ' out of thin air. That’s the result of us living on an island all by ourselves. We came up with something for ourselves that we wanted to do. It was about writing good songs, not about playing fast. Yeah, we like playing fast, and we happened to have a drummer who is capable of very high-speed coordination, so why not take advantage of it?"

"We do various things to prepare to go into battle, and it involves some meditation and other practices that we feel like expressing from time to time. We've always been a very spiritual band, and we remain that way."

"Grindcore is the bridge between thrash and death metal mixed with brutally fast hardcore. You take it and throw it all in a blender, hit puree and stand back."

"(on O'Brein's returning to performing) Having not been onstage for a while, he wondered, 'Are these people going to want me around?' We were, like, 'Come on, Pat. You're Pat O'Brien. These people want to see you.' I can appreciate how he felt about it after all he had been through. I could imagine there was an intimidation factor about it. We got up there and he said, 'I think I'm going to lay low in the back, get up and play and be done.' As soon as we got onstage and people saw him, the place went nuts. I said to the crowd, 'Hey, look, you all know Pat, right? Show Pat some love.' And they went nuts. They adore this man. Who wouldn't? If you ever met him, he's one of the nicest people you'd ever meet. He's one of the greatest at what he does, too. Then he started taking pictures with people and talking [after the gig]. He had a big smile on his face. That was so worth it. Here was a guy who needed a good break in his life and we needed help from him to get the show done. It couldn't have been any more perfect."

"He definitely brings a more technical side, as far as playing goes. He usually writes the crazier songs and the more technical-sounding songs and probably technically hard-to-play songs. [...] I know, usually, vocal-wise, they definitely are [the most challenging to perform]. [...] His songs are usually fast, but when he slows down, it's pretty much heavier than fuck, heavier than anything you're going to hear."

"I was coming to the end of my drinking time and was realizing I wasn’t the easiest person to be around at times. [...] I could be a fully functioning yet contrary alcoholic at 23 or 24. So songs like "I Apologize" are clearly me feeling like a bad young man, like I should apologise globally for something I probably did but was not fully aware of because I was drunk a lot."

"I really look up to Alex when I’m mixing an album. I just love the way his bass sounds."

"Considered an icon among the punk, alt and indie scenes, and a champion of human rights, vocalist and guitarist Bob Mould took the '80s by storm with his band Hüsker Dü. An aggressive guitarist flaunting an array of Strats, and the occasional Gibson Flying-V, Mould's aggressive approach, coupled with his cheeky songwriting, provided listeners with a shuttering display of off-beat duality."

"Awake, I’m being disembowelled Rotation pulling out the guts Tortured by this tool Intestines on the spool"

"Alex has always been 100 percent tech, using his finger trying to get all five going. He was driven as a musician. I've never met anyone as driven as Alex when it comes to trying to learn an instrument. That's for real, man. He was always trying to outdo guys he thought were amazing. He pushed himself. On Tomb, Alex became more vocal, as far as being a songwriter and being involved in the recording process. He really got on Scott Burn's nerves. He wanted the bass turned up. Scott walked out of the room a couple of times. Alex was pushing Scott to the limit as far as how loud the bass should go. That went on into the next album, The Bleeding, too."