Recently, WMSC/Montclair NJ’s The Metal Teddy Bear Experience interviewed Trivium’s Paolo Gregolleto. With the band currently on tour in support of The Sin and The Sentence, the radio show spoke to him about whether they would be commemorating next year’s 10th anniversary of Shogun, what other songs in their catalog they’d like to play, and an update on Matt Heafy’s screaming voice.
2018 is coming up and that is going to be marking the 10th anniversary of Shogun. Do you have any plans? Maybe playing an anniversary tour or a one off date? You mentioned that before.
Paolo: I got to see when that album came out, I forget. It probably came out in October because I feel like every record we did came out in October at this point. Pretty possible we can do something like a special one-off thing. I don’t think we would do a full tour. We’ve always debated doing like…is a 10th anniversary tour in the middle of a cycle of a new record, does it make sense? Does it take attention away? I think with this record [The Sin and The Sentence] being so strong, we really want to tour it hard and we want the focus to be on it. I think a lot of our fans have said this is their favorite stuff we’ve done since that album [Shogun]. Maybe a good a trade-off would be maybe to play a little more from Shogun that we haven’t played. Maybe the title track, maybe a couple that just haven’t been played as sort of like this is the celebration of the record.
Are there songs that you haven’t played, not even from Shogun, that you’ve been itching to play?
Yeah, there are a lot of songs from Ascendancy. I mean, we’ve played the whole record but we haven’t played “Declaration” in a while. We haven’t played “Ascendancy” in years. That’s probably one we’re going to play soon. It’s just so much. Even the ones that we haven’t played yet, like “Shogun,” “He Who Spawn the Furies,” we never played. “Prometheus…” “Calamity” we haven’t played, there’s just a lot.
You guys do have 8 albums now.
Yeah, it’s tricky. But the up side is like we have to tour to make things happen. Keep the wheels on the band. But now we can tour more because we can play more songs. We have a lot of songs we can leave off for one tour and play on the next and make it worth people’s while to see us a couple times on an album cycle.
I heard a lot of rumors, over the past couple of years about Matt’s voice. Like, he blew out his voice and he wasn’t able to scream, so that’s why he didn’t scream on Silence in the Snow. I also heard that he was perfectly able to scream but chose not to because he wanted to work on his vocals chops. There’s a quote from TeamRock, where [Matt] said, “Screaming is easy. Singing is hard. I’ve always been a fan of what’s harder.” So what actually transpired?
He got a new technique down for screaming that took a while and the new technique is the one that allows him to do the screaming 24/7 on tour and all that stuff. On the record, he does it the wrong way because he can get a certain type of tone that you need to get for the record. It’s hard to explain because live is such a different animal than the studio.
Well, wasn’t Corey was taking over some screaming live?
Core’sy always done backups live but there was a moment where Corey was doing more and it just doesn’t work with the way the songs are kind of laid out with the vocals. Matt’s back to it and he’s got the new technique. I mean, I guess if anything, screaming for us is like this tool in our writing arsenal that it works so well and to be able to have it and to be able to use it when we need, is something we just got to keep with us and works. Silence in the Snow broke open the doors for us in a lot of ways in places we never were able to get to and now that we’re through those doors, it’s kinda nice to bring back this other element an surprise all these news fans with, “hey, we also do this.” It seems to be working well.
Check out the full interview below:
