There’s little doubt that in the five years since Coal Chamber split up and Dez Fafara formed his new band, DevilDriver, that the man himself has also under gone a radical charge. Gone are the Gothic garb he wore in the Coal Chamber days and it also seems that he is enjoying being away from the stress that led to Coal Chamber’s demise.
It was a very relaxed Dez Fafara I spoke to when I caught up for a chat, ‘I’m in a very rare place at the moment… I’m actually at home for six days. Then it off to Europe, a tour I’m looking forward to because we’re headlining it, that means we get forty five minutes on stage not twenty,’ he says with a chuckle
Dez says he has got used to touring even though he is very much the family-man these days, so much so that even during this interview he has a regular ‘family-guy’ moment when his Red Doberman made such a racket he couldn’t hear on the phone he nicely yells out to a family member to ‘put him outside’. Dez has learnt to incorporate his family in his music so much so that his young son has a guest vocalist spot on DevilDriver’s critically acclaimed new album, ‘The Last Kind Words. I ask him whether he agrees with the claim that this is DevilDriver’s best album yet, ‘Definitely I do, in different ways we have progressed and we are still evolving.’
That evolution has seen DevilDriver produce their heaviest but also their most melodic album to date, where they hoping that this there third album would define their sound, ‘Definitely, it was time to define ourselves. I always believed that if the second album doesn’t kill you, the third would go nicely. This time we went into the studio totally compared. We want to keep ahead of all the metal bands in the United States. If they’re doing B we want to do A… but with the sound of this album it pushes and pulls both ways between the musicians and the songwriters. We felt we had to define ourselves right now because there are so many other bands out there right now. Even the record label originally said that this album was too heavy.’
I ask him what part Jason Seucof the producer played in producing the new sound on this album. ‘Jason was great to work with, an unbelievable talent and most people don’t know this but he is one of the best guitarists in the world, right up there if not better than Yngwie Malmsteen, and not only that but he knows how to capture the guitar on an album. But the great thing is he can get what he wants from song in an hour instead of six. At first I wondered if he was lazy and then I realized he just knows how to get what he wants… he captured the vibe.
Dez has always been a promoter of a hard work ethic so it’s little surprise to hear that the album only took two months to record, ‘I am lucky that I am surrounded with artists, great musicians who share the same ethic.’
One of the disappointing things about the arrival of ‘The Last Kind Words’ was it was spoilt by many fans by being leaked onto the internet but I was surprised to learn that Dez wasn’t all that upset about it happening, ‘All our albums have been leaked and I know that downloading could kill underground art, but on the other hand it spreads your music and more people will come to our shows.’ So does that means Dez downloads? ‘I do,’ he laughs. ‘I’ll download a couple of songs and if I like what I hear I go out and buy the album.’
And while he may not be skeptical about downloading he is skeptical about a rumor currently going around that former Pantera and current Down lead singer, Phil Anselmo recently came out and said that DevilDriver are the new Pantera, ‘I’m not sure if he really said that or not, I’ve heard he did, and I mean I’ve been friends with Phillip for years, when I didn’t have a home I lived with him, but we don’t want to be the next Pantera, we are DevilDriver.’
With Dez in such a good mood and talking about dispelling rumours I asked him if he was comfortably talking about all the things that have been said about the split of Coal Chamber and to my surprise he responded with ‘Shoot…I’ll tell the truth.’
I started by asking him if it was hard to jump straight into DevilDriver after Coal Chamber’s demise, ‘Not very hard at all. I saw them (Coal Chamber) going on a wayward journey… off the tracks… drugs, stuff like that. We were sitting on the tracks and there was a train heading right towards us. To be honest I was recording a demo for DevilDriver while still in Coal Chamber. I mean when we were recording Coal Chamber’s third album (‘Dark Days’) we weren’t even in the studio together.’
So do you see DevilDriver as a new beginning for you? ‘Yes…but it’s still hard work. People talk about DevilDriver having a very different sound to Coal Chamber but even back when I was writing Loco (one of Coal Chamber’s first hits) I was listening to…and being influence by Emporer. Back then I wanted to be like that but the musicians around me didn’t want to follow…we were electronic…Goth and it was new.’
That lead to the question that I had been so nervously waiting to ask. Could he ever see Coal Chamber reforming? ‘I don’t know. A week ago if you had asked me that I would have said definitely no, but three days ago…and you’re the first person I’m telling this… three days ago Meegs the guitarist rang me to say he is getting himself off the drugs and apologized for the hell he put me through. It’s brought peace to me…I can go to bed of a night with peace.’
Well perhaps we may have Coal Chamber back together again one day but if DevilDriver keeps producing albums like ‘The Last Kind Words’ we are hardly going to complain.