Marisa Connelly of The Daily Rock conducted an interview recently with EXODUS drummer Tom Hunting before their show at The Chance in Poughkeepsie NY. Tom talked about the history of the band, their longevity, recording, personal matters and offered up his own 10 Commandments.

An excerpt from the chat is below:

Q: What's the key to longevity in music?

A: "To be true to yourself and try to stay away from drugs."

Q: As you did?

A: [laughs] "Yeah! No actually, we embraced it for quite some time, on and off again. But, everybody’s clean and sober now, so it’s good. But the key to longevity is to, you know, you’re going to have a certain fan base, and you have to evolve musically, but at the same time not leave your fan base behind because they want you to do a certain thing. It’s kind of hard to please everybody. But I think that’s one of the key things, for sure. And take good care of yourself to where you still can do this. So, I don’t know, there’s the two I can think of. I’m not the smartest interviewee in the world."

Q: Clearly, but we'll get past that.

A: [laughing his ass off]

Q: When you released Let There Be Blood, some people speculated that you just did it to make a few extra bucks. What is your response to that?

A: "Well, we don’t really make a lot of money anyway, and I don’t think we’re going to make a ton of money off that. We just did it as a representation of what the songs sound like now, with the current lineup, and as a tribute to Paul [Baloff] our old singer because he sang on the original. People don’t have to buy it if they don’t want to, but I hope they would give it a chance, see what it sounds like. It’s kind of like, the recording technology has come so far since we recorded that, everything is so much more isolated and crisp. Not that the original sounds bad, it’s more like an accompanying record for it, like a companion record. So, everyone’s entitled to their opinion about it, but we didn’t do it for the money because we didn’t make shit! Yet."

The complete interview is available at The Daily Rock.