HELLYEAH / MUDVAYNE frontman Chad Gray is featured in a new interview with Charlie Steffens at KNAC.com. An excerpt is available below.

KNAC.com: Is your approach to writing lyrics with Hellyeah any different than how you write with Mudvayne?

Gray: "I sit in my room and write and I'm only hearing it in my head. I'm not sitting in there screaming and yelling and singing. I start writing and then I go in to do vocals around 7:30, 8:00 o'clock at night. The first time I've heard it out of my mouth is the first time I've heard it. And sometimes that'll make it on the record. Moving in and out of the songs and the actual writing process it's just something I've never been a part of. Like that, on that level. You really feel like you're doing it old school, even though you're using Pro Tools."

KNAC.com: Is writing songs and touring in Hellyeah like a much-needed outlet from the music you make with Mudvayne.

Gray: "Absolutely. Hellyeah is a breath of fresh air. It's been awesome, like I said. Mudvayne's taken a lot of lumps over 10 years. We knew when we came off the road from Lost And Found that we were going to take a break. I didn't know how long it was going to be. A couple months before we got off the road I started to talk to Greg (Tribbett) about it. 'Dude, I'm putting this thing together with Tom (Maxwell). We're really going to do this.' We wrote 'Waging War' in 2003 or something like that.

So we started talking to some different drummers and nobody came around. And we thought, 'We're going to miss the window again, and it will be another however many years.' So we just started looking and then here comes Vinnie (Paul). I couldn't believe it, because we had other drummers that were going to do it they just didn't call back (laughs). I got the word, 'Hey, man, he wants you to call him,' and I'm like, 'What? I don't even know him.' Ten years of touring and 15 years or more of being a fan of PANTERA, I didn't know him.

KNAC.com: How fast did things start to move after that?

Gray: "We talked on the phone for less than 15 minutes and three weeks later I was on a plane going down to see him. We hung out the first night, went and had some dinner and got drunk and got acquainted. The next day we went in the studio and wrote a song and the next day a song, the next day a song. We wrote seven songs in the first eight days we were down there. We just kept pressing it, man. We worked really well together. It was so honest. We didn't go in with any notion of what we were going to be--no premeditated thoughts or ideas. We went in there with a couple riffs and it ended up being the first record--in less than thirty days, total time, of actually working on the record. It was pretty awesome how it worked out. I think that first night--not necessarily the first night--but the second night, when we wrote the first song, I got 'side project' out of my head, like instantly.

Click here for the complete interview.