BLACKGUARD - Video Interview And Live Footage From Hollywood Show Available
May 11, 2011, 13 years ago
MetalAssault.com recenty caught up with BLACKGUARD frontman Paul Zinay when the band hit the House of Blues in Hollywood, CA. Topics of discussion include how the dropping out of NEVERMORE and SOILWORK on the SYMPHONY X tour impacted them, their set list, the new album Firefight, Zinay's favorite song on the album, the busy year of touring ahead of them, one band he would love to tour with, and sharing the van with POWERGLOVE. Check it out below.
Live footage from the gig is also available.
Following is an excerpt from BW&BK;'s recent interview with Zinay about the new Firefight record:
Symptomatic of the constant roadwork is a growing number of disgruntled metalheads that would like to see Blackguard not come through town for a change. They’re one of the few small bands in recent memory with long term visibility, having secured some high profile tours over the last 24 months, and while Zinay understands the discontent he’s not about to apologize for having a career.
“Whenever a new tour gets announced and we’re on it, people take their potshots at us online, sure. I was on the BW&BK; site a couple months ago, actually – the EPICA tour had been announced, followed by the SYMPHONY X tour – and people were so pissed. It was like, ‘What the fuck are they doing on this tour again?’ I responded and said, ‘You know what? We’re going to tour until you hate us even more! We have three more that aren’t even announced yet!’ (laughs).”It’s something of a miracle Blackguard found the time to do any writing for a new album, let alone record it, and cough up top quality songwriting at that. Entitled Firefight, the album surpasses Profugus Mortis on every level.
“There really wasn’t a lot of downtime where we could sit down and write,” Zinay reveals. “The writing for some of these songs happened after the HYPOCRISY tour (June 2010); we nailed down four songs – ‘Firefight’, ‘Cruel Hands’, ‘The Path’ and ‘Fear Of All Flesh’ - for a demo at that point. Those were the first songs that Victory Records heard when we were negotiating with them. We worked on the rest of the songs after that, but they were pretty much done on the road. Kim (Gosselin / guitars) brought a lot of his recording equipment with him – laptop, soundcards – so we built the songs as we were going. There was no time to stop. We had tour obligations and there was a date looming for when we had to have the record done. When we got back from the Epica tour there was a little mad rush for me to finish up some of the lyrics. I was back home December 20th, and January 2nd I was in the studio recording my vocals.”Click here for the complete story.
