MACHINE HEAD guitarist/vocalist Robb Flynn has posted a new diary titled The General Journals: Diary Of A Frontman... and Other Ramblings - Where Do We Go Now...? An excerpt can be found below:

"Just to refresh everyone who may not have read the first Journal I wrote, I have started up my diary/journals again after taking a much needed break from it. They're now called The General Journals: Diary Of A Frontman... and Other Ramblings. For a little background, I started doing these journals/diaries 11 years ago in 2002, between Supercharger and Through The Ashes. It was the first wave of the internet, and we jumped on board, were one of the first (if not the first) to start the text/video diaries, and we fully embraced it. It was awesome, and enabled our band (that had been completely written off by the major US metal press, and continues to be) to connect with our fans in a really unique way. And that's what these are for/about: the connection. I need this connection, and from what you've told me over the years, you need it too. I find myself looking back on my life and so much of it is about searching for a connection, any connection, through music, through shows, through jamming, through partying, through girls/sex, through friends, and oftentimes, down all the wrong paths. Maybe we all are. And maybe some of us don't need to be. Some of us had great normal lives, lives that kept the need for this fucking endless search at bay. I'm certain that part of it with me is, being adopted at six months and never feeling truly ‘connected’ to anyone (three foster families in the first six months of life), but hey, that's a whole other story.

Side Note: If you're reading this on a website other than MH1 or our Facebook page, please know that this is not a press release. These are my journals, ramblings, brain dumps, etc. There seems to be some confusion about that. If you're not a fan of the band, feel free to ignore these, I'll be doing them often, sometimes twice a week. I'm not trying to win anyone over here, I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion of Machine Head or me, I don't expect, or even need, everyone to like me or the music we make. This is for the diehard Machine Head fans (the Head Cases, The Undesirables) who follow the band closely. It's for our main site MachineHead1.com, our Facebook, and the PHPList that I've started. Its purpose is to give said fans updates, thoughts on life, and life in a band.

Machine Head ... no immediate tour plans, but we will officially begin writing this week or next. No one has really sat down and discussed where we'd like to go in depth, but we have talked about shorter songs (LOL). The last Ten Ton Hammer show we did in London really got us thinking about cool, short songs. In particular, ‘Postmortem’ by SLAYER seemed to really get our blood flowing. We all talked about it afterward, how they managed to squeeze so many awesome riffs into three minutes and 28 seconds is just freakin' mind-boggling (or as our drum tech Mudbilly says, mind-bottling). ‘Everlong’ and ‘Sad Statue’ were also cool nuggets of shortness (videos of us covering those songs are up on YouTube, check 'em out). Phil has told me he has some riffs, McClain e-mailed some cool riffs, I have some pretty awesome riffs tuned down to F that I'm stoked on... so, who knows where it's all going yet, but it's definitely starting to bubble. Can't really tell where it's all gonna end up, you can't really plan that out, but that's some of what we've been bouncing around.

Read the entire entry at this location.