Randy Blythe wants to make one thing clear. “I’m not Buddha,” says the Lamb Of God singer. “I get angry all the time. But are you just going to sit here and be angry forever? Or are you going to try and figure out a way to make things better?”
He’s talking the inspiration behind his new book, Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head, a collection of first-hand stories of survival and self-betterment, and the insight they’ve brought him.
“It’s just trying to understand myself and the world,” he says. “It’s just about navigating those thoughts.”
Do you think you could have written this book before you got sober?
“No fucking way. I couldn’t have written any book when I wasn’t sober. I used to write when I was younger. I did a couple of fanzines and stuff, I quite enjoyed it, but that was in my early 20s, and then sometime around then the drinking and drugging just became way more important than writing.
I did write lyrics, but writing a book is much harder than writing a song. It’s a much more sustained creative exertion. I didn’t have that sort of stamina when I was drinking. No way.”
There’s a lot of personal stuff in there: bereavement, mental health issues, fear, anger. Was it cathartic writing all that down and putting it out there?
“If you stuff something down, it will come back and fuck you up. I know it did with me. I lost a daughter, the only child I ever had [Randy’s newborn daughter died in 2000 of a heart defect], and I didn’t want to deal with that. I just stuffed it down behind alcohol and drugs and shit and just didn’t look at it, and it fucked me up years later. It’s absolutely imperative that you do let things out, it really is.”
And those perspectives are helpful to other people as well…
“I’m doing this book tour right now. There’s a Q&A and I will talk about my [late] grandmother a lot. Then after, when I do the signing, people will come up and it really moves them. It really does, because it makes them think about their grandmother or an elderly family member. If one thing comes out of the book, I hope that if people do have older people left, it encourages them to go visit their family.”
In the book, you make no secret of your disdain for social media and online culture.
“Because it’s fucking bullshit! Punk rock and metal have been warning against this for years. Look at Fear Factory! We’ve been talking about this, but we’ve been in the underground. Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, you guys are a bunch of dirtbag fucking idiots!’ Fuck you! The pattern was easy to see, and lo and behold, the idiocracy is upon us.”
There’s a lot in the book about what it means to be an artist. How important is that to you?
“I could go live in a fucking cave somewhere, I’m good with not much, but that is not taking advantage of what I view as my purpose in life: being an artist, which in my case requires expression, and expressing to people. I could write all the wonderful songs in the world, write 15 books, take a bunch of photos and never show them to anyone. They may be great, but what good is it if nobody gets to see them?”
So do punk and metal still have the power to change anything?
“Yes. I don’t think metal or punk or hardcore is ever going to drive a mass societal change, and that’s OK, because I think the only thing I can do in this crazy time is try and be an effective person individually. Punk and metal have the very real power to effect individual change, because they certainly did in my life.”
You talk in the book about the physical struggle of being in Lamb Of God. How long do you think you can continue with doing that?
“I think we can be in Lamb Of God till the day we die. I hope when I fucking croak, I croak as the singer of Lamb Of God, and at a ripe old age. We’re such good friends now, way better than when we were younger, because we shelved the egos and learned how to be a team more.
That being said, physically it is taxing. Man, my back hurts. It hurts bad. I have no idea how long we can keep it up at sort of the manic level that we do. But I don’t think we ever have to completely stop.”
You’re a musician, an author and a photographer. How do you satisfy all of those creative urges?
“It is frustrating for me in a way, because I love shooting photos, I love writing, I love being in a band, I do some acting every now and then… not very well! The frustrating thing is trying to find a balance between all those things, because since I got sober, my creativity is just like a fire hose. I have three or four books outlined that I want to write, then I need to do a photography book. All of these things are swirling around up here [taps head]. I want to do music of different sorts, not just with Lamb Of God.”
What other kinds of music are you talking about?
“Other wild side-projects. I will always do music as long as I can. When I get older, I think it will definitely be something a little more mellow. But I’m a physical performer. I won’t be able to restrain myself. To this day, I’m like, ‘I’m not going to jump off the drum riser, I hurt like shit.’ And then I’ll get onstage and it’s like, ‘Fuck this!’, and I’m flying through the air, because I can’t stop. It’s just too much power.”
It sounds like retirement isn’t on the cards any time soon.
“I’ll be doing it to the day I die. I will never retire. I don’t even understand the concept.”
Randy's new book Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head is out now via Da Capo on in the UK and Grand Central Publishing in the US.
