Former Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams has carved out an excellent side-career for himself in recent years. The axeman has always looked like a fella that can handle himself, and he took that image one step further when he started to try his hand at professional wrestling in the mid-2010s.
Eventually, he'd sign with major wrestling company AEW - currently home to such legends of the squared circle as Chris Jericho, Sting, CM Punk and the Hardy Boyz - tearing his way through the roster under the moniker of The Butcher (a name he's wrestled under for some years now).
On a new podcast with wrestling personality and television presenter Renée Paquette, Williams discusses the similarities between his job as a guitarist and his job as a grappler - and it's all to do with his unique way of writing music.
"I don't know how to read music," he explains. "I just picked up a guitar and it just made sense. To me, it was more like Tetris than anything. I would just make these shapes up in my head and I would play these shapes. If I wrote out music, it would only make sense to me and the dudes I was in the band with. A lot of it is like X's and O's, or I'll use squares for certain things and triangles for certain things. It really turned into more of, like, a video game to me than making music."
Williams then goes on to compare his approach to wrestling matches - which are usually structured in a specific way by their its participants to tell a story that will entertain the crowd - to his approach to songwriting.
"Wrestling, to me, is like writing a song," he says. "Once I kind of understood how to write that 'song', it was like, 'Oh, ok, that's cool - there's an intro, there's an outro, there's a chorus.' It really does work like that."
Every Time I Die suddenly imploded at the start of the year due to rising tensions and legal issues within the band. Their break-up was a shock to many fans given that their most recent album, the critically acclaimed Radical, was released only a few months prior.
