AVENGED SEVENFOLD have announced Brooks Wackerman as their new drummer on the Talk Is Jericho podcast hosted by Chris Jericho.
About a week ago it was revealed that Brooks Wackerman had left his previous band, BAD RELIGION.
“To be honest, Brooks‘s name has always been in the mix,” AVENGED SEVENFOLD frontman M. Shadows said. “It was one of the names we were throwing around when Jimmy [‘The Rev’ Sullivan] passed away in terms of who was going to step up for [the 2010 album] ‘Nightmare’. We felt Mike [Portnoy] was the right choice and we still feel that way. Mike just destroyed on the record. He was perfect. But at the time, our tour manager brought up Brooks‘s name as well. But at the time he was also busy with BAD RELIGION and it was also… People were going to look at it differently because he was a punk drummer at this point.”
The band also feels strongly about bringing in Arin Ilejay in the middle of their touring and working him into the band, but felt that they needed something different to be the band they wanted to be. “It just became increasingly difficult to be on the same page, not only touring, but with writing and just where we want to take things,” said Shadows. “We’re just a bunch of guys who are all over the place and we have a bunch of different influences and we need somebody who can instantly … who can sit there and say, ‘Yeah, I’ve got that influence too or I understand why we’re gonna go here. I understand why we’re going to do that.’”
He continued: “It just got to the point where after Mayhem Festival last year, we had just decided to fire on all cylinders the way we want to, we needed to make a change. And we all had our little talk. We said, ‘Listen, we can ride this thing out the way it is right now and we’ll be fine or we can shake the nest a little bit and we want to fire on all cylinders again. We want to be the baddest band on the planet. We want to just dominate onstage.’ And I came up with the idea that I really want to talk to Brooks and see if there’s any chance and see where he’s at in his life right now.”
You can check entire interview at this location.
