Three albums into its run at rock history, DevilDriver is adding a personal touch to familiar sounds of days gone by in hopes of making a permanent dent in the industry.

    If the latest offering, “The Last Kind Words,” is any indication, DevilDriver is setting itself up for a historical run. Frontman Dez Fafara spoke with The Culture Shock Tuesday, August 7, 2007, shortly after the band joined up with Ozzfest.

Hello?

Can I speak to Dez please?

This is Dez.

Hey Dez, this is Patrick, how are you doing?

Hey, what’s going on, man?

Not a whole lot. You ready for an interview?

Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go ahead and do it.

Excellent. What’s up today, you traveling to Columbus?

We have the day off today. We’re getting ready to travel to Columbus but we stopped off ‘cause Daath and Nile are playing a show so we’re gonna hang out with them tonight.

You’re on Ozzfest again. You’ve got a solid relationship with the Osbournes and Ozzfest in general, having been a part of so many previous gigs with those guys. Was this pretty much a no brainer for you to hop on board?

Yeah, it was. I thought I’d have the first eight weeks off in my entire career in the summertime and I ended up laying at home with my feet back and here comes the phone call to do Ozzfest, so what are you supposed to do? It was awesome. Ozzfest just called, do you wanna go and it was a resounding ‘yes.’ We showed up with no tour manager, no crew, no anything. We drove two days in the driving rain to get there and we’re just now starting to … everyone’s starting to come on board. Everyone’s been helping us out. Hatebreed’s sound guy, everybody’s techs. It’s been real cool.

Yeah, dude. Usually you have time to mentally prepare for something like this …

We had no time. No rehearsal time. No anything.

How weird is it to be approached to do something like this with zero prep time?

Yeah, but nonetheless great. With the record coming out that’s getting such positive response, it’s fitting that we be out on the road on it.

How are you getting used to the baking sun out there? You guys joined up just in time for the Texas shows, right?

It’s been unbelievable, man. The heat’s been actually crushing heat. Honestly, I do my gig and I go back to the bus until the sun goes down. I’m just really not down with the whole sun thing. I try to make it out, we go and we do our signings and stuff, but after that, you take three or four hours on the bus until the sun goes down.

It’s gotta be rough down there. Up here in Montana, we’ve been getting record heat, something like 10 or 12 days in July that topped 100, which is really odd for up here. I imagine the areas you’ve been playing have been brutal.

Yeah. We’ve got a fixed slot. We go on about 3:30 or 4:00 o’clock everyday and it’s hotter than hell, but we manage to pull it off. Everybody gets about a half hour or so, we manage to squeeze six or seven songs in and then just go take a relaxation after that, man.

Let’s talk about the new album. I spoke with you in ’04 and you were talking about the first album and you said ‘you’ll get a lot of passion on the album, but you won’t get a lot of anger and hate in every single song.’ On ‘The Last Kind Words’ there’s some real aggression in the lyrics. Tell me about the way you approached the songwriting on this album in terms of lyrical content.

The second record, ‘The Fury Of Our Maker’s Hand,’ I went to a different place lyrically then I did this time. This place for this record is just a massive middle finger. To many things. I’m also going deep on religion, I’m going deep on you should be treated the way you should treat people. That vengeance is ok (laughs) and perseverance is even better. What I said about the second record really stands true with this new one. If you’re looking for any words of forgiveness on this one, you’re not getting it.

I’m really digging ‘Horn of Betrayal.’ I think that’s my favorite one so far …

Thanks man.

I love the way it starts out. I love that beat that kicks in through the song. It’s killer. Like I said earlier, the lyrics are brutal. Tell me about the creation of that song and where it originally spawned from.

It’s difficult for me to say what each song is about because you may think it’s red and I tell you it’s blue and it blows it for you, right? Each thing is just surrounded by life. The ‘Horn of Betrayal’ is basically saying to a person or a group, however you want to put it towards, the horn of betrayal sounds loudly for you while I’m sitting here comfortably in my own skin. I think it rings true for a bunch of different ideas, not just one idea.

Obviously the album pummels right off the bat with ‘Not All Who Wander Are Lost.’ That’s a killer song. What does it feel like for you when you listen to the final master copy of a song like that, knowing that it’s just gonna set the tone and the standard for the album?

Oh, man. I’m excited for this record. Especially when I heard the finals that Andy Sneap had done I was jumping up and down. I’ve said it over and over, I’ve made a lot of music but I rarely listen to my own stuff. I listen to it until it’s done but when the record’s done, I rarely put it on, but this record, man. When we were at home, I was just jamming it constantly for people that were coming over. My wife and me. There’s definitely something about this record that feels like we’ve touched on the pulse of DevilDriver. We’ve found our sound and we’re solidifying and defining our style right now, which is great because most bands, their first record is usually their best one and after that it’s no good. It goes downhill from there. It’s not that way with us. We keep getting heavier, we keep getting better. We refuse to pander to what radio or what everybody thinks is safe and what is sellable, we refuse to pander to it.

There’s something really cool about the cover art too. It’s easily the most detailed of the DevilDriver albums. How pleased were you with that?

I love that. We decided early on to brand the cross. Not to try to use so much imagery on the front of the album in order to explain what the record is. A lot of the times, you can see heavy metal records and you know death and destruction going on on the cover, it means death and the destruction inside. We just wanted to brand the cover with the cross so when you see it, you know it’s a DevilDriver album and still pick it up and feel out what’s inside for yourself.

Right. It’s got some awesome color to it and I like how it compliments the picture on the back where you guys all have your back to the camera.

I work with some great people. Some really cool people at Roadrunner. This cat Charles Dewar (sp?), him and I really go back and forth all day long on the cover work. He’s a huge asset to myself ‘cause I can tell him, ‘I want a gold cross and I don’t want something that’s flat gold. I want something that looks real,’ and he’ll send me something that does. It’s cool when you’re surrounded by great people like that to work with.

You’ve got three albums under your belt with DevilDriver. It’s difficult sometimes for an artist or musician to move from one successful endeavor to another one that reaches equal success, and in this case, I think it’s surpassed what you’ve done in the past. How satisfying is it for you to have accomplished that?

I’m obviously humbled at the point of even having a second career. There’s only a few guys who have done it, a handful of guys and I could name ‘em off the top of my head now. I’ve worked extremely hard, so when you see things come to fruition, it magnifies it even more for you. You know that hard work pays off and if there’s one message I’ve always tried to say to anyone, it’s ‘if you work hard, it’s gonna pay off.’ And I don’t even mean monetarily. By people coming around and going ‘hey, this is the best work of your career,’ or the rest of the guys, ‘this is the best work of your career.’ It’s exciting, man. Like I said, it feels like a defining moment. It’s almost pulsating through me that I know ‘ok, this is the sound in which my vocal sounds best with the music and in which their music sounds best. Now, let’s hold on to that sound and keep refining it and make sure through the years as everybody changes to what’s popular and what’s not, that we don’t. That we just forge through it like a tank.’ It’s very important. To answer the question, man, I’m happy.

I was about to say too, this is definitely the band it seems like you were meant to be in charge of. When you listen to this album everything has come together. Not taking away from anything you’ve done in the past, but it’s almost like this is it.

Right. These guys are killer. I’ve surrounded myself with good friends, great musicians and it’s a full on democracy in the band. So much so that I give ‘em my lyrics before we do it and they tell me what they like and don’t like and I think that’s the only way that art can feed and you can be happy with it. If everybody’s coming in with ideas and then it slams together to make the whole. Yeah, I’m stoked man. I couldn’t be happier right now.

Rock and roll and metal is always evolving and changing and bands rarely get the respect they deserve until they’ve either been doing it for twenty years or they’ve been gone for at least a decade. How do you think this band and the music you’re making right now will be viewed twenty years from now?

I definitely hope that especially this record right now, ‘The Last Kind Words,’ is viewed where it came out in a time when it was way more popular to sell out and do metal appropriate for radio, to make the company happy, to keep your record deal to make money, that we said ‘here’s a massive middle finger and here’s a huge boot up your ass. Here’s DevilDriver.’ I hope ten, twenty years from now people will remember what’s popular right now, what bands are popular right now, what the scene is doing right now and we did something completely opposite.

How hard is it for a metal band, in whatever genre of metal you want to talk about, to earn respect from not only fans but fellow bands in the business?

I don’t know. We’ve never really had any problem with that. We’ve always been really good friends with everybody from Lamb of God on down. So, the respect from other bands, it comes from the amount of touring that you do. When people look at you and go ‘well, you’re on the road for 300 days a year,’ there’s nothing you can say about that. From the fans, it’s gotta come from the music you’re putting out. Like I said, they know when it’s honest, they know when it’s real and they know when you’re going against the grain of things. If one thing rings true through the whole interview right now, it’d be that we’re completely going against the grain of what’s popular right now. We don’t sound like anything like Killswitch, Trivium, Shadows Fall, all great bands, good friends of ours, but we don’t sound anything like that stuff and it’s real important for us.

You definitely have a contingency of fans here in Montana, when are you gonna try and make your way up here?

We’d like to get up there as soon as possible. It’s looking now like it’s not gonna be until fall time ‘cause we’re supposed to go over and do Europe and then do Japan and Australia and then South America before we come back to the states. One never knows, this industry changes by the minute. If something comes up, we may be there next week, you never know.

Don’t forget about us. We get the shaft a lot when it comes to big time metal shows.

Ah, man. I won’t. I’ve always made it a point in my career to play the big cities and the out of the way places and me personally, I like driving through the country. So, Montana, places like that, Colorado, that’s where I feel at home. We’ll be there, don’t worry about it.

Awesome. I became a father for the first time last summer when my wife and I had our son Marky and I saw that your son Simon appeared on the album singing background on the tune ‘Tirades of Truth.’ How proud of a moment was that for you to have your son appear on a recording?

First of all, I’ve never been able to record close to home and I finished the last two songs a block away from our house, which is so weird. My one son, who’s nine, long hair, he’s a metal kid. He came in and wanted to do it. Bless my band for giving me a chance to do that on one of our biggest records, but that kid man. He sang the lines ‘you’ll live below angels and above beasts,’ and if you listen to it, you can hear something different and what it is, is us putting his vocals up, almost above mine and we’ve got almost a Corpsegrinder kind of growl. If I said it didn’t bring a tear to my eye, I’d be a fucking liar.

Obviously with you being his dad and like you said, he’s a little metal head kid, is he playing any instruments? Is he striving to want to do this?

I bought him a guitar last year, but man, I’ve got three boys and I’m hoping that they all go to college and don’t follow the road that I followed. I support them in anything they wanna do. I’m an outlaw. I’ve been on the road for almost twelve years now. If that life suits them, then so be it, I’ll support ‘em. My wife, I’m lucky I’ve got a supportive woman. When I met her, the first time she told me she loved me, the next day I wrote her a poem that said ‘you have the life of a wife of a sailor.’ So, when she read that, she understood exactly what she was up for. I gotta good family behind me. Behind every great man and good man is a great woman so that’s the way it’s gotta be.

I keep telling my wife that we’re gonna have three boys and you’re living it right now. How is it having three boys hanging around?

Get a bigger refrigerator (laughs).

I’ll write that down (laughs).

I keep telling her we’re moving out of California because I want ranches, I wanna raise horses and I wanna raise bulls and because I wanna live off the land because it’s costing me so much to feed the kids (laughs).

Excellent Dez. I really appreciate you talking with me again.

We appreciate it. It’s really cool. We’ve had a lot of people come full circle. A lot of magazines that wouldn’t write about us in the beginning because I was in Coal Chamber, now they’re giving us ten out of tens. Everybody’s coming to the table with what’s real and what’s real is you can’t deny what we just put out and coming from the most humble side of an ego which I have very little of for a frontman, I will tell you that this thing’s gonna crush. And it is crushing and for me, there’s nothing better than that. You take care of yourself brother, it was good talking to you and any time you wanna call, let me know.

Dez, have a good one, man.

Take care of yourself, man.