JUMPING DARKNESS PARADE: EYAL WANTS TO KNOW EVEN MORE ABOUT YOU

Okay. It’s time for me to get the answer to a question which has been haunting my soul for a few years now. How many of you metal fans are musicians, how many of you are musicians in bands, and how many of you don’t play any instruments at all and just love the music? Please feel free to get as detailed as possible with your response.

DAATH is the kind of band that likes to meet all of our fans. Granted, we’re not as big as the Jonas Brothers yet, so we have time every night to talk to our fans. But regardless, we make a point of doing so. The grand majority, and I mean GRAND majority of fans we talk to, at some point will tell us about their band, or about a guitar they own, or about some sort of musical inclination they have. Is metal a style of music by musicians for musicians? Are straight up music fans that don’t play anything the minority? Or is it just that way in the more extreme genres of metal – since there aren’t as many fans to begin with are the people that are there just generally the bands in the scene?

I’m just seriously curious as to how many people out there are just straight up music fans. I can’t imagine that in other genres of music there are this many musicians in the crowd. But then again, other genres of music don’t happen to be as small as metal. It doesn’t seem like it, because the community is so structured, but metal is in fact a tiny part of the music industry. And to those of you who are just music fans…I wanna know. Do you give a fuck about things like guitar solos? How do you rate your favorite guitarists? What’s your criteria? What about drummers? Do you give a shit about their double bass speed? Or is it more just the overall feeling the music gives you?

See, I can’t think outside of a musician’s mind. When I was younger and I experimented with LSD and other similar drugs, I could sometimes step
outside of myself and just hear music for what it was. That was a mind blowing experience. For me to hear music outside the frame of being a musician made me feel so free and in some ways feel it so much more deeply that it makes me jealous of non-musicians. However, I wonder if it was just the acid, or if that’s how non-musicians listen to music.

I started playing music when I was three years old. Started on violin and piano. I continued that until I was nine. Then I took a three year break until I discovered electric guitar. In those three years, I found rock n’ roll and, eventually, metal. I was not thinking of Nirvana, or The Doors, or The Beatles, or Megadeth, or GN’R, from the perspective I would just a few years later. I was just experiencing how the music made me feel, and experiencing how it affected my emotions. And I have to say – it was deep. Again, in many ways deeper than how music affects me now that its my entire life.

That’s not to say that I don’t live, breathe, shit, eat, bleed, and write blogs for music. It’s my everything, and I would wither up into a raisin and shoot myself point blank in the face without it. (Some of you are going to suggest that someone remove music from my life so I just get on with it, but those of you who do so can go fuck yourselves with a sandpaper dildo.) I feel music incredibly deeply, but there’s always an analytical side to it. There’s always an intellectual side to it. There’s always an agenda to it.

How do you non-musicians hear it?

-EL

Musicians and non-musicians alike should visit Daath on MySpace.