ARSIS’ JIM MALONE MAKES THE IMPLICIT EXPLICIT
When Arsis main man Jim Malone released a statement last month explaining the band’s recent tour cancellations, I wrote that “you don’t have to do much reading between the lines to see what happened here.” That’s because Malone’s assertion that “there is no healthy way lose 100 pounds in four months, as I did late last year,” seemed like a pretty clear way of telling his fans that he had an eating disorder (and NOT, as some fans have hypothesized, a substance abuse problem).
Well, MetalSucks Maniac/fellow writer Carlos Ramirez as now confirmed as much in an interview he conducted for Noise Creep. Here’s an excerpt:
You recently released a press release trying to explain all of the cancellations and trouble Arsis has had in the last year. But it raised more questions and started more rumors than anything. Would you like to set the record straight once and for all?
This is really tough for me to talk about. I don’t even know where to begin in all honesty. I just want to start off by saying that I don’t have a drug problem of any kind. I know a lot of people were saying that when I released that press statement. The truth is I’ve had anorexia for the past year or so. It’s not the first time I’ve gone through it either. When I was in college I struggled with it. I finally got past then I started having a drinking problem that I fought with for years. When I stopped drinking last year, the anorexia problems came back.
I have the kind of personality where I take things way too far. For me it wasn’t about weight, it was all about control. I couldn’t control everything in my life so I fixated on my weight. At my worst, I weighed 128 lbs and that’s crazy for a guy who is 6′ 1″ tall. I got to the point where I was surviving on 500 calories a day and that’s even with the rigorous exercising I was doing at the same time. Last year I lost 100 lbs in the span of 4 months. I think doctors say that a healthy weight loss pattern is about 2 lbs a week so that should tell you how messed up I was.
Malone’s a good guy and this is a serious condition, so, no, I’m not gonna be a dick and make any jokes. We’ve had friends with eating disorders here at MS, so, again, we just wanna say we hope Malone gets well so that Arsis can continue to reign as one of the premiere melodic tech-death acts in metal today.
Read the rest of Carlos Ramirez’s excellent interview here.
-AR