Comedian Rob Delaney’s Open Letter to High on Fire’s Matt Pike

(Pike and Delaney enjoying their favorite shirts)

You know what feels baddass? Being recognized by someone way more famous than you. Like the time New York Mets relief pitcher Jon Rauch responded to my Tweet and I got all giddy, or the time a certain very well-known and respected metal drummer emailed us to say he’s a fan of the site and was closely following our Top 25 Modern Metal Drummers list. Those two incidents made me feel like a million bucks, like I’d actually done something useful with my lowly existence as a metal blogger.

Matt Pike must feel pretty badass right about now, then; megastar comedian Rob Delaney (who has 468k Twitter followers for ONE DUDE compared to High on Fire’s 8,900 for the entire band) has written Pike an open letter through Vice praising his music and wishing him well in his journey to sobriety.

Delaney is consistently one of the most hilarious comedians on earth and this letter is no different — so you should really read it in full — but here’s the tl;dr version: “You fucking rule and I love your music. I’m glad you’re taking the time to get sober because we need you as our Almighty Metal Saviour. You can do it! Take it from me, I went through it 10 years ago.” Here’s an excerpt:

But guess what? You gotta knock that shit off. It’ll kill you and we need you. Every superhero has their kryptonite; yours is booze. It’s cool; if you didn’t have a weakness, you’d be a God and then you’d be chillaxing on some cloud mountain playing chess with Liberace or some bullshit. And you’re not a God. You’re a filthy metal animal teaching scumbags like me about NOISE.

You have a sworn duty to rock the faces off the people of Planet Earth. (And for those people who’ve lost their faces to a bath salts huffer or chimpanzee, you have a duty to rock their asses off. Just because people don’t have faces doesn’t mean they don’t need your tuned-down sludge metal assault as a part of their daily lives.) So you want to drink booze? Tough shit. We need your sonic warfare more than you need a particular beverage. Pellegrino makes a new lemon flavored sparkling thing that’s nice; try that instead. It’s time to buck up and recommit to the service of Almighty Metal.

Getting sober is no easy feat so I’m sure Pike needs all the encouragement he can get, and getting it from such a famous fan has gotta feel pretty good. Speaking of Pike’s feelings, we haven’t heard a single comment from him through this whole ordeal… we hope he’s doing alright.

-VN

Additional reporting: Gary Suarez and MetalGF