Discussing Avenged Sevenfold’s latest string of cover songs, singer M. Shadows touched on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” admitting to Grant Random he wasn’t really fond of the Dylan classic at first (transcribed by UG):
“I’m a huge Dylan fan now – but at the time I just didn’t get it. I was like, ‘Guns N’ Roses made this song good, this song sucks!’
[metalwani_content_ad]
“And now I listen to it and there’s a part of the Dylan song that I like much more than Guns N’ Roses performance. And so, as you grow older you kind of see these things.
“But I think that’s one that really stood out to me as being… Like they did something different with this, they brought it into the ’90s.
“And they really crisp everything up, the drums, they added their own arrangement, made it longer, that big section in the middle, the choir. So I love that one, that’s my favorite one probably.”
Talking about how the boys chose which songs to cover as “The Stage” bonus tracks, Matt added:
“We were having so much fun writing ‘The Stage’ and having Brooks [Wackerman] involved. We were having a blast every day. And we started messing around with a couple of songs and we just said, ‘Why don’t we do some covers? We’ve never really properly done covers.’
[metalwani_content_ad]
“And the idea was to keep it off of our album because we’ve never been fans of putting covers on our album. Because as soon as you put a cover out the radio goes, ‘Oh let’s put that on the radio because it has worked already.’
“We have no problem with bands that do it, but it’s just not our style. So what we wanted to do is to see evolving record. And we said ‘Well let’s test this evolving record idea with some of this covers that have influenced us.’
“So the bands like The Beach Boys, and The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, etc. – are all songs that really influenced out writing on ‘The Stage’ and also influenced our lives. And so we just took songs that we felt we could change enough to where it would work for us.
“And there’s a bunch that we threw on the waste and said ‘That’s not gonna work for us.’ So we did it during ‘The Stage’ recordings and the whole idea was to make this record evolve. We felt that it was better to do that with covers than to do it with originals. Because with originals we would wanna put a little more promotion behind it and push it a little differently.
[metalwani_content_ad]
“This whole idea was to release it without hype. If you’re a fan of the band, you follow Instagram or Twitter or whatever, something new might show up on the record or it might show on Spotify one day.
“And you go ‘That’s pretty cool! I didn’t get hit over the head with this.’ Our whole idea was very little hype, put these things out silently. And then a lot of fans wanted a physical product so we decided ‘Let’s do deluxe to make them happy.’ The whole summer played out the way we wanted it.”