Phil Anselmo

I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.

I've heard too many times where people say that I'm this ultra-serious guy. In truth, I've got an extremely absurd sense of humor. I thrive on the absurd - I love it.

Pantera revolutionized the sound and the approach to heavy metal. It's been regurgitated. Once you up the production on a product and not just the playing but the actual production, then it's going to up the ante.

Music is there for us to explore. To intentionally limit yourself to one, two, or three genres is limitation at its worst. Music is huge; it's a gigantic history lesson, and if you are true music fan or a musician, you should explore it. It's all right there in front of us.

I loathe rock stars. I am a music nerd, a fan, a follower... just like any fan of music might be. And although I have blood-relatives, a lot of times I feel closer to my audience than my true family, because at least my fans get what I'm doing, to a certain extent, whereas my family does not.

Honestly, I got the best of both worlds: groove of New Orleans meets the intensity of Texas. That's the best education I could have, the best experiences I could have.

People are going to think and take things how they're going to take it, and I have no control over that, so it's kind of like biding time until you get your feedback. So, it's like, once the public can consume what you're putting out there, then you know. Then you know hit, miss, in between.

You can only exist as far as your mind will allow you to exist, and I think chronic pain will stop time dead in its tracks. You feel like you're the only one, and how unfair it is, and a million different feel-sorry-for-yourself type feelings.

To do an extreme metal record is something that is well within my capacity as a musician to write stuff out of the box, write stuff that's probably more extreme than the band I'm in at the present time, and it's something that needs to come out of me one way or another.

The lead guitar work is a bit repetitious, but when a song is under two minutes long, I don't have much room anyway. Thank goodness. But I've always contributed guitar parts to every band I've ever been in, so I'll always play the axe.

The success that Pantera had, I could have never, ever forecasted or predicted, and I always felt a responsibility to try to pay even a bit of it forward.