TRIVIUM INTERVIEW

Very few musicians celebrate their 21st brithday while touring the globe. Even fewer do it with their thrash metal band. Trivium vocalist and guitarist Matt Heafy isn't your average precocious talent. Wise beyond his years, Heafy has always shown an unparalleled dedication to his music, something Trivium has also become renowned for. Whether its driving through Hurricane Charlie to get to a gig or writing their latest album on the road to satisfy fans. Heafy and Trivium get it done, even if that means ringing in milestones on the road.

MATT plays Dunlop Premium Strings 10-13-17-30-42-52

"My guitars go through extremely harsh touring environments. Even with all the temperature changes, sweat and flat out abuse from so many shows. Dunlop Strings hold up strong and give me the performance and durability that is needed to make my guitar rock hard every night!" - COREY plays Dunlop Premium Strings 10-13-17-30-42-52

TOPP: It must be good to be finally drinking age?
TRIVIUM: Yeah it is, even though ive been doing it for a while now.
TOPP: How did you first become interested and involved in music?
TRIVIUM: I was about 11 and a kid lent me The Black Album by Metallica. It was the first metal thing i'd ever heard. I picked up the guitar and started practicing seriously and decided I wanted to get good. I think I was about 12 years old when I played my Middle School Talent Show, it was 8th grade and I did No Leaf Clover by Metallica and the original lead singer of Trivium was there and he asked me to try out for the band. The try out song was for whom the bell tolls. I learnt that, tried out and made it into the band. We played our first show in Feburary 2000, played the local scene for years, went through numerous line-up changes, tonnes of demos and then our Blue demo in 2002 got us signed to Lifeforce.
TOPP: Did you or your family have any real reservations about joining Trivium so young?
TRIVIUM: No, not at all. I'm sure it was weird as hell for everyone else because they were all 17 and 18 yeaers old and I was 13. I remember Travis used to say that he was really sceptical of it at first but then they heard me play and they weere like , "Oh, never mind".
TOPP: Did you feel you had to prove yourself
TRIVIUM: That first time I knew I definitely had to do good and bring something more to the table that someone older than me, I was sure of it. I'd been practicing and I'd gotten my chops to the point that no one else was doing that sort of thing. So I did have confidence in that sense.
TOPP: You mentioned the group had a few different line-ups in the early years, do you think it was destiny the way its all worked out?
TRIVIUM: Definitely. We got Corey because he was a fan of our band locally. I'd seen him at a couple of shows. I was like 16 and we'd just been signed and were playing at the House of Blues in Orlando. Mushroom head were headlining, under then was Shadows Fall and this was when Avenged were a tiny band and they were opening the show up. I saw Corey at that show and I asked him to try out for our band. He did and made it straight away. We went through about three more bass players and the Paolo was in a local Ft.Lauderdale band we'd heard , so we asked him to try out. He came on tour with us for that Machine Head tour in 2004 and the rest is history.
TOPP:: ---Now your most recent album, The Crusade has been a tremendous success, how did that all come together and what did the creative process involve?
TRIVIUM: It was kind of difficult because we've pretty much been on the road since April 2004 touring. We had a touring schedule we wanted to complete but the label had a date that they needed the record out by so we had t o write the whole thing on the road. We weren't quite in a bus at that stage, so for some of it we were in a van, which was pretty difficult.We got home for about a week, did pre-production, taugh each other everyone else's music, started recording and as soon as we were done, we left again.
TOPP: After the acclaim of Ascendancy, were you ever worried by what reactions it might generate?
TRIVIUM: No, not at all. We wanted to write music the four of us wanted to hear. regardless of whether people loved it or hated t. We just wanted to do exactly what we wanted to do.
TOPP: Is it difficult for you to pinpoint the differences between the two records?
TRIVIUM: To us, it still sounds like us. We didn't charge anything or come into this thinking we were going to do something differently. We just wrote whatever came out naturally and went for it. That was all there was to it.
TOPP: There's a tremendous vibe about your live shows, how important is that aspect of the band?
TRIVIUM: Live and the CD are the two most integral parts of the process. There are so many parts of the process. There are so many more parts; videos, press, literally hundreds of different things you can put into a band. I think the nice thing about us as a band is that a lot of bands, whether they are using backing tracks or whatever, sound exactly like they do on their CD as they do live. I don't think people want to see that, I think they want to see something different. People are definitely going to get the material, it sounds like us, but theres more energy. The nice thing about our band is that we've had so many fuck ups and technical difficulties that if we fuck up or my voice cracks, I'll call myself out, the crowd will alugh with us. It's a very natural progress, its not staged or planned. we just go with our instincts and see what happens.