Behind The Avenged Sevenfold History

The story behind the Bat Country Video

Well we've had a lot of Hunter S. Thompson [enthusiasts] e-mail us and say they totally hate it. But we go to Vegas all the time and when we go there we party like it's the last day of the world. So we were writing the song and I was like, "Let's just have a desert vibe and let's just write about our own experiences and kind of base it off 'Fear and Loathing,' " and so we did that. And then Hunter died and then we talked to the Gonzo Trust [a group of three trustees who oversee Thompson's estate] and they were super cool about it. They're like, "Yeah, it's cool you guys are doing a song, all you have to do is send us two CDs and you can have our approval to use quotes and stuff from the movie." It just came about because the whole last record was very gothic-feeling and we wanted this record to have a lot of different aspects. There's the Danny Elfman vibe, there's the rock and roll vibe and we wanted to have that desert vibe and we felt "Fear and Loathing" was just the perfect thing. Driving down in 110 degree weather in a convertible Cadillac and you're just going to get screwed out of your mind as told by M. Shadows

Story behind the naming of "City of Evil"

Originally, we wrote ‘Beast And The Harlot’, the first track on the album, and lyrically it was about the fall of Babylon and it being called a city of evil. At the same time, Zacky was working on the artwork, which was a city with our bat character riding out of the city, so we decided to call it that because the album artwork looked like the city of evil burning. We had the song about Babylon as the first track, so we just called it City Of Evil.M. Shadows

Story behind the song on the Album "City of Evil" entitled "The Wicked end."

That originally started out with us wanting to do a thrash song and just go somewhere with it that we’ve never gone before. We’re all huge Danny Elfman fans, he did the Edward Scissorhands soundtrack, and whenever we do the introduction to our live show, we always have Edward Scissorhands playing. We wanted to do one of our own, so we wrote the score first, and then based the rest of the song around it. When you listen to Danny Elfman, he always has a boys’ choir, so we went to the label and asked if we could hire a boys choir and they said we could, so we just went with it. It was one of those things where we tried to branch out and do whatever we wanted.

The story behind the song off of the Album "City of Evil" entitled "Strength of the World"

We weren’t trying for a hardcore song, but it just came to me that maybe we could have a group thing in there. Just to throw a group vocal in the mix. We thought that it was a weird song to do it in, but we just decided to do it. It’s one of those things that had a real whiny vocal after it, so we wanted to have a real tough vocal before it, just to have the contrast. We weren’t trying to throw back the old school, we were just going crazy.