AVENGED SEVENFOLD's M. SHADOWS On Life Is But A Dream: "Artists Should Do What They Wanna Do"

Avenged Sevenfold's latest record Life Is But A Dream left quite a few fans confused, given how not metal it was. Personally I loved it, but I can also see how people expecting a more "traditional" Avenged Sevenfold record would've been irritated.

Speaking to Igor Miranda of Rolling Stone Brasil, Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows opened up about the experimental nature of the record, the backlash it's received, and why he's not losing sleep over it.

"I don't think any of that stuff weighs on me at all,” he said. "I think it weighs on other people more than it weighs on the band. But I think it's healthy for us to be kind of oblivious to it, because when we wrote that record… Every one of our records, I think, served a really cool purpose at the time.”

He added: "I definitely think it's funny. There's those moments where you go… We were playing in Greece, and I think there was, like, 10 or 12,000 people [there], and I'm looking at these faces and I'm thinking, I just wonder what those people thought the first time they put on Life Is But A Dream It's kind of funny to me. I get more of a kick out of it than anything. 'Cause we totally back it. We love it. We think it's great.”

Shadows then gets to the point I think every fan should remember – you're not in the band and you don't have control over what they make. Purchasing music does not give you voting power in what a band does.

"I think those people can either go on a journey and learn to like it, or they loved it off the bat, or they'll never put it on again. But the idea that we have some sort of control over our art and we can put it out there and we can like affect people in that way, it's just kind of funny to me. It can't be that serious, right? Like if someone makes a painting and you're, like, 'Oh, I don't like that, but I like that.' The artists should do what they wanna do. We don't let it weigh on us as much as it probably weighs on other people."