Tom Araya Quotes

The harder stuff has always done it for me. Man, if it rips, I'll give it a thumbs up!

I was always very into heavy metal, and heavy metal is full of emotion and extremes, and I think that's the same in dance music.

If there's anybody who's new to what I do, who maybe heard 'Liberation' or some of the songs off 'Epicloud' and thought, 'This is really cool, I could get into this,' you're going to hate 'Casualties.'

There's nothing worse than a good video and good song, and you see a band and hate them because they can't perform. That's wack.

I just think, certainly for live music it should look as good as it sounds.

When you're in a club or a theater or even an arena, yeah, you want visuals, you want a good light show. But Slayer has always been about the sound. We have to sound good. It has to be tight.

The Doors were never that good as musicians.

A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!

If you've got a good song, it's easy to play. But you can't make a bad song sound good no matter who you have to play on it.

I love live performance and have huge admiration for people who can really do it. It's the same with music: I'll play a record and think that I'm not really into country or ragga. But, if it's live and the musicians are good, I'll listen to pretty much anything.

The first eight songs we were using someone else's monitors and it is hard to follow the changes when you are jamming if you can't hear those who you are jamming with.

When I got my band in 1983, I knew what I had to do. If I'm going to have a big band, they're going to have to sound equally as good as what I'm used to hearing.

It wasn't very satisfying playing the big arenas, but it was good as far as a paycheck. But the sound was terrible, especially in hockey arenas - the sound would go on for 30 seconds after we quit playing.

There are a lot of singers who cannot sing to save their lives. We have to accept it, but thank God there is such a thing as live shows. It's only when people are faced with live shows that the world gets to know how good or how bad they are.

We wanted to get everyone back focused on the fact we are playing live again. It really does sound great.

I think what AC/DC does best is play live. That's when everything comes together. Even after you make a studio album, when you go out and play live, that's when you learn what being in a band is all about.

It's so easy to make albums with overdubbing and editing these days, but I really prefer playing live and just getting the music to sound right because the musicians, the songs and the performances are good.

Even when I wrote death metal songs for a death metal record, I was always trying to do my best to make it as catchy as possible because that's how I like music.

I want to show everyone what a good rock 'n' roll band we can be.

When you're on stage and you got a great audience, that makes the show that much better for the band.

Death metal has now become exclusively about being evil, Satanic and playing full speed ahead. It's not what I'm into at all.

I've been thinking about songwriting more in terms of playing it live, and how it will sound as a band.

We're definitely a metal band. We push a lot of boundaries. But at the core we're a metal band.

Working with Bob Weir directly, we learned how high the bar is for Dead music.

As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.