In a new, deeply personal interview, Mudvayne frontman Chad Gray has opened up about the cathartic yet painful nature of his songwriting, revealing that while he has “been using music to flush my trauma for years,” performing those songs live forces him to relive the very moments that created the pain in the first place.
Speaking with 93X’s Kevin Kellam about the band’s first new music in 16 years, Gray offered a rare and candid look into his creative process. He explained that he initially thought songwriting would be a way to “exorcise my demons,” but soon discovered a difficult consequence of pouring his trauma into his art.
He said:
“I’ve been using music to flush my trauma for years. I thought that it was gonna be a way for me to exorcise my demons, and then one thing I didn’t think about it, ’cause I was novice and new and didn’t know any better, it’s, like, ‘Oh, okay, now you get to play these songs every single night.’ … What sucks is, anytime that I play a song, I don’t go back to the time that I penned the song. What I go back to is the time that created it, for me to pen the song. So I literally go back to the action, not go back to when I wrote it. I go back to the time that inspired me to write it.”
He offered a harrowing, specific example of this process when discussing the lyrical inspiration for one of the band’s new singles, “Sticks And Stones.” The song, he explained, is a direct refutation of the old nursery rhyme, because “words do hurt.” The track is rooted in his own childhood trauma.
“I was a child that was used as a weapon,” Gray revealed. “You see that a lot in the world that we live in today. Divorced parents, or whatever, treat their kids like bullets, just to fire [at] one another, and they don’t even take into consideration the child… It’s hard to get out from under family trauma, ’cause it comes from people that you love very much generally, and we’ve gotta be careful about the kind of we trauma that we inflict on people.”
The two new singles, “Sticks And Stones” and “Hurt People Hurt People,” are the band’s first new material since 2009. Gray explained that it was crucial for the band to return with the heavier of the two tracks first. “If we’re gonna release new music, we have to come back and put the exclamation point on the end of Mudvayne. We are Mudvayne, here we are, and sock people in the mouth with it,” he said.
The new music arrives as Mudvayne is currently on the road celebrating the 25th anniversary of their landmark debut album, L.D. 50.
