Metal On Loud recently conducted an interview with ANTHRAX singer Joey Belladonna. Metal On Loud: You’ve been around for ANTHRAX’s biggest successes, like [the “Among The Living” album]. It has really big hits on it. Yet you’ve been out of the band for eighteen years. How do you look back at your departure from ANTHRAX, that period?
Joey: “While I was out? Or before I was [out]?”
Metal On Loud: How do you look back at that [entire] period [when you were out of ANTHRAX]?
Joey: “You know what? I was on my own. There’s nothing like being on your own after being in a band. You just don’t have all that to rely on. [I had] barely any assistance that came along with me, like it was gonna be, like,’No problem.’ I wasn’t gonna turn into Phil Collins overnight, you know? It just doesn’t work. You know what? I was okay. I was sad to see that thing [happen]. I don’t know what they were really going for; they were going for some nineties style, and apparently I wasn’t the guy or something. That’s all I can think of. That’s enough for me to realize that, what do you do? You don’t beg your way back in. So I just maintained playing music, as I do all the time. So I haven’t stopped.”
Metal On Loud: If you look at the stuff that the guys did while you were away, how do you look at that music? How do you feel about that music?
Joey: “It seemed good. I don’t know. If I was to compare it, I didn’t hear anything that we were doing that wasn’t as good [as what they ended up doing with replacement singer John Bush]. I didn’t hear anything that blew me away. I thought the music end of it was good, John’s decent, but just the overall thing… I think we had something cool there, and I didn’t hear that [in the music they made with John]. But that wasn’t meaning it wasn’t good; it just wasn’t my idea of better, being better about it. It was just different, you know? I enjoyed the style that they were trying to dig into. I think they kind of straightened it all out a little bit, but it wasn’t as thrashy in some ways sometimes too. I don’t know. It gets crazy after a while when you’re trying to explain it all. It’s, like, it was what it was, you know?”
