Tom Araya

If it were bad songs, yeah, I’d speak up, but they’re not bad songs.

We just bought a new house, so my wife’s been doing all the moving and other stuff, so I would like to go home and just sit and enjoy all that for a couple months before I gotta start playing again.

Oh yeah, our first tour in Europe they wouldn’t give me the time off from work.

I read a book recently by a psychiatrist who was able to interview a few serial killers and she had a thesis on how you could figure these people out. And she thinks that there are things that could tell you whether someone has the potential to do that.

I write, I write, I always write.

I read true crime books, and I read when people do case studies of stuff. I’m into books like that. Case studies or forensics or murder – all that good stuff.

No, I have to really focus, especially when I’m writing because I wanna be good at it.

Fortune is either with you or it’s not.

Whatever had been on the radio in the ’60s; I mean we were always listening to the radio.

Venom was a band that strongly influenced the image and the idea behind Slayer.

I follow politics, but I don’t like to discuss it.

That was the reasoning behind learning to play bass, and then after that it was more like it was neat to play songs together – for me to play bass and for him to play guitar.

As far as thinking about death and murder and various ways of killing people and how people die… I probably have the most twisted mind in Slayer.

I try to incorporate melody. Even though I’m screaming, I still like to think I bring melody into screaming.

Yeah, yeah I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions towards the band. The biggest one is that we’re Satan worshippers, but next to that just the fact that we’re normal.

We did like 12 shows, then we did the entire Ozzfest with the first half completely booked; then we did the second half with a couple days off here and there.

I just don’t write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.

I was born and raised Catholic.

I had to be at least 8 or 9; I was listening to everything on the radio. You name it, I heard every song.

Sometimes I’ll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren’t clicking. And when they do come to me, I’m in the middle of that same verse!

I went to school for about 2 years on a technical course, and I learned a lot. I learned about air mixture ratios and all the stuff; I learned how to draw blood.

As long as it’s good music, that’s what’s important.

After that I didn’t listen to music as much because ’70s music just wasn’t… I remember all the songs, but it wasn’t because I was into them, you know what I mean?

I would have to work on the song and figure out how they wanted the song done, because they’re such high-intensity songs. We figure that out first, then I go back and listen to it and go over and rehearse stuff with it and try to get a feel for the words.