Avenged Sevenfold
Avenged Sevenfold was well into work on the album of their lives. Then, in an instant, their lives changed. The Rev had died. They hadn’t just lost their drummer. They’d lost a family member – a guy who was best friends with vocalist M. Shadows since second grade in the Orange County town of Huntington Beach, and with guitarist Synyster Gates since fifth grade.
Nightmare, the album the band was working on when Jimmy Sullivan died in late December, was already shaping up to be a dark masterpiece, a concept album tracing a journey of madness, despair, and, yes, death. The songs forged all of what Avenged Sevenfold had done before into a visionary prism bringing out new range on one hand and a focused intensity on the other. Even continuing work on the album seemed impossible, unimportant for Shadows, guitarists Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance, and bassist Johnny Christ. “We were going to see if we could write another song or two,” says Shadows of the days following the Rev’s death. “And we couldn’t. We weren’t in the mood for it. Sitting there trying to figure out chord progressions and guitar parts felt ridiculous.” But soon the band realized that it was impossible for them not to continue, that it would be almost a betrayal of the Rev’s legacy and their love for him. He’d played an integral role in writing and crafting the tracks that had been demoed for the album. And just days before he died, he’d completed his ultimate accomplishment, baring his raw emotions in the song “Fiction” that now seemed to have foretold his own death and assured his friends in no uncertain terms that they had to carry on.
