For the past few months, Avenged Sevenfold have been giving a master-class on what goes into their songwriting across their entire career. Today, they've dropped the followup video to their first explainer on 2010 title track "Nightmare."
Both M. Shadows and Zacky Vengeance get really stoked on how the guitars build on each other creating a kind of sonic tension and narrative, before the clip moves on to inter-splice scenes of the actual recording and writing of the album, including both the Rev and Mike Portnoy's drumming.
As the video continues, they get into Jimmy Sullivan's drum work as a whole, and his ability to carry over elements from the chorus and into the later verses, and the minor details of his work that would make the songs work.
One of the funniest anecdotes they bring up is the line, "die again, die" where the entire band started cracking up when they were adding it into the lyrics for the hell of it. "When you have five people that think it's hilarious, you have to keep it," says Shadows.
