Lamb of God's 'Resolution': How Randy Blythe Saved Himself From Self-Destruction | Revolver

Lamb of God's 'Resolution': How Randy Blythe Saved Himself From Self-Destruction

How the LOG singer pulled back from the brink
092811_5207.jpg, Travis Shinn
photograph by Travis Shinn

This story was originally published in 2012.

"The guy who signed us once looked at me onstage," Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe recalls, "and said, 'Either that guy's gonna be a star or he's gonna be dead.'"

Drummer Chris Adler remembers the particular gig that inspired that reaction. "We played a showcase at [famed Brooklyn metal club] L'amour a long time ago," he recalls, "and we had all these label guys there. First song in, Randy—after a good couple of drinks—misjudges the front of the stage and goes headfirst into the floor and knocks himself out. That was the end of the show. In an interesting twist of irony, the people from Epic asked us to dinner and they said it was by far the most dangerous thing they'd ever seen and they needed to sign us immediately."

But if Blythe's drunken recklessness helped his band along on their path to becoming one of the most influential and popular post-'90s metal outfits, it also placed the singer personally on a path of self destruction. He's lucky to have lived out the prediction of stardom rather than the other option, but, as he admits, death did seem like the more likely destination, at one point.

"That was where I was headed," Blythe says of his heavy-drinking lifestyle. "I had some scary experiences waking up all bloody from fucking myself up falling on the stage barricade or having some other alcohol-induced accident. I never would have made it to dying from cirrhosis of the liver. I would have been the guy who died because I was drunk and I watched Lethal Weapon IV and decided I could jump between two buildings."

Blythe has been sober now for just over a year—though it's not the first time that he's sworn off alcohol. With the support of his wife, Cindy, and longtime friends, the singer has kicked booze before at home, in Richmond, Virginia. But as soon as he's returned to the road or the recording studio, his demons have not taken long to spring back to life. So, realizing that if he stopped drinking on the road, he might actually be able to remain sober, Blythe cut himself off just over a year ago and has managed to stay on the wagon.

Sobriety has been a struggle, but the benefits have been tangible. These days, Blythe is more rational, less moody, and more inspired than ever about the band he helped build. That renewed passion rings out on Resolution, the sixth studio album (seventh, if you count the 1999 self-titled record they made together under the name Burn the Priest) from Blythe and his bandmates, Adler, his brother Willie, who plays guitar alonside Mark Morton, and bassist John Campbell. The record is just as sonically crushing and uncompromising as anything in the band's catalog, but it's more eclectic, free-wheeling, and experimental. Album opener "Straight for the Sun" is a slow-mo sludge workout more akin to Eyehategod than LOG's signature thrashy fare, while closer "King Me" features the sort of orchestral strings and operatic female backing vocals more typically found on Dimmu Borgir songs. As musically diverse as Resolution is, it's Blythe's ravaged vocals and incisive, personal lyrics that focus the record and make it so penetrating.

According to the frontman, much of the album grew directly out of his battle with addiction. Songs like "King Me," "Terminally Unique," and "The Undertow" touch on his alcoholism and the fear, frustration, depression, rage, and jubilation of getting clean. Blythe obscured the details of his struggle in metaphors, and he and co-lyricist Morton wove other topics into the songs, including politics, war, Internet shit-talkers, betrayal, and insanity, keeping the record from being a sonic 12-step program. Still, for the 40-year-old frontman, the Resolution of the album title is a direct reference to the wisdom and clarity he has gained from examining his life and deciding to stay away from alcohol.

"The longer I'm sober, the more I realize how much time I spent fixating on getting fucked up," he says. "I was either drinking, thinking about drinking, recovering from drinking, feeling guilty about drinking, or getting mad about the fact that I couldn't drink when I wasn't drinking. I was always thinking about writing and thinking about creating, but never doing anything about it."

On several occasions, Blythe's drinking problem and the recklessness and belligerence that came with it led to inter-band tension—check the infamous tour-bus fight between Blythe and Morton captured on the 2005 DVD Killadelphia—and nearly broke up the group. By the middle of tour cycle for Lamb of God's previous album, 2009's Wrath, Blythe was downing up to 12 to 24 beers a day, was often obnoxious, and pulled regular disappearing acts. His bandmates considered an intervention but decided against it, mainly because it would have been both useless and hypocritical.

"If we had to take a test, every one of us would qualify as some sort of ''holic,' Adler admits. "For the two years, we were on the road for Wrath, we were drinking hard every night. But if we were all taking it to 10, Randy had to take it to 20."

Then Blythe suddenly stopped cold turkey. The singer remembers the day: He was chilling on a sunlit hotel balcony while on tour. There was a bookstore down the street and a park nearby, both of which he planned to visit, but he couldn't motivate himself to do either. "I was hungover as fuck, looking at this mountain of beer bottles on the other side of the balcony from the night before," he recalls. "And I was like, You know, I don't feel like doing anything but drinking, and I don't even feel like drinking. I suddenly realized that's no way to live. I was gonna go onstage later in the night, but I might as well have been going to clock in at 7-11 for the amount of enjoyment I was going to get out of it. So I got sober."

These days, St. Pauli Girl and Beck's non-alcoholic beers line the shelves of Blythe's home refrigerator. But more than "near beer," Blythe has turned to real coffee. He can be frequently found at the Lamplighter Roasting Company restaurant, a popular joint in Richmond's Fan neighborhood. "I love that place," he says. "They have good food and amazing coffee. It's owned by a punk-rock married couple who grow their own beans and make deliveries on these tall bikes which the city used to use to light gas lamps. That's how they got their name."

When not caffeinating himself, Blythe has been undergoing survival training exercises with his friend Cody Lundin, who hosts Discovery Channel's Dual Survivor. "I take it to the real caveman level—no knife, no lighter, no food, no water container," the singer says. "As a species, we've grown incredibly weak. We have all these modern conveniences, but we don't know how to process our own food, weatherproof our house, store food without a deep freezer. In America, the best survivalists are the homeless. They know how to get by with very little. But for most people, the grid crashes and they're fucked. I have my shit prepared and supplies laid away. I'm gonna be ready."

Thanks to his newfound sobriety, Blythe brought a similar preparedness to the making of Resolution—which was something very new for the vocalist, according to Adler. "Whenever we made a record, there was a lot of hand-holding and puppeteering with Randy," the drummer says. "He didn't pay any attention to what the band was doing, never had time to contribute or try different things, and then, when it came time to write, he was woefully underprepared. Working on Resolution was one of the first times it was very, very apparent that Randy was on the same page as the rest of us and in good enough shape to contribute creatively."

Not only did Blythe enter the studio with a full cache of ideas, he was eager to try different vocal techniques with producer Josh Wilbur, who also helmed Wrath. "I don't know if this is our best record, but I know it's my favorite," Blythe says. "It's the first record we've ever done that I actually like listening to. It shows a huge growth in musicianship and it's heavy as fuck. But there's a lot more attention to dynamics—the ebb and flow of the songwriting. There are some really quiet points to it that just blow up. I think the tension that is our lives and being in Lamb of God is displayed in a very good way on this record."

The musical growth also reflects the time Lamb of God put into the project. Morton and Willie Adler wrote riffs while the band was still touring for Wrath. When the band got back home in November 2010, the guitarists continued writing and fine-tuning until March 2011, when Lamb of God got together in their rehearsal space to shape and arrange the songs. Instead of working without guidance as they had in the past, they invited Wilbur to join them as a sixth member as sorts and band moderator. Typically, he'd work on music with the band for six or seven hours, then on vocals with Blythe for an equal amount of time.

"Josh was the dartboard for everybody to throw ideas at," Campbell says. "He was there from the first day we set up our gear and he was there until we finished the record."

"He acted as a buffer between the sometimes volatile personalities in the room," Blythe adds. "We can get bogged down as musicians in incredibly trivial details. A 16th note could result in a three-day argument and, by the end of it, you've forgotten what the fuck you were fighting about."

Lamb of God spent the next four months arranging and rehearsing 26 songs, which they pared down to 18. In July, Adler recorded drums in just a few days at Spin Studios in Long Island City, New York, and Lamb of God tracked the guitars and bass and early vocals at Studio Barbarossa near Chesapeake, Virginia, and the final vocals back in New York. Only Blythe ran into a substantial creative block, but being sober, he was patient enough to work through it.

"Recording is much different sonically than playing live," Blythe explains. "It was hard for me to produce the same sounds as I do during a show."

The main problem for Blythe was that his onstage technique didn't vibe with studio protocol. When he's leaning over and bellowing in concert, Blythe usually cups the mic; doing so in the recording booth substantially thinned out the sound of the vocals. "Josh let me use a handheld mic, but I was still having a hard time," Blythe says. "So I said, 'Look, Josh. On this next track, let me cup the mic to see if it's a mental block. Maybe it's fucking up the way my brain controls my throat.' And he's like, 'Fine.' So I cup the mic and sing, and he says, 'Your tone is there, but regrettably I can't use the take because you're cutting out a lot of the frequencies.'"

To remedy the problem, Wilbur put a digital filter on the recording program so the vocals in Blythe's headphones sounded overly distorted. "Suddenly my tone improved greatly," Blythe says. "Making my playback sound worse made my voice sound better. It put me in the right headspace because that's how I'm used to hearing it live or in a practice space where I can hardly hear anything at all."

And the results are some of the most ferocious vocals that one of metal's most ferocious frontman has ever laid down on tape. "Randy's performance is definitely one of the shining spots on Resolution," Campbell says. "He completely nailed it and I think that has a lot to do with his sobriety and the benefits of him focusing on what he's doing and having a clear head."

Now that Blythe has stopped drinking, everyone else in the band is also partying less and being more productive. Blythe is working on his first novel, Morton and Willie Adler continue to write during downtime, and Chris Adler is maintaining a strict exercise routine. The guys are also spending more time with their families. For the Resolution tour, they're considering hiring an extra bus that would serve as a rolling playpen. Each band member would have a week in the vehicle with his wife and kids—or in Blythe's case, his 16-year-old cat, Henry.

But if all this suggests a group that is well on its way towards mellowing out, Blythe is quick to impress that this is far from the case. Resolution is the sound of a band at their most confrontational, and that attitude is not going anyway anytime soon.

"I do the Twitter thing, and sometimes it's not too popular with the fans because I will argue with them and dogmatically express my beliefs," the vocalist concludes. "Someone said to me, 'Jesus, dude, you're 40. Shouldn't the punk-rock attitude calm down a little bit?' And I said, 'God, I hope not!' That's what I am. I don't want to be old and complacent and say, 'Oh, I was such a wild, idealistic kid in my 20s or 30s.' No way. I wasn't crazy, I was right. I still believe in everything I've written. Things were fucked up then and they still are. That doesn't go away just 'cause you get older."