Gojira vocalist/guitarist Joe Duplantier is the latest guest to appear on the ‘Music Ruined My Life’ segment that regularly emerges via the BBC Radio 1‘s ‘Rock Show With Daniel P Carter‘. As part of the segment (which you can stream below,) Duplantier details some of the more important songs in his life, from getting into metal thanks to Metallica‘s “Fade To Black” to revealing which Gojira song he’s current the most proud of.
As for the latter, that honor falls upon “Lowlands” off their GRAMMY nominated latest album, “Magma“. He said of that:
“I thought of “Low Lands“, because that’s one of the songs on “Magma“; because it was a challenge when we come up with that weird groove on drums with Mario—we thought that was a fantastic drum thing [mimics drums]. It’s a weird approach. And then we have a riff at the end of the song that is very open that could almost be from a Muse song.
It was interesting musically, but I had no idea what I could do with my vocals on it. And then I tried, and I tried, and I tried and I can’t get no satisfaction. And then I called my brother and I’m like ‘Okay we’re just gonna drop that song.’
He replied ‘Yeah but we dropped three already, there’s just five left. We cannot release an EP, there has to be just enough to make an album.’ And we both agreed that we wanted to release a short album, so it wasn’t a problem, but then I’m like ‘OK, I’m gonna try again.’
So I’m proud of that song because I worked hard to find something. Now I listen to it and I don’t blush when I listen to it. I’m like ‘Hmm, it’s good enough to be on a record.’
I finally accepted what I was doing, because for those who don’t know the song, the story is that I’m used to screaming a lot. I have always been against cheesy choruses, you know the clean vocals [mimics cheesy singing] I refuse that. I can’t do it.
I like to have my own approach. It needs to be interesting, original and organic and pure. But then doing it, singing, actually recording parts is very difficult. As a screamer it’s very weird to sing. So it was a big challenge and at some point I’m like ‘Yes, I’m OK with it now.’
And then I redid it, I re-recorded it maybe six-seven songs. So I spent two months on this song, just for the vocals. But I prevailed, I didn’t give up.”
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