Ivan Moody caught up with Press One ahead of the bands headliner show in Romania as part of their 2024 UK and European Tour.
In this interview, Ivan talks about Five Finger Death Punch’s evolution from ‘The Way of the Fist’ through to ‘AfterLife’, the support and love he receives from 5FDP fans across the globe, being exposed to all genres of music growing up, his love for Jazz and more.
Below are a few extracts from the interview conducted by Press One. Fans can read the full interview with Ivan Moody here.
On what music he listens to in his spare time and how his family introduced him to all kinds of different genres growing up:
Oh everything.
My grandmother was a country artist. My grandfather listened to the Bob Barbershop Quartet. It’s five, six people standing in a row with no music, singing melodies and harmonies and cannons.
My mom raised us on 60s and 70s rock and roll. My stepdad was the same. My uncle played jazz, but he was a rock guy. My other uncle loved metal. So I was exposed to it all. When I’m at home, honestly, I love jazz. There’s no vocals. I can’t stand vocalists. I hate my own job sometimes. I do, because I think vocalists have a tendency of ruining music. Once we open our mouths, it’s our opinion. Whatever information is registered to us, our life story, it is going to come back out in a different form. So the second a singer opens their mouth, they’re expressing information and how they digested it. It’s almost like we are expecting you to either understand it or hate it completely and not understand it.
On what bands and artists he’d love to collaborate with in the future:
Like Ice Cube, Method Man, Wu-Tang Clan, any of those guys. There’s a lot of new ones coming out. Well, a few of the new ones. But again, we’re multicultural. I don’t like to be stagnant again. And DMX was a no-brainer. To me, he is what encompasses the rawness of hip hop. He really is. He was exactly who he said he was and more. And that’s very rare in this day and age. He was honest.
On touring with Metallica and Megadeth:
There’s no words to describe it. I guess you could use overwhelming, because you grew up on this stuff. I grew up on it. I still have only talked to James Hetfield twice, I don’t know how to approach him, because he was an icon to me and he still is, so I’m very nervy around. But James and Dave are very different people, different bands, they have a little bit of friction there, so for us it’s just the idea that we’ve worked so hard and that our fans are just crazy cool and we’re actually in a position now where we can do that. So we just never try to overlook it and we try to take it in stride. Being on those stages with Metallica in front of 80 to 90 000 people it’s like an ocean so there’s no bad to it.
On his late night Instagram Live sessions and why it’s important for modern day bands to showcase more than just music to fans:
I do live sessions on my Instagram all the time. And usually I do it late at night, when nobody else is up. So there’s only a few hundred people there, but that’s that setting. I want them to know me as a person, because we talked about this before you sat me down. The media has such an idea of what they want me to be, a box they’ve already put me in, that I don’t get a chance to defend myself half the time, much less be real about who I am as a person. So social media, in a way, and that’s a lot of the reason we do this, is giving everyone an inside look to who we are as people. So if you think the music is too angry, or something’s too sappy or comedic, it gives you a chance to go inside and see maybe there’s a reason why.
If you enjoyed reading the interview extracts above, make sure you check out the full interview with Ivan Moody and Press One here.