It was a brisk Friday morning on day one of Christmas Burns Red, an annual Christmas-themed metal festival held in Lancaster, PA by metalcore giants August Burns Red. After a brief train ride into town and an incredibly not brief walk to the venue, I met up with Dan Hodsdon, The Callous Daoboys guitarist and all-around chiller. We ventured into the Lancaster Convention Center's upper level, and the two of us sat down to discuss all things Daoboys and the like. When I interviewed Jackie Buckalew, the band's bassist, Dan was originally scheduled to be there, but due to unforeseen circumstances he wasn't able to. Due to this fact, I opted to take some of my questions from the Jackie interview (in order to get a new perspective on things) and mix them up with some new questions.
Sam Owens: How are you feeling today, Dan?
Dan Hodsdon: Really fucking tired. I drove from midnight to around 6:30 AM, and then I slept in the passenger seat of the RV for an hour, and then I woke up and then I had, then I went back to sleep and I had nightmares about the song "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam.
S: As one does.
D: Yeah, I was in the classroom when he spoke. It was scary, man, I’m just being honest.
S: Well yeah, I appreciate the honesty. So, I know you weren’t originally a member of the band, then you joined after Jackie but before Marty, right after Celebrity Therapist came out, do I have that timeline right?
D: Pretty much, I mean Jackie joined probably around 2018 or so, something like that, recorded Die on Mars with the band, and helped to write Die On Mars. I joined, I had one more show under my belt than Marty did when he joined. My first show with Daoboys was with Sam, the old drummer, and then Marty joined a month later when we kicked off our tour with Greyhaven back in 2022. So like, not by a lot, we were very, very close together.
S: How do you think your experiences in adjusting to joining the band differs from those two?
D: Marty and Jackie?
S: Yeah.
D: I feel like me and Jackie entered in a similar way, where we were both big fans of the band and we just punished our ways into being friends with them, and then joining the band and being like, “Hey, I’m actually really good at this instrument, you should put me in the band,”. That’s kinda what happened with Jackie, I think their old bassist just wasn’t really digging it anymore and just wanted to move on and do other stuff, and for me, they were like, “Oh wow, Dan’s actually really good at guitar, we should put him in the band,” and I literally punished my way into being friends with everybody, and then showed everyone how good at guitar I am, and they were like, “Oh, you!”.
S: Fuck yeah. You were a guitar tech for them, weren’t you?
D: Well, air quotes around guitar tech, the story goes that I tweeted at the band saying, “Hey, let me be your guitar tech,” and I think Matty at the time probably just liked the tweet and was like, “random guy, go away, whatever.” Then Carson reached out and was like, “Hey, do you actually want to do that?” because he gets excited when people just wanted to be involved somehow, and I was like, “Yeah man, I also got this cool idea to repaint a guitar for you guys if you want something to look cool,” so I painted his Charvel to be a crazy Eddie Van Halen-looking thing, and then I helped to set up all the instruments when they were recording Celebrity Therapist, and that just helped to speed along the recording process. They didn’t have to sit there and figure out how to intonate everything, so while one guitar is getting tracked, I was setting up the next set of songs, et cetera. That’s kinda what I did for Daoboys, as far as guitar tech-ing goes, that is what I did. And then, before I was in the band I would set up their guitars before they would all go on tour.
S: So how would you say the transition from ‘guitar tech’ (air quotes) to actually being the guitarist went?
D: I don’t know, I was in the band to begin with, so getting onstage was just another step. Just another step, but I think it was something that I went very gracefully into. It just came very second-nature, like I found home, that’s just what it feels like.
S: Hell yeah. So, you have had one hell of a 2025, how do you think the year went for both yourself and the band?
D: For myself, pretty tumultuous. A good chunk of us were living together, and we recently weren’t able to stay living together, so I moved back to Florida and everyone just dispersed off from there. The first quarter of the year was maybe a little stressful personally, I guess? In terms of the band, it’s been our best year period, like ever, in the almost 10 years of this band existing, it’s probably the best its ever been. You always have the good and the bad with it, and not being able to live in Georgia anymore is a bummer, but I get to be near my family again, which I really, really like. It’s bittersweet, now that we’re towards the end of the year it feels very, a ‘this had to happen’ kind of thing, it feels right.
S: You’re getting closure?
D: Well kinda, it feels like a good way to wrap up the year, and looking back on it, I’m not upset that I don’t have the same living situation that we did before. I’m okay with it. I would like it back, but what am I gonna do, be upset? Dwell on it?
S: Punch a wall?
D: I could! But, you know, it’s not really worth the time.
S: So, we’re coming up on a little under a year of the album being out. How would you say the reception to it has been?
D: Unbelievable, if we had to use one word. I mean, the headliner was really, well, you were there at the Philly show, I think you interviewed Jackie before the set and everything so it’s cool to follow up on this. We weren’t prepared for how well that tour went. We were, but at the same time we just couldn’t have anticipated it being that great, it’s just, almost 4 years of almost constant support runs, and going over to Europe a bunch and just eating shit, it’s weird to say that when we travel more often than the average person does. It’s work, but it’s a really fun job, it’s the coolest job on the planet. Once that album came out and we did the headliner, it just all made sense. It was like this big breath of fresh air, like my lungs expanded because all the hard work that we did finally paid off. That headliner was proof of that.
S: Hell yeah. That makes me really happy to hear.
D: It was just under two months ago that we wrapped that up, so it’s cool to be able to look back on it now, when you previously interviewed Jackie, and just being able to say all of that biding our time, pulling the trigger at the right moment to have that first big headliner to see, “Do people actually fuck with us like that?”, and to find out that they do, it was a really, really cool feeling. Nothing really compares to it. It was incredible, unbelievable was the word I used. Philly was one of the scariest shows on that tour, too, it was awesome.
S: What happened?
D: No, scary good, Philly brought the moshers out. Philly, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh were all kinda evenly matched with how insane the shows were. That’s what I mean.
S: Alright, so walk me through the writing process. How did I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven come to be?
D: Carson had a couple ideas. I’ve said this a couple times in different interviews, but Carson has an interesting writing style where there’s always something just kinda going in his head. He’ll say himself that he has a weird synesthesia with stuff and he’ll get inspiration from not just other music, but film and books, stories and dreams that will culminate into songs, and the rest of us will fall in with that. A really good example, I think, is "Full Moon Guidance," because Carson had that for, probably even before Celebrity Therapist was fully realized, "Full Moon Guidance" almost made it onto Celebrity Therapist, but Carson was just like, “There’s something missing about this,”, so we just shelved it for a while. Then, when we were getting ready to write more for Heaven, he’s like, “I think it’s time to bring this song back, but I hate the chorus,”, and it went through a couple title changes, and I said, “I have this chorus idea that I’ve been trying to get into a song for a really long time,”, and I showed him the chord progression, and he’s like, “That’s going in the song,”. We built off of that and it’s the reprise at the end of the song.
There was a night where me, Marty, and Carson were all in our old little studio room in the house, I think we were in there until 2 or 3 AM, and we just kinda kept slowly building on it, Marty had different rhythmic ideas for parts, the clapping that you hear, that is Marty. We didn’t rerecord it or anything, that’s just Marty in our little studio room at our old house in our old office. I got my bass out and I wrote the bassline for the rest of the song, and we just… yeah. Carson has an interesting way of writing where if he hits a roadblock he’ll grab somebody and say, “This part needs a really violent, crazy breakdown" like in " [Tears on] Lambo Leather," for instance, and Carson will eventually just hand the guitar over to Jackie, because Jackie writes crazy, evil, fucked up breakdowns that sound like your house is falling apart. That whole breakdown section was just Jackie, where Carson was like, “something crazy, an Orthodox riff,”, essentially, just handing the guitar to Jackie. Very weird and disjointed, but very pummeling. Carson will come to me for big jazz chord ideas or chord progression ideas and voice leading, will sometimes pull from Marty for rhythmic ideas. Carson just has a cool way of pulling from different people. It doesn’t always have to be from the band either, we’ve pulled from Bejalvin before where we ask, “Guys, we don’t know what to do with this next part, here’s the project file, do something with it,”, and we’ll see where it goes from there. It’s an interesting writing style but I think it really works. For the song that 1st Vows is on, that was one take or something like that from Ryan, he just sent it over to him and Ryan was like, “This is what came to me, this is what I got,”. Carson was like, “Perfect, I love it,”. It’s a cool way of writing, it’s not so ‘Singular Songwriter’. Of course, Carson leads the charge on a good many things, but it’s always open to collaboration, especially if a roadblock is hit.
S: I know you mentioned that he gets his inspiration from film, I know that he got the "Two-Headed Trout" sample from when he saw Ocean's Twelve on a plane, and then "Full Moon Guidance" is The Muppets Movie?
(Dan shoots me a confused look.)
"The Rainbow Connection!"
D: "Rainbow Connection?!"
S: "The Lovers, The Dreamers, And Me?"
D: You’re crazy. I wouldn’t have even guessed that, that’s funny, you did your research. I don’t know how you found that, that’s funny. I didn’t even know that. It’s funny, that song used to be called "Rainbow" or "Rainbow Connection." That was an original name. You good, Sam Owens, you good at this.
S: Thank you, thank you. I try to be. You guys have been on the road a lot this year, and even more now. You started your touring in support of Silverstein, and then almost immediately afterwards, you had your headliner, which was fucking insane. And before that there was Chiodos. Is there a certain pressure when it comes to opening with certain bands like Silverstein and Chiodos?
D: Not really. There’s never, at least to me anyways, I can only speak for myself, because I know what my job is, and not saying job as in, ‘I gotta clock in’, I think we all know what we bring to the table as a band and as performers, and what the objective is onstage. From touring with so many different bands from so many different backgrounds, it’s… Like of course we take our musicianship very seriously, these aren’t easy songs to play, they’re really not. You can ask Marty that and he can tell you the same thing. At the same time, our goal is to have fun and it’s why sometimes, some bands are so serious, it’s just like, ‘Hey, can you lighten up a little?’. We’re all wearing black clothes onstage, we’re not scary, some guys are scary-looking, I’m not gonna say they’re not. It’s breakdowns, man, it’s people doing karate in the pit, can we just lighten up a little bit and have some fun? Sometimes there’s just a distinct lack of having fun and that’s something that a lot of people recognize with us, they’re just like, “You guys seem like you’re having so much fun up there,”, and yeah, I’m having a fucking blast, dude. Again, it’s the coolest job on the fucking planet, and I’m so lucky and fortunate that I get to do it, and it pays my fucking bills, man, and it allows me to be pretty decently comfortable.
To go back to your question, there’s no pressure with performing with acts that have been around for 20+ years, or our heroes. We’ll get starstruck here and there, don’t get me wrong. I remember when we first did the tour with D.R.U.G.S. back in 2023 and we got to meet Craig Owens, everyone was like, “Holy shit, it’s Craig Owens!”, and then we shared a bus with Thursday with our Silverstein run, Thursday being a very important band from New Jersey for Marty growing up, an important band for a good many people in my band, and we got to share bunks with them. Within a day or two, we were just clowning around with them every day, so the pressure leaves pretty quickly because you realize these are just other people. They’re just people. The only time I really got starstruck is when I saw Victor Wooten walking outside. I ran out there and was like, “You’re Victor Wooten!”, and he was like, “I am!”, “Oh my god!”. I was shaking, it was crazy!
It’s not hard to not see these people as just other people that are doing the same thing as me, I’m not going to say coworkers but they become our peers pretty quickly, and that alleviates a lot of the pressure. It’s never really the case that we play a show without having met the other bands prior to the set, and at least saying hi and shaking hands or hugging, that pretty quickly disarms a lot of it. I think if that weren’t the case then maybe it might feel a little weirder? I couldn’t name a single time that that hasn’t been a thing. Usually other bands go out of their way to hang out. When we went out with Avatar, the guys from Sweden, they went out of their way to hang out with us, all the time, and that alleviates so much pressure, because it’s just other fucking people playing guitars and drums. That’s what it is. And screaming. Most of the time screaming.
S: Sometimes they sing.
D: Sometimes they sing!
S: Alright. ArcTanGent Festival 2025. Hidden Mothers vocalist, Liam Knowles, joined you guys for a combo cover of Enter Shikari’s ‘Sorry, You’re Not A Winner’, and Norma Jeanes’s ‘I Used To Hate Cell Phones, Now I Hate Car Accidents’. You guys really brought the fucking house down with that one.
D: Yes, their national anthem, the UK’s national anthem.
S: Are you bringing that out tonight?
D: No.
S: Aw, damn. I have to ask, whose idea was that?
D: Kinda all of ours, we thought it’d be really fun to do that cover in the UK, because the first ArcTanGent was at the very last show of a pretty rough first time in Europe. It was a really good first time over there, but some factors into playing made it kind of rough. It’s your first time over there, you’re not really sure how things are supposed to go, it’s a whole slew of things, but then we got to play ArcTanGent. That’s like, the super-fan festival and it made every gripe and complaint that any of us might have had just disappear. We could’ve played any song and they would’ve known it. We played Barnstormer at that and people knew every word, I was like, “Oh my fucking god, dude,”, so we wanted to do something really special for them when we went back. We were like, “When we go back, what if we play an Enter Shikari song? Fuck it!”, and we did. It’s such a fun song, it’s a fun song to play, and putting on their house music was like a cheat code to getting people engaged with the night.
S: I did that song in karaoke a couple months back, it was an absolute blast.
D: Yeah, everyone knows it. It’s great.
S: So, would you say that there were challenges that presented themselves doing a headliner tour?
D: I TM ‘ed the entire thing, which, I wish we just had a driver. And we were going to, but he does driving for bus companies, bus tours and stuff like that, he was out with Thornhill when they were out with Sleep Token. He was gonna come along with us, but he was like, “I gotta do this gig, these are my guys,”, you know. He helped us advance the tour, so there’s some stuff that you get thrown headfirst into it, and you gotta figure it out or call upon your friends and your peers to help out, which is what we did. From there, I was able to TM the entire tour, make sure everyone was taken care of. I guess that was really the only challenge, but you have to be first and last out pretty much every day that you can be. We were also driving ourselves, so that was a challenge. It’s a sleepover with 8 people for a month. We can exist in close quarters, but that’s just a tour, any touring musician will tell you that. It’s like living with your family but in one room for a month, anything that you can imagine would happen can basically happen, but it’s so minor. It’s such a minor thing to worry about.
S: So, in 2026, you got some pretty big festivals coming up. You’re doing a festival with Limp Bizkit, a festival with Bring Me The Horizon.
D: Resurrection, Roskilde and Tuska.
S: How are you feeling about that?
D: I’m feeling really awesome about it, but we have to fly in and out for a lot of those, and that makes me nervous, but it should be fine! Smile. Let the records show I’m smiling very big. I am smiling so big because I am so happy to be on a bunch of flights in international airways. No, it’ll be really cool, I’m really excited. Bummed we’re not playing the friday set. The show dates came out and we’re not playing the same day as Limp Bizkit, so what the FUCK is the point? We’re playing with Iron Maiden though, so whatever. That’s cool. My friend Jordan in Bloodvultures is also playing that same day as us, so that’s also really cool. Roskilde is like… the European Coachella, so they don’t put a lot of heavy bands on that every year. It’s a pretty big honor to be doing that. Pretty excited.
S: You guys are on the road most of the year, you go from city to city, state to state, country to country, with very little time in between. What keeps you going?
D: Redbull. Food and Redbull and water. Fruit. Fresh fruit.
S: What’s your favorite fruit?
D: Pineapple. I love pineapple. Pineapple’s probably my top favorite fruit. You can get a cup of it at any Loves or Pilot and it’s probably fine. There’s no esoteric or special answer here, it’s making sure you eat food and drink water and have a little bit of a caffeine pick-me-up in the morning. I have to force people to eat sometimes, I have to force myself to eat sometimes, because we all get hangry and we’re almost 30, we got to stop doing that.
S: What do you do to pass the time?
D: Drive.
S: When you’re not driving. Are you the main driver?
D: Me and Maddie are usually the main drivers if we have the RVs, overseas we have our good friend Connor Laws that drives and TM‘s for us. Over here, if we’re not doing a van, we’re in an RV, me and Maddie have experience driving large vehicles. If I’m not driving, I’m sleeping or copiloting. It’s work from the moment you wake up. That is how tour is, it’s fun, again, it is fun, but it is work.
S: The day of your September 23rd show on the headliner, Carson contracted an upper respiratory infection.
D: Yes, he got that at the start of tour, it’s so ass.
S: So it just festered?
D: Yeah, it got worse as we got further out west.
S: Well, rather than cancel, you decided to have a Daoboys karaoke show.
D: Oh, the Salt Lake show! Yeah, we did a Daoboys karaoke, we just put the front vocal mic right in the front of the crowd, and whoever knew the words did the song.
S: I’m bummed I couldn’t make it to that.
D: It was a really fun seat. Carson played guitar for "Fake Dinosaur Bones" and "Blackberry," that was really fun.
S: It had to have been surreal, can you describe what it was like to perform those songs without your lead vocalist, with someone entirely new?
D: Eh. I mean, it was mostly people having fun and yelling into a microphone, so I opted to not have any of those vocals go into my monitor, because I knew that sometimes they might not know the words. Then our friend Tom from Crush++ sang "Lemon" with us, Nat Lacuna did a couple songs, and Jackie was the frontperson for "Blackberry" and "Fake Dinosaur Bones." It was sick. It was a lot of fun. Again, it was just second-nature. We cut a couple songs that were maybe really wordy and people might not know all the words to, so we didn’t play "Schizophrenia Legacy" or "Idiot Temptation Force." We opted to do stuff that people would absolutely know, or just mosh to.
S: Hell yeah. Who came up with the idea for that? Why not just cancel?
D: Because fuck cancelling.
S: Whose idea was like, “Let’s put the mic in front of the audience and have them sing it?"
D: It was a collective thing, we stopped at Guitar Center that morning and Carson was at first worried that we might just have to cancel it altogether and we’re like, “Yo, dude, you know we don’t cancel shows,”, and he was like, “Yeah, you’re right, we’ll figure something else out,”. I can’t remember exactly who was like, “Why don’t we give the audience the microphone for the entire show?”, but that’s what we ended up doing. We were all, “That’s fun,”, I made an edit to the setlist and it says Daoboys Karaoke, threw it all over socials, in our Discord I’m like, “Hey, if you’re coming over to Salt Lake tonight, study up! Bring a lyrics sheet or something."
S: Bummed I couldn’t make it to that.
D: Who knows if it’ll ever happen again! We’ll have to rip out Carson’s throat to find out.
S: Yup! So, there were 26 stops on the Heaven Across North America tour, 21 on Heaven Across Europe And UK, are there any stops that you really wanted to go to but just absolutely couldn’t make it?
D: Upstate New York, Vegas, really anywhere in Nevada, we’ve not been able to play in Nevada. Boise… Pretty sure I just heard Carson warming up… Anywhere in Idaho, thankfully we’re playing that on Arm’s Length, so that’ll be fun. In Europe, Europe we’re hitting everywhere we want to, there’s no dedicated Paris show, it’s in Lyon instead. The only thing I guess I regret not doing is having more days off to do stuff in-between, because both of those tours were very go-go-go-go-go and you gotta get to the next city and if you have a day off, it’s to get to the next city, it’s not to hang out, which is always a bummer. There’s a day off between Berlin and Budapest, which are two of our favorite cities to hang out in, but the distance between them is about 10 hours, so we have to drive that whole day. It’s one of those things, the only regret is not being able to hang out because there’s nothing more important than hanging out. Quote JJ.
S: So that Arm’s Length tour, how are you feeling about that?
D: Really awesome. Really, really awesome.
S: I would say that your music is quite a bit heavier than some of the other bands on that tour. How do you think that’s gonna go over?
D: I think we need to be doing more tours like that anyway, I think more tours like that need to happen anyway, because I think that it’ll work out really, really well. I don’t know why bands always want to tour with bands that, yeah, your fanbase is already listening to these guys, like sure, it’s cool to do tours that everyone’s like, “I fucking love all 4 of these bands, oh my god!!!!”, that’s cool, but what if you did a tour where maybe not a lot of people know you? Then you give them something new to listen to and then there’s a whole, another fucking world for them to check out afterwards. If someone on the Arm’s Length tour is like, “Man, I really fucking liked that Callous Daoboys band, what’s in their related artists? Oh, Johnny Booth? Oh, 156/Silence?”, and then they find a bunch of other bands from that, that’s fucking cool. Vice versa, for us with Arm’s Length, I don’t know what other bands sound like at Arm’s Length. Someone could hear them for the first time and think, “Holy shit, this is fucking cool,”, and do the same exact thing. I think that’s more important to do than always playing with bands that, obviously, your fanbases both already listen to.
S: Diversify!
D: Like, duh, diversify. Branch out a little bit.
S: That’s how I found UnityTX, was I started listening to UnityTX in preparation for the tour, and I really fucked with them. So, I’m probably going to catch them with Varials.
D: They did just announce that, it’s gonna be a cool tour. The Scary Tour.
S: The Callous Daoboys are not a band without influence. Whether it’s the Bjork interpolation on "Country Song in Reverse," Muppets Movie on "Full Moon Guidance," and Ocean's Twelve on "Two-Headed Trout," what are some personal inspirations, songwriting, for you?
D: That's... not a fair question without preparation. Damn. It’s a lot of my peers, usually, the way that they will pull from their own influences, it inspires me in turn to not just write the same kind of stuff that I already listen to. I could say Joe Duplantier from Gojira all day, I could say James Hetfield, I could say all those guys, but seeing how my immediate contemporaries also embody the stuff they listen to is really important to me. Guys like Michael Baccierella, my instructor, Mike Monaco from Cryptodira, Luke Boismier, who’s a really good friend of mine from Atlanta. Carson also just, seeing some of those guys, just to name a few, Jimmy Howell from 156, seeing how those guys take what they consume, because of course people get inspiration not from just listening to music. That’s kind of what I meant by Carson’s synesthesia, like, “What would this image in my head, sound like?”, or, “What would this phrase sound like as a song?”, or, you know, this, that, and the other. Seeing how those guys take the stuff that they consume and, I hate using the term regurgitate, but to put that back out into the world, as something that’s wholly unique, I think is more interesting to me than just being like, “I’m gonna write a Gojira riff,”. I can write a Gojira riff. I can write a Pantera riff. That’s cool, but how do I take everything that I hear, see, taste, and dream about, how do I put that into music, is something that I see a lot of my peers and close friends do that, sometimes I’m just like, “How do you do that?”.
S: Jackie said that they got a lot of inspiration from Finch?
D: Yes! Finch is a great band. I guess if I had to name one band that I just don’t fucking understand how they do it, but I want to try to do something like Fear Before The March Of Flames. Especially their last two records, I’m just like, “How the fuck do you conceptualize something like that?”. So, Always Open Mouth and then the self-titled Fear Before. Those two records are just fucking unbelievable, and it’s incredible to me that human beings wrote those.
S: I will have to check that out.
D: You should! They will blow you away. They are such strange records, but they are so gripping and the… You’ll see what I mean. You’ll see what I mean. Listen very intently, you will see what I mean.
S: I’ll let you know how it goes. So, you guys filmed three music videos for four songs, each being wildly different than the last, which was the most fun to work on?
D: Oh, "Trout" and the "Unreality" music video, because those were across two filming days, and it was pretty cool to see how they all came together. They fit so cohesively with each other.
S: Which one posed the most difficulty working on, and why?
D: "Lemon," because we had to go rent a poker table, and I was trying to buy a poker table, and then when we were there, we were like, why didn’t we do this video at Maddie's little dive bar that she worked at at the time? Lemon just because, it turned out great but there’s always that thing that’s like, “Oh, I wish we had that!”, like hindsight. You show up and you’re like, “Fuck, I wish I had this thing!”, but it still worked out perfectly fine. There’s the bit in that music video where there’s just constantly trash being thrown at us, we eventually ran out of trash, so we just started throwing giant cardboard boxes at each other, there’s one that hits Jackie in the video, I’m pretty sure.
S: I thought that was a person!
D: No, it’s a box.
S: I thought I saw a person go flying into Jackie.
D: It would be really funny if it was a person.
S: I meant to ask Jackie when I interviewed them, because I’m like, “Did somebody throw a person at you?” Alright, so sometimes for your live shows you have guest vocalists join you, like Liam Knowles at ArcTanGent, in Chicago, you had Maude from Splitjaw. How does having a guest vocalist contribute to the energy of the performance?
D: If people recognize who it is from their local scene, it’s really fucking hype, because they’re like, “RAHHH”, and that’s really cool. There’s never really been a situation where they don’t know the words or anything, so I can’t really speak on that, but it’s cool. It freshens things up a little bit, it’s always a fun hype moment for any band when someone just grabs the microphone and starts going crazy. It’s just fun.
S: Hell yeah. Alright, last one. To close it out, what is your favorite nu metal track or album and why?
D: Issues by Korn. It’s gotta be Issues, Issues is the one that I will revisit pretty frequently in the Korn discography. It’d be kind of a cheating answer to say Iowa because Iowa is like the perfect metal record of all time, but Issues holds a really weird place, specially, for me. Everything they were trying to do on Follow The Leader that they weren’t serious enough to do at the time, because there’s a handful of tracks on Follow The Leader that are just like, “Okay guys, we get it, we’re in our mid-20s" and "All In The Family" is not good, it’s funny, but it’s not good, "Cameltosis" is pretty bad, the song with Ice Cube is pretty bad, "Seed" doesn’t know what it wants to do. Also, "Earache My Eye" is fucking hysterical, Fieldy doing the fucking vocal, the ‘Oo-de-layy’ is so fucking hard. People would fucking kill each other if they were playing that still. There’s even a video where they did it with Cheech, which is really fucking funny. It’s so awesome. People are stagediving, it’s like a no-barricade Korn show, with Cheech Marin onstage. Is it Moreno? I forgot his last name. No, I’m thinking of Chino, it’s Cheech Marin.
It's gotta be Issues because it’s a very mature record. It’s not perfect, there’s too many interlude tracks on it, but I think Issues is the quintessential Korn record, almost, to really show people what that band does and still having some really gross and heavy moments. Then, I think it’s easier to show people stuff like their self-titled and Life Is Peachy and Follow The Leader. I think Issues was the last really fucking truly great Korn record, because Take A Look In The Mirror, great production but the songs are very boring. They’re just okay. I’m saying this in case they take us on tour one day, but the songs are just okay. The production, there’s never been a Korn album where JD, and the guitar tone, and the bass tone, and everything just sounds that fucking evil. It’s the perfect sounding Korn record, but it’s not the perfect Korn record. I have a lot of opinions about Korn. Issues, I’ll say Issues. I’ve been talking about Issues for a really, really, really, really, REALLY long time. I also, when I was little, like in middle school, I was trying to make the doll from the cover, but I threw it out because I got mad at how ugly it was but I think that’s kinda the point, that it’s supposed to be ugly. Issues. Also, what is it, "Dirty" is a fucking crazy song, "Trash" is a crazy song, fucking great record.
S: Yeah. "Somebody Someone"my favourite off of that one.
D: Great fucking song! "Make Me Bad" is probably one of my favorite Korn songs of all time. Make Me Bad is so fucking good. "Beg For Me" is also really fun. That’s also the album when Jonathan Davis started saying "May" instead of "me," and it’s like, hey man, can you just fucking say the word right? MAYY!
S: I think that wraps it up!
D: Hell yeah.
S: Thank you.
See The Callous Daoboys live in support of Arms Length in 2026.
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