Way back in 2000 before Hellyeah came together, Nothingface guitarist Tom Maxwell and Mudvayne vocalist Chad Gray started talking about forming a band. Hellyeah eventually materialized in 2006 with Greg Tribbett on guitar, Jerry Montano on bass, and the late and great Vinnie Paul on drums.
Now Gray has revealed he and Maxwell are talking about reviving their original pre-Hellyeah project. Gray spoke a little about the idea on The Jesea Lee Show, noting that Hellyeah without Paul isn’t happening and that Maxwell is kicking around some riffs in the studio.
“I can’t see us ever doing [Hellyeah] again without [Vinnie Paul], you know what I mean?” said Gray. “It’d be a lot of fucking fun, but I’m excited to do other shit. I’m excited because Tom, he’s going in the studio and he’s just writing these absolutely crushing riffs. So we’re talking about putting back together a project that was the beginning of Hellyeah – what Hellyeah was supposed to be, and then we got Vinnie. So it didn’t end up coming to fruition, that particular project.”
In the same interview, Gray also touched on Mudvayne‘s progress with their new material. Gray noted that the band is still trying to figure out what sound they’re going for, and that he’s really not interested in rehashing the old stuff.
“We’re just trying to figure out where we want it to go,” he said. “Right now, we’ve got some, you can call them whole songs ’cause they have a start and a finish, but I feel like they’re kind of half-songs. I just don’t think they’re realized yet. I don’t think we have figured out exactly how we want this to play out with what we’re doing in our business or how we want it to sonically sound.”
“Nothing inside of me wants to be the Mudvayne of L.D. 50. I think that the more albums we wrote, the better we got as songwriters. A lot of people would probably disagree with me, but The New Game is probably one of my favorite fucking albums. It’s got like ‘Dull Boy’ on it, it’s got just some really quintessential Mudvayne stuff that’s not anything like anybody else was doing. I feel like we fucking finally had kind of found our groove. L.D. 50, to me, was a very gratuitous, individual workshop, and we put all four pieces together and called it an album.”
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