Tristan Pratt conducted an interview with former MEGADETH and current ACT OF DEFIANCE guitarist Chris Broderick before the latter band's U.K. live debut on July 27 at the Underworld in London. You can now watch the chat below.
Asked what he has taken from his previous bands — including MEGADETH, NEVERMORE and JAG PANZER — and applied to ACT OF DEFIANCE, Chris said: "Just a lot of experiences as you go through life. For me, the view that you get when you see a band that has really huge production and the way they handle themselves, and when you get a large crew that can help you put on a bigger show and deal with the rig and stuff like that. So there's a lot that I got from that as far as considering the show aspect and not just the playing, the musical aspect."
Broderick is joined in ACT OF DEFIANCE by fellow former MEGADETH member Shawn Drover (drums), along with ex-SCAR THE MARTYR singer Henry Derek Bonner and SHADOWS FALL's Matt Bachand (bass),
ACT OF DEFIANCE's sophomore album, "Old Scars, New Wounds", was released last September via Metal Blade Records. The follow-up to 2015's "Birth And The Burial" was mixed by Dave Otero, who has previously worked with CEPHALIC CARNAGE and CATTLE DECAPITATION, among others. The cover artwork was created by Travis Smith (KING DIAMOND, OPETH, AVENGED SEVENFOLD, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD).
Asked how the writing and recording process for "Old Scars, New Wounds" was different to that for "Birth And The Burial", Chris told Distorted Sound: "Well, there were elements that were similar and then definitely some that were totally new. So it started off similar in the sense that we all started presenting songs fully demoed on our own, and so for this CD I wrote four songs of music, I think Shawn wrote three, Matt wrote three and Henry wrote one. And we actually have another song, I think, that we wrote but we're gonna save that for a special release or something like that. But, yeah, so we put them all together and that's where the similarity ended, because this time we had the input of Matt and Henry. And so we started talking about song formats together, we started talking about melodic lines of the vocals and, you know, 'Ah, maybe this chorus should be lengthened,' or, 'Let's transpose this,' 'Let's speed this one up,' things like that. And so we spent a lot of time on really the format of the songs collaboratively together and also lyrically — it was a little bit more of a collaborative effort. So that's where it diverged greatly really from the last CD. The last CD was much [more of] a shotgun wedding where Shawn and I were very much forming the band while we were writing the music and trying to get it out as quickly as we could."
