Name D. Randall “Randy” Blythe
Best known for Being a professional mayhem maker.
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Current city Richmond, VA
Really want to be in Bag End, The Shire, Middle-earth.
Excited about My new book, Just Beyond the Light, out February 18, 2025. Also, SUPER excited about splitting to catch waves somewhere warmer this winter. I hate the cold.
My current music collection has a lot of Punk fucking rock.
And a little bit of Smooooooooooth jazz.
Preferred format Vinyl or MP3 albums that I bought and paid for. I don’t stream music. EVER.
5 Albums I Can’t Live Without:
1
Bad Brains, Bad Brains
Bad Brains are the greatest punk rock band of all time, hands down. Groundbreaking and highly accomplished musicians who melded heavy reggae with lightning speed hardcore. I saw them live for the first time in 1988, and no show since has come anywhere near to matching the intensity of that one—it was a religious experience. The ROIR Cassette is the Bad Brains album that comes closest to capturing that insane energy on wax.
2
The Head on the Door, The Cure
I was 14 years old and hanging out in the Surf City Surf Shop in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, watching a skateboarding video on the shop TV and generally being an annoying little shit. There was a slow-motion sequence in the video of a dude slinging enormous backside airs with this incredibly beautiful music playing as the soundtrack. “WHAT IS THIS MUSIC?” I asked the dude working behind the counter. “The Cure,” he answered. I immediately went to a record store and found the tune— “Kyoto Song” from The Head on the Door. This album is the soundtrack to falling in love for the first time long before you ever even meet the girl, to catching that first tiny glimpse of your own mortality as you party with all the other teenage misfits in a backroads graveyard at midnight, to being 16 and staying out until dawn smoking cigarettes and walking the empty city streets with her because you are both young with endless energy and filled with the delicious sadness of pondering life without each other…
3
Endtroducing, DJ Shadow
While my band was recording our third album, As the Palaces Burn, I was working as a cook in a steakhouse. I would slave away in the kitchen until midnight every evening, then get on my BMX bicycle and ride uphill and out of downtown Richmond, VA, to a studio in the near West End. I would record vocals until dawn, go to sleep for a few hours on the studio floor under our drummer’s drum rug until the rest of the band arrived and began making noise. Then I would wake up, ride my bike back to the restaurant, and do it all over again. I was so exhausted and sleep deprived that after I finished on the last day of recording, I rode my bike to my girlfriend’s apartment, sat down in her kitchen, and burst into tears. But on those late night uphill bike rides, I would crank the Endtroducing album in my earphones. “Midnight in a Perfect World” is the beautiful sound of moving alone through my city at night… of every city I have moved through at night.
4
Floodland, The Sisters of Mercy
I was at my grandmother’s house one day watching a stupid Top 40 television dance show called Solid Gold. Suddenly the camera cut to some smoke-filled club in England full of strange-looking people all dressed in black. A band came on the club’s stage, with a skinny pale dude singing in a very deep voice over an operatic yet somehow simultaneously dirgey dance tune. The bass player was an impossibly hot vampire of a woman wearing tight leather pants. I immediately fell in love with: 1) Her (Patricia Morrison, also of Gun Club fame), and; 2) The band’s music (Leed’s finest dark export, The Sisters of Mercy). Floodland is a wonderfully caustic blend of Cold War nihilism, hedonistic occult angst, and amphetamine-infused sardonicism. It was a snarky middle finger to the painful banality that was the 1980s—it’s also perfect for the shit show that is today.
5
Initium, Samhain
For my 16th birthday, someone at school gave me a cassette. On the cover were four dudes with poofy 1980s hair and wearing makeup, all looking like chicks and shit— this was Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In. Ummm… thanks? I immediately traded it to a dude with the locker next to mine for a black cassette with three covered-in-blood and evil-as-fuck-looking dudes on the cover—this was Samhain’s Initium. The Poison tape (which I never listened to) had songs with names like “Cry Tough,” “I Won’t Forget You,” and “Talk Dirty to Me.” Conversely, the Samhain tape had songs with names like “All Murder, All Guts, All Fun” and “Horror Biz.” Do I really need to explain any further?
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