The As I Lay Dying Interview, Paul Gray Tribute — ”Creep Show’

The past six months have been rough for a lot of great metal musicians. At the end of 2009, Avenged Sevenfold drummer Jimmy 'The Rev' Sullivan died. On April 14, Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele passed away from heart failure. On May 16, Heaven & Hell frontman and metal legend Ronnie James Dio died of stomach cancer and on May 24, Slipknot bassist and co-founder Paul Gray was found dead in a hotel in Urbandale, Iowa. This week's show is dedicated to his memory and to his accomplishments with Slipknot, one of the best and most original metal bands of the past decade. To everyone who knew him, Gray was soft spoken and always friendly.

"He was one of the more mellow guys in the band but any time we saw him he was one of the kindest guys," said As I Lay Dying vocalist Tim Lambesis, whose band spent a month on the road with Slipknot. "After touring with somebody for a month, you usually think that they'll have at least one aspect of their personality that'll get on your nerves and start to bother you. But he didn't have one. Any time we saw him he was always smiling."

Lambesis' bandmate, guitarist Phil Sgrosso, also joined us in our tribute to Gray. The panelists were Revolver senior writer and Noisecreep regular Jon Wiederhorn, Noisecreep lead blogger Amy Sciarretto, Noisecreep photographer and Dragpipe guitarist Gino and Michael Duncan, editor of RockEdition.

While the podcast is somber in mood, it's not depressing. And during the conversation, everyone shared stories about Gray and Slipknot that were revealing and insightful.

After our Paul Gray tribute, we talked to Lambesis and Sgrosso about the new As I Lay Dying album, 'The Powerless Rise,' which is their most musically complex, heaviest and most well written album to date. But don't just take our word for it. The critically acclaimed disc debuted at number 10 on the Billboard album chart. Of course, we don't even want to think about what the top five releases were. In addition to talking about the new disc, we asked the dudes about their upcoming Cool Tour, which also features Underoath, Between the Buried and Me, Blessthefall, the Acacia Strain, Architects, Cancer Bats and War of Ages.

So tip one out for Paul, and then learn something you didn't know about As I Lay Dying. Cool?