Times of Grace Guitarist Saw Surgery as an Opportunity — ‘Creep Show

When Killswitch Engage guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz was lying prostrate four years ago after enduring major back surgery, he didn't expect to be working on new songs any time soon. "I was in this dark place where I didn't know if I was ever going to be able to walk freely and be able to tour," he told Noisecreep. "Out of all that misery and depression and anxiety, I started coming up with ideas for songs. And all of a sudden I kind of had this whole record mapped out in my head, the lyrical ideas as well as the music."

With ideas in place for the entire debut Times of Grace album 'The Hymn of a Broken Man' (out Jan. 18), Dutkiewicz hummed beats and melodies into a handheld tape recorder. The more he recorded, the better he felt. "It was a really bizarre period in my life -- a constant crap storm, so to speak," he said. "So in essence, this record was almost something to take my mind off all the bad stuff and the purging of all the bad stuff in my brain and kind of a helpful little catalyst in my life at that point."

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When he got out of the hospital and started healing, Dutkiewicz dove back into Killswitch Engage with a vengeance. Then, when he had down time, he tracked guitars, bass and drums for Times of Grace. Once the skeletons of the songs were finished, he called his good friend and ex-Killswitch Engage vocalist Jesse Leach, asking him to come over to Massachusetts from Rhode Island and record vocals. But because both musicians were so busy, it couldn't happen all at once. As a result, 'The Hymn of a Broken Man' was completed over about nine weekends.

"I can't really gauge how long I worked on this," Dutkiewicz said. "Whenever I would have a couple days free, I would track these songs. Everything came together fairly simple, because it was just one guy having to manage these thought processes instead of having all these different ideas coming together from different people [in a band].

"I can't tell you enough how weird this was for me," he reiterated. "I just wrote music. I never second-guessed it. I never got over-analytical with it. I did it all under the radar, and it literally just came out of me."