Oh there is always something you could do better! But the thing you have to keep in mind is at the time you are doing something, as long as you are doing the best you can do, then you just be happy with it and forget about it and move on and once the record is ready, the next step is promoting it and talking with people and setting up record deals and all that stuff. In fact I haven’t listened to my CD, my music in many months, because when I did it I was very happy and I did hear it a couple of months ago, the whole way through in a friend’s car stereo and I was really happy with it, especially the thing that occurred to me is how good we sounded after taking a long break!

We did a little tour with a small band called Judas Priest! (laughter) We didn’t do a long tour we did a small part of the reunion tour and actually it was an honour for me and everybody. We toured with Judas Priest in 1991 with Pantera, who were the opening act and nobody knew who we were over there in Europe. A year later Pantera became the biggest band in the world! So, we did the Painkiller tour for a couple of months through Europe and 13 years later we get a call from Judas Priest’s people and they wanted us to come back when Rob Halford joined the band for the reunion! So, we played the very first show in Hannover and some other shows after that in Berlin, Switzerland… It was fabulous and it was an honour to play with them. That’s what I did for that time and then I think after that I came back and I was having some problems with the record company AFM and finally I had some time off, being away and not doing anything. Then I got back into doing the next record, which was going to be my last record with AFM records and some people, maybe even the label, anyway some people from the inside that knew what was going on, thought that maybe Jeff would do a CD and do it very fast, just to get out of this record deal and I decided to do exactly the opposite. I tried to do the best possible record at the time, because it would be very easy to give them a shitty record and then move on with the new company, but I had a lot of driving motivation. Sometimes when things are going well, you have a great motivation for songs and ideas, because you are in a great mood, happy and you love what you’re doing and you love life, but when you are in a bad or sad moments in your personal life, that’s also when you get inspiration. Some of the best songs in history were made during bad times and situations. I had a great personal life happening with my girlfriend and my son and I have a fantastic life here in Canada, but I was having some big problems with the label, the publishing company, I got rid of my manager and that was a bad time. I was able to turn all this around and come out of that! You know it might sound funny, but if you really believe in metal music or believe in something, anything, then you really fucking try and you do your best. You love what you are doing and you try to be as good as you can be, you always gonna win! No matter what you are up against, neither people nor things can stop you! You’ll be back and that’s what I’ve been doing since 19… hmm fuck since 198something… 

All the beautiful blond women… That’s probably number one! (laughter). I guess memorable moments for the band were, those blond women, and having the chance to meet and play with Judas Priest. That was a big honour! There are just too many! There aren’t only a couple of moments to mention? In my life I had others, my kids were born and other things, but for my music perspective and through the band there’s just too many. I mean meeting Adrian Smith or Judas Priest or playing the Dynamo festival, we had some incredible shows like in Moscow in 2000 and in Milan in 1993. There was a show that we did with Nevermore in 2001 that kicked ass, but one of the biggest shows I remember, one of the coolest moments was a show we played I think in 1991 during a break we had from the Judas Priest tour and we decided to fly with only 2 of our crew members to fly all the way to Athens and that was fuckin’ coolest show I’ve ever done. The fans were simply fantastic! 

Yeah! We played there I guess two times one with Overkill and another show with Nevermore…

Yeah!!! I’d love to come to Greece again! I was talking to Metal Hammer, Rock Hard and some other magazines before Christmas when I was promoting “Schizo Deluxe” and I guess a lot of people really want us to come back and play there and of course we’ll come back. Hopefully this year you will see us play a couple of shows in Athens, one in Thessaloniki and perhaps one more in another city. 

Wow! That’s a really good question! I’d say that it has a similar pattern with the “All For You” album, but it also has a similar mood with “King Of The Kill”. Well, it has some ideas, not a lot. You know it’s evolution and it’s different kind, a different take, a different style, that comes all out of the same influence. I’m not necessarily doing any new groundbreaking, new original music and records and styles and songs. I’m actually taking some of the best and coolest influences from the 80s and mixing it with a little bit of modern stuff, but it’s just good old 80s metal music done in the year 2006!

Yeah! I mean it was weird because it was the first album that Dave Padden ever done as a singer. Actually he was a guitar player. I’ve talked with some of my x-singers who had taken some guitar players and turned them into singers. You know if guitar players have a good voice, can be the perfect singers, because they know all there is about timing and things and that’s an advantage in the studio for sure, especially when you play sort of more technical metal like we do sometimes. I think that Dave hasn’t sung in a studio before and since I didn’t know how his voice really sounded in the studio and he didn’t know what he was capable of, we put each song as a different album, in each song he was a completely vocalist, we put different voices to find out what he could do, so we could say it was a schizophrenic vocal record and the music was very different too, but at the end of that I was really impressed, because this guy came really nervous with no experience at all and he ended up on a pretty good selling record. Most Americans haven’t heard of Annihilator for so many years, they got on the Internet and started thinking that the band was really coming back. So, when those old fans from North America heard the title track “All For You”, I think they thought that this album would have been more of a newer metal and more commercial record and they didn’t hear all the record and when they did they heard two ballads and an instrumental, so they weren’t used to that. A lot of the kids were used to hearing to thrash metal and one style and all heavy and all brutal and all thrash and they just didn’t understand and Annihilator has ballads to most of their albums! We’ve got a lot of ballads. I myself like everything from death, thrash, speed metal, British wave, Priest, Maiden and German bands like Kreator, Destruction, New York Overkill and Anthrax. I also like AC/DC and Aerosmith, Metallica, Exodus… I like so many different styles and I like classical and jazz guitars and the blues, so since I’m the songwriter of the band my style could be everything from pop and ballads to punk death thrash metal. Do you know what I mean? (laughter). So, it was a bit confusing for the young ones to find out we were alive and doing well over here and the Internet was namely where we got some good comments and this was what got us up for even more in “Schizo Deluxe” record! 

Hmm. You have to be more specific. Do you mean in Annihilator in general or in every single album of ours? 

I like the fact that most of the times there’s different changes in it, you know it’s not the same all the time. For example you start with a ballad or something and you end up in thrash metal. I like sometimes some of the guitar pickings that I do… I sort of came from the school of bands like Exodus for example. Those guys, well their guitar picking was fantastic so I just put it through, I made it a little different and a bit faster. Sometimes I hear stuff and laugh… It doesn’t matter how fast you are, this is the least important thing in the music. Look at Malcolm from AC/DC and Tipton from Priest, Murray from Maiden they write great songs. They don’t have to play fast to be good, but I always thought it was amusing and funny to play some extremely fast parts and a lot of times I like to do something very, very crazy and very, very picking just to see how fast I can go. And I have a good friend, who has supported me a lot, and he sometimes tells me “I bet you can’t do something faster” and then I try to do a really fast and picking part or song. Negative part I guess sometimes when you are in the studio producing or mixing your record, the sound isn’t so good, because you are tired after writing the songs and spending months over an album. Your brain just gets tired and there are some records that are mixed by Andy Sneap for example or any other good mixer, that sell a lot better, but I think history always proves that the sound is important, but nothing is as important as the songs. I mean that there are some great, classic albums from huge bands that the production was so bad, but practically they have some incredible songs in them and lyrics and stuff. So, I think that if you have really great songs, you can record it in a really shitty recording system, cause the songs are really the number one thing!  

When it comes to lyrics I guess it’s everything around me, something I can write a song about many times comes from the TV or radio or the newspaper or just from people I know, bands, touring… Sometimes it’s about an important thing, sometimes not. Sometimes it might be about something funny, crazy, insane, some about dreams, about life… Whatever! Musically now I just get a good drum beat and I grab the guitar and I just play riffs, just like you do when you learn how to play the guitar. I throw along a drum machine and I’m like a 16 year old sitting all alone in my studio jamming. You know banging your head really bad and getting totally into the beat, the aggression and the riffing. I’m currently working on some ideas for my next record and I have one more interview after you and then I’ll go in my studio for about 3-4 more hours and just turn it up loud and jam! It’s the greatest thing to do you know!

Yeah! In some songs, yeah!

It kind of depends on what the song is about. It all started as a fun continuing on the theme of “Alice…” in the album “Never Neverland”, that it’s sort of a dreamy psychological story that started back in 1989. It seems that we have this theme, sometimes it’s psychological, sometimes meaning something like “you’re driving me crazy” and it can be about a bad relationship, a marriage or something like that. We got titles and songs inspired by the media, televisions and computers and some seem like very evil songs, but what they actually say, if you read the lyrics, is that the kids should turn off the fucking TV. If you watch too much TV and you watch the wrong things, you’re gonna start thinking that the world is terrible and evil place with bad things happening and things getting worse and worse, and if you think about it, I’d say that things are a lot better than they used to be a hundred years ago. People don’t die at 35 anymore, most live for 70-75 years and people are doing things about poverty and about so many other problems… Anyway some songs are disguised. Most people think that some of our songs talk about Satan or paranoia, but what we are really saying is that if there actually exists Satan, then he is using the media to try to spread this depression, hatred and anger. So, the lyrics and titles might sound ordinary, but if you get to read the lyrics you’ll realize that it’s something totally different we are talking about. I do like to use obvious things and titles, but I just want to say that kinds now spend too much time in front of TVs and computers and I want to state what’s happening in our times. We have another song that deals with all the shit and bad things that can be thrown on a person, about people who try to harm you, ruin your reputation or toss you with problems because they didn’t do their job right. So we talk about succeeding and never letting anything stop you from what you want. There’s lots of stuff… There is another song whose lyrics I wrote after watching something on the news. It’s not poetry and it’s not like the best lyrics in the world. Nothing like that, but it’s just a guy who talks about what he sees and thinks.

Yeah he is (note: sorry we didn’t get the name) and he is a Hungarian guy, who I think is really talented and incredible. I included his website address on our CD and on our website, so people should check that out.

Yeah, we’re trying to put something together for 2006. Definitely! It might be in Athens or in Thessaloniki… Did I get this name right? (Laughter)

Well, you’ve got one of the most beautiful countries in Europe for sure!

11. YOU’VE ALSO PRODUCED SOME ALBUMS. SO, CAN YOU NAME SOME NEW BANDS THAT YOU THINK DESERVE OUR ATTENTION?

Hmm… You know what? I can’t remember any names right now, but I’m sure that when I hang up the phone, I’ll definitely remember at least 10… But there are a lot of good and great bands. A lot of young bands are starting to realize that instead of looking in the 90s sound, they should return and look at the 80s sound. And it’s really cool to see 19-20 year old guys forming bands and getting signed to ROADRUNNER or other labels and go on tour and have a sound that respects all the greater metal bands. One of the highlights I remember when once I played in New York city at a festival with younger bands and I saw that I had around me about 20 young guys from other bands. I thought then that I’d have to introduce myself by saying “Hi! I’m Jeff Waters and I play in a band called Annihilator” and I expected that most people wouldn’t have heard of me. So, one of the highlights of this tour was and I was really shocked when guys from bands like Trivium, Killswitch Engage and other bands would come and talk to me and tell me that they are Annihilator fans! My girlfriend was there with me and we were really shocked and just smiling. I went there thinking that most people wouldn’t know about Annihilator or Jeff Waters so I came back home thinking “Fuck! Everybody’s got my record!” (Laughter) and I want to clear out here that this is not an egotistical thing or an attitude, it makes me smile and it makes you realize that it’s just another nice thing to be given for your hard work.

Well you know it’s just something I’ve wanted to get into producing, mixing and engineering other bands’ records and I have my own studio for 12 years now and it’s something I really love to do, but every time I think about it I end up going away back to Annihilator and I think that’s more my full time job, but you know there are some really good bands out there, whether they are from Greece, Spain, Germany or wherever… and I will definitely make the time to help them if they want me to do so.

Well, my deal with AFM records is done. Thank you! It’s over! So, now I’m a free agent and one of the things I wanted to do is find a deal for a DVD. Not for an album deal, but for a DVD and it’s coming out in a few weeks. It’s really cool! You know it covers all the Annihilator years, almost from the very early years in 1985-1986 and comes up to the year 2000. So, actually it should have been about 20 DVD, because there’s a lot of stuff about this band. (Laughter). Ten bad thing is that we didn’t have a lot of footage or really good quality versions of the live songs and stuff like that. So, we just put the best of it together and it’s almost 4 hours, so it’s a lot of stuff that our fans would like to know about Annihilator’s history and information.

Hahahahaha! I like that! Yeah!

Oh no, no, no! Nothing like that! That was an old version last year or maybe more than a year. There was a tour agent in Germany talking to me and I said something like that maybe I would like to write something with somebody else for another project or something. So, the tour agent thought that I was saying “Oh Jeff Waters is looking for somebody to help him co-write an Annihilator CD” so he got in touch with Kai Hansen and Kai Hansen called me and told me “Oh you want me to write with you” and I said “Oh no, no, no, no! I was not looking for other people to write Annihilator music. I was talking about another project. Maybe starting another band or something”. So, that rumor started from a mistake so Kai and I said “OK! Let’s meet for a beer in Hamburg someday, say hi and let’s see what happens”. So, up to now there are no plans or anything… 

The weirdest?!?! Hmm… Not weird, but rather annoying... One guy asked me “Is Annihilator really your solo project?” (Laughter)

Well you see… The thing about it is that a couple of years ago I started getting a little bothered. Not angry, but a bit annoyed about it, when journalists would say all the time things like “The line up changes all the time” or “You can’t stand the other”. It’s hard to explain things about the line up questions, but they would made it sound like Annihilator is… Jeff Waters has been trying to keep the same line up for 15 years, but he can’t do it, he keeps firing everybody and there was time when I would get angry and I said “No! Jesus Christ!!”. But they’d say it’s obvious it’s a solo project, cause almost every album has a totally different line up and that I was such an asshole or dictator that people wouldn’t like to come back or join my band! There is a list of guys who call me or ask me if I need a bass or a guitar player. But at the other side of it, I can see why people ask me the question, because for new fans that don’t know anything about Annihilator, this is a very strange situation to them, cause they see a guy named Jeff Waters to fire his musicians and on every new album he gets new musicians, but now it’s good and simple for me to sit and explain to them the situation. When I do a record with Annihilator I go into the studio with a singer and Jeff plays the guitars and the bass and engineers and produces the record. The signer does the singing and then Waters hires a drummer to play the drums on the record and that’s just it! We only are 2-3 guys who work on the record and do all the work and then only months later I form a band for a tour, seeking for musicians that I know and ask them if they like to go on tour. If some guys can’t make it this time, then I call somebody else. The cool thing is that I get to work with many different people, which really makes you a better guitar player and it’s interesting, not at all boring and Annihilator always have very good live shows and it’s not because of lights, explosions or fires. It’s just because we love what we are playing. There is some good metal music and the musicians are incredible. All the musicians I’ve worked with are incredible, so when other bands want a musicians they come and steal one of mine! (Laughter)

Hmm… Real and true!

The Greek fans are number one and Greece is one of the best countries I’ve ever been to and I can’t wait t play the new songs for you, from “Schizo Deluxe” and I’ll definitely return to play in Greece. Hopefully this will happen in 2006. I hope to see you all there! 

Yeah! I hope to see you on the tour!

(Laughter) Bye, bye!