Trivium guitarist Matt Heafy recently joined an interview with Guitar World and revealed that Metallica’s ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ provided him to be a part of his band.
Matt Heafy’s tendency to music started from a very young age. His passion for music began with playing tenor saxophone and later evolved more into an interest in guitar. In his earlier periods, Heafy mainly listened to pop-punk bands and auditioned for one of them called Freshly Squeezed by playing a Blink-182 piece. Although the members did not call him back, the guitarist followed his passion.
As he revealed in a recent interview, Heafy became more ambitious to be better at playing guitar. A friend introduced him to the metal genre with ‘The Black Album‘ by Metallica, and he became more into metal music. The rocker said he practiced guitar by playing the songs from this album. After he played Metallica’s ‘No Leaf Clover’ in his school show, he was asked to the local band Trivium.
Heafy stated that when he went to the former drummer Travis Smith’s house, the kids did not believe that Heafy could perform something well. However, the guitarist noted that he impressed everyone in the room by flawlessly playing Metallica’s ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls.’ Later, the band members decided him to join the group, as Heafy added.
About how he became a member of Trivium, Matt Heafy explained:
“I think they’d been around for two weeks and had never jammed at that point! It was funny they’d already lost their guitar player before even getting into the practice room. I remember showing up at ex-drummer Travis Smith’s house, and he was the only kid I knew that smoked cigarettes and had a neck tattoo! I was only 13 years old, and he would have been 16 or 17.
They all looked at me as if to say, ‘What’s this kid going to be able to do?’ I played ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ perfectly. Their look changed, and they said, ‘Alright, you’re in!’ I also played the high school battle of the bands. We opened with Slipknot, then played ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls,’ an early Trivium original called ‘Thrust’ from one of the early demos, and maybe ‘Stinkfist’ by Tool. The rest was history!”
Furthermore, Trivium had a chance to tour with Metallica during the ‘Black Crusade Tour’ after the third studio album, ‘The Crusade,’ released in 2006. Matt Heafy himself has become an inspiration for metal musicians as Metallica has influenced him.
