Some might think a celebrity and an entertainer like Jericho would be more fly by night in their love for all things metal, but that is far from the case here. Jericho’s band Fozzy (which was initially jokingly named as a play on Ozzy), not only features lifers like the majority of the dudes from Stuck Mojo in the ranks of the band, but also top notch, better-than-ever before performances from Chris himself! If you need more proof, try challenging Chris to some old school metal trivia. You’ll find yourself face planted like the many opponents he’s dominated in the ring. Shit, Chris Jericho even took his last name from the Helloween album Walls Of Jericho, and his vocals sore as high and as confident as the German power metallers on Fozzy’s latest record Chasing The Grail. The Talisman inspired “God Pounds His Nails” has a chorus riff that likewise feels as heavy as getting hit with a one-handed bulldog by Jericho himself!

Stuck Mojo/Fozzy axe man (and Grail producer) Rich Ward’s performances and guitar tones on Chasing The Grail are unbelievable! Ward is a veteran of the underground who helped lead Stuck Mojo to cult hero status and his riffs are always full of groove and punch, but he has outdone himself here. It’s early to make this claim, but I think this record could easily hold up and be one of the best heavy albums of 2010. It’s not art metal or hipster, by any means, but this is just a rock solid release. “Let The Madness Begin” sounds like classic solo Ozzy with a modern, heavy weight flare and the opening “Under Blackened Skies” is astoundingly catchy and balls heavy. The opening salvo of “Under Blackened Skies” is the top of album track to beat of the moment. Right out the gate these guys are simultaneously burying you while carrying you skyward.

Fozzy have some mainstream, catchy tendencies, but this isn’t some watered down crap. Sure, some parts are more accessible than your average Dio record, but the band has a strong attack and lots of epic, classic metal flourishes merged with grimy, Pantera stomp. Chasing The Grail is sure to inspire and is a record rife with stories of self-motivation and pushing oneself in trying times. All that, and some Viking pillaging/eating the hearts of your enemies type stuff thrown in the pot as well!

I talked with the affable and influential Rich Ward (produce my band, Rich!!!) about the amazing level of hi-fi sounds meets killer, no bullshit performances and tones on GRAIL, as well as what the process of the record was like. This is no novelty band and with CHASING THE GRAIL, Fozzy have proven beyond a doubt they are to be taken seriously.

MORGAN Y. EVANS: CHASING THE GRAIL is killer. This record really raises the bar for the band and is a real competitor.

RICH WARD: Thanks, man.

MYE: Going into it ahead of time, what were you setting out to prove? There’s a range of material for fans of many types of metal but it’s still cohesive. Did you plan it out ahead of time?

RW: I never go into writing a record with a blueprint or what it should be. I kind of feed off of ideas and I’ll write a riff and work with some of Chris’s lyrics and keep building it. Lots of musicians go into things with a nice outline but I’ve always liked to see what happens and let things unfold organically. Every song on CHASING THE GRAIL was kind of written that way. [laughing] I know that you can sometimes end up with a house that leans to the left if you don’t have blueprints, but I’m okay with that. I really, again, feed off the energy and start building programmed drums. I play a little keyboards and bass myself and start constructing songs. A lot of times you end up with a song that’s much heavier than you anticipated or it takes more of a melodic turn. I find that’s my favorite part of writing. You start with a blank canvas and then throw some colors on there, step back and go, “Wow!” But, there’s lots of revisions. The first draft is loose and then the rest of the guys in the band shape it. Instead of just Chris Jericho and Rich Ward doing everything, it does end up as a band effort by the end. I’m lucky to be surrounded by so many good musicians, so it’s hard to mess it up.

MYE: It’s cool you let it evolve like that. Some people have a big concept or are predisposed to one direction, but this album seems to have some reoccurring themes. You write an album at some times in your life and whatever is going on will come up.

RW: That’s very true and I’ve found that to be very true for me in the 15-16 years of making albums. The material that I end up writing is very much dictated by what’s going on in my life. That’s why I find it’s better to go with your instincts on it. I know a lot of guys think of art as higher mind stuff, but rock’n’roll happens somewhere between your chest and your pelvis! [laughing]

MYE: [laughing]

RW: You can over think things too much. My bass player’s dad had a great saying I always keep in my front pocket while writing. He said, “Don’t be so clever you’re stupid.”

MYE: [cracking up] That’s genius!

RW: Yeah. You know? Sometimes the AC/DC method is the best, where it is just about laying the foundation that makes everyone’s head bob as soon as the CD hits the player. I really gravitate towards groove. Stuff that has swing to it. I’ve always tried to maintained that even in the context of metal. Like Dick Clark says, “…if it’s got a good beat and it’s easy to dance to.”

MYE: This new Fozzy record really balances stuff everyone can grab onto with epic material. Even in the lyrics, something like “Pray For Blood” is a very epic song but has this massive, catchy intro hook of (singing) “I don’t want to wait for the rest of my life…”

RW: Yeah! That’s the big thing for me, as well. If you’re gonna do a song like “Pray For Blood”…when Chris sent me his lyrics, I mean, that song is all about him being captivated by Vikings going into battle. They used to eat the hearts of their victims in a ritual. He thought that was a great concept for a metal song. He tells me this is the concept, and what options do I have other than to write something super aggressive and match the lyrical content musically? That being said, I wanted to start the song off and end if with a cool, big hook vocal theme. All of it needs to be tempered. That’s why Ozzy Osbourne’s DIARY OF A MADMAN album really meant a lot to me growing up. It was very heavy but had amazing melodic moments that were the yin to the yang. It wasn’t just heavy for the sake of heavy. To me, even though there are a lot of bands that do it which I appreciate, it tends to get old for me when it is just about one emotion. If I am going to see a horror movie, it’s heavy, awesome, but I don’t want to see ten horror movies in a row because it’s not scary anymore. You become desensitized. The dynamics of mixing melody and really nice, majestic parts with fast, aggressive guitar riffing and vocals, it makes it much more interesting. Then when it gets heavy it is that much more powerful. It says more for me as a writer and helps me be creative.

MYE: There’s a really good emotional connection. I must have listened to “Under Blackened Skies” about thirty times this week! It really kicks the album off and has that punch of something like Nevermore’s ENEMIES OF REALITY but even more soaring vocals! Or even something like “Grail” there seems to be a theme of perseverance.

RW: Chris was going through a lot of transition in his life while making this album. He wrote the lyrics in poetry form and I tried to interpret that. You can’t just take poetry and write music to it, so there was a lot of musical stuff I contributed, trying to imagine, without asking him, what he was trying to say. Sometimes I missed the mark on the message of what the song was, but we agreed that was great to have our own interpretations and it weaves stories and ideas together. It was the first time collectively that Chris and I worked on lyrics together before the process started. Normally it’s me writing ten or eleven songs musically and then I collaborate with Chris after the fact. This time we started on the lyrics and I contributed here and there to make it more like a song, slight adjustments to make it fit better in a song than pure poetry. It was the best effort we’ve ever had as a band. A really good experience.

MYE: You write all the melodies too, right?

RW: Almost all of them. I write the melodies and use Chris’s lyrics and I’ll demo them out in my studio. Chris puts his thumbprint on it and makes changes so he doesn’t feel uncomfortable. We make sure it fits his style and it is a real collaborative effort. We have such trust for each other. It took a few albums. Chris and I are both alpha males and are unwilling to give up our turf.

MYE: Who would think a wrestler and a guitarist would be alpha males? [laughing]

RW: Yeah! We’ll both be standing on top of the mountain and not shoving with our hands but nudging with our shoulders, finding that area where we can get our way, like, “No, it has to be this.” This was the first album where we had a complete, one hundred percent trust. Chris immediately loved the melodies and what I’d done with his lyrics. When I recorded him, obviously I’ve produced Chris’s vocals for the last few albums and produced this record as well. I really have an idea now of his comfort levels and strengths as a vocalist. Sometimes, if he inadvertently changed a melody, I know that’s because it was how he would sing it. I don’t question it. We have a really nice balanced working relationship. It took us a long time to get there. We recorded the first album in 2000. Here we are ten years later and you hear stories about bands that have trouble with steady line-ups and people who are very territorial. Before you know it you have two separate bands. One of the best things about Fozzy is it took us awhile to find that middle ground, but the fact that Chris has been successful with everything he does and I’ve been successful on my own as a musician, we have a trust for each other.

MYE: You are both goal-oriented. My new band, Antidote 8’s bass player, Dave Daw, used to work for wrestling. His brother Nick Daw still works for magic department. Dave told me that Chris and Undertaker were those guys that, whenever there was a rocker visiting or something to do with music, they’d always be there. He said people should never underestimate how Chris is with metal and always had so much trivia.

RW: He absolutely is the biggest metalhead I know. He’s more passionate about music that I am, from a fan perspective! I play guitar every day but he listens to it everyday. I may go a month without listening to music at all. When I’m in the car I’ll listen to NPR or talk radio or books on tape. I really don’t listen to music. It really takes a bug up my butt to make me go, “let me listen to this new band” or “let’s hear some POWERAGE” from AC/DC. Chris is really a music addict. He knows the history of bands and is friends of the guys in the industry and bands. I’ve been playing over 20 years and have toured with some of the biggest bands on the planet. Half the time I really don’t go out of my way to become friends with them. I’m so focused on the gig and keeping my focus. In the days of Stuck Mojo it was like going to war. I’d be friends with bands we played with but I kind of viewed them as the enemy. I always thought my job was to make other bands look inferior. I wanted to be faster, tighter, more melodic and better on stage. That’s been my focus, a crazy drill sergeant. I wanted to be the greatest band ever on that night. We toured with Pantera, one of the greatest bands of all time, and that was the one tour we did where I felt we were getting a nightly ass kicking. [laughing]

MYE: Well, Stuck Mojo has a great live show, man.

RW: Oh, yeah. I bring my battle axe and shield ready to go to war. Chris is the same way and has that mentality on stage, so it’s great. Horus before the show, you stretch back stage and have a full house out front. You give the best performance you can and get in that mindset. You remember what it was like to be 18 years old and going to see your favorite band at some venue. You get in the mindset of owing it to the fans to get their money’s worth and that every dime was worth it and then some. They go back to work and school the next day talking about how amazing it was. I try and honor that experience for fans because I was that fan boy growing up. I remember being in the front row and catching my first Iron Maiden wrist band. Bruce Dickinson threw it and I caught it and it meant EVERYTHING to me! I was such a fan and so I try to make that happen for people who support Fozzy. Chris is the same type of guy and it makes it an amazing experience for, not just us, but hopefully people who come to see us live.

MYE: Also, mentioning Stuck Mojo, you have the song “Revival” on CHASING THE GRAIL that was originally gonna be a Mojo song but you made it a bit more Fozzy. There’s still the thread there though.

RW: “Watch Me Shine” was also a song I’d written for the last Mojo record as well. Stuck Mojo was doing a tour of Europe with the band Volbeat and we got offered to support them. It was late 2008. Our record company needed us to finish the album before the tour started. I tried to get all the songs ready but couldn’t get those two done in time. I played them for Chris without vocals and he loved them. I did some retooling on them to make them sound more Fozzy and I did. I think they are amazing additions to the CHASING THE GRAIL record. They feel perfect in the set list and on the record, and it’s the same guys—same guitar player, drummer, bass player. It comes to be reasonable that there are some similarities.

MYE: Right, but each band also has their own characteristics. The production and some of the tones on this record are monstrous. You did a hell of a job!

RW: Thank you, brother. The goal is simple: great guitar tones, old guitars, great old amplifiers—a 1968 Marshall Cabinet with original speakers in it that I’ve used to record most of my records. It’s like an old comfy pair of running shoes where you know how they’ll react. You know them inside and out. Our ALL THAT REMAINS record, we used an outside producer for Fozzy and he did a great job, but he was more of a rock producer. I felt this new CHASING THE GRAIL record should have more of a metal production. There should be big guitar sounds and I’m a big keyboard fan too, again, going back to the smart usage of keys on the DIARY OF A MADMAN album. Obviously Chris’s voice, I’m really proud of his performances. The bass guitar is the best sound, really bigger than we’ve had on any Fozzy record. The drums are amazing. It really boils down to making sure everybody’s playing well and has good gear. You don’t have to do much. You just roll tape and there are no mistakes.

MYE: How did Jeff Waters from Annihilator get involved? He plays some guest solos on the album.

RW: Jeff and Chris are friends and both Canadian, so there’s that connection between the two of them. I asked Chris on the last record what guests we should get and we talked about it. I am a big Jeff Waters fan and so is Chris and we decided to have just one guest for the new record. Because they were friends the contact was easy to make and he recorded his solos at his studio in Canada. We sent the music files, he recorded it and sent them back and it sounds amazing. He set fire to the fret board and it’s an honor to have him on the record.

MYE; He’s one of those players where even if you weren’t in the same room, he makes the take feel like unified energy.

RW: He’s a pro. As many records as he’s made and him being an engineer as well, I had no doubt that we’d get anything short of brilliance.

MYE: How does it feel to have all the positive reception to “Martyr No More”?

RW: It’s always nice to have someone say “good job” especially when you spend a lot of time. We spent eight months making this record and it wasn’t every day. With Chris’s wrestling schedule there are a lot of travel days back and forth and some challenges, but we live and breathe it. When you can’t wait to get up and listen to the work you did last night and it becomes, especially as a producer, the job to rest it on my shoulders, well…if something goes good that is great, but if something goes bad, you’re the one holding it. So, when people love the tunes, obviously it’s a sigh of relief. Nobody wants to send their kid to school to hear they are misbehaving or are stupid. [laughing]

MYE: [laughing]

RW: It’s the same for me. These songs are my kids! Nobody wants to hear they are rotten brats. I don’t have kids. I’m married and am in love with my wife but my life is my music and my songs and it means a lot. I know it means a lot to Chris because he is very passionate, but he has lots of careers. He’s an actor, a wrestler, an author. I’m a one trick pony. I don’t play drums or bass. I play guitar and write songs. It’s everything and my life and I feel blessed and so humbled that I get up everyday and get a paycheck for playing guitar and making music. When I first started playing guitar all I wanted to do was be able to play my first Motley Crue or Iron Maiden song on guitar. Fast forwards 25 years later and I never thought I’d be able to pay a mortgage on a house!

MYE: You deserve it, man. You’ve put your hours in and write awesome shit.

RW: Thank you, man. I know that music is a subjective thing. You could put something out you think is great and other people don’t react. I’ve seen movies I thought were great and friends thought stunk. I don’t take offense when someone says they didn’t like your last record. I recognize a piece of coal to one person is a diamond to someone else. I am willing to take the good with the bad and if it’s all good, even better!

MYE: How was it coordinating the full choir action for “Wormwood”?

RW: That was Mike Martin. He organized the choir and did the guitars on that song. The only thing I did on “Wormwood” was work with Chris on that. At the start of the writing process Chris came to me and said he had this idea to do an epic song, a fourteen minute Dream Theater/Maiden epic about the Wormwood Prophecy of the end of the Earth. I said, “let me tell you this…You’ve got to find someone else to handle that.” Of course, I could write a fourteen minute song. I could come up with melodies, but it’s not something I could relate to or do passionately. If you don’t resonate with it, it’s something an artist has to be able to admit. Some lyrics Chris sent me I didn’t approach because I didn’t identify with them. If someone said to go outside and plant a tomato garden, I guess I could do it. Someone could give me instructions, but I have no interest in it. We have so much talent in the band and our keyboard player Eric Frampton is a human mutant hybrid! He’s the most amazing musician I’ve ever been in the room with. Sean Delson, our bass player, is a mutant as well. Unbelievable. I passed the buck and said I had a lot to do on this record and that the epic jam wasn’t something I could do justice to. I knew they’d knock it out of the park, and they did. To keep continuity, I recorded all the instruments, except for Mike’s guitars. It was interesting to record something I didn’t write, because on all our records, 100% previously had been a Rich Ward or Rich Ward/Chris Jericho collaboration. It was fun and I was happy to do it. I want it to feel like a band. Sometimes it feels awkward. I want everyone to contribute, obviously, but I’m the one who shows up with all the songs, so it’s nice to have the guys have their own thumbprint and writing contribution. It builds camaraderie.

MYE: “New Day’s Dawn”, I was wondering if you’d wanted Christie Cook to sing the falsetto intro? She was great on Stuck Mojo’s THE GREAT REVIVAL, but I guess Jericho wanted you to sing the part?

RW: I fought for that. I was willing to get on the top of the mountain and start nudging! I had written it with a clear vision of what it should be like and I demoed it. I sent it to Chris and he wasn’t crazy about it. A few days later it was one of his favorites, but, it had the caveat, he wanted me to sing it. He said, “I just think there’s something unique and quirky about the way you sang it. I want you to do it on the album.” I was like “NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!”. The manager and rest of the band all said the same thing and thought it was unusual and had a cool sound. I really practiced. I’d never thought about singing something like that in my life, some high falsetto thing. There’s never been a need for me to. I’m happy with the final product. My third or fourth stab at it ended up on the record.

MYE: It’s a cool collage of styles, coming back to what we were saying about the natural process of making the record, because there’s some cool sludge riffs in that song and it is a wild juxtaposition, but works!

RW: Yeah! You go from an ethereal intro to this vulnerable verse from Chris and then the middle is like gothic/sludge and then a keyboard solo. The song is a rollercoaster. I’ll let Chris describe what the lyrics are, but the whole song is about change and rebirth. Whether drug addiction or losing a relative through the dying process or a husband, a wife, a spouse…this song touches on loss and change and what it looks like. I tried to compose music…I shouldn’t say compose because it sounds pompous, but I tried to write music that fit that vibe.

MYE: Even down to the title of the record or the song “Grail” there’s the theme of life’s process and that the looking or growing process, either inside as a person OR making an album, is as important as where you end up.

RW: Once you’ve arrived and are standing on the top of the mountain, you aren’t growing. It’s the climb. You look in the mirror and have to push through it. You keep moving. That’s what a lot of the themes are all based on, the self-realization that we are all very flawed. Once you recognize this, what are we gonna do about it? We can all stand in a 12-step program and say, “Hi, I’m Rich Ward and I’m a dumb ass,” but what are we gonna do about it? You know what I mean? Not looking at other people to take the blame and saying it is your parent’s fault or you went to a government school. I’m not as smart as someone from a private university. No blame—100% accountability. You have to say, “I am where I am today because of the choices I made in my life.” That’s an empowering place to be. Then you have to be accountable for your own life. Once you are honest that your place in life is due to your choices, you can be a victim and whine about it or climb the mountain. That self-realization and, “Now what are we gonna do about it?” are the themes of the record. Everyone is flawed.

MYE: There’s humility and striving and it pays off in the attention to detail on the record on many levels.

RW: Thank you very much, man. This is an awesome conversation, man. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and you have researched it well. I bow at the altar of your feet, sir! [laughing]

MYE: Thanks, man. I’m a real metal fan. I hope to catch you guys live.