In the case of John 5, who spent nineteen years doing things more or less by the book, 2008 became the year of the ultimate quantum leap. After playing in Marilyn Manson, contributing to albums of such luminaries as Rob Halford, Randy Castillo, and David Lee Roth, working with artists ranging from Avril Lavigne to Meat Loaf as a staff writer at Chrysalis Records, and releasing three solid solo albums within the last four years, he finally took all he knew about rock, metal, and country, and created an opus which completely destroyed categories of perception of contemporary music. Requiem released this June, leaves the everyday realities to department store decorators, cutting through all preconceptions we may have had, not only about the instrumental guitar genre, but also about traditional American popular forms. This breakthrough album is as much a work of experimentation and inspiration, as of experience and calculation, where John 5 finally comes up with a completely new and radical mode of artistic expression. Here he managed to muster superhuman focus and courage to take what was before known as thrash, industrial, and country, to single-handedly break them down and empty them of their emotional resonance, their historical significance, and their original meaning.

By erasing boundaries between those styles, dissecting them, and assembling them anew in a phantasmagorical new creation, he invented a new genre which doesn't borrow anything from the past apart from the necessary musical forms. The result now glares at us in its strangeness and insularity, vivid and complete, autonomous and self-sufficient. The old stimuli of the genres he works with are annihilated, and we see an entirely new beast bursting forth, a new value, a new meaning and a new purpose. This is something not for the faint-hearted to witness, an event of distinct nightmarish quality, as we watch the genres we all thought we knew so well, knew what to expect from, and how to respond to, stripped of their soul and their essence, and then twisted into a new Frankenstein-like creation. And it is precisely John's intimate knowledge of those genres that allows him to do this so compellingly. In this sense, John 5's Requiem is a lament for American popular styles as we've known them, and a celebration of the birth of a new aesthetics.

The album's vehemence of execution, its dense texture, it's lightning-fast biting chops, its whopping vigour, and the rational, measured, almost mechanistic control John 5 exercises over the proceedings, all speak of nothing but intensity of the underlying chaos he is submitting to his control. "God above the goat below", as Nietzsche aptly put it in portraying Satyr in The Birth of Tragedy, the ultimate artist and the mediator between chaos and order, is the best way to describe the role our hero assumes on this album, where frightful willpower is used to control the untamed demons raging underneath. Their looming revolt is suppressed by ferocious means--John's technique on this record is almost inhuman in its machine-like precision and its speed, proportionate to the underlying inner torrent he thus manages to keep under control. Formidable command of his instruments (the guitar, the banjo, and the bass), and clockwork execution are all absolutely necessary for him on this record to subjugate the wild and the tempestuous within.

Pleased with my chance to speak to the demiurge himself shortly after the release of this groundbreaking work, and just before the start of his current US tour, I start by asking John about the evolution of his style and the inspiration behind such dramatic metamorphosis. “I wanted to make a record that would be a little bit more extreme than the last,” John says. “Nothing on it is improvised, everything is planned out and pieced together like a puzzle. The album is called Requiem, which is a song for the dead, and all the song titles are torture devices. So it's not just cool music. Everything has a meaning. And I think it's an important thing to do. It's very important to get not just the music, but the full concept between the music and everything else as well. A lot of thinking went into this record. If you look at this CD is a whole, it is one large piece of music where all tracks blend into each other. Making this record was very hard on your brain.”

With the approach to the concept being more intellectual than spontaneous, I ask if eschewing improvisation meant that all parts had to be written out before they were performed. “It's all written,” says John, “and I had to make sure that everything is performed to the best of my ability. It's a lot of work, but it's fun. It's a lot of fun.”

Among other things, Requiem demonstrates something else that we haven't heard from John 5 before—passages of pristine melodic clarity and beauty inspired by classical baroque, perfectly composed melodic masterpieces that he later goes on to develop into full-flown mini-symphonies with polyphonic guitars building cathedrals of sound over heavy metal harmonies. Although this direction for him is new, it is well-known that John has always had an interest in clear, memorable melodies, which he recently demonstrated so movingly with Loser, a band he put together in 2004 but unfortunately had to leave soon after because of the clash in schedules with his commitment to Rob Zombie, which is now a permanent gig for him. Zombie's 2006 album Educated Horses featured eight tracks written by John.

Poles apart from the austere pulsating electronic punk grooves John writes for Zombie, the tracks he wrote for Loser drip with lush melodic lyricism, so poignantly lucid and compelling, that it prompts my next question of whether it was John's constant interest in the melodic side of things that inspired his explorations into the structures of classical music. “I am a sucker for great melody,” John replies. “I love a great melody. I try to just do everything, you know. When I am writing for different artists, I try to come up with the best material possible. I try to write what people can relate to, and sometimes playing a lot of different chords isn't the way to do it, and you have to have a good melody. It's very important to me.”

Puncturing the hurtling break-neck speed of the album with classical-sounding passages of slow, disciplined clarity, is something John refers to as "taking a breath". “It's like taking a breather from what you are getting pounded into your head,” he says. “And then you have to come up for air and get this nice bit out of nowhere, going, “Wow, I was out of breath and now it feels good.’ And that's something that will just throw people off completely, and will catch people's ear. And it's still good guitar playing. I'm just trying to inspire other musicians and players like I myself was inspired at the time—to show people that there is a world of music out there, not just rock music.”

With a lot of guitar virtuosos thought to be self-centered and keen to impose their own vision onto people they work with, John 5, on the other hand, always adapted perfectly to any creative situation, be it writing for mainstream acts like Avril Lavigne, or working with uncompromising purists of their chosen genre like Rob Zombie. This makes me wonder how he knows what each artist’s individual needs are and what it takes to adapt to each individual style. “It's just like when you go for a job interview,” he says, “and you know what you are going for. I do a lot of research before I'm gonna go into a studio with someone, and really try to find out the ins and outs of how they write their songs, what they are like, even reading the interviews and finding out what they don't like. So I do a lot of research before going into a studio with someone I'm writing for. I think that's very important.”

Anyone he hasn't worked with before with but would like to? “I love Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, you know, Jagger, all those guys,” he says. “I really think I could do something pretty special with any of all those artists, not that they need any help, but...”

With the new album giving the rock audience what they love and what they hate—from metal to country—I ask John if he knows who his audience is these days, or if he simply throws his material out there to see what happens. “That's a great question,” he says. “I like to mix styles like that. I have rock fans, and goth kids show up, and older men who appreciate finger styles like country music, and that is a great treat. It's really rewarding. Older type guys enjoying what I do, going, Oh, I really enjoyed this. I heard this in my son's room, checked it out, and I like that kind of style.’ It's very wide-ranging, it's for a very diverse crowd. So it's very rewarding, given that there is also a sense of danger to it too, you know, because the music is crazy, the message is crazy, the look is crazy. But it's a lot of fun, it's entertainment.”

Virtuosic banjo technique is, of course, another thing that surprises and enthralls on this album. Asked whether he has finally found the underlying principle that unites all plucked string instruments, John says that he loves playing the banjo and he loves playing the bass. “I love music and I appreciate all instruments,” he says, “but my favourite instrument is not the guitar, but the pedal steel. It's my favourite instrument. I love it for some reason. It's such a cool sounding instrument. I don't know how to play it, but I'm working on it, so you may hear some of that on the next records.” Asked if the work on new material has already started, he says that he always works on new music. “I'm always working and thinking,” he says. “If I am not, that's when my head begins to go to other places that are not good. I think that as long as I keep my mind occupied and working, it's good for me. That's why there happen to be titles for my albums such as Vertigo and Songs For Sanity, just to keep my brain occupied. They are little clues to what goes on in my mind when I'm not working.”

Asked if he sees music as a therapeutic experience, he says that he absolutely does. “If I wasn't doing it,” he says, “I'd probably be compulsive and a real wreck. A real, true, wreck. And I'm not saying that to shock anybody or anything like that. I really think I would be like that because I'm on the verge of it now. It's very therapeutic for me, working as much as I do.”

Music being able to alleviate the burden of inner conflicts, and John’s latest album reflecting so graphically the degree of willpower it takes for him to tame the demons, I wonder if any objective knowledge or any information received from the outside would ease the tribulations of his inner world. If he could receive a true answer to any question in the universe, what would he ask? I can hear his voice changing. “I want to know exactly, Exactly what happens when you die,” he says, his until now relaxed, chilled out tone now coloured with vibrant interest and just a tingle of portent murky unrest.

I am mystified for a fraction of a second before I blurt out on impulse my next question: “You are not an agnostic or an atheist, are you?” “No-no,” he replies, ruling out any doubts that this could be idle curiosity on his part. “That's what I really would want to know.” What does he think happens? “I don't know,” he says in half-whisper. “I talked to Nikki Sixx about it, who had a near-death experience, and he told me what had happened. Whenever anyone talks to me about this stuff, I always want to know what happened. I talked to doctors about it, and they say, ‘You know, what happened to this person or that person could have been their mind starting to whither away or whatever, stuff like that, but I always... That would definitely be my question. If I had an answer to that, oh my god, I'd really love to have that answer.” And what would he like to happen? “What everybody wants to happen,” he says. “To see your loved ones when everything is okay, but it's very hard to believe. Who knows what happens. Maybe you will shut out like a light, or maybe there's something else next.”

A conceivable possibility for anyone else, the former option is now, of course, out of the question for this musician. While it’s hard to know what awaits us in the other realm, it's clear that John 5’s latest achievement, whatever happens to the rest of his being, is not going to whither away into the shadows for as long as the art of music survives. His latest album’s triumph over the mundane and the temporal so staggering, and the potentialities his new vision opens so vast, it is now obvious that at least his music has now managed to escape the menace of death without redemption. Not only a radical breakthrough for the existing genres, but also a glimpse of creative possibilities still unborn, its full significance for our culture will only become evident with time. But what is apparent already is that Requiem has now become the first true artistic breakthrough of the 21st century, the one that destroyed boundaries between modern musical genres and introduced an entirely new mode of creation. A mode of creation whose power over life, as well as death, should not be underestimated.