As the unveiling of Trivium’s new album ‘In Waves’ draws near, guitarist Corey Beaulieu has reflected on his early years as a guitar player.
In a recent interview conducted by Metalshrine, Beaulieu spoke of the his time spent as a young, aspiring guitarist; “…I would play in my room and play along to CD’s, the most, was like Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Iron Maiden and Iced earth.” Adding “There’s a lot of stuff that I listened to, but learning those songs, like learning Maiden, Slayer, Megadeth and that really showed me and was kind of like the blueprint for how to play metal and how to write metal music. Once you learn it you can kind of take it and Frankenstein it and put your own twist on it. You gotta learn the tricks from somebody and then you gotta figure it out how to take it and make your own thing out of it.”
Beaulieu is a guitarist that favors and produces some of his best work while writing and playing on a subconscious level, “…My amp’s next to my TV, so I just turn my amp on, pick up the guitar, sit on my couch and just watch TV-shows or movies or something and play guitar and it’s like you’re playing but you’re not full on thinking about it. It’s just like autopilot and usually when I do that, that’s when a guitar lick or a riff will come out and then you work on it. It’s more fun for me.”
Fortunately for Trivium fans, Beaulieu is just as capable of writing while on the road. “We do a lot of writing on tour, so we’re always writing riff ideas in the dressing room and recording on our laptops or like showing each other riffs in the dressing room and kind of bouncing ideas off each other. We like to do that so we have a lot of… so we can kind of start the basic song ideas. We may not have the whole record by the time we get done, but at least having like a good chunk of anywhere from like four to six songs. A good number of tunes that start early on and during the touring and on the bus, we’ll just listen to songs on the speakers and throughout the tours, modify the riffs or add stuff to them or add parts to the song. It kind of gives us a little extra head start with putting the songs together, so by the time we get off the tour and it’s time to go work on the record, we can go into the rehearsal space and everyone’s already familiar with a good chunk of songs and we can get right into putting the songs together and go through all that and fine tuning them and then things change when the whole band is playing together, with the songs and the way they feel and everything like that and then modify that and once you do that everyone brings in new song ideas and keep adding to the songs we have…”
Beaulieu also commented on the concept behind ‘In Waves’, which one could be forgiven for interpreting as being about the recent tsunami disaster in Japan; “In waves” can mean a bunch of different things. Not just necessarily about an actual wave. It can be that things come in waves one after the other. I’m not really sure because Matt never… he’s doing this whole thing where he doesn’t want to explain the meaning of what anything means on the record, like the lyrics or the artwork or anything. He wants everyone to be able to get into the record and listen to the record and be able to form their own ideas and what the songs mean to them, instead of having someone else saying “This is what the song means!” and then not be able to make the song their own, the way it means to them. A lot of the stuff he just kind of wrote a lot and it flowed out and he didn’t really have a definite meaning of what it’s supposed to actually mean, because it just kind of came out. A lot of stuff was inspired by visual art and movies and stuff and not necessarily inspired by music. It could mean a lot of things and I just think that everything with the record, everyone will hopefully form their own… kind of what it means to them and make it more personal to them when they listen to it. I couldn’t even really tell you because Matt hasn’t even told me what most of the shit means, so I kind of have to do the same thing.”
‘In Waves’ launches August 9