What's good about the way we write songs is that I never quite know what I'm doing cause I can't read music. source

Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking. And this has held me ever since.

I'm tryin' to right my wrongs But it's funny, them same wrongs helped me write this song.

Me and Richey can’t write music but we can write lyrics and look pretty tarty.

I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying to not think about.

My songs aren’t dreams. They’re more of a responsive nature…

To me, when you need them, they appear. Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.

Most Western music is people singing from the heart — singing to a girlfriend, so a lot of people are freaked out by our songs [...] But our lyrics are just stories. They’re just written to be as gross and disgusting as we could make them. At night we’d get a case of beer and watch gory horror movies. [...] We just play extreme music so we figured we needed extreme lyrics.

When you are happy it is harder to write [songs].

I think what informs my songwriting is my empathy with that. Maybe that’s what bothers people. It scares them to go to the edge of the well and look in. But it’s what they like also. And wouldn’t you rather feel the pain than not feel anything?

We are ugly but we have the music.

Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite, it is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.

We saw that a lot of bands in Florida seemed to have more of a darker, anti-religion thing going on, so we decided to do the gore thing with the art and lyrics.

I think our lyrics reflect reality. Maybe not someone else's reality, but definitely ours, you know? I don't write about bullshit and neither does my guitar player, Jerry Cantrell. I have a fascination with how brainwashed people get with religion and how they'll give up their money, their time and their whole life for a cause that they're sure is right, but I'm sure is wrong. I think there's a lot of people who are scared of life and living and they want to make sure they get to Heaven or whatever. I try to stay away from it as much as I can. I was raised in the church until I was 16 and I've disagreed with their beliefs as long as I can remember, so when I had the choice I chose not to believe in anything apart from myself.

Being that vulnerable is so necessary; putting words to those feelings is difficult, and it take a while to write the songs because I want to get them right. It can be excruciating, but it’s worth it, it feels like you actually got to the bottom of something, and the hope is that people can easily relate to it.