Randy Blythe
speaker
593 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 15 Apr
Randy Blythe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I remember how music made me feel when it, when I, as we talked at the beginning of this conversation, how I felt so different and outside and alone. And then I first heard this music, this punk rock music, this X feels, I'm like, These people understand. Finally, someone understands.
And when I get told this by these fans, and I've been told so many times how our music or a book I wrote or even my photography has truly helped people get through difficult times, it is by far the most rewarding part of what I do. It's nice to make a living, it is true. But having someone tell you that you made a real impact in your life
in their life it's supremely gratifying to me and it provides me what i feel like a sense of purpose and i think we're talking about how people feel lost and as if they don't matter not everybody is supposed to be an artist. Not everybody's supposed to be in a heavy metal band, but everybody has something that they can do to help others.
And I have found that trying, at least trying to structure my life around beyond paying the basic bills, around allowing enough room for me to be of service to other people in other ways has provided me with fulfillment and a sense of purpose that chasing money or success or notoriety has never provided, ever. And I think anyone can be of service to others. They just have to look around.
They have to look and look around their own neighborhood and see, what can I do to make this place better? Who can I help? Even if just by walking over and talking to someone. Like old people, man. Old people are lonely. If you are able to go and go to an old person's home and volunteer and talk to old people...
who are spending the last of their lives alone you may a learn something from these people there's a lot of wisdom and b you will be being of service and that costs nothing it costs nothing to you to to engage with this other human being on a person-to-person level and and i think
for all the supposed connectivity that the internet and social media provides, it's really in many ways causing us to separate from ourselves more and more. When my grandmother, I interviewed my grandmother right before, not right before, eight years before she died. She lived to be a hundred and a half years old and I was right by her side when she died. But I interviewed her, maybe she was 94.
I can't remember when I interviewed her. And I asked her this question. I said, grandma, What do you think is the biggest difference between now and when you grew up? She grew up in the depression, so there's massive differences. But she didn't talk about computers or technology or self-driving cars or whatever. She said, I think people aren't as close as they used to be.
I think they don't come and visit as much as they used to. Nobody knows their neighbors.
and i think our society is feeling that and i think that lack of real person-to-person human contact is manifesting itself in these feelings of anxiety and not belonging and feeling alone and not knowing our purpose because we don't know the people around us we don't know our community um and therefore we don't have anyone to bounce these feelings off of so we're just stuck with ourselves
That opens up the book. It's a chapter called The Duke.
which is a lamb of god song i wrote about this young man wayne ford and i've talked about this before wayne was a young man i'd met outside a show in phoenix arizona and he had been diagnosed with leukemia recently and was starting his chemo treatments and radiation and all this stuff and i had a talk with him and his wife outside the show and wished him the best of luck and i thought
man good luck i hope this guy makes it and pulled away and didn't think much more of it and then five years go by and one of his friends wound up emailing me through my publicist and was like Wayne, I don't know if you remember meeting him, but he's not going to make it, dude. He's fought this thing for five years and he's done.
So he's decided to spend out the last of his days at home, not undergoing any more chemo or trips to the hospital and enjoy his life. with his family the way he wants to, the way he's going to live the way he wants to, because he had spent the last five years in and out of hospitals, unable to eat what he wanted to eat, just a miserable existence. But he was fighting for his life.
This guy wrote me this letter to let me know that Wayne was dying. And he said, can you get the guys in lamb of god together to say hello to him and i said unfortunately that is not possible because they were in california recording an album and i was in richmond virginia working on lyrics we weren't all together and they were in different studios i said look I'll call him though.
I would love to talk to him for whatever that's worth. So I wound up setting up this video call where I was going to chat with this terminal young man, Wayne Fort, he's 33 years old. And before the chat, I became overwhelmed. We were talking about fear. I became overwhelmed with fear and anxiety that I'm not a grief counselor. I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know anything.
how to handle this sort of situation. And then I started worrying, well, what if I make it worse? What if I say something wrong or stupid? And this sends him, it shortens his life even more. What if I offend him? And it was, I had this realization as I'm thinking about all this, I'm not thinking about this young man. I'm thinking about myself. I'm thinking about myself.
fear of looking ineffective or of doing the wrong thing. It's entirely fear-based. And I came to, I asked my dad who wasn't minister and had a lot of experience with grief counseling. I asked another friend of mine, actually he was a rabbi who had experience with grief counseling.
I'm like, they both confirmed what I already knew is it's not my job to talk to this guy and make him feel better and be the front man clown and tell tour stories or whatever. It's just my job to be And so when I wound up talking to him, I approached it. We said hello. And it was normal conversation. Like, Hey dude, how are you doing?
I approached it from this sort of way where I was thinking, well, there's this elephant in the room and this young man is going to die, but I don't need to beat him over the head over it, but I can open up space for that if he wants to talk about this with me. So I asked him how he was feeling. Which is a different than, it's very different than just like, what's up, dude?
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