U.D.O., Vega reviews

Beyond The Metal Tour Of The Year with Paolo Gregoletto of Trivium

Interview by Ken Morton - Live Photos by Jack Lue

One of the very first bands out of the gate after live shows resumed in a pandemic age, Trivium would find themselves on the road with Megadeth, Lamb Of God, and Hatebreed on The Metal Tour Of The Year. There was no time for a break in the midst of Covid-19, as Trivium found themselves recording and releasing In The Court Of The Dragon, their 10th epic album via Roadrunner Records! In this interview with Highwire Daze, bassist Paolo Gregoletto talks about being on the road again, their 10th glorious masterwork, his previous band Metal Militia, and a whole lot more!

Is there any overall story of concept behind the album title In The Court Of The Dragon?

I kind of spent the time collecting any ideas – anything that could be cool for song titles or lyrics. I don’t know where I saw it – probably online somewhere – someone mentioned Robert Chambers. I was kind of doing a deep dive into the King In Yellow type stories – and that’s where it came from. He had a short story called In The Court Of The Dragon in one of his books – and I really liked the title. So, I kind of put that down – maybe this story would be cool for a song or whatever. And as we started to write lyrics and figure out the vibe of the record, it kind of seemed like instead of taking the story and kind of doing a retelling of that, we could just take the title and sort of re-purpose it into a whole new story – essentially creating our own storyline myths – meant to feel kind of conceptual. I don’t want to say it’s a full concept album, but I definitely feel that there’s a story that runs through each song – and they all are meant to feel like they connect.

This is in fact Trivium’s 10th studio album – you’re on 9 of 10 of them. How does it feel you have recorded and released Trivium’s 10th studio album?

It’s pretty mind blowing. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but it also does feel like it’s been that long in some ways. The last two years have been such an interesting time to make music and I feel like we are one of the more prolific bands in this sort of pandemic time period with releasing a record and then writing a whole new one. And so, it’s been very crazy, and we’ve not done a lot of touring yet – we only did the one tour. So, I haven’t been able to really fully comprehend – like we’ve done albums 9 and 10 in the last.years – and that’s such a big feat for a band to exist that long and to have done 9 of them on the same label even. So, it’s a really crazy thing! We’re just trying to stay on our timeline. We like to write albums every couple years – and this was kind of a different scenario where we had the time to go right into the next record without any touring.