M.Shadows and his wife, Valary, were having a night out at a local bar when the psychedelic mushrooms began to take hold. A new Avenged Sevenfold album was already in the works, but the singer wasn’t seeking chemically enhanced inspiration at that moment – until the feelings of love and happiness got intense. “Then we got home,” Shadows recalls, “and we just had this connection, being so sure that we had travelled through space and time to be together in every life that we meet up in – the ultimate love story.”
From that experience, Shadows wrote the lyrics to Cosmic, a sweeping ballad with influences from Elton John to Daft Punk and 808s-era Kanye West, and nothing to remind you of metal. It’s also the longest track on the mind-expanding new Avenged Sevenfold album, Life Is But A Dream…, with a romantic vocal that promises: ‘as we chase through the stars beyond forever / I’ll follow you’.
“Do I believe that’s the truth? Probably not. But on some sort of other level? Yes. Maybe,” Shadows says with a grin. “That’s not where my belief system lies, but I thought it was a really compelling song. And I did experience that and feel full-heartedly, 100% that that was the truth when I was living in it, you know? We felt like she was some queen and I was some guy that was in the Roman Army, and it was like a movie. It’s probably [because of] a million movies we’ve seen, and it all festered its way into our brains.”
Shadows looks perfectly relaxed as he describes the track, sitting inside the band’s warehouse headquarters in Huntington Beach, California, clad in a Black Flag T-shirt and black Avenged Sevenfold-brand mesh shorts, his hair cropped short on the sides, long on top. But he knows this is the quiet before the storm,
