In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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What do you mostly listen do? Classic 80’s metal? Death metal? Thrash? More punk-influenced styles? Progressive/instrumental metal? Do you prefer the more melodic sung vocals or the Cookie Monster-style delivery that’s popular these days? What are some of your favorite bands?

I talked about this a bit earlier in the Q&A. Here’s what I said about metal:

If anyone’s interested in the metal I listen to, here’s a spreadsheet export of my iTunes library. It’s almost all metal, though there’s also probably some random shit in there that I added to my library and rarely (if ever) listen to it. I do like some lighter stuff, but I just don’t listen to it very much. Here’s my current playlist.

Some of my favorite bands: Dark Tranquillity, In Flames, Protest the Hero, At the Gates, Baroness, Eluveitie

To expand a bit on that, melodic death metal is probably my favorite subgenre of metal, but I also listen to a lot of folk metal and metalcore. But my library has a pretty good mix of subgenres. There’s thrash, progressive, power metal…all kinds of stuff.

As for vox: I don’t particularly have a preference for one or the other. I tend to like bands that mix up the screaming with some clean singing.

I feel like a failure as a metalhead–and as a human being–for not mentioning Mastodon in my answer. So, yes, I do like–nay, love–Mastodon. Also, I once killed a man because he killed my goat. Though there are so many bands I could have mentioned as favorites, it’s inevitable that I would neglect to mention some. Like I didn’t mention Lamb of God!

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