INTERVIEW: Chris Jericho – Fozzy

When your day job consists of a nearly-three-decade-spanning career as a professional wrestler for the likes of WWE and New Japan Pro Wrestling, you’d be forgiven for thinking that might be enough for one person to keep themselves occupied with. For Chris Jericho however, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In between stints as an author, actor, critically-acclaimed podcast host and the aforementioned wrestling career, the Canadian known best to many as Y2J has also filled time since 2000 by fronting the rock band FOZZY and touring around the world with them. We caught up with Chris after their set at this year’s Bloodstock Festival (read our review here) to find out more about what’s been going on with the band over the last year and how this album cycle might just have been their best ever.

You’ve just played the Main Stage here at Bloodstock a couple of hours ago. How do you feel everything went today?

Chris: It was a blast man. We played Bloodstock a few years ago and you could see the difference in the size of the crowd; and before it was much more of a heavier, thrashier type of festival, and now it’s much more well-rounded, and I think you can see that in the crowd. So we had a blast, it was a great set and great way to round off the tour.

We’re now a couple of months away from hitting the one year anniversary of the Judas album’s release; arguably one of, if not FOZZY’s most successful to date. How do you feel about the reception the album’s had over the last year or so looking back now?

Chris: Yeah, the single came out in May 2017 and the record was October. It’s been amazing, it’s taken us to a completely different level all across the board. I mean, we’ve done three European tours, three UK tours, we’re gonna do our fourth US tour, we’re going to a lot of countries we haven’t been to before or haven’t been to in years. So you can see what I call ‘the Judas effect’, you know? It’s the right collection of songs in the right place at the right time for us, and it just took us to a completely different level, and was basically all anchored around the reception it received in the States on the radio. We’re at three Top 40 hits now, two Top 10s, and really no signs of slowing down, so it’s been a really cool time for us because we knew eventually it was going to happen; we’ve had popular songs before, but things now have just gone completely through the roof.

Obviously you mention there, the title track from the record has been hugely successful so far, racking up nearly 21.5 million views since May 2017 and becoming FOZZY’s de-facto show opener. Did you feel like you had something special from the moment that song was written?

Chris: Yeah, once again, it’s kind-of become our signature song, and that’s fine. I mean, once you’re lucky enough to have that happen for your band, you know it takes things completely, it’s like our Stairway To Heaven, our Enter Sandman, something along those lines. But you know, like I said, when you’re lucky enough to get to that point where you have a song that everyone equates with you, it’s just a great thing. It’s one of those things where if people only know one FOZZY song, that’s alright, we don’t have a problem with that. And it just continues to build and continues to grow and to get bigger. Like I said, our new single Burn Me Out just came out, and we had almost like 500,000 views on YouTube, and in that timeframe Judas did 700,000; it just continues to grow and grow and grow man, so we’ll take it.

You’ve already mentioned Burn Me Out, but there’s also been more singles from the record including Drinkin’ With Jesus and Painless as well. Has the reaction to every single been just as positive as it has been for Judas?

Chris: Oh yeah. I mean, Judas took a while because it took about 25 weeks in the charts to get to No.5, which was a huge awakening for a lot of people that had never really heard FOZZY before or didn’t know what to make of us. And after that, Painless got to No.7 much quicker, and then Burn Me Out made it Top 40 basically first week, which had never happened before either. So I think it’s one of those things where once you get momentum going, more and more people kinda jump on the bandwagon and more and more people want to discover your band and get into what you’re doing.

In that regard, do you think this is FOZZY really hitting its stride then, so to speak?

Chris: I think so; I mean we’re getting there. I think more than ever we know exactly who our band is and what it is we do best that not a lot of other bands do, which is very melodic, groove-oriented heavy music with a lot of harmonies, a lot of vocals. It’s rock and roll with a smile, you know? People have a good time at a FOZZY show, and we go out of our way to make sure of that. So I think all of those things have been benefiting us.

I suppose in that regard, your background in entertainment outside of music must be quite helpful with that?

Chris: Well yeah, but it’s not just me, it’s the whole band. I mean, you’re dealing with guys that’ve been entertainers for 25 years in music and wrestling, in stand-up comedy, all the different things I’ve done. So there’s a different element of experience to FOZZY, but we’re still a fairly new band, a fairly young band; at least when you see us on stage. I mean everybody’s slim and trim with long hair and it looks cool and we make sure to go out of our way that we look like a band, that’s the way it should be. All of those things add to the success and to the constant upward momentum of the band.

Going back slightly to the album itself, are there any moments on Judas that you’re especially proud of?

Chris: Well it’s interesting because we worked with Johnny Andrews on this record, who basically took over songwriting with Rich [Ward, guitar]. Rich and Johnny wrote all the songs, and I contributed on three different songs (Wordsworth Way, Three Days In Jail, Running With The Bulls). But it doesn’t really matter who writes it, y’know? I have to sing it, I have to introduce it to the world. Whether I wrote the lyrics to Judas or not, people hear me sing them and those then become my lyrics by design. I mean, I think from the stuff that I wrote, there’s a song called Wordsworth Way which was inspired by a song called Cedarwood Road that U2 wrote talking about the childhood street that Bono grew up on, and I thought that was real interesting, and so Wordsworth Way is the street that I grew up on as a child, and I just thought it was kind of an interesting song title and I wrote about all these different things that happened as I was growing up. And it ended up being a really powerful, really cool song on the record for sure.

I had no idea that was the reference…

Chris: It was; I’ve always been a guy who’d look at song titles and decide whether I liked the song or not just based on the title, and Wordsworth Way seemed very interesting to me, and something that I could really delve into.

You mentioned on-stage before that this is FOZZY’s final stop of the European tour before you head back home. Are you virtually straight back out on tour again once you’re back?

Chris: Pretty much, we have ten days off and then we go back out in the States for the last run, our fourth tour on the Judas cycle. Then we head to Australia for a while and then we’ve got a couple of weeks in Canada and that’ll be the end of it. And then we get ready to start working on another new record.

And in-between all that, the small matter of you booking your own cruise to play on.

Chris: [laughs] Yeah, right; Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling Rager at Sea. I’ve still got some commitments with New Japan Pro Wrestling as well, so I’m always busy, always got things going on.

Once all the touring’s out of the way and everything, is there a timeframe for when you’d like to try and have any new material done by?

Chris: Well you wanna keep the momentum going, like David Lee Roth used to say “Here today, gone later today”, and we don’t want to lose any of the steam that we’ve got, that’s why this tour continues to grow. And it may still go on, the last thing we have booked is Canada in November. But I mean, like I said, when you get this amount of notoriety and this intention, you wanna keep going and keep it rolling and that’s what we’re planning to do. So, I think the old model of two years or two and a half years between records, it’s not gonna happen this time – can it happen this time because we’ve got so much going on? But yet, you don’t wanna just rush something out either, so it’s a fine line.

Just to cap things off – is there any message you’d like to give to the readers of Distorted Sound Magazine who might be fans of FOZZY?

Chris: Like I said, we’re really excited with all the upward momentum we’ve gotten this past year all across the world, but the UK’s always been our backyard, it’s always been our second home and it’s always been the first place that really accepted FOZZY as a band. I still remember the first gig we ever had at Nottingham Rock City, I couldn’t believe how many people were there, couldn’t fucking believe it, we’d never played to a crowd that big before, and I don’t know what the capacity is, if it’s 300 or 700 or whatever, but whatever it was it was the first jam-packed room that we’d ever played and it’s been that way ever since basically. So we love England and we were excited to play today; we did Download last year, we’ll take next summer off and come back the summer after that and continue to build and grow and play bigger rooms in front of more people here in England like we have been, and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland and everywhere else.

Judas is out now via Century Media Records. 

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