DevilDriver recently released their latest album Winter Kills and are currently on tour with Trivium. At the tour's stop in New York, I sat down with guitarist Mike Spreitzer for a wide-ranging conversation.
Chad Bowar: What have been some of the highlights for you of this run with Trivium?
Mike Spreitzer: Montreal was definitely a highlight. It was a sellout. I think tonight will be good. A lot of my favorite cities on this tour we haven't hit yet.


I think the best is yet to come, especially on the next leg of the tour when we hit Texas. Denver's always a highlight, Toronto is really good.

You'll have a few weeks off between legs of this tour. What will you do with the down time?
I've actually been pretty busy with other projects. I just moved and I'm in the middle of building a studio in my garage for when I'm producing and mixing, and also when we're doing DevilDriver pre-production. We might actually do the guitars and bass in my studio for the next record in a couple years. I'm going to be busy doing that during the three weeks we're off.

How do you go about constructing your set list? Do you pick it at the beginning of a tour and stick with it, or change it up?
We pick one before rehearsals, then it usually changes during rehearsals, then it changes again on tour. But the set list has not changed since rehearsal on this tour, surprisingly enough.

With each new album does it get more difficult to choose your set list?
Yes. It used to be easier.

There are personal favorites that the band likes to play, there are songs that fans expect us to play, so it's a little bit of a struggle. But there are no big arguments over it or anything.

Winter Kills has been out for about a month now. Are you satisfied with the response?
Very satisfied. A lot of people are saying it's our best record since The Last Kind Words. That's definitely one of my favorite records. I was a little worried about what the fans' reaction would be to "Sail," and there was a little bit of a debate between management and the band whether we were even going to include that on the main record or put it on the special edition. I love the way it came out. My vote was to put it on the record. During the argument I used "Planet Caravan" from Pantera's Far Beyond Driven. It's a mellower song, it doesn't sound like Pantera. It was the last track on the album that kind of finished things out.

Winter Kills ended up charting higher than your last album Beast. Since you switched to a new record label for this one, were you concerned that might not be the case?
Definitely. We didn't have any experience with Napalm. They definitely proved themselves. Things went well. You can't ask for much more these days in a failing industry.

"Sail" is getting some radio airplay. Tell me about the first time you heard a DevilDriver song on the radio.
Honestly I don't remember. I do remember seeing my first video on Headbanger's Ball, which was "Hold Back The Day." I went over to my friend Mark's house and watched it over there. I was living out of the band's practice space at the time and didn't have a TV. It was the first time I got to see myself on MTV, which I thought was pretty cool.

How old were you when you first picked up the guitar?
I was 8. I didn't like my guitar teacher at the time. She wanted me to sing at a recital. I was into metal already back then, and didn't want to sing that (crap). So I quit. Then two years later when I was 10 I found some decent guitar teachers. They started teaching me heavy metal, which is what I wanted to learn. When I was 18 I joined my first band in college. That's when I really got into it.

How did you join DevilDriver a few years after their inception?
I was in a band with all the other guys except Dez in Santa Barbara. They have known each other for a long time. I came in and asked to join their band because I was unhappy with the band I was in at the time. Eight months later after we broke up I let our old bass player John Miller and Jeff Kendrick stay at my house because I had an extra room.

They came home one day and said Evan (Pitts, guitar) didn't want to go to Europe and they were leaving in two days. I offered to go and learned all the songs. They bought me a plane ticket and the next thing I knew I was in Europe touring with In Flames. I couldn't have been happier. I was just supposed to be a fill in. Evan is a great guy and great guitar player, but some people aren't meant for touring. I don't think he enjoyed being on the road.

But I love it out here. You get to have two lives. You get to have your road life and you get to have your home life. They are very separate things. But I like it. Most people get to live one life, I get to live two.

You've done composing for movies in the past. Are you still involved in that?
I've always had an interest in doing soundtracks and movie scoring. Unfortunately, it's a very hard thing to get into, especially if you're not doing it full time. I've been producing other bands. There's a band called Thrown Into Exile.They were on Mayhem last year. I produced an EP of theirs. I was supposed to be doing a full-length record with them right now, but we got behind schedule. They all have jobs and have to work during the day. We got as much done as we could, but I believe Logan Mader is going to finish working with them.

I've submitted music for music libraries. It has popped up on things like Dexter and WWE without me even knowing it. I sell them the music, then they basically license it out to certain companies. I was watching Dexter one day and heard a pretty cool metal song. Then I was like, 'hey, that's the stuff I produced!"

Tell me about your website AllAxesses.com.
It's a company I started with Jeff (Kendrick). It's going very well. It started out as a guitar community website. So many people want to learn how to play other people's songs, but a lot of the information on the internet is wrong. We thought it would be a good idea to get the actual artist to teach people how to play the songs, so you know it's correct. We did that, and it just snowballed into a bunch of things.

We're starting to manage a lot of artists' online media. We have Chris Kael from Five Finger Death Punch, Munky from Korn, Paolo from Trivium, Willie Adler from Lamb Of God. We filmed Willie's first instructional video that's available for digital download right now from his website WillieAdler.com. We're doing a number of other things, too. We started another website called SlamFactory.net that's completely different. We're throwing a bunch of stuff out there and seeing what sticks.

Do you personally run the sites, or do you have people helping you?
We have a full team. We have a business partner that's based in London and we have a couple of full-time web developers that work for us that are also based in England. We have a guy that writes stories for us that's based in Australia. It's turned into this small, worldwide network of people.