This article was originally published in 2024 as part of Revolver’s special collectors issue on Lamb of God and has since been slightly edited and updated.
Over two decades later, Ashes of the Wake stands as a landmark record for many reasons.
Lamb of God‘s third studio album under that name, and fourth overall, Ashes of the Wake was LOG’s first for a major label. Epic Records, who ultimately signed them, were one of several majors vying to enlist the Richmond, Virginia, metal quintet in the wake of 2003’s blistering As the Palaces Burn, which had been released via the indie Prosthetic Records.
Produced by Machine (a.k.a. Gene Freeman, who had previously worked with Clutch, King Crimson and English industrial rockers Pitchshifter), and recorded between Richmond’s Sound of Music and Hoboken, New Jersey’s Water Music Studios, the 11-track album was a dark and rage-filled meditation on war and self-destruction. Yet, much to the surprise of the band members themselves, Ashes of the Wake not only became an enormous commercial success — the album reached No. 27 on the Billboard 200 and would eventually go gold, selling over 500,000 copies in the U.S. alone — but also produced several of Lamb of God’s most enduring songs, including “Laid to Rest,” “Now You’ve Got Something to Die For” and “Omerta.” Critically acclaimed at the time, Ashes of the Wake is now widely hailed as one of the greatest metal albums of the 21st century.
A 2024 expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of Ashes of the Wake offers fans a fresh perspective on the acclaimed album, thanks to the inclusion of original pre-production demos of “Laid to Rest,” “Ashes of the Wake” and “Remorse Is for the Dead,” live versions of “Remorse Is for the Dead” and “Now You’ve Got Something to Die For,” and remixes of “Laid to Rest” and “Omerta” by HEALTH and Justin K Broadrick (Godflesh/Jesu), respectively. Also included in this deluxe edition is a remixed version of “Another Nail for Your Coffin” — originally a bonus track on the Japanese edition of Ashes — which features new vocals by Alex Taylor of Malevolence and Matt Honeycutt of Kublai Khan TX.
In 2024, Lamb of God also celebrated the album’s 20th anniversary on this summer’s Ashes of Leviathan tour, which they’re co-headlining with longtime pals Mastodon, another great American metal band who just happened to drop an incredible album of their own, Leviathan, on August 31st, 2004.
Revolver sat down with Randy Blythe and Mark Morton to discuss the making of Ashes of the Wake — the circumstances, pressures and influences that forged it — as well as their perspectives on the album two decades after its creation.
Rudy Archuleta
How did you guys end up on Epic Records?
Mark Morton It kind of all goes back to Palaces. We had done Palaces on Prosthetic Records, and we’d done the “Ruin” video, which I think both captured the essence of the band and was also just a really cool-looking video, and that got us the most attention we’d ever had upon its release. Prosthetic did a good job of getting us out there, and we were doing the work — and we started getting a lot of solicitation from major labels who wanted to be a part of what was being dubbed the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, because it was something that was real and was happening pretty organically.
Epic’s presentation to us was not the most financially lucrative, but they did a really, really good job of conveying that not only did they believe in what we were doing, but they believed in allowing us space and freedom to develop that. And looking back, I think it has proven to be true.
Did Epic make it pretty clear that they wanted a new album from you as soon as possible?
Morton Yeah, it was terrifying. I had never been in a position before where I felt pressure to write music — I have always written music sort of just because that’s what I do. All of a sudden, it’s a business in a way that it had never really been before. There was a timeline, and the stakes felt very high. They probably were. I remember thinking, Well, this is great — we got a signing bonus, and I probably won’t have to work a day job for a year or two! But I felt a lot of pressure to rise up.
I think I knew, intuitively and correctly, that when you move from college ball to the NFL, if you keep playing like you did in college, you’re not going to make it. You have to level up.
Randy Blythe I didn’t feel the pressure creatively as much as Mark did. I think I was more riddled with anxiety at the prospect of signing to a major label. Because there are countless horror stories where a bright, viable young artist signs to a major label, and then the A&R people come in to, quote unquote, develop the band, and they start shoving bright ideas down their throat.
We each got an advance check for about 30 grand when we signed, which was great — I copied it and put it on my refrigerator [laughs]. But I remember thinking: OK, we’re going to take this money. We’re going to do what we do. We’re going to put out a record — and it’s not going to deliver them a charting hit. It’s not going to be the tune that everybody is singing along with, and we’re going to get dropped. It’s going to be like The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle with the Sex Pistols — we’re gonna get this money, and hopefully we can somehow Malcolm McLaren our way out of this deal, and still have a little money in our pocket after we get dropped. And then me and Mark can go back to roofing, and John [Campbell] can go back to bartending or whatever.
I was also very nervous about this, because it was my first time of not having to work a day job. It was the first time we had to say, “OK, this is what we do for a living now — we’re concentrating solely on music.” And I’d been working since I was 13 or 14 years old. I’d never not had a job, so it was scary.
Morton I remember I kept looking at my checking account that day the advance check cleared. I was like, “Oh my God!” [Laughs] I knew I wasn’t wealthy, but I had never had that kind of money before, and I knew we were going to have to work our ass off. And honestly, none of this was really ever about, like, “Let’s get the money!” I think we were pretty in touch with the fact that what this really meant was that we had an opportunity now to focus entirely on music, and to see what we could do with this shot we had. And, you know, our collective and individual lifestyles at the time are pretty well-documented. But somehow, we still had the wherewithal and the presence of mind to understand, like, “This is a really great opportunity.” And I think somewhere deep down inside, without necessarily being able to articulate it, we did actually believe in ourselves.
Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe, 2004
Justin Borucki
You signed with Epic in October 2003. How soon after that did you start writing the songs for what became Ashes?
Morton I don’t remember exactly the timeline, but I do remember us kind of shifting gears prematurely, because we didn’t really end up touring much on Palaces at all, which is a bit of a shame. Because, for me, it’s one of my top three favorite Lamb records, and I think it’s aged as well or better than most of them. And the thing was, I had just poured all of my ideas musically and lyrically into the Palaces record. So, I had an empty notebook and an empty tape recorder that I used back then for riffs, and now I had to come up with the most important creative contributions of my career.
It was really scary, but we started writing and started getting songs together. I remember Kaz Utsunomiya, our A&R guy, handed me a copy of Clutch’s Blast Tyrant record, because Machine had produced that album, and Kaz had this vision that Machine would produce us.
Your previous albums had been produced by Steve Austin and Devin Townsend, of Today is the Day and Strapping Young Lad, respectively. How different was Machine’s approach to recording?
Blythe For Burn the Priest and New American Gospel, I did all my vocals in, like, a day for one, and a day and a half for the other. There was no real time for producing — it was like, “Hurry up and do this!” And with Palaces, the guys would work with Devin Townsend all day, and I would come in and record at midnight after I got done working my job at a chophouse in the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood of Richmond and rode my BMX bike to the studio. So, no one had ever really produced me before.
The first take I did with Machine, I don’t remember what song it was, but I got out about two or three lines and Machine stood up and threw a chair across the room. And I was like, “What the fuck? Is he mad?” And he looks at me and rips off his headphones, and he’s like, “Yeah! This is gonna be awesome!”
He’s pretty intense to work with. He’s a very physical producer, and I mean this quite literally — when he produces vocals, he does these weird sorts of physical, almost aggressive dance interactions with you while you’re singing. Machine’s a character, but right from the beginning I really felt like Machine went to bat for me.
Morton We would literally write our songs as instrumentals, then say, “OK, here Randy — scream your lyrics over the top of it! Go nuts!” And Randy is still one of the best at that.
But at the same time, I think we were undervaluing the importance of the vocal. And Machine, as much as anything, helped all of us start to understand the big picture. Like, the people that are listening to this music, what are they listening to? What are they listening to it for? I think Machine helped us sort of zoom out and understand, “This isn’t about your part, or the part you brought into the rehearsal, or the part that you think is best. Let’s listen to the song. What do we have here? And how does it integrate? And how does it make the listener feel?” That is what a good producer does, and Machine’s a good producer.
Blythe That’s one of the hardest lessons for younger musicians to learn — to sort of step back for a second and shelve your attachments to what you’ve done and be like, “OK, does this serve what we, collectively, are doing?” That’s one thing with our band that I’m really grateful for — as we go on through the years, that lesson seems to become more and more clarified with us.
Lamb of God’s Mark Morton, 2004
Jimmy Hubbard
Let’s talk about some of the album’s songs, like the leadoff track “Laid to Rest.” What do you remember about that one?
Morton It’s interesting to look back on it — I don’t remember in its inception thinking that it was going to be one of the biggest songs of our career. I had the intro riff rattling around in my head, which, as it turns out, was remarkably similar to “Into the Pit” by Testament. Which makes sense, because I’m a pretty lifelong Testament fan, but it was definitely not intentional — in fact, I didn’t even realize it until sometime later.
And lyrically, it’s just one of those songs where you take an emotion that comes from a sort of mundane kind of life experience, like getting in a fight with your girlfriend, and you try and get to the essence of it and then use it to inspire lyrics that feel not so specific to that experience. It’s kind of a general “fuck you” sort of song, which is very in-the-lane for metal.
I thought it was cool and thrashy, and I thought it was a good song, but I didn’t want to start the record with it. I felt at the time, and I still feel to this day, that “Hourglass” would have been a better album opener. But “Laid to Rest” was the song that all the people from the label who were involved with the record keyed in on pretty quickly.
Blythe “Hourglass” is me and Mark, lyrically. There’s a line in the bridge that says “petty is as petty does,” and that is a line from a Richmond band that Mark was actually in for a minute years before called Hose.Got.Cable. They had this song with a sing-along part of “petty is as petty does,” and I was like, “That’s a fucking brilliant line!” And the next part, I don’t know if you’d call it a verse, starts with “God forbid you read the signs” — I was working in band names of friends of ours in a few places on the album, so that line is me putting our New Jersey homies God Forbid into the song.
I don’t know if the riff on the bridge was a Mark riff or Willie [Adler] riff, but it sounds very New York hardcore, very Cro-Mags Age of Quarrel. So, it was very easy for me to write that.
Morton That’s a Willie bit in that section, because he’s got the more hardcore influence. We were still up in Hoboken recording the drums for the album, and the lyrics weren’t entirely done yet. Sometimes there’ll be a couple sections that are left over, and we’ll just kind of work them out before Randy does his tracks if there’s little missing pieces, or he will. But in towards the end, there’s this little section that says, “You finally made it home/Draped in the flag that you fell for/And so it goes/The ashes of the wake.” And that’s from around the time that we saw these pictures of the flag-draped caskets coming back in the cargo planes…
Blythe From the second Gulf War.
Morton Right. There was one particular image that I remember as just so startling, and so I was referencing that along with kind of a double entendre with “Draped in the flag that you fell for” — like, you died fighting for America, ostensibly, but at the same time we were all sort of sold this lie that war was for something when maybe it was for something else. And then the line “And so it goes” is from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I was sleeping in this room at the studio in Hoboken, and that book was on this little bookshelf in there, and I was just kind of thumbing through it. And “So it goes,” that’s like a refrain in the book.
The second Gulf War casts a long shadow over this album — it must have been heavily on your minds at the time.
Blythe And it had been on the previous record, as well, so there was some carryover.
Morton “Now You’ve Got Something to Die For,” that’s more of what we’re talking about there. It’s pretty harsh — if you think about saying “now you’ve got something to die for” in the face of people being shipped overseas and getting blown up by IEDs and shit. But there was this sentiment of, like, “What is this really for?”
I was a political science major in college, and at the time I think I was still pretty intrigued by politics and the war machine and all that kind of stuff. Not that it’s any more or less appalling now, but at the time I was pretty fueled by that stuff.
When I wrote that first kind of up-tempo riff, without drums it almost sounded like Pantera’s “Cowboys From Hell” — if you were to cut that in half-time, it would be very Pantera. But that song shifted a lot in terms of the feel of it once Chris Adler put the drums on it. I think one of the strengths of the band has always been that we come from different angles, and often take one idea that might seem like it’s going one way and then shift it into something else.
Tell me about “Omerta.” What’s the story behind that one?
Blythe Musically, it’s one of my favorite songs that we’ve ever done, because I come from the “slow” school.
Morton Me and Willie collaborated for the guitar parts, and Willie brought in that first riff, which is how the song starts and where the verse goes over. And Willie brought it in very fast, but I think Machine had the idea during preproduction of, like, “What if we make this vastly slower?” And we dropped it down 60 BPM, or maybe more, and then the whole song really changed character.
Blythe Pretty much everyone now knows what “Omerta” means. It’s the old-school Sicilian Cosa Nostra code of silence. I was always a big fan of the Godfather movies.
I do not think the Mafia or any organized crime is a thing to emulate, whatsoever, you know, particularly seeing how bad organized crime has gotten in South and Central America. But in Sicily, back in the day when Cosa Nostra started taking over, you didn’t go to the police with your problems. You went to the local padrino, or whatever, or handled it yourself. And that aspect of “handle your own shit” is very attractive to me, especially in this insane, litigious, whiny society we live in.
So, that’s where the inspiration behind that one came from.
Lamb of God’s Willie Adler, 2004
Justin Borucki
What’s the story behind the title track, “Ashes of the Wake”?
Blythe My favorite song on the record — the instrumental! [Laughs] I didn’t have to do shit. I think they should play that every single set!
Morton I think on the next tour, we will be playing it every night, unfortunately. [Laughs]
Blythe I know, I’m stoked! I’m gonna be taking a little tea break, breathing…
Morton That song was one of those William Adler masterpieces where he brings in this, like, incredibly elaborate, long, stretched-out, winding riff bonanza. Most of our songs at the time would come in as this instrumental form, and then we would begin this process of reduction and rearrangement to make it feel more like a song with some kind of refrain or chorus. This one just really never got that treatment, and I think it kind of started standing on its own as an instrumental.
Conceptually, philosophically, we were cool with this idea of having an instrumental interlude piece on the record. And then we added these guests — I remember being really excited about having [Testament guitarist] Alex Skolnick and [former Megadeth guitarist] Chris Poland on the same record, on the same song, and that I got the chance to sort of “cut heads” with them on the track a little bit. That was pretty cool for me as a lead guitarist, because those guys were two big influences.
I don’t remember where the idea for the spoken-word track [an interview with U.S. Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey] came from, or who brought that in. It really was kind of an incidental decision to include that on the song. It just seemed like an interesting layer. But it certainly seemed to be in the lane of what we were doing, thematically. It really served to define the album as this kind of protest statement piece.
And then there’s the closing track, “Remorse Is for the Dead.”
Blythe That’s one of my favorite songs on the record. And I think the ending sort of — I don’t know if you’d call it a breakdown — but that’s one of my favorite riffs that Lamb of God has ever done.
Morton It’s so heavy, and it’s got such a cool groove. I hadn’t played it or honestly even listened to it in years and years, until we had to learn that album for the [2020] livestream. And in learning the song again, I kind of got reacquainted with it — and I think we all agreed like, “Wow, this is like a forgotten banger for sure!”
Blythe Lyrically, it’s about my residence in Dirtbag Manor, this house where I was living at the time. There’s so many lines in there that are direct little stories from living in this atrociously filthy punk-rock house, where everyone was drinking and doing a lot of drugs.
I remember in the hallway upstairs that connected our bedrooms, we were just like stacking beer cans on top of each other, like a fratboy beer-can pyramid, just to see how high it could go. So, the line that says, “Constructed a monument/To denial and excess” — that’s like this beer-can tower.
Mark and I mention our alcoholism and addiction quite often, and to me, when I look at the lyrics I wrote back then, it’s interesting to see that I’m sort of talking to myself about my alcoholism. It’s like I’m subconsciously saying, “Hey, dude, you’re pretty fucked-up. You might want to dial this back.” But at the time, I was just taking it at face value, like, “Oh, this is a cool line — and of course we’re alcoholics!” [Laughs]
Justin Borucki
Ashes is viewed by many fans and critics today as an iconic Lamb of God album. How do you view it?
Blythe I don’t look at the album as, “Man, this is gonna go down in the canon,” or whatever. We just had hats made that kind of sum up our attitude towards it — they say, “Ashes of the Wake: It’s the 49th Greatest Guitar Album of All Time!” [Laughs] Guitar World called it that, and that’s just funny to me.
You know, it’s a Lamb of God record to me. It was a shift to us being professional musicians, literally, but personally, it’s a Lamb of God record.
Morton I agree. That sums it up: It’s a Lamb of God record. I’m aware that I’m not the intended audience. I write what I want to hear and what’s on my mind, but once that’s down and documented, I move on to whatever’s next. I don’t spend a lot of time sitting with and reflecting on and celebrating the accomplishment of whatever new album. That’s just how I work, and I think it’s probably how a lot of musicians and songwriters work.
And I have little to no control about what connects with the audience. So, the same way I wouldn’t have earmarked “Laid to Rest” to be one of the band’s biggest songs of our career, I wouldn’t have necessarily earmarked the Ashes of the Wake album to be the album that everyone says is the classic Lamb record.
I think its popularity has a lot to do with our increase in profile and visibility at the time. Very often, the first album from a band that you fall in love with becomes your favorite album of that band, and I think that’s what happened with Ashes of the Wake. I certainly don’t have any issue with that — I’m grateful when fans love any of our work.
Blythe I do think, as Mark mentioned, that that album is perhaps when a lot of fans first heard us. But I also think that that album was a big part of a larger thing that was happening in our music scene at the time. Like, Mastodon’s Leviathan came out on exactly the same day, right? And Killswitch Engage and Shadows Fall were also getting a lot of attention around that time. Several of us went on Ozzfest in 2004, which was huge for us. So, while that album is specific to Lamb of God and our fans, I think it’s a significant piece of a broader happening that was occurring at the time.
Morton Killswitch’s The End of Heartache came out in May 2004. So, in a matter of those three or four months, you’ve got The End of Heartache, Ashes of the Wake and Leviathan all coming out.
Blythe That’s crazy, right?
Morton Yeah — they were all pretty big records for our scene, and they are all still celebrated as long-lasting pillars of that moment in that genre. So, I think what we’ve really learned here is that 2004 was a good year for metal. [Laughs]