By David E. GehlkeIn 2019, drummer Chris Adler found himself out of LAMB OF GOD, the Richmond, Virginia outfit he co-founded and helped steer since 1999. To the outside, he was the steady anchor, signaled by his identifiable snare sound and stamp on the band’s songs. Yet on the inside, LAMB OF GOD’s grueling tour schedule led to physical issues that Adler struggled to overcome. The band’s unpredictable dynamics also reared their head around the time he played on MEGADETH’s 2016 Grammy-winning “Dystopia”. After all of that, the drummer unceremoniously learned he was no longer needed in LAMB OF GOD via email. Adler often talks about “chapter two,” which kicked off a new phase in his personal life while re-learning how to play the drums after being diagnosed with musicians’ dystonia. He’s since formed FIRSTBORNE, a multi-national rock/metal outfit featuring up-and-coming Indian vocalist Girish Pradhan and guitar shredder Myrone. The band’s first proper studio album, “Lucky”, is set for an August release, which provided BLABBERMOUTH.NET with the opportunity to catch up with Adler not only on FIRSTBORNE, but what exactly happened in LAMB OF GOD. Blabbermouth: Are you enjoying the change of pace that something like FIRSTBORNE brings? Has it given you a fresh perspective? Chris: “Yes, a hundred percent. There’s a lot that goes into that story. The years in between, I had to be very introspective and decide where I wanted to go from there and what chapter two was going to be. Fortunately, I was in touch with these guys, and that’s a whole story in itself. We decided that it’s what we do and who we are; it doesn’t necessarily define us or me anymore. It’s something I care about doing, and it’s a great creative outlet for me. I wanted to do it and I wanted to do it with friends. I wanted to do something that I considered to be fun. I think it would have been a mistake, in any way, to try to compete with anything I had done before. We really got much further than I thought we would. I had the opportunity, from when I was a kid, 14 years old, to hear my first MEGADETH tune, which set me on the path: ‘That’s exactly what I want to do, who I want to be.’ Then, to join that band and help write a record that won a Grammy, I think it would be ill-advised to try to compete with that or go back to that or try to even come up with something similar…it would be too messy. It wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore. At that point, I had been in it for 22 years. In the military, 22 years is a career. I had my fill of that. I wanted to continue and work with people I got along with and make some fun music. “We did about 20-plus songs [for FIRSTBORNE] before we did the record and put it out on YouTube and Bandcamp, just a fun, self-release. Then we started getting some attention and got signed. We were more than happy to put a record together. It was a lot of fun. I kept in touch with [producer] Machine throughout my whole career. We’re friends, and he was happy to do it. We had a blast in Texas. Girish, our singer, was there for his first time in the U.S. As far as the pace is concerned, it’s only what we want to do. There are some touring offers coming up, and we’re considering them, but we all sat down and talked. Not that it would be considered entirely part-time, but Myrone and his wife just had a beautiful baby. Girish is in India. With the current administration’s approach to visas, getting people here and there is probably a nightmare. It was hard enough to get him over here to do the record. We are considering starting up a tour. The record comes out in July, and shortly after that, doing some stuff overseas is probably easier for us to get out than for them to get in. But it is chapter two, and it is more laid back. I’m remarried and we have three teenagers. It’s a whole world that, in many ways, during those several decades of my running around the world, I missed out on a lot. It’s really nice to be able to here and put together, maybe for the first time since I’ve been, a great group of friends, great home life and have those things when you’re sitting in Bulgaria wishing you could have a cookout and go to bed with your wife, I get to do those things now.” Blabbermouth: You nearly answered my next question: Do you get asked to play on many things? Do you get asked to join other bands? Chris: “It still happens, yes. In the past month, I’ve done maybe three or four for-hire things. I’m able to do those from the studio that I have in my house. I’ve got a really extensive electronic kit that’s hooked up to Toontrack. The last album recording I did with LAMB was the BURN THE PRIEST covers record [2018’s ‘Legion: XX’.]. Immediately after doing that, ToonTrack came in, and we did a sample pack for ‘Drums Of Destruction’ for EZDrummer. The kit, basically, mimics my acoustic kit very closely. I’m able to do things for hire from here. If I’m into it and it’s something interesting, and actually, the more recent ones that I’ve picked to do were really outside of what I’m known to do, just to challenge myself and do something different. I know people are going to expect me to do what I did in LAMB, but I want to challenge myself and do something else. Part of this chapter two is something new. There have been offers, right from the start. I don’t think they would mind saying it. I think Gene [Hoglan] was leaving TESTAMENT, and they got in touch right away. That was right when I decided to start chapter two. There were a lot of things going on. I was in the middle of a terrible divorce; my mom just died. I got diagnosed with an issue that was making things a lot more difficult at the time. It wasn’t right for me. There are opportunities, but I’m enjoying, right now, saying yes to the ones I like and being able to be comfortable enough to turn some things down.” Blabbermouth: Perhaps that’s the cool thing about FIRSTBORNE — it’s not what’s expected of you. There’s even some VAN HALEN thrown in. Chris: “We’re all fans of them. If you look at the other guys and the stuff they’ve been doing, I don’t want to call it a throwback, but a lot of their style is based on that kind of, certainly VAN HALEN, the late ’80s and early ’90s hard rock, when it seemed a little more fun and less dark. I think we wrote most of it in E [tuning], which is a bit happier. That was the goal, which was to have fun. I would still consider it a hard rock album, but not to push on some of the stuff we’ve done before but make it lighter and more where we’re at. One of our favorite records has always been ‘Surfing With The Alien’ by Joe Satriani — that kind of vibe. You feel like driving fast, but it’s not a black Camaro. It’s a top-down by the beach, like, ‘This is awesome!’ A happy day kind of thing.” Blabbermouth: You wrote the FIRSTBORNE record together, which is how you used to do things in LAMB OF GOD. The band is not centrally located. How did it go? Chris: “One of the things I liked about the early LAMB records and one of the things I didn’t like about the recent LAMB records was that initially, we’d get together and bang heads and talk about a part for months until everyone was happy. That process served us well in the early records, and how well they did proves my point. Going forward, it became more of a ‘Here’s a song. I wrote this at home. Here’s the whole thing.’ We stopped being in the room, which I wasn’t a fan of. I was trying to get back to that, but it wasn’t working. I mentioned earlier we put out a bunch of stuff on YouTube and Bandcamp, that was all done sending files here and there, collaborating, having Zoom meetings and talking about the parts. There was some back and forth with that. Honestly, we had about 100 songs before we were to go into the studio outside of Austin with Machine that were demoed and ready. We already had our favorites. We were going to have Machine listen to all of them and make sure his favorites aligned with ours. About two days before we went, I woke up with this concept: ‘This is the first time we’re going to be in a room together. If you guys aren’t opposed, let’s ditch all of that material and just see what happens when we’re breathing the same air in the same room.’ Of course, that freaked out Machine. We only had four weeks to do the entire thing. He said, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to be able to write and record in four weeks.’ He was completely shocked. [Laughs] In six days, we had written 14 songs. We were beating each other up, but it was super-fast paced and not overthinking things. It was, ‘This feels good, let’s ride with that. Maybe this part goes in this song better.’ One of my self-proclaimed strengths is arrangements and hearing all the things that we were going to do and being able to plug them into the puzzle. It went super-fast. It meant a lot to me. I had missed that for a long time.” Blabbermouth: The MEGADETH record you played on sounds great, but it didn’t have the trademark Chris Adler snare sound with the “pop.” Was that a criteria on the FIRSTBORNE album for Machine? Chris: “I think Machine has been beaten down by the idea of that snare. I don’t think he’s the biggest fan of it either, but I think he’s aware that it’s a favorite—the same with [producer] Josh [Wilbur]. I don’t think either of them was in love with that drum, but they recognized, for whatever reason, it meant a lot to me and appeared on everything we’ve done, and it’s a signature sound for me and the band. They’re in a rock and a hard place. They’re forced to use it.”It’s funny you mentioned MEGADETH. When I first went, of course, I had my snare. We got together and jammed a few times. I think he [Dave Mustaine] was, in a way, kind of feeling me out to see if he wanted to ask me to join the band, if it was going to be more than an album recording. I don’t think he was ready to say ‘I hate that snare.’ When we got past that courtship and I was in the band, as soon as the red light came on for the record, he said, ‘Hey, man. About that snare…’ I understood where he was. I respected the legacy of the band and everything they had done. I didn’t want to come in there and push my sound. I knew it wasn’t their traditional sound. I was happy to do it. It was odd for me since I had been playing a 12-inch snare and going to a 14-inch. It felt like I had this enormous thing. It still sounded great.” Blabbermouth: Your departure from LAMB OF GOD was a big deal. How are you feeling these days? How is your health? How about your mental health? Chris: “People are interested in, ‘What the fuck happened?’ There was an incident in 2018 when I had a motorcycle accident on an island outside of Thailand that really messed up my shoulder, but that was resolved quickly. I had a great surgeon who works for the Indianapolis Colts, who got me up and running. In three or four months, I had as much motion and strength as before. That wasn’t an issue. First of all, I’m doing great, but it took a long time to get to this point. Right around the time I left, there were a lot of things going on. My mother was very sick. She ended up passing. I was going through a really terrible divorce. If you’ve been a fan of LAMB and followed us from the beginning, there are enough stories to go around. Number one, I really put all of myself into this project. Two, we were, in general, a very dysfunctional family that was rolling around, trying to figure it out. In many ways, that worked well for us. It pushed us to push each other to be better. It wasn’t something that anybody wanted to walk away from. We knew we might not always be best friends, but in pushing each other, we made something fairly unique. Right at the same time, it was around 2003, I started noticing something with my right foot doing weird things when I didn’t want it to be doing weird things. It wasn’t too often, and it didn’t mess up anything for a long time. Slowly, it got worse. By around 2016, I was touring with LAMB and MEGADETH, and it was making a difference in the show in that there were points where I felt like I couldn’t control it. I started going through all sorts of physical and occupational therapy. Working out, not working out, yoga—whatever I could do to figure out what was going on. I ended up in a place in Richmond called Neurological Associates, which, because of the symptoms, had me bring in my pedals to solve what was going on. They sent me to the neurological center at VCU, which is a big school here that has connections with Johns Hopkins. They put me through a battery of tests, and I was diagnosed with a thing called musician’s dystonia. “I haven’t wanted to talk about it before now. It’s really a death sentence in many ways. But Alex Webster [bass, CANNIBAL CORPSE] had brought it up, and I’m friends with him. I recently saw the NICKELBACK documentary. I’m not the biggest NICKELBACK fan, but it’s a great documentary. Their drummer [Daniel Adair] went through the same thing. He had the same issues as I, where it’s a death sentence. It’s called ‘task-specific focal dystonia.’ It’s in my foot in this case. It happens to people who perform a repetitive motion for an extended amount of time, like quarterbacks, golfers, first-chair violinists and a lot of guitar players. It’s not as common for drummers, but I know a few people who have the symptoms but never got diagnosed. I’m pretty sure it’s more common than they are aware of. The nerves that are telling my foot to do this are worn out. Eventually, it stops doing what you want it to do. In the case of dystonia, it causes things like depression, but the nerve gives your foot the signal. At the same time, it misfires. It uses the muscles that would go opposite to the intended motion. If I were trying to depress my right foot, often it would lift or shoot to the side or shoot back. It kept getting worse and worse. That happened at the same time that all this stuff did. I took the medical work to the band. They knew I was in the middle of a big divorce. Like I said, we were dysfunctional. We weren’t always best friends. It was strained. Whoever was not in the room was getting picked on. I was the guy out of the room. I think one of the things that, from my perspective, and I don’t mean to speak for anybody, I think when I took the MEGADETH gig, that really strained things even further. Nobody said, ‘We don’t want you to do it,’ or ‘You’re cheating on us.’ That was still the vibe, then when MEGADETH won a Grammy, that pushed it further. I won a [Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy] with the other band that I joined, PROTEST THE HERO, a couple of years prior. It just snapped, and that was it. I went to them and said, ‘This doesn’t happen all the time. It happens on these particular songs. Can we work around it? We have a pretty large body of work.’ Nobody wanted to do that. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. “That was very difficult for me. In many ways, that band was my identity. It’s everything that I worked for. I spiraled. My mom passed, divorce—it was a messy, messy time for me to try to pull myself up and try to feel ‘I’m going to be okay.’ It did take a while, to be honest. Maybe about a year into that, I was just trying to find myself and even define what chapter two would look like; the only way around dystonia is to re-learn how to play. In that case, your right foot as a drummer is your lead foot. I worked out and talked to the doctors and specialists about changing it. Now, playing in FIRSTBORNE took many hours and months and a lot of practice, but now I lead with my left foot, which throws the right foot in a loop mentally. I have to build a different connection for it to work. That connection is now strong. I’m able to do it well, but not some of the things I was doing in LAMB. It’s a relief not having to do those things because I was coming offstage really depressed about the shows we were having. It took a long time to get back to feel capable enough to offering something to Myrone and Girish and being a part of a project instead of, ‘Oh, I’m going to fuck this up.’ It took a long time. Clearly, I’m making it work. I’ve gotten remarried. The kids are all doing great. We’ve got a nice house here. I’m taking projects here and there that I can do at home. I’m still working with people that I like, like Machine. Things are good now. It did take a while, but things are good.” Blabbermouth: It was a surprise when you left LAMB OF GOD, considering how involved you were. You were viewed by many as a sort of Mike Portnoy-type figure in the band. Chris: “It was as big of a shock to me. It was, ‘I don’t know how to make this work.’ I wasn’t given much of a choice. It was one of those emails: ‘Services no longer required.’ It took a while to dig out of that. I’m happy I did. It could have gone a different way. Today, I’m grateful and happy for where I am. Like I said, my home life is awesome, and I’m looking forward to doing some shows with these guys, having more fun and feeling a lot less pressure.” Blabbermouth: You noted that you’ve pretty much done everything, including the years when you did 200 shows. Your departure, for what it’s worth, happened at an interesting time. Chris: “It took me a minute to get perspective, but what you said is right. When I look back, there’s not much more…I’m not basing anything or everything on any kind of accolades, like when I mention the Grammys. As far as the trajectory of the band, where we thought we’d be and ended up, I think I rode this thing to the top. I’m not saying it’s going downhill now, but I think I got off at a really good time.” Blabbermouth: Are you still in touch with your brother, Willie? Chris: “I guess the best way to put it is that I was sideswiped with the whole thing. I wish him all the best; I’m wishing them all the best, and I think about him all the time, but I would say we are estranged. Since that email that I got, where he was not even willing to talk to me about it, we haven’t spoken.” Blabbermouth: Families can be a tough business as well. Chris: “They are. At this point, I’ve got to work through resentments and regrets and all that stuff. I’m happy where I’m at. I hope he’s happy where he is. Everything is cool with me.”