Source: Blabbermouth.net
In a brand new interview with The Village Voice, SLAYER guitarist Kerry King said that he doesn’t feel the the spirit of his longtime friend and band co-founder Jeff Hanneman is guiding the group two years after Jeff‘s untimely death.
“Jeff is worm food,” King said. “When you die, you go in the dirt. There is no doubt. Doubt’s called agnostic. I’m not agnostic.”
Due on September 11, SLAYER‘s new album, “Repentless”, includes “Piano Wire”, an unfinished song from the “World Painted Blood” sessions written by Hanneman.
“I didn’t know this until Tom [Araya, singer/bassist] told me recently,” King said of the track. “I didn’t talk to Jeff about that song, because I didn’t really have to police Jeff. If he wrote it, I was pretty sure it was all right. It was about sometime in World War II, because he was a big World War II history buff. I don’t know the exact instance, but apparently the Germans would hang people from buildings by piano wire as a warning to people not to go against them. That’s a very general description.”
King refers to the “Repentless” title track as “the Hannemanthem.” He told The Village Voice: “I went with it based on SLAYER. SLAYER is repentless; SLAYER‘s always been repentless. I said, ‘You know what, I should write something about how I think Jeff looked at the world, because he looked at the world exactly how SLAYER looked at the world.’ Plus little ‘Jeff-isms.’ It was both easy and difficult. The difficult part was doing it justice; I didn’ want to just throw it together. I wanted it to be solid, as deep as it could be without getting personal.”
Hanneman, who passed away in May 2013 from alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver, is credited for writing many of SLAYER‘s classic songs, including “Angel Of Death” and “South Of Heaven”.