“When even the rumors or the hints at or the thought of LAMB OF GOD winning a Grammy [first started spreading], that was never on our list [of things we were looking to accomplish]. In fact, we were — I wouldn’t say opposed to it, but we did not put any weight whatsoever into possibly getting one of those things. As we got nominated, I remember Randy [Blythe, LAMB OF GOD singer] boycotting it and being, like, ‘This is bullshit. Fuck this,’ all that punk rock [way of looking at things]… To me, I kind of rode the fence there. I understood where people like Randy were, like, ‘This is bullshit,’ and we’ve been watching this for years, and you see the wrong people get nominated and the wrong people win all the time. So there is a kind of a bit of hokeyness to it. But to be nominated and be able to maybe tell your parents, like, ‘Hey, these past 30 years where you thought whatever I was doing, this is real,’ ’cause their generation had a different view of that. So it does mean something, there is some credibility to be taken away from that, but that was never something that we aimed for. And I was telling somebody this the other day as well, we were nominated, I don’t even know how many times. I’m not sure if that’s happening anymore. But we went two or three times, and I think two of the three times that we went, MEGADETH was also nominated.
My history with MEGADETH goes way further back than me joining the band in 201[5]. When I was 14 years old, I was on a skate ramp, and it was at the time of trading cassettes or whatever, and everybody had all these punk rock bands on it, 7 SECONDS, CIRCLE JERKS, T.S.O.L., and somebody had put a MEGADETH song on one of these cassettes, and I was, like, ‘Who is this? Who is this?’ And that one song, and then my finding out more about the band, buying the records and all that stuff, that band singularly put a point on my horizon, which was, ‘That is what I want to do with my life.’ MEGADETH defined everything about what I wanted to do and be a musician, in that style, in that vein, the whole thing. So, coming around to it and actually being in the band, and then ‘Dystopia’ itself, when [MEGADETH leader] Dave [Mustaine] asked me to do it, I was in Los Angeles recording the drums for ‘[VII:] Sturm Und Drang’, the LAMB record, and I got a call at, like, five in the morning. He’s an early bird, and he is, like, ‘Hey, Chris.’ We had met years ago and gotten along fairly well. We weren’t penpals or anything, but he’s, like, ‘Hey, I remember hanging out with you and you’re cool. And now a lot of people are telling me a lot of good things about you, and I was wondering if you’d like to make a thrash record with me,’ which was, like, I was jumping up and down. They had recently put out ‘Super Collider’, which I think was a big disappointment to the [fan]base. And I was, like, ‘Yes, I wanna get you back on track.’ So I’m finishing up a couple tours, and then he flies me to Nashville, rents a house for, like, three months, and it’s just me and him for that entire time. At the end of those three months — I think it was three months; maybe two and a half — that’s when Kiko [Loureiro, guitar] was brought in. I was there when he was going through, like, ‘I don’t know who should play guitar. I don’t know this.’ And so Kiko comes in at the very end to do solos. Dave Ellefson comes in at the very end to do bass. But basically Dave [Mustaine] and I wrote that entire record. And there were parts of it where I was, like, ‘This should be heavier, this should be heavier.’ I was really pushy about it, but I think he appreciated that at the time. And the songs are awesome. Clearly, it went on to do great things.
To answer your question, I was never disappointed that we did not win a Grammy in LAMB OF GOD, and I was completely thrilled that I won with MEGADETH, because even when LAMB OF GOD would go to the Grammys, I would sit there and hope that MEGADETH won it, because they had been nominated, like, 12 times, and in my mind they deserved all 12. So for me to be a part of it and to get it actually probably meant more than if we had gotten one in LAMB OF GOD, because the mindset within that project [LAMB OF GOD] was, ‘This [Grammy stuff] is all kind of B.S.’”
Metal Anarchy 
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