“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Soilwork’s Devil in the Details – Column

“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”

Phil Lewis from L.A. Guns…
“I like a dead Mexican in my headphones and I’m ready to go.”

I interview rock guys two, three times a week. I use voice recognition software to transcribe these interviews. Works like this: I tape the phone conversation, then take the tape and speak my questions and their answers into a headset and voila, it’s a transcribed text file. It doesn’t always come out as planned though. Fun game: Repeat the wrongness out loud and you might be able to figure out what the guy actually said. Here are some of the more memorable miscues. More than a few of these gems ring truer than the actual words spoken…

by Martin Popoff
illustration by Jonathan Ian Mathers


Peter from Soilwork on his new album…
“They want to put the devil tapes on as bonus tracks. We play like a warship, in my opinion.”


Michael Weikath from Helloween on tour plans…
“We’re going to do some South American shows and then we go to Mexico and then we’re going to be in the States for eight to ten shows, depending on the local promoters, whether they think it’s worthless being in their town or not.”


Dave Grohl on the Nirvana sound…
“Nirvana was lumped in with a lot of the bands from Seattle like Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Tad, Melvins. But they basically stood out on their own, to me, when I first heard the album. Kurt’s sense of melody was so strong and sweet and it definitely had a Karachi aspect.”