How your musical journey led you to metal

I’m sure there was a thread on this at one time but I can’t seem to find it.

I thought it would be interesting to see how everyone’s musical journey eventually led them to heavy metal.

As a kid I always had a love for music. Through my dad, I grew up listening mostly to artists from the sixties and seventies. Through him I was introduced to bands like The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

At the time my parents were divorced so adding to the tension my mother did not approve of his music so she introduced me to the Christian music scene. I began listening to bands like DC Talk and The Newsboys. In this Christian teen magazine called Breakaway I was introduced to bands with a harder edge like Pillar, Skillet and P.O.D.

My mother was not fond of those bands but tolerated them. Lol

Well, then one day for the first time my dad turned on Bon Jovi and Def Leppard and I immediately fell in love with eighties hard rock.

But because of my convictions at the time, I still felt like I couldn’t listen to most secular music, so through the help of the internet and google I began searching for Christian metal bands from the eighties and that’s where I discovered websites like Firestream which were extremely helpful in finding bands like Stryper, Guardian, Barren Cross, X-Sinner, Sacred Warrior and Deliverance.

This was great and exciting for a while but it didn’t take long for me to discover that finding bands that were up to the levels of quality as their secular counterparts were far and few between. Not to mention most Christian metal albums from that era were out of print and extremely expensive.

Then came my introduction to power metal...

One fall afternoon, a friend of mine came over to my home to play Halo 3 online which was the video game we were addicted to at the time. He brought over his mp3 and told me he had the perfect music for us to listen to while we blew our opponents to pieces. Or what usually happened, we got blown to pieces by our opponents….
                           

Anyways, he turned on Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce and I was blown away by the speed of the song and epicness of the music. Till that day I had never heard anything that even remotely sounded like that and I immediately checked out their Myspace account. After carefully inspecting the lyrics, I ordered all of their music starting with Inhuman Rampage which was their latest release at the time. I find this funny now because people like to make fun of Dragonforce by referring to them as “video game metal” but that is actually how I was introduced to them.

In the weeks to come, my friend began bringing over other bands when we gamed like Sabaton and Within Temptation. I fell in love with the epicness of the music and soon bought all of those band’s music up. It was then I discovered the label thrown on bands like Dragonforce and Sabaton was power metal so through google and message boards I began searching for other bands in the same genre which led me to Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, Nightwish, Blind Guardian. Ect. And from there, I began to learn about the bands that paved the way for modern power metal and discovered Iron Maiden, Queensryche, Black Sabbath, Metallica and Manowar. At this time I became more lax in my standards when it came to lyrics and began buying up these bands discographies to.

And that pretty much brings me to where I am today and metal still remains my favorite genre.

It’s funny because the friend that introduced me to Dragonforce moved on a long time ago to Eminem and Lady gaga and now dislikes that kind of music and teases me for still listening to them. What’s even more funny is just a few months ago I actually turned on Three Hammers from the new Dragonforce album without telling him the name of the band and for a moment he actually got excited and said. “Dude! Who is that! That’s awesome!” I then told him it was off of the new Dragonforce album and he never said anything more about it.

Sigh… He always was a trend follower.

Hope some of you will share your stories.

lol cool story. Yeah, my friend who got me into Metallica and therefor metal in general now likes Nickelback and Eminem. Some music just mind-bombs you, and your friend has like no idea.

Friday13th wrote:lol cool story. Yeah, my friend who got me into Metallica and therefor metal in general now likes Nickelback and Eminem. Some music just mind-bombs you, and your friend has like no idea.

Yeah. Sounds like my friend.

The only heavy band he's into right now is Avenged Sevenfold I think.

Or was at least.

My parents listened to southern gospel. My favorite uncle (who died a month ago, incidentally) listened to classic rock - Boston, Kansas, Pink Floyd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, stuff like that. That led to punk rock as a teen and metal in college. I still prefer classic and punk but listen to a handful of metal artists.

After Rush's 2112, I was hooked.  

It was 1984 and it was this song which lead me down the path of the dark side.



Before that I listened to CCM.

1 4 All wrote:It was 1984 and it was this song which lead me down the path of the dark side.



Before that I listened to CCM.

Figures.

Let me guess. Dee Snider appeared in your bedroom.

My introduction to metal came from one of the Mortal Kombat movie soundtracks. I think there was a remix to Wake Up Dead by Megadeth in one of them and I always thought the song was cool. I was more into tv shows and video games back when I was a kid so, I didn't really pursue them or anything. Later in my middle school years, bands like Linkin Park, Korn, and the whole Numetal movement was at its prime. I really got into these bands but enjoyed System Of A Down the most who had the most traditional metal sound out of all the stuff that was going down back then. Eventually I reconnected with Megadeth and got introduced to the Big 4 of thrash. The rest is history. I'm still discovering different bands and genres and I hope it never stops!

I liked music as a kid but didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it.  Rush's 2112 was an experience.  I've enjoyed the music and concept from the very beginning.  What really peaked my interest in music was hearing Scorpions' Blackout on headphones.  I've been a hard rock/metal fan ever since.

Nevermind, it was a remix of Almost Honest lol.

...satan appeared, and told me about a certain style of  music.....and the rest is history.

sentient 6 wrote:...satan appeared, and told me about a certain style of  music.....and the rest is history.

Darn Satan!

Well say what you want, he does have good taste in music....

To quote Larry Norman - "why should the devil have all the good music". I grew up with gospel quartet music, southern gospel , and early Elvis. At about 12 years old I was at a friends church youth event and heard "Makes Me Wanna Sing" from Soldiers Under Command. It was the first "Metal" I had ever heard. I can't describe the feeling - It was a special piece of heaven for the soul. Been a metal head ever since.

My father was more musical but passed away when I was 9, and my mum wasn't much into music, only the occasional cheese like Richard Clayderman.  Nevertheless she made us all learn an instrument which helped my interest.

Listening to the Top 40 I gravitated into heavier things like Queen, Def Leppard and Guns 'n' Roses, then at 15 a guy at school made me copies of Maiden's Piece of Mind and Metallica's Master of Puppets (still two of my favourite albums).  I must have been aware that metal existed and was seeking it out to some degree as I remember the guy was a bit put off by my enthusiasm and protective of sharing 'his' thing.

Piece of Mind was a bit spooky as it had some backwards talking, and I'd been shown that documentary on backmasking in youth group.  One of my clearest memories is the family driving to church camp, and I was listening to Master of Puppets, just staring out into the dark bush.

A year later another friend made me copies of his brother's Deliverance, Tourniquet, Vengeance and One Bad Pig, and that was that.  I loved thrash, but death was lukewarm, then in 1995 I heard a radio show dedicated to black metal and it renewed my interest in metal.

Interestingly all of the Christian friends I had in high school that listened to metal don't do so any more, they've backslidden if you will   To be fair, most people lose interest in music as they age.  Even now I can't think of a single person in my church that listens to metal, but that's life, it's lonely at the top.

I was about 10 when I heard Kiss for the first time. That was all it took.

Well, my earliest memories of rock/metal that made an impact on me would have been Def Leppard's "Love Bites" and Bon Jovi's "Shot through the Heart" in 4th grade or so.  Mom and dad were pretty dead set against the evils of rock and roll, being upstanding members of a Baptist Church in the mid 1980s and all, so I didn't really explore past what I heard on the radio until HS at which point the progression went something like Def Leppard->Slaughter->warrant->Poison->Motley Crüe (dr feel good)->G'n'R->Skid Row->Metallica (black album).....just all the stuff that was all over the radio in those days......but I can tell you all EXACTLY what made it all "click" for me.  It was The B-side to the "wherever I May Roam" cassette single: Fade to Black, live, Tushino Airfield, Moscow, 1991.......after hearing THAT SONG, it was all downhill from there.  It is DIRECTLY responsible for both my continued exploration of the heavier end of things and my picking up a guitar, which are the two things that define me outside of faith and family....I was quite literally a different person after hearing it.

A friend of mine was into metal and we used to listen to a lot of music when we got together.  Little by little, I stopped listening to most of my top 40 stuff as I was digging the sounds of AC/DC, Joan Jett, Twisted Sister, etc.  The rest is history.

I never liked metal/hard rock until one day I was listening to college radio. I heard bands like "The Adolescents" and "The Vandals." I really liked that hard core sound the energy and sound really spoke to me. I started going to shows. At the shows there were thrash bands too that opened me to the metal style.

I don't remember what was the very first artist that I've heard, but it must have been some old finnish gospel. But I DO remember the one artist that got me interested to metal and hardrock: STRYPER.  Of course I have found a lot of great artists after that, but Stryper is still my favourite

exo wrote:Well, my earliest memories of rock/metal that made an impact on me would have been Def Leppard's "Love Bites" and Bon Jovi's "Shot through the Heart" in 4th grade or so.  Mom and dad were pretty dead set against the evils of rock and roll, being upstanding members of a Baptist Church in the mid 1980s and all, so I didn't really explore past what I heard on the radio until HS at which point the progression went something like Def Leppard->Slaughter->warrant->Poison->Motley Crüe (dr feel good)->G'n'R->Skid Row->Metallica (black album).....just all the stuff that was all over the radio in those days......but I can tell you all EXACTLY what made it all "click" for me.  It was The B-side to the "wherever I May Roam" cassette single: Fade to Black, live, Tushino Airfield, Moscow, 1991.......after hearing THAT SONG, it was all downhill from there.  It is DIRECTLY responsible for both my continued exploration of the heavier end of things and my picking up a guitar, which are the two things that define me outside of faith and family....I was quite literally a different person after hearing it.

Shot through the Heart is a cool song!

Yeah from what I hear listening to metal and being a Christian was pretty controversial in the 80s. Moreso than today.

It was very controversial at times. I played in a band who was kicked out of our church because of it. We were a Christian band.

I started with micheal jackson the beatles and Read to roll or RTR as it was called then. So charts mainstream stuff. then I moved into def lepard bonjovi etc then along the way I became a christian and got into petra white heart etc then a friend who had stuff like stryper and bride etc this was the start of my metal journey. I got myself into Mortification when they first released thier self titled album and from then on the heavier the better lol. I then gave christianity the flick and moved onto secular metal and I first liestened to justice for all I said to a friend you ever hear Justice for all by metallica they go ahhhh yeah maybe once or twice ha ha it was new to me. So thanks to christian metal I got into metal. Yes most folks go through the normal gate Metallica Megadeth but I learned the hard way lol. Thanks christian metal I still have the albums I love and need to reaquire some ones I dont have anymore cheers.

I grew up in the country in the pre-Information Age.  My older brother introduced me to AC/DC, Rush, and Kansas around 1980/81.  A couple of years later, because of where my last name fell in the alphabet, upon joining kids from neighboring towns at the regional junior high, I happened to meet a kid in homeroom who started chatting me up about music.  I thought I knew a thing or two about heavy music but he somehow knew WAY more, even though he didn't have an older sibling to guide him in his musical journey.  I was somewhat disinterested in what he was trying to hip me to, and then one Saturday night the locally-produced program All Hit Videos (no cable TV in my home town back then) aired a video that blew my mind.  In homeroom the following Monday I enthusiastically described it to him and he said, "Oh, yeah.  That's 'Freewheel Burning' by Judas Priest.  I have that album and can tape it for you."  From there it accelerated pretty quickly into faster & crazier stuff and it's been a constant for the 30+ years since.

My metal enthusiasm did kind of wane a bit as I focused a bit more on the hardcore scene from 1994-2002 (I never got rid of my metal albums, just became slightly and inexplicably less enthusiastic about metal in general), but then on October 11, 2002 I saw Thor, Damien Storm, and Nasty Disaster play the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA.  I walked out of there with my latent metal fanaticism fully and permanently uncapped (it also turns out that fan interview footage of me from that night appears in the new Thor documentary!)

P.S.-Check out Judas Priest's awesome 30th anniversary Defenders... reissue! \m/\m/

As a kid, my dad had a Whitecross cassette tape, "Back By Demand" and I listened to it for hours. So much in fact I went through several walkmans. But I didn't really get into metal until I was a 18. I had been listening to a lot of mallcore stuff, starting with Pillar and eventually reaching stuff like Godsmack and Disturbed.
However, the seeds of metal had been planted a few years prior when I was 15 and I found a compilation CD that had Vengeance Rising on it, and that kind of laid dormant for a while until I found...Dragonforce. Yes, just like OP it was Dragonforce that catapulted me into a tailspin of metal. Just european power metal bands at first. And then Tourniquet happened to say "hi." And then a few years later I found Deliverance and that was it for me, I became metal obsessed.

It's amazing that my tastes in metal have opened up from only liking melodic power metal, to liking just about every metal subgenre I hear. Except for black metal, I just haven't found any bands I absolutely love. But anyways a few bands that really influenced my taste in metal are: Whitecross, Vengeance Rising, Tourniquet, Deliverance, Dragonforce, Running Wild, and Accept. These are the bands that really made me stick around for the ride.

\m/ \m/

I grew up in a conservative Christian family, with much classical music (which I still like), and my uncle was an opera singer.  We had little more pop music in the house than a few old Monkees and Beatles singles.
Then, when I left school as a teenager and got a job in 1984, my sister and I started listening to pop/rock on the radio, and I was hooked, Duran Duran being my initial love.  My parents were not impressed at first, but eventually realized their offspring were not becoming demons from Hell, and did not get overly upset, apart from the occasional "I'm not sure I like you listening/watching this kind of stuff" comment from my Dad (who I remember reading the lyrics to Duran Duran's "Seven And The Ragged Tiger", the first album I ever bought), while there was also much condemnation coming from other Christian circles, particularly in regards to metal, which I saw as VERY evil, and something I would NEVER have anything to do with.    All the same, I studied the goods and bads of pop/rock for years, praying, thinking, reasoning.. but metal?  Noooo.
Fast forward some years, and I'd been reading about more and more bands I had not listened to (in books, before the Internet), and such metal acts as Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden were intriguing me.  I'd never actually heard their stuff, but I'd read so much about them, they started to take on a certain mystique.  And were they as "evil" as I'd been told?
Then, sometime in the early 2000s, I took the plunge.  I bought Black Sabbath's debut.  Ironically, I had recently started studying fulltime at the Bible College of Queensland.    Listening to the song "Black Sabbath" remains one of the most defining moments of my music listening life.
From there, I got further into the band, and then there was Iron Maiden, and I also started trying thrash, like Megadeth and Metallica... But it was not until towards the end of that decade when I came across what the OP has fallen in love with.
Power metal!  Here it was!  The melody of 80s pop that I'd always loved, with the power of metal!  I actually found it through Wikipedia and reading up on various metal genres, which led me to YouTube and listening to a few sample songs, and I was   This kind of music exists?? It has choirs!  And orchestras!  And operatic singers!
So I became obsessed with power metal, and yet I continue to go looking back, fascinated by the history of the genre (and its various subs), and wanting to discover more.  This is as well as other genres, particularly 80s synth pop and also progressive rock.
So that's a brief overview of my "how I got where I am now" in regards to my metal love, in all its rather boring glory.