It also had been featured in two recent movies, Mystery Men and Inspector Gadget, and licensed for Rat Race, which would be out later in the year.
But the song, by the band Smash Mouth, had been all over radio and television since its release two years prior. It had the feeling they wanted: fun, and edgy yet not too edgy. It was 2001, and the creators of Shrek, an upcoming animated film about a foul-tempered ogre, had slotted it in as a placeholder track over the opening sequence. Even though I didn’t write it, I’m probably even more proud that I got to witness that from a fan’s perspective and it was my best friend that created it.They really didn’t want to use “All Star.” “I’m so thankful that we did it because to me, I feel like we have a song that stands the test of time and is one of the greatest songs ever written, like a Bohemian Rhapsody or a Stairway To Heaven. More than a decade on, Syn looks back at A Little Piece Of Heaven as one of the benchmarks against which Avenged Sevenfold will always be measured, and he’s perfectly happy for that to be the case.
The album is a fucking compendium of ridiculousness! Ha ha ha! There are auto-tuned vocals and country songs and shit like that, so we would have been betraying ourselves and acting like the biggest hypocrites of all if we didn’t do it.”
“We were a little intimidated to put something like that on the record, but our whole motto and ethos at the time was fucking fearlessness. This has to be on the record,’” says Syn. “I remember the label hearing it and they said, ‘This is not a Halloween EP song. When the stars align like that and you have Steve Bartek and Marc Mann - the Oingo Boingo guys – then you know you’re doing something fucking crazy and big.”Īs soon as those around the band heard the completed song for the first time, they knew this couldn’t just be an EP track – it needed to be a cornerstone of the next album. “The minute we started recording it, everybody knew we had something special. “The song started taking life,” remembers Syn. He just thought it was so funny to juxtapose that with the lyrics. He thought it was such a cheesy kind of jingle, so catchy and so syrupy. It was a little bit of a joke, too when he’d sing it, kind of like Scooby-Doo. Jimmy wasn’t the guy who needed a pat on the back, but he was really proud of that chorus. Then he wanted to finish it because it started picking up momentum and he really got a kick out of the chorus. He’d draw a fucking crowd of all of our friends and we couldn’t wait to hear it, the new shit. Whenever there was a fucking piano, he’d always be playing it and it would always be original stuff. “He had these parts in his mind and he was always playing piano. “It was a conjuring of Jimmy’s genius,” confirms guitarist Synyster Gates. You may not be too surprised that this song, like so many of Avenged’s more unique moments, came predominantly from drummer Jimmy ‘ The Rev’ Sullivan. Roping in spooky piano tinklings, violas, trombones, clarinets, a choir – hell even a saxophone or two pops up – the 2007 song bounces along with equal parts mischief and melancholy, eventually exploding in a blizzard of demented horns, drum rolls, screams and strings.
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