Alex Skolnick of Testament
(NOTE: This is an interview from December 2020, and I've converted it to podcast form.
It's like opening a time capsule now when I listen to songwriters talk in 2020 about how they were navigating the pandemic as artists. For some, it was a bane: the isolation paralyzed their creativity. For Alex Skolnick of Testament, it was a boon. Quite simply, he says, "Not having to travel has opened me up to different ways to be creative that I didn’t have before."
But on those rare occasions when he's in a rut (and they are very rare), Skolnick knows what to do: "If I’m stuck, I know what to do to get inspired. I know which films to watch, which books to read, which tv shows to watch."