What’s it like playing again with Testament? Can you talk about how stable the relationship is these days, and lessons learned from that time apart?

Yeah, I think we’re all at a good place. I was being pulled towards different music in the past and that perhaps was a threat to the band, maybe in the sense that I wasn’t “metal enough” or something. But in the time we’ve been apart, they’ve worked with other guitar players and, I think, over time have come to appreciate what I bring to the band. The reverse is true, too. I realize that not all situations are perfect and no matter what your vocation, there are challenges to collaboration for everyone. There’s much more mutual appreciation now than there was before, which adds to that stability.

From all accounts, it seems the “one step at a time” approach you all took in reforming the band helped heal the partnership, too. It could just as easily not worked out, like that old adage says, “you can’t go home again.”

Yes. Part of it was definitely the way we all got back into it. We eased into it slowly and gently. We did a few shows in 2005 and 2006 and before we knew it, we all realized that we were having fun. The audiences grew and, to a certain extent, it was almost like starting a new band again. The audience was new, too. We’re still getting a lot of younger fans in the audience, which is great – those people [who were] too young to see the band the first time around. It made sense to do a record after we realized these things, even though we didn’t push ourselves to do one. And looking at it all now, The Formation of Damnation is getting a lot of attention. It did well on the Billboard charts and we ended up as an MTV “Artist of the Week” as well.

It’s a great new record, by the way. It reminded me a lot of the old Testament days, but it still sounded fresh and contemporary – not at all as dated as some of the recent work your contemporaries have put out.

That was really important. None of us wanted to do something that sounded dated; there’s no point in going that route. Even before I started playing with Testament again, I had done some guest appearances with Lamb of God [on their Ashes of the Wake tour] and considered stepping back in again after that. We were all on the same page and clear about what we wanted to achieve: something current and satisfying.

Your recent show at Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland was a much more commanding performance than even I expected. Has this reunion led to more than you expected or perhaps even bargained for?