Drowning Pool Back With ‘Desensitized’

Jason Cohen of Guitar.com caught up with Drowning Pool guitarist C.J. Pierce to talk about their new album ‘Desensitized’ featuring new singer Jason ‘Gong’ Jones, who filled in after the sudden death of Dave Williams in 2002 from cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle. “Yeah, loss of a family member is really hard. This is my first experience, knock on wood, my whole family is still kickin’ and they’re awesome,” Pierce said. “It was like a double whammy. It was pretty hard. We were on top of the world: main stage, Ozzfest. You lose your best friend and at the same time you lose your career. You definitely feel like you lost everything and you do some stupid things. I really don’t know what it is about people being down but sometimes you have to kick yourself a little bit harder to really realize you’re on the ground before you get back up. We did that. But, because of music you just have to keep going. The love of music kept it going. I kept writing songs. We had to look for a new guy. That’s the thing. We weren’t sure we would find a new guy. We didn’t know if we were going to find anyone else. We didn’t know what we were looking for. It took a while. It was very discouraging. It took quite a few months. We spent everyday listening to demos. Five demos, 10 demos a day. Then we brought a couple of guys in. Jason was like the sixth guy we brought in. We kept everything low-key. He just stepped in the room. We were like ‘ah’. The way his voice fits with the band, his personality, he just came along and he was the right guy.”