During High School metal music was my life. I lived it, breathed it – couldn’t talk or think about anything else. It was my drug of choice. I could tell you the members of any metal band and the year any lineup change occurred. My very Christian family worried about my road to certain damnation. But metal gave me something nothing else could… a message. The message I clung to tightly during those hellish years, “Stand up and fight for yourself and don’t let anyone tell you how to live.” I started working in the metal music biz at age 16. Life was good.
By 1991 I was working for a record company. Then grunge happened and metal died. Metal suddenly referred to death metal which I hated. Everything I worked for was gone. The record company started a new division for thrash/death metal and I was put on the promotions staff. Life was not good. I left the music biz and decided it was time to “find myself.” But metal was so entrenched in who I was I couldn’t know myself apart from it. So I did the unthinkable. I sold all my cd’s, threw out my concert T-shirts and turned my back on metal. This went on for 10 years. I got as far from hard rock as I could and started enjoying world music. My only tie to metal was my Leatherwolf cd, which I refused to part with. I got it out once a year when the mood was right, then back into the basement it went.
In 2002 by luck or fate I was introduced to Finnish rockers Stratovarious. I heard their music and instantly my heart was pounding, as if a long lost lover had come back to make peace with me. I felt like reaching back and pulling a piece of the old me back to join the new me, but it felt strange. I made a skittish step to rejoin the music industry and was shocked when I effortlessly landed a job as journalist for a European metal magazine. There I was able to hang out with musicians and report on the music without making an emotional commitment to it. I enjoyed it but still felt I was leading a double life. After a year with the mag it folded. Again I buried the whole metal thing and went about my life. I was happy and I had “found myself”. 
2009. I’m now working in video production. I am working on a project that requires me to listen to a song by the Scorpions over and over. I find the dang song is slowly sinking into my heart, into my blood. I cannot resist its call. I know every word of that song, every chord, every drum beat. The Scorpions were my first concert back in the day. Tears drip from my eyes as I finally realize I can’t stop loving the music. All these years it was buried but now I am ready to embrace my full metalness. I can’t believe it. How much I still love it.
Reigning Metal is the result of my return to metal. I can’t tell you anything that’s happened in this genre during the last decade. But I remember what I loved back then and when I hear the new music, especially what’s coming out of Europe, I realize metal is still alive and well. And I want to be a part of it. Permanently this time.
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