DISTURBED singer David Draiman was one of the speakers at last November’s Immersia Connect virtual event from Immersia, a new comprehensive storytelling platform for people to engage and discover the benefits of cannabis and overall wellness. Draiman talked about his long relationship with the plant that he tributes his wellbeing to.
He said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I guess I first tried cannabis when I was in seventh grade — way, way back in the day. Herb and I have a long history together. It has always been a perfect means of balancing for me — for being able to achieve clarity and peace. My brain can be a pretty busy and insane place, and my ability to be creative has been helped tremendously and aided tremendously through the calm and serenity achieved from a THC high. I would say 95 percent of the music that I’ve written was written under the influence of cannabis.
“From a health perspective, one of the things that has plagued me over the course of my life — it’s hereditary — is high blood pressure,” he continued. “If I’m doing cannabis on a regular basis, I don’t even need to touch the blood pressure meds. It regulates it better than any pill I’ve come across and does it so much more comfortably.
“I can’t even stress the amount of benefit I get from having a touring body that has suffered 24 years of this business to have something that has anti-inflammatory agents that continuously work to keep my inflammation and my pain that I have all over my body from what I’ve done to it over the course of my career in check. I don’t have to take Advil on a daily basis, like a lot of other people do. I don’t have to take my blood pressure meds. I don’t have to worry about a lot of the things that people need other medication to worry about.
“Truth be told, it brings you, besides the mental calmness and serenity, the physical calmness and serenity that goes along with it,” Draiman added. “I can’t say enough about what cannabis can do.”
DISTURBED‘s song “Fire It Up”, which appeared on the band’s 2015 album “Immortalized”, opens with the sound of a bong hit and was inspired by the singer’s pot-smoking routine.
Draiman told Revolver in a 2015 interview that marijuana plays a huge part in his songwriting process. “I’ll have a very skeletal musical idea in my head, and then I’ll light one up, go in the shower and let the steam kind of build up,” he said. “It helps me relax, and I can see the gaps. I can see the holes in the rhythm and the melody and I’ll know where I can go, and what the possibilities are. It helps me be able to perceive everything a little bit more clearly.”
Draiman told The Pulse Of Radio that “Fire It Up” was inspired by a recording session where he sang DISTURBED‘s cover of SIMON AND GARFUNKEL‘s “The Sound Of Silence” while high. “I was done with the day and I wanted to relax, so I went ahead and I smoked a bowl,” he laughed. “[I] came back and was high out of my mind and no, no, by no means ready to track vocals by any stretch of the imagination. And they all encouraged me to go into the vocal booth, and I was pretty blown away. I hadn’t heard my voice that vulnerable in a very, very long time.”
Asked what his favorite strain of marijuana is, Draiman told Artisan News: “If I can find Kush of any kind anywhere I go, that’s the preferable… I love it. If I go to Amsterdam, I’ll hunt down the master Kush over at the greenhouse the minute I get there, I still love White Widow too, I still love Bubblegum, I still love a bunch of ’em, but there is no substitute for Kush. Kush is just, to me, the be-all, end-all. I’m much of an Indica guy than a Sativa guy anyway, so I like the more stony kind of thing, ’cause that’s what puts me in the right zone for creativity anyway. I’m not looking to wake up from it.”
