Chad Gray of nu-metal masters Mudvayne was forced to drop a pair of shows in California after suffering a vocal injury. Following a rough performance at Aftershock Festival, Gray canceled solo shows in San Diego and Santa Ana. He subsequently offered anyone who had tickets for those shows an opportunity to see him perform in Las Vegas.
Now, in an interview with The Jesea Lee Show, the singer has provided some context to what’s been going on. “We flew into Nashville for rehearsals and my voice wasn’t working,” Gray explained. “So I thought it was allergies.”
He noted that in Tennessee, there’s a lot of “ragweed” and other allergens. “It’s a Petri dish in Nashville when it comes to allergies,” Gray said. Unfortunately, getting away from the area didn’t make things better. “I was working with my [vocal] coach, and she’s like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but something’s going on.’”
Eventually, Gray was able to get to the doctor, where he “got scoped—like you put the thing down your nose and look at your vocal cords.” He sarcastically quipped that it was “super fun” and “very comfortable.” Explaining how the process worked, Gray shared that the doctors “looked at it, and one of my vocal folds is just—is twice as wide as the other one, which makes it heavier.”
Mudvayne singer Chad Gray is trying to heal his damaged vocal cords
He pointed out that “the way your vocals work is they’re butterfly wings. They hit each other. And now mine are f**king crazy hitting each other.”
It turns out that Gray had been dealing with some serious pain because “there’s a big broken blood vessel on the front of it, which means that at some point I’ve hemorrhaged and bled, or whatever. He then admitted that he’s “supposed to stay quiet” and be on “vocal rest.”
“To tell you I was scared would be the understatement,” Gray confessed. “I’m f**king scared to death. It’s not only my instrument, it’s my life; It’s my career; It’s what I do for a living. The potential fatality of this is just—it’s enormous.”
“You got to take care of it,” he continued. “[But] it’s a hurry-up-and-wait thing. It’s like the only thing that’s going to heal it is time… I think I’m going to need [surgery], though, to deal with that larger fold…”
While his vocal issue is very concerning, Gray says that’s really the only issue he’s facing at the moment. “Life-wise, I’m good. Health-wise, I’m good. Just my throat’s f**ked up.”
Photo by Jeff Hahne/Getty Images
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