Sometimes, older artists can fall into the trap of dismissing newer acts, especially if they make a different kind of music (on that front, a recent Roger Waters quote about Drake and The Weeknd comes to mind). That’s not what 70-year-old Rob Halford, singer of iconic heavy metal band Judas Priest, is all about, though.
In a new interview with The Pit, Halford was asked which non-metal artist he’d like to collaborate with and his immediate answer was Perfume Genius. He added, “Why not just go, you know, to the unexpected. Wanna do something like that or… oh God, my mind’s gone blank. The guy that wears the cowboy hat with the fringes on the front. Can’t think.”
The interviewer interpreted that to mean Orville Peck and Halford confirmed that was indeed who he was thinking of. He continued:
“Those two people just immediately came into my head. [For a collaboration, I would like to] think outside the box, left field — just do something completely unexpected. Because musicians, and I think this is an absolute, but it doesn’t matter when musicians get in a room. You could have a classical musician, a metalhead, soul, rap, R&B, or jazz artist, anything. When we’re in the room together, we connect because of the love of the music that we make as an artistic style of expression. Yes, who knows what could happen.”
The Halford interview is a three-parter: Find the first part here, the second here, and the third (the one where he talked about Perfume Genius and Peck) here.