“All those months on the bus we really weren’t finding new rock that was moving us,” says Shadows (born Matthew Sanders). “Instead, we were listening to everything from Toby Keith to T.I., and finding elements we could incorporate into what we were doing to make our next record more interesting to us.”

Indeed, the string sections on the soaring “Afterlife,” the children’s choir on “Unbound (The Wild Ride)” and the pedal steel/banjo stylings on “Dear God” might strike longtime A7X fans as mind-bogglingly incongruous, but as Gates says, “It’s the dueling guitars, Shadows’ voice and the Rev’s brutality that make every one of the songs sound like Avenged Sevenfold.”

The group’s also entered a new phase lyrically, Shadows says. “I feel we all experience a certain inner conflict,” he says, “the push and pull between how we think we should act, or want to act, and the temptations and human instincts that we often blame when we don’t end up being the person we want to be.”

All the boundary pushing on display, he adds, came naturally. “We write what we really feel in our hearts,” he says. “The label didn’t push us. We took six months to write, and we wrote every single day and just drained everything out of us. At the end of the day, we were 100 percent happy.”

Playing to an expanding fanbase through the end of the year, it seems that A7X’s followers feel the same way.

Mariah Carey	The Game	T.I.

Carey's four wins included Artist of the Year, R&B Voice of the Year, Best R&B Song for "We Belong Together" and Album of the Year for her comeback hit, The Emancipation of Mimi. She is also up for four American Music Awards, set for November 22 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

The night's first V trophy went to "Hate It or Love It" by The Game (featuring 50 Cent) for Hottest Hook, while hard-core rapper T.I. took home the Street Anthem award for his hit "U Don't Know Me."

Man of the hour Kanye West was named Best Rapper and newcomer Young Jeezy tied for the Next Award.

Kanye West	Cam'ron

Rap artist Cam'ron and his Harlem crew the Diplomats picked up a Vibe Award for Best Group. The Reelest Video nod went to R. Kelly for his dramatic saga "Trapped in the Closet" (Chapters 1-5).

Marred last year by violence, this year's show went on without a hitch with co-hosts Tracee Ellis Ross from the sitcom Girlfriends and Anthony Anderson from the movie Hustle & Flow.

R. Kelly	Young Jeezy

The 3rd Annual Vibe Awards will air on UPN on Tuesday, November 15 at 8pm ET/PT.]]> 2005-11-14T17:00:00-05:00 http://www.bmi.com/musicworld/entry/234419 Artists, T.I., Musical Styles, Urban, Musicworld, Feature, Type, Important Like many a rapper before him, Atlanta-bred emcee T.I. sprouted from the poverty, bleakness and decay all too common to people in urban communities. His rags-to-riches story, replete with the drug dealing and gun-toting themes prevalent in rap music, begins with the young artist garbling out his first raps at age eight, doing talent shows at 11 and, by 14, shopping demos.

His songs, honest and unflinching, dealt with his absent father and the reasons he found the pursuit of cars and clothes more important than school. By 15, the driven but disadvantaged youth was a number in the judicial system, locked away for possessing marijuana and a firearm.

Flash forward to 2001: T.I., nee Clifford Harris, had released his first album, I’m Serious . Largely because of his widespread underground approval, the album made the 24-year-old a knight on the regional scale and a talent to watch on the national landscape.

Two years later, T.I. released Trap Muzik , which again explored working class themes. Only then, with his self-described cockiness and intellectual treatment as trademarks, T.I. was no longer an emerging national talent but a force — precisely why T.I.’s latest work, 2004’s Urban Legend , prompted fans to crown him a “Living Legend” and ‘King of the South.”

These days, T.I.’s aims involve not just making hit records and staying out of trouble, but inspiring new generations of inner city children to see their concrete world through a more optimistic, colorful lens.

With his mentoring to at-risk youngsters, music production company and construction enterprise building affordable housing, T.I. looks poised to become more than a rap star but a cultural influence who’ll measure up to much more than the sum of his previously unsavory parts.]]> 2005-04-20T18:00:00-05:00