How can you explain to all your friends and family that you’re leaving home for four months to be in Vegas, y’know? To come up with something that you’re so proud of and not be able to tell anyone about or play it for anyone is torturous, believe me.” Donegan says there was “a close call” towards the end of the process when a radio convention came to town and planted at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, where he and Wengren were staying. “It took a lot of pain and agony and white lies and deception non-disclosure agreements. “It took a lot to keep things quiet,” says Draiman. Only the group’s management, immediate families and select executives at Reprise Records knew what Disturbed was up to, and the group members were even careful to avoid being spotted together in Las Vegas, Chicago (where the group formed and Donegan still lives) and in Draiman’s current residence of Austin, Texas. worked on the group’s first three studio albums. The group recorded the set in Las Vegas with producer Kevin Churko, Disturbed’s first outside collaborator since Johnny K. Work on the 13-track Immortalized (16 on a deluxe version) began at the beginning of 2014 with Draiman, Donegan and drummer Mike Wengren gathering to write songs. Let’s walk away from it and give everyone some room to breathe and we’ll come back when we’re ready to come back and when we feel like we’ve got the strongest album we can deliver.’ We were at the peak of our career and that was a tough decision to make, but we felt like it was the right one.”
That was all great, but we just thought, ‘Let’s put the brakes on for a minute here. Guitarist Dan Donegan adds that, “We wanted to give the fans a break, and we wanted to give ourselves a break and break up that routine so it didn’t feel like it was just a machine to us of write, record, tour, do the same festival over and over. “We always said right from day one that this was a hiatus, and it was planned and calculated and we were going away for awhile, and that it wasn’t a break up, just a break,” frontman David Draiman tells Billboard. Disturbed Releases B-Sides Album Before ‘Going Away for a Bit’