Being in a band full-time might sound like a lot of fun, but it certainly isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, as Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor has revealed.

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In the latest issue of Metal Hammer, Mansoor looks back on a time in his life where being in the band actually made him “less happy” than holding down a regular job.

“I was actually quite happy when I was working a sales job at Radioshack and making music in my free time,” he says. “And I remember [while touring after Periphery III: Select Difficulty], looking back and being like, ‘I think I’m less happy now,’ because I was making music on someone else’s schedule.”

The issue, Mansoor says, has to do with treating music like a job instead of a hobby – something the members soon went on to rectify.

“It took recalibrating a little bit and being like, ‘I’m treating this too much as a job,’” Mansoor explains. “We made some pretty big changes: we got a new manager, who’s our manager to this day, and who we pretty much would not do the band without. We started our own label. We took a bit more control of our own fate.”

Elsewhere in the chat, the djent pioneer also shares his less-than-positive initial impressions of Meshuggah, the Swedish metal band from which Periphery first got their sound.

“I thought Meshuggah were absolute noise, just trash!” Mansoor says. “I didn’t understand them until I spoke to a friend of mine, who was a very talented bassist, and asked, ‘Why’s everyone obsessed with Meshuggah?’ He went, ‘Their thing is that everything they do is in 4/4, it just doesn’t sound like it.’ That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus! I think this may be a big shift in my life.’ And it was!”