Joey Vera — born in the United States in 1963 — has been Fates Warning's bassist since 1996, and is one of the most sought-after instrumentalists in American metal. His main career is Armored Saint, the Los Angeles heavy metal band he has belonged to since the early 1980s and of which he is a founding member. Working simultaneously in two groups of such distinct languages — Armored Saint's direct hard rock and Fates Warning's irregular structures — demands unusual versatility. In Fates Warning his function is to hold up compositions that change metre frequently and rarely return to their starting point. The bass here does not follow a repeated riff: it has to follow development, which brings the job closer to reading a score than to executing a pattern. He was also Mercyful Fate's bassist during the Danish band's revival, a position he left in 2024 — when he was replaced by Becky Baldwin. He also works as a producer and engineer, on recordings by other bands in the field.
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