Davey Havok was born on November 20, 1975, in Rochester, New York. As AFI’s singer and lyricist, he helped take a high-school punk band to a wider audience with 2003’s Sing the Sorrow, including “Girl’s Not Grey.” Long before that breakthrough, he was already reconsidering how much of himself he wanted to put into a song.
AFI formed in Ukiah, California, in 1991, while Havok was still in high school. He recalled in a 2002 interview with Juice Magazine that rehearsals moved between a garage and his parents’ living room. His family helped with the practical work of getting a band started, including printing shirts and stickers and securing its first van. Although his parents would have preferred him to finish college, they supported his commitment to music. Performing helped Havok recognize what he wanted from his writing. He told Juice that the emotional effort he put into singing had begun to feel out of step with the frivolous subjects of some early lyrics. Growing confidence let him express feelings he had previously held back for fear of ridicule. “So I began writing about things I really felt strongly about,” he explained. He connected AFI’s increasingly dark presentation to that same confidence, with the imagery developing alongside the music.
By Sing the Sorrow, AFI had signed to DreamWorks. Havok told Pollstar in 2003 that the band wanted a label that understood its artistic direction and would support it across different levels of commercial success. The album debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200. “Girl’s Not Grey,” with Havok singing lead, was one of its singles.
Guitarist Jade Puget became a crucial writing partner. Describing their working arrangement to Guitar World in 2010, Puget said he supplied the music, the two developed vocal melodies together, and Havok wrote the lyrics. That division gave Havok a role in shaping how a song moved as well as what it said. Their collaboration also extended into Blaqk Audio, an electronic duo whose debut album, CexCells, arrived in 2007. Blaqk Audio gave their shared enthusiasm for electronic music a dedicated outlet, built around synthesizers, drum machines and software. Work on CexCells fitted around AFI’s travel schedule: music was programmed on the road, while melodies and vocal parts developed both away and at home. The pair then came together in Los Angeles to record vocals. Havok carried his singing and lyric writing into arrangements built by Puget, taking their partnership into a different musical setting.
That experience fed back into AFI. Discussing 2009’s Crash Love with Verbicide, Havok said making and touring the Blaqk Audio record had left the pair excited to write guitar-based music again. Their interest in adding electronics to AFI had receded, and the new songs moved toward a more direct rock approach.
Havok described a painstaking process behind those songs. After developing melodies with Puget, he would work on lyrics that evening; the pair would review the results the following day. Promising songs went to the full band for further work, while others were discarded. He drew on both new ideas and notes collected over time, finding words that suited the melody. By his estimate, he and Puget wrote about 60 songs for Crash Love, with roughly half set aside before the rest of AFI ever heard them.
