Project Description
Interview with
BRENT SMITH
from
SHINEDOWN
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Shinedown are multi-platinum, record breaking American rock band with a career spanning over nearly two decades! Earlier this month, they released their sixth studio album ATTENTION ATTENTION.
AMNplify’s Amy Smith caught up with lead vocalist Brent Smith to discuss the conceptual and recording processes behind the album, opening up a dialogue around mental health and whether or not Australia will be seeing them soon…
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Hi Brent! Where in the world are you calling from today?
I actually just got off tour yesterday. We got about a week before we go off to Europe for the entire month of June. I’m in a city called Knoxville in a state in the US called Tennessee. I’m here to see my mum, my dad and my only living grandmother. I don’t get a chance to see them as much as I would like to, so I popped into town to see them for a little bit.
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That’s amazing! It’s nice that you get a little bit of down time between tour dates.
Yeah, it’s been a lot from the beginning of the year to where we are now. This is the first break that we’ve actually had this year. It’s not super long, but I’ll take it.
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It’s nice that you are making the most of your time off.
Absolutely.
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I’d like to talk about your most recent record Attention Attention. It’s been out for a few weeks now. This has given people the chance to give it a really good listen and digest the material. How do you feel about the reception to the album so far?
I think that the reception so far, from a global standpoint, is pretty positive overall. It’s our sixth record, but it is the first album that we self-produced. Our bass player, Eric Bass– who is way more than just a bass player, produced Attention Attention. He also mixed the album as well. As we were writing the album, we were figuring out that it wasn’t going to be a traditional Shinedown album. It’s not what you would call a ‘concept’ record, it is a story album. The whole of the record takes place inside of a room.
We looked at everything from a very international standpoint. We really wanted to focus on writing a record that the world could embrace. Because the fact of the matter is, to us, it is a very urgent record, it’s a very necessary album. The whole record is about not being afraid to fail. I think a lot of times people will pigeonhole themselves into a corner and they will paralyse themselves psychologically. If they want to achieve something that they’ve never done before, they will start to second guess themselves. I don’t think that people will be defined by their failures. I think that you will be defined by the fact that you don’t give up.
Definitely this early on, because the record came out May 4th, we are starting to see a very healthy heartbeat around the fact that people are genuinely understanding that this album is a story and that there is a lot of depth to the record. So far, it seems to have been embraced quite well.
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Fantastic! I was just going to say that I get the impression that you have a very clear mission with this release, right down to the album title and artwork.
Yes. The artwork was extremely important actually. We worked with a gentleman named Mark Obriski. Mark actually did the album artwork and the cover for the last album Threat to Survival. When we (ED: The band) started to talk about the record, we knew that the name of the album was going to be Attention Attention. Of course, there is a very important song on the album called Attention! Attention! We had all these ethereal names for the record, and what I mean by that is, really, just too complicated. Zach came in one day and was like “Why are we banging our heads trying to be clever with this extensively long album title? Just call it Attention Attention. Because that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to call attention to the world.” We all kinda just looked at Zach and were like “Alright”. Once we had the name, then it was like okay, what is the symbol gonna be for this? We all use dry erase boards everywhere in the studio and also chalk boards, everyone is always writing ideas down, there’s always just stuff everywhere. We all walk in to the studio one day and Eric just wrote attention attention, side by side, and put an exclamation point in the middle of it. And I was just like “That’s it! It’s an exclamation point! We’re going to design our own exclamation point!”. So, when we went back to Mark, we talked about, it wasn’t built around propaganda, and it wasn’t built around this idea of make it political. There’s actually nothing in Attention Attention that is political at all. It’s a very psychological record. But, we wanted there to be a symbol that, you don’t even have to see the name of the band on the front. All you gotta see is what the cover is and what the symbol is. If you notice on the record, if you have the CD or the Vinyl or whatever, the name Shinedown and the name of the album is not actually on the front. It’s just the exclamation point with the yellow background. That was done on purpose to really foreshadow the symbol that this is an urgent and necessary record. So, from an artistic point, we did exactly what we wanted to do.
Yeah, it is a very effective attention grabber!
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ATTENTION ATTENTION feat. DEVIL + THE HUMAN RADIO is out now HERE
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Attention Attention is quite different from previous releases in Shinedown’s back catalogue for a few different reasons. As you have mentioned, it is a story album and was entirely internally produced. What were some of the challenges that you faced during the process of creating this album?
I think some of the challenges might have been the guys, especially Eric, waiting on me with certain lyrics. I really want to answer this question truthfully, not that I wouldn’t answer it truthfully, but I want to make sure that I put it in the right frame of mind. Once I figured out that this album was a story, I had to be very careful with, at least in my opinion, who I talked about. The only thing that I could do was talk about what I know. Me and Eric worked on the music for what was to become Get Up. I was responsible for the lyrics. Normally, I take about a day and a half to two days to write lyrics. Sometimes I’ll get a gift. A gift is where song writes itself; Music, lyrics, melody and all, in around 30mins. Those are what we call gifts, they don’t happen very often. But, it took me about seven days to finally walk in and sing Eric the lyrics and the melody to Get Up. And finally, the day that I walk in and did it, because he was getting aggravated with me, he was like “Just come in and sing it! What the hell are you so afraid of!?”, I’m like “I dunno man…”, and he’s like “Just come in and do it”. So I come in, I told him “I got something but I just don’t know what you’re going to think”, he’s like “Just let me hear it,” I’m like “No man. Is the mic live?”, because we’re in the studio, and he’s like “The mic is always live!”. So, I walk in and I’m like “Let’s just record it”. So, we recorded it. It took about four and a half hours. Eric put the song together, he mixed the demo what have you, he said “come back tomorrow. I’ll muck around with this”. I call him about an hour and a half out and I’m like “Is it ready?” Eric’s like “Yeah, it’s ready come and take a listen to it”. We came in and I listen to it played back. I was really enamoured by what he had done from the production side and everything. I looked at him and I said “Do you know it’s about?” Eric looked at me and said “Yeah I know what it’s about, it’s about me”. That was a huge icebreaker! Because, once I was told “It’s okay, write about what you know, if you gotta write about me then write about me”. Eric suffers from depression, clinical depression, and that’s what Get Up is about. It’s about Eric and about what he faces on a daily basis. Get Up was one the earlier songs written for what became Attention Attention. It was kinda the sounding board of, okay, all bets are off, nothing is taboo and if we’re gonna go for it, then we should just go for it and just be unapologetic about everything.
As far as sonics and bringing certain people in and were there any challenges with the band and what have you, Eric was an incredible producer! Eric’s done productions for us before. He’s done Cut The Cord off Threat to Survival. He produced and wrote Diamond Eyes, Her Name Is Alice and a bunch of other songs. From a production standpoint, there was never a day where he walked in and didn’t know what to do. He was always taking the captain’s chair and putting together everything that needed to be done.
We have a good relationship with our record label. Atlantic Records have never bothered us. This is our sixth record. Julie Greenwald, in America, and Max Lousada, who runs the international umbrella of Warner Music, and Craig Kallman; They’ve never rushed us. They’ve never told us to hurry up. Julie is always like “You can turn it in when it’s ready”. That’s trust between us and them. We’re a family too. We have a very different relationship with our record label. We know sometimes other bands and other artists will sometimes bash the labels but not us. We hold the Atlantic Records and Warner Music Group flag very, very high. They’ve allowed us to be ourselves.
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Brent, you’ve never been one to shy away from heavy lyrical content. Sound of Madness still means a lot to me personally because of its brutal honesty. I was going through some heavy stuff when that song was released. I had a tendency to wallow in self-pity and that song was like a swift kick in the ass!
The album? Or are you just talking about the song itself?
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The song.
*Laughs* That’s cool. That song still kicks me in the ass too, from time to time.
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But it’s that brutal honestly, that’s also very apparent on Attention Attention, that people connect with and makes us feel less alone. It also opens up some much-needed dialogue. Do you feel that people are more willing to have this conversation?
I wanted to make sure, from a lyrical standpoint, that everybody that heard the record knew that there were no limits to the subject matter. Because the album is a journey, it’s a story. The whole record takes place inside of a room. There’s a reason why Devil starts the album off. If you’ve seen the video, it starts off with a scene in the background and you hear a door being knocked on, the door opening, you hear the person walk in, take a deep breath, exhale and immediately Devil starts. The only other video we have right now is The Human Radio; But all the songs are going to have an accompaniment of a video. We have told the story sonically, but we are also going to tell the story visually.
I needed to make sure that everything came from my gut. I can only write about what I know. I’m the main lyricist in the band, I don’t really pull things out of thin air. It has to be something that I’ve gone through and dealt with or watched someone else go through and I’ve seen what it did to them. The fact of the matter is, it’s a record about not being afraid to fail. Once again, I don’t think that people are going to be defined by their failures, you’re going to be defined by the fact that you don’t give up. You can’t be quite all of the time. I don’t think you should be quite if you have something to say. If there is something that means the world to you and you want to express it, then do it. I know that is difficult for some people because they don’t have encouragement maybe from this that or the other. Sometimes the world can be tricky! You know? It can be a tough place to navigate.
On the album, once you listen to Get Up the next song you hear Is a very interesting song called Special where Get Up makes a return at the back half of that song. This album is laid out in a very specific way because it’s meant to be psychological, it’s meant to emotional, it’s not meant to cover anything up, it’s actually meant to expose everything. That can be scary for people sometimes. They don’t want to look at reality. What I don’t want people to lose though, I think this is something that is at the real heart of Attention Attention, I don’t want people to lose their humanity.
Just the act of what you and me are doing right now- Which is really, really gorgeous and really beautiful- we’re just having a conversation. I watch society not know how to have a conversation with each other. Everybody their own platform, everybody has their opinion- which is all fine and good- but it’s just way easier to just get on the bandwagon and do what everybody else is doing and just be negative than it is to try and find that positivity inside of a situation and figure out a solution. That’s, I think, what people get afraid of. They don’t wanna say something and then feel like they’re going to be an outcast. Guess what? I’ve been an outcast my whole life and I’m freakin’ proud of it! I don’t look at that word as a negative, like you’re being branded with something evil or negative. It just means that you think outside the box. And that’s my whole outlook on the album too, don’t be afraid of who you are, embrace that!
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Congratulations on the recent record, it really is a fantastic album. It is quite an ambitious release though, especially with the current climate being a “Single-driven market”, you know, with the uprising of streaming services like Spotify.
I understand what you’re talking about in regards to streaming and in regards to the single mentality. We’re probably in the top 5 most streamed rock bands in the music industry. But we’re also something that is kind of an anomaly in this industry that is consistently trying to go digital and get rid of the physical, especially vinyl. If you had to break it down to actual percentages; We’re probably still about 60% physical in all different nations and all different countries. There’s something about this band that people do want to hold.
I watch a younger generation now that is like “Wait a minute? There is another way to experience listening to music?”. They’re finding out about vinyl, which is amazing in a lot of ways, because that’s about as retro as it gets. But to see this younger generation make these discoveries, for me, is something very, very exciting! Especially when a younger person wants to be in music. I go back to when I was a kid and one thing that you can’t replace is that feeling of looking at the album artwork, looking at the band or artist and then reading the liner notes, reading the lyrics. I remember being a kid looking into all that stuff; Who engineered it? Where did they record it? Who recorded it? That kind of stuff meant something to me.
But in the same breath, with having this kind of technology and adding it to the fact that people are becoming desensitized because of the influx and amount of different music and different artists that are out in the world. I think presenting an album is probably what stands out more than anything. That’s why I think Attention Attention two years from now, I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think that it’s going to be looked at as a very necessary piece of art that the world really really needed to be made and that’s why we made it.
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The last time I saw Shinedown live was at the 2010 Soundwave tour. Am I correct in believing that this was the first and only Australian tour?
You’d be absolutely correct. That is not by design. We have been tirelessly, this year and last year, well, let’s put it this way, we are definitely at the drawing board. We want everybody down under to know that we have not, under any circumstances, forgotten about Australia. We are doing our due diligence to figure out exactly how to be able to come back down under, but to be able to bring everybody in Australia the show that they deserve, especially after 8 years. So, we’re working on it right now. We’re trying to figure out the best way to do it.
A lot of bands here in the United States have been talking to each other a lot more about Australia, I’ll be honest with you. Bands like: Avenged Sevenfold, Five Finger Death Punch and Godsmack. Me and David Draiman (ED: Disturbed) have been talking about Australia for, a little over a year now. You gotta go down there with a package, it costs money, you know? We want to be able to play and build a show for the Australian audience that is deserving of the fact that it has been 8 years since we’ve been there. We are working on it, I don’t want people to think that we’re not. We have a massive admiration for the Australian audience.
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