Meltdown chats with Brent Smith of Shinedown at Riff Fest
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00:00Backstage here with Brent Smith from Shinedown.
00:02You were just saying the dress code's fancy on stage.
00:04What do you mean?
00:05You guys going to dress up like the Beatles or something?
00:07No, we're going to dress up like Shinedown.
00:10Okay.
00:11Now, we just, earlier this year we were doing, we kind of went very kind of, I don't want to say military,
00:18but we had a little bit more of a kind of G.I. Joe type mentality with the exclamation points and things like that.
00:26It was a little bit more Mad Max.
00:28Yeah, for the attention, attention.
00:30Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:31And so for this tour that we've been doing, we still have some of those military elements,
00:37but we're in suits and ties because it's classy.
00:40Makes perfect sense.
00:41Hey, I was just asking, Howard over here, you've been at Atlantic so long.
00:44Do you have your own office, your own, no?
00:49I think my presence is in every single floor, you know what I mean?
00:56Because our pictures aren't in every single floor.
00:58It could be worse, you know, when Grunge hit, I was talking to someone like, I don't know who I was talking to, like Slaughter or somebody.
01:03Yeah, one day they're in there and their picture's on the wall.
01:05Next day they walk in there and it's now Nirvana and stuff, right?
01:08Yeah, that happens.
01:09That can happen.
01:12You know, you need to make sure you're not phoning records in.
01:15That's right, exactly.
01:16No, man, it's crazy, too, in a really, really beautiful way.
01:18I'm not desensitized to the fact that we've been on Atlantic Records for 18 years.
01:23The interesting thing is that in 2017, I got an email.
01:26Well, I got a phone call from her first, but Julie Greenwald, she sent me a text message and said, check your email.
01:35And we were just in the middle of the mixing phase for what became Attention, Attention.
01:40It's the sixth album from the original contract, and it was a six-album deal.
01:44And the email was basically all of Atlantic, Julie and Craig Kalman and just everybody asking us to sign an extension for two more albums.
01:54Nice.
01:54And I remember looking at that, and of course we said yes.
01:58It's just not something very common in this day and age for a record label to give an artist from day one, literally from day one.
02:07They've never rushed me.
02:09They've never told me when to turn something in.
02:11They've always given me every single tool I ever needed, myself, Zach, Barry, and Eric, and even on the first two albums,
02:18going all the way back to the band with the two original members from Leave a Whisper and us and them, Jason Todd and Brad Stewart.
02:26Atlantic Records is 1,000% the greatest record label on the face of the earth.
02:31Man, you don't hear that very often from guys, so there you go.
02:34The most incredible men and women, that company is just...
02:41They're just remarkable, man.
02:43Now you mentioned, you know, you signed another two-record deal.
02:47So, I mean, I know that you guys don't really have anything going on as far as new music yet.
02:51Oh, no, no, no.
02:52You do?
02:53Okay, because I heard something else.
02:53We've always got stuff going.
02:54We've always got stuff going.
02:56I was going to say, because do you sit at home on a piano or guitar and just like kind of put melodies together?
03:00And, you know, are you constantly doing that kind of stuff or what?
03:02I'm not necessarily that particular one in the band.
03:06I still do have what I call my two engines, is what I call it.
03:12Neither one of my engines are ever turned off, but I'll put one on standby and then I'll turn the other one on full tilt boogie.
03:18Okay.
03:18So, that's basically studio and performance.
03:21So, when we're touring, that's more performance and we're out and we're promoting and, you know, we're traveling.
03:26That's more the performance side.
03:29The studio side, I very rarely will...
03:33Like, for the longest time, we didn't, while we were in a studio, we didn't add shows.
03:38Like, we wouldn't play shows for that year.
03:39No one-offs or nothing.
03:40Nothing.
03:41Zero.
03:41And then, back in 2017, the interesting thing that happened was at the beginning of that year when we started the writing process for the album,
03:50we got an opportunity to go to Europe and the UK and we did 44 dates with Iron Maiden.
03:55So, that's just something you don't ignore and you just go and do it.
03:59And what happened was it was so awesome because it actually gave us such a better perspective on the album because you weren't in a studio, like, 24-7.
04:09We were able to kind of leave, get a little bit of a perspective, come back, and you're kind of infused with new energy and more creativity.
04:19But when it comes to the writing process, I mean, there does need to be a moment where, like, I know I have a bit of structure in there because it's, for me, I have to stay focused on what I'm doing.
04:29But I think even when we go into the writing process for the next record, we'll still, you know, we'll do some touring in between it.
04:36I think it's good for perspective.
04:37Right.
04:37Has that writing process, I mean, started at all?
04:40Some.
04:41Some, okay.
04:41Yeah, some.
04:42There's a ton of stuff going on.
04:45It's interesting, man, because we're booked all the way through December 21st of this year.
04:48Right, right.
04:48We finished at the O2 Arena in London.
04:51Wow.
04:51And we're already, and we've been friends for a long, long time, so we're already into, like, no BS, man, we're already into August of 2020.
05:04Right.
05:05Like, it's pretty nutty.
05:06Yeah.
05:07Well, here's a generic basic question for you.
05:09How are you?
05:10I'm fantastic.
05:11I'm getting to hang out with my boy.
05:12That's right.
05:14I'm great, man.
05:14I'm in Michigan, man.
05:16I'm stoked.
05:17Outside of that, though, like, the band, family life, your son, you're telling me, is 12 years old?
05:22He's going to be 12.
05:23He's going to be 12 on December 26th.
05:26Everyone's really, really well, man.
05:28Everybody, you know, in Barry's family, Lori and Stella are awesome.
05:32Eric and his beautiful wife, Kelly, he's getting ready to, I think they're getting ready to buy a different house,
05:37and he's going to start breaking ground in a couple of months on his new studio.
05:41Zach, of course, is basically the mayor of Memphis, so he's fine.
05:46Bethany and the boys, Ollie and, you know, Avery, they're doing great.
05:51And my son is fantastic.
05:53And, I mean, that's all I can hope for.
05:55Everybody's happy and healthy, and that's all I can ask for.
05:57That's all I can ask for, exactly.
05:58I see you doing your meet and greet out here, and you talk, and you touch, you know, everyone's life out here.
06:03Tell me about the importance of doing that.
06:05It's very important, man, because they gave us the platform, and they gave us the platform to be ourselves.
06:13And, I mean, and I'm not just saying this because, I mean, you were sitting with each other.
06:17You know, I go back to 2003 when we first met each other with an album called Leave a Whisper.
06:23And, you know, you have to start somewhere, and we have tried to constantly, because you are the one that brought it to the people, man.
06:31And then the people make a decision.
06:32They decide whether you stay or whether you go.
06:34I have said this many times, and it's because it's the truth.
06:38We have one boss.
06:39It just happens to be everybody in the audience.
06:42And they're just unbelievably important to us.
06:46And, you know, it's one of the reasons why our VIPs are a little different than other people.
06:50We don't sit behind a table.
06:51We don't run people through like cattle.
06:54You know, we have three different tiers in our meet and greet packages and our options.
06:59And, you know, look, man, they're expensive.
07:01So, if we're going to charge that much money, too, and don't get me wrong, everything that we make, honestly, we put it back into this.
07:08You know, but if you're going to charge that kind of money, it needs to be an experience.
07:12You know, it needs to be a one-on-one.
07:14So, it takes a little bit longer, but it's so very, very important.
07:18Now, earlier today, I was telling you, I was going to ask you about your relationship with WRIF in Detroit.
07:23Yeah.
07:23Do you remember the first time you came to the station?
07:25You just mentioned 2003.
07:28Is this with Tommy DeBenedictus?
07:30Yes.
07:30Or is this with the legendary Howard Lesnick?
07:32No, it was with Tommy.
07:34Oh, my God.
07:34And so, if I'm not mistaken, it was you and Brad and Jason.
07:37It could have been Barry.
07:38No, because it would have been me and Brad and Jason, because I remember that tour.
07:46That was the impromptu.
07:48We had the album ready, but it wasn't released yet.
07:53Well, I'd only played Fly From the Inside a few times.
07:55You came to the station, and I'll never forget, you put your mirrored sunglasses on in the studio and just started ripping through it.
08:01Yeah.
08:01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
08:02I kind of remember that.
08:04But I was trying to prove a point, man, you know, it was like, because here's the thing that happened with that, too.
08:10You know, you go back to that.
08:11We were in a Buick.
08:13We were in a four-door Buick car.
08:16We were doing 200 miles, 300 miles a day, sometimes upwards into getting to the next town or what have you.
08:24We'd have to do like 400 miles.
08:26We were sleeping in one hotel room, sometimes in one bed, like, you know, one of us would take the floor.
08:32The other two would take, you know, the bed, or if we had a couch, if we were lucky.
08:38But the thing about it was is we weren't going to wait around for the record to come out, and Atlantic was like, we're going to give you this much money to go and play as many as you can do.
08:48Like, as many stations that will have you, you need to play them.
08:53And we just didn't say no to anything, man.
08:55And it was one of the most defining facts that we were able to – Zach Myers is over here staring at me.
09:02Zach Stardust.
09:03There you go.
09:03Look at him.
09:05By the way, he complained that those jeans were not very, very comfortable.
09:09It's because he's not wearing any underwear.
09:11Right?
09:11You're not wearing any underwear.
09:13Yeah, you don't have underwear on.
09:15Ladies and gentlemen, Zach Myers.
09:16There you go.
09:18So you're playing these stations, and you're taking this travel time.
09:22And you guys were road dogs for a long time.
09:23Yeah.
09:24But the thing that made that great was that's how you do it.
09:27Right.
09:28And that's one of the reasons that makes Atlantic Records so amazing because they didn't allow us to sit around and wait for the record to come out because they're like, what is that going to do?
09:36Nobody knows who you are.
09:37Get your butt out there and hustle.
09:40And we still do that.
09:43Yeah, you guys do.
09:44There's no question about it.
09:45What's a great piece of advice a fellow musician has given you?
09:49A fellow musician has given me?
09:52Or even a record company rep or whatever.
09:54Some of the best advice I ever got was actually from, and I cannot, I wish I could remember his name.
10:04This was like right around 2000 and, right around 2000 actually.
10:08Might have even been 1999.
10:09But I do recall the advice was, you want to be in a band?
10:17Yes.
10:18You're a singer?
10:19Yes.
10:20Do you write your own songs?
10:22Well, I mean, I'm starting, do you write your own songs?
10:24Well, I mean, do you write your own songs?
10:26And I'm like, well, not at the moment.
10:28He was like, write your own songs.
10:30And the interesting thing about that was, you know, you learn later on that I was never really the guy that was like learning cover songs, though.
10:38You know what I mean?
10:39I was never really into that.
10:40I was always about writing my own thoughts and putting them down and expressing them.
10:45But when this guy asked me, I wish I could remember his name, but yeah, his advice was like, no matter what you do, make sure you own your publishing.
10:54Make sure that you write your own songs because that's yours.
10:58And yes, you can get a publishing deal, but don't ever relinquish your writer's share.
11:04And I have never done that to this day.
11:05And I'm very, very lucky because I'm with Sony ATV and my publishing with the incredible John Platt, who just became the president or the chairman and who is running Sony ATV again.
11:20And he's an incredible publisher.
11:22But that's some of the best advice I ever got, man.
11:24And also the other one was remember when you get an advance or remember when you ever make any money that half of it's going to the government.
11:32And then you've got to pay your manager, your lawyer, you've got to pay your booking agent, and then you've got to pay your business manager.
11:44Well, I see.
11:44You've got to save your money.
11:46You've got to save your money.
11:47Hey, you're talking about writing your own songs and stuff and really putting yourself out there and whatnot.
11:52And sometimes when I interview some of the same guys in too close a period of time, I've already given up all my stuff.
11:57Now I've got to come up with new stuff.
11:58So it's the same way with writing where like in this last record, you've like kind of drained yourself of all your personal stuff.
12:04Do you follow what I'm saying?
12:06I don't.
12:07I mean, I do.
12:07I don't feel like I drained myself from the personal dynamics of everything because today I've had a lot of wonderful experiences that I will probably write about.
12:19You know what I mean?
12:20Like that's the thing.
12:21It's one of the reasons why we tour the way we do because every day is a learning experience and every day you don't necessarily have to, but you try to find what's special about those moments.
12:35You know, because yesterday is over and tomorrow is going to come with or without us.
12:41But what we're doing right now is very, very relevant and very, very valuable.
12:45So one of the most, one of the heaviest things about the new album was that it was the first album that I wrote and recorded completely sober.
12:55Yeah.
12:56I was saying it earlier.
12:57Yeah, I, uh, right before Threat to Survival, the last album was released, um, from right around 2014 leading into 2015, I had a slip, man, you know, and I had been on the road during the Amaryllis cycle and two years straight of just, you know, I had lost a ton of weight.
13:19I had kind of just become a different person in a good way, but there was so much regimen to it, man.
13:28And I was so scheduled.
13:29I was a machine, you know, and then all of a sudden what happened was it stopped.
13:35And all of a sudden I'm supposed to be domesticated, you know, and I didn't know how to, I didn't know how to function.
13:41And I, I slipped, you know, I'm, I'm human.
13:44And the entire touring cycle for Threat to Survival, and we've been friends a long time and I can be very candid with you about it, but that 19 months of touring, that record, Threat to Survival, I, I had to come back.
13:58Like I, with that entire cycle, I was withdrawing from a lot of just, I had, I had jumped off such a, I'd found myself in such a dark place and I'm surprised I made it out.
14:11But the three guys that I'm in a band with, they never judged me.
14:17They never were like, you know, look, man, we're not cops, dude.
14:19We're here to support you, but dude, you've got to get it together, man.
14:23And it was a struggle.
14:25And what's incredible about this, though, is that I was at the lowest point, like I couldn't have got lower.
14:32Really?
14:33Yeah.
14:33And yeah, man, I don't talk, I've never really formally talked about this, but it is true.
14:39And the interesting thing was, is that once again, my brothers, Barry and Zach and Eric, man, like they supported me through it all.
14:53And, and my son did too, you know, and, you know, it, it showed a side of me that I'm not invincible.
14:59And what happened inside of that was we were able to create attention to attention.
15:08And one thing that Eric has said before, because he was with me every step of the way, because he produced the album.
15:15He mixed the album, he engineered the album.
15:17I was with him in 2017.
15:19We spent like 179 days together.
15:21Yeah.
15:21Everything was written sober.
15:24Everything was performed sober.
15:26And I used to think that I had to be messed up to write messed up songs, if you know what I mean.
15:32Yeah, yeah, I know, yeah.
15:33Couldn't be further from the truth.
15:35Yeah.
15:35And, you know, Eric and, and quite a few people have told me before, and I guess it really is true, man.
15:40They're like, dude, you're way more dangerous when you're sober.
15:44So, you know, in my opinion, I wrote probably the, you know, I wouldn't change one word.
15:50I wouldn't change one note on attention to attention.
15:52It's exactly what it needs to be.
15:54Yeah.
15:54And I'm, I'm super proud of it for a lot of different reasons.
15:57Well, I've, I've said this before.
15:59It's like, I've seen you at your highest.
16:00I've seen you at your lowest and everywhere in between.
16:02And it's like, you know, your son being born was a big trigger for you.
16:05Huge.
16:06Yeah.
16:06Yeah.
16:06I mean, he, uh, he's number one at all times.
16:09Like, literally he's at the top at all times.
16:12Yeah.
16:13I mean, everything that I.
16:16He's watching.
16:18He is and he isn't.
16:19You'd be surprised how much they soak up.
16:21It's funny too, because I love it when my son does.
16:24He doesn't come out as much.
16:25Yeah.
16:25But when he comes out, I'll see him at monitor world for the very first song.
16:29And then I'll look over on the second song and he's gone because he, he, all of this
16:33to him, he just doesn't care.
16:36And I love that about him because he's more about, he's more about basketball.
16:41Oh, is that right?
16:42Yeah.
16:421000%.
16:43And he, you know what it is, man?
16:45He keeps me humble because no matter how cool I might think I am, which I don't think
16:48I'm cool, but you know, I, he just sees his dad, you know what I mean?
16:53And he loves me, he respects me and he appreciates me.
16:56And I know that, but I'm still just dad.
16:58Well, there's no fair.
16:59It's, there's, it's, it's, uh, it's humbling.
17:02Well, I'll tell you what, uh, we'll wrap it up here, but I was watching your, uh, your,
17:05your meet and greet saying somebody did bring up the sobriety thing.
17:08Yeah.
17:08I thought to, I thought to myself, I'm like, you know, you're taught about this.
17:10You know, we're, we're, we're, we're looking at 17, 18 years now.
17:13Yeah.
17:14And it could have been over after five or six, dude, I am, you, you are sitting across
17:19from one of the most grateful, humble and lucky human beings on the face of the earth.
17:23Yeah.
17:24Well, vice versa.
17:24Trust me when I tell you.
17:25Absolutely.
17:26But I don't take it for granted and I don't take your love and support and this station
17:30and this community.
17:32I love everything that is Michigan and you know, it's, it's, it's events like this and
17:41it's people like you that it's very, very refreshing on a lot of different levels because, you know,
17:49especially here, man, we, we have that feeling we always have from everybody in this state,
17:55um, and all the cities that surround that, you know, you can always go home, man, and
17:58they'll support you.
17:59It's just like a second home for us.
18:01And, uh, you know, we're never going to phone it in and we're always going to give people
18:04our 100%, you know, everything we got.
18:07We're always going to give you our best.
18:09Well, I'm definitely looking forward to the show and I couldn't appreciate you more and
18:12thanks so much for coming out.
18:13Congratulations on the success and, uh, man, and good luck on all, you got all these tour
18:17dates.
18:18You're all booked up, man.
18:19You're ready to go.
18:20So, Hey man, thank you for always believing in us, man.
18:22Thank you for the support.
18:23Thank you for the love.