Brent Smith of Shinedown Talks With Gotts Backstage at WRATFEST 2022
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00:00You have wings, let's start with that.
00:02You have antennas, and you have a pro on what looks to be your right wing.
00:07I'm in awe right now.
00:08I think we should maybe put this on the next album cover.
00:11I'm into it.
00:12As long as you'll give me half the royalty.
00:16Let's talk money later off the air here.
00:19But nevertheless, man, tour's going great.
00:21How's everything been in your eyes as far as you had to break up a fight during this tour?
00:27No, no, no.
00:27We were in Canada with that.
00:30It was funny because we were in Drake's Club.
00:33But, yeah, it actually ended up being okay.
00:37But this tour's been incredible, man.
00:40Look, I tell people because a lot of the cities, we're breaking some attendance records in these venues right now.
00:49And that's because it is a collective of all three acts.
00:53I have a love for John Harvey.
00:55I have a love for Jelly Roll.
00:56As far as us and Shinedown, myself and Zach and Barry and Eric, earlier this year, I stumbled upon Jelly Roll.
01:07And we just, you know, reached out to him, talked about, you know, him coming out, reached out to John Harvey.
01:13He's a new artist.
01:14But this was about music.
01:16And this was about not having a tour where you could put it in a box.
01:20It should be about all different kinds of genres and styles and everything that, you know, evokes what we do live.
01:27And, you know, music is medicine, man.
01:29And I think the fact that we decided to do a tour with artists that we'd never worked with before, with the camaraderie on this particular tour, has been unlike anything I've seen in the last decade.
01:40It's probably one of the most, the proudest I've been of a tour in the last 10 years.
01:44That's beautiful, brother.
01:45That is beautiful.
01:45And I'll tell you one thing.
01:46Speaking of Jelly Roll, you just said you kind of found him.
01:49How did that all come to be?
01:50Where did you find him at?
01:51Man, if I'm being honest about it, it was a little bit, kind of in the middle of last year in 2021, I was down like a rabbit hole one night on YouTube.
02:01And for whatever reason, the song, Save Me, from Jelly Roll, at the time had like 100,000 views.
02:09But I'd never heard of the guy or anything.
02:12It's got like 200 million views now.
02:14But I watched this guy sing, and he had the voice of an angel.
02:18And then I started to kind of dig a little bit deeper into who he was.
02:22And it's country.
02:23It's rock.
02:24It's R&B.
02:25It's soul.
02:26It's rap.
02:26It's urban.
02:27It's just a melting pot.
02:29You know, he comes from all these different backgrounds and all these different styles.
02:32And then last year when we met him on Blue Ridge, we invited him up to do Simple Man with us.
02:37And then at the beginning of this year, I reached out to his team.
02:40We knew that this was kind of an area of the fall that we were going to be touring.
02:44We were going to do amphitheaters.
02:45I asked him if he wanted to be a part of it.
02:47And he was like, absolutely, man.
02:48And then same thing with John Harvey.
02:50We met him last year.
02:51Me and Zach met him on the Smith & Myers tour that we were doing.
02:54And, you know, his record just came out last Friday.
02:57It's called Told You.
02:59It's out there for everybody.
03:01Obviously, we've got the new album, Planet Zero.
03:03But we just wanted to tour with different people, man, and just do some different things this time.
03:06Kind of mix it up a little bit.
03:07Yeah, man.
03:08And, you know, pay it forward.
03:09And so far, man, it's just been a blessing, man.
03:14It really has.
03:15Like, it's wild because, like, we were in Pittsburgh last night.
03:19And the last time we were there was in 2021.
03:22And, you know, with vaccination cards at the time and masks and everything like that, it was a little bit – people were a little nervous and what have you.
03:27So the venue we played last night, when we were there last time, we had only sold, because of the situation, about 4,000 tickets.
03:34There were 17,000 people there last night.
03:36Wow.
03:36So, you know, and live music is back.
03:39You know, it never really went away.
03:41But, you know, I think everybody has come back together.
03:44Music is medicine, man.