Smith’s own musical education began where he was born and raised: Knoxville, Tennessee. “We’re really big fans of education and learning new things,” Smith says. Together, everyone keeps each other on their toes.
But he knows he’s also making music for them. For Smith, he enjoys pushing himself mentally and creatively and he loves when he sees the crowd respond. When one exhales, the other inhales, and vice versa. The relationship between a band and its audience is always an intricate, symbiotic thing. But our biggest thing is that we only have one boss in Shinedown and that happens to be everybody in the audience.” We listen to a lot of different music, inspired by a lot of different genres. “We’re rock ‘n’ roll to the bone but we’re very much-our palate is pretty vast. “We’re constantly evolving from a musical standpoint,” he says. Why? Because he knows his audience-massive as it is-will always be changing, too. If one chooses to stay stagnant, the world will pass them by. “If you stay in the same systematic ideology or just do the same thing over and over and over again-what’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over again and expecting a different outcome?” “You’ve got to get uncomfortable,” Smith tells American Songwriter. 26) and portends a new album of the same name, slated for April 22. And this has perhaps never been more evident than on the band’s latest single, “ Planet Zero,” which is out today (Jan. The music grabs and shakes as much as it provokes the brain. These philosophies and vantage points show up in Shinedown’s songs. Sometimes to know the truth about something requires one to be uncomfortable. Honesty is not about consistency or regularity. What he also knows is how tricky it can seem to be honest, both with oneself and with others.
But it can also seem that the more one looks around, the more dishonesty or diversion seems to proliferate the ether. That idea may seem obvious on the face of it. It can be rough here and there, but it's what I do, and she respects that, and she's been with me a long time.For Brent Smith, frontman of the acclaimed Jacksonville, Florida-based rock group Shinedown, honesty is always the best policy. It's just a song about the person that you love and that you miss and that you still believe in, and that's the only thing that you have to hold onto sometimes. "At least a hundred times, I've awakened at 4:03 in the morning, and it's usually from missin' her. "For some reason, I would always wake up, and I still do to this day,” he said. It becomes apparent in talking to Smith that his girlfriend became a major factor in his recovery, his return to the studio (where the album took 18 months to complete), and his eventual return to the road where, like the song says, he has trouble sleeping at night when Ashley isn't there.
He told Smith to take all the time he needed.īy this time, Smith had crossed paths with his old friend Ashley again in Florida, and friendship had turned into love. But Kallman - an "amazing guy,” Smith said - apparently thought the singer had earned a break. "He was like, ‘Are we going to gonna get another record in six months?' And I said, ‘There's no way in hell.' And he said, ‘Well, what do you need from me?' And I said, ‘No time limit at all.' And he was like, ‘Well, does that mean like a year, does that mean a year and three months?' I just said, ‘That means no time limit.'”Ī lot of other industry suits would have shown this guy the door. When he was rested enough to make the trip, Smith paid a visit to Atlantic Records Chairman Craig Kallman in New York. "I'd gone through tons of addictions, and my body was just beat up, and my brain was just gone, and I had to take some time off from everything.” "Honestly, I had to take about a month and a half off after we finished ‘Us and Them' to just kind of decompress, because I just wasn't myself anymore,” he said. Meanwhile they were earning a rep as one of the hottest live bands on the festival circuit with a nonstop touring schedule that was beginning to take its toll on Smith. "Us and Them” followed in 2005 with more fierce yet melodic guitar-vocal attacks that racked up gold-level sales. Shinedown went on to record and release its first album in 2003, "Leave a Whisper,” which unleashed the hit singles "Fly From the Inside” and "45” on its way to platinum status.
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