Sevendust
Sevendust and Australian tours have not gone hand in hand previously but the band assures Aussie fans that this tour will go down as one of their best ever and that they will be here. With the relatively new album Kill The Flaw in hand and delving in to the back catalogue this show is building to be a long on according to drummer Morgan Rose who indicated that people coming to the show will be up all night.
It is great news that Sevendust are returning to Australia for a headline tour.
Yeah, it is great news for us. We know that there is definitely a good chunk of people over there that are probably cautiously optimistic if we are going to show up but I can promise you that we will be there. We have been getting word that the shows are selling really well and we’re extremely excited about it.
Is this tour going to lean more towards the new album Kill The Flaw?
I think it will be a really long set and we will tap in to all of the records. The weird part is the first tour of Australia I believe we played Seasons and we were told by our promoter that our previous record Animosity was a really big record in Australia. We were always at the mercy of everyone telling us when we could go and where we could go and all of that stuff and that was how our career played out. We never exploited Australia enough so I think there is a lot of people out there that want to hear a lot of that old stuff so we will definitely bring out something from all our records.
Even the acoustic album Time Travelers & Bonfires?
I’m going to push for that, we were discussing that as far as what we are going to do when we headline in Australia and then come back for our first headliner in the States. Our first true headline run will be in Australia but I have been talking to the guys about incorporating that stuff and we might not do it over here because we did a proper acoustic tour. I think we might tap in to it a bit over there.
Fingers crossed hey? I think it will bring some light and shade to the set.
It is going to be a long one, people coming out to it will be up all night!
Is a second acoustic album still on the cards?
Yeah it is possible and we had such a good time doing it so I think we could easily pull out five or six old songs and do those acoustically. We like bringing in the old songs and stripping them down so yeah it is possible. The acoustic tour over here was extremely successful so as much as we enjoyed it and we have gnawed out long enough that it is time to get back to the heavier stuff. I think we’ll bust our arse enough on the regular heavy stuff that when we’re done with this cycle we will do it again. So an acoustic record would not be a bad idea.
Have you been happy with the feedback from the album Kill The Flaw?
The reception of it has been fantastic and one of those records when we went in to record it, you know we always play what we wanted to play, but at times in our career again when we were lead this was one of those times to know that we have done enough records to prove what we are and we don’t have anything left to prove, we have surpassed everything we wanted to do in our career (well eighty percent of our career). At this point it was like we will do what we feel like doing and hopefully everyone likes it. We did the record for us and didn’t think to
o much about singles or what was the climate like in the industry. We just did what we wanted to do and it was really rewarding to have the reception so good.
With that philosophy did that take a lot of the pressure off knowing that there were no expectations except your own?
Absolutely! Yeah absolutely! We never really paid attention to the charts or what it was doing at radio or before the record came out. You know what? It’s going to do what it’s going to do! We focused our time on the tour, what we’re going to play, who we are going to go out with and it will land where it is going to land. It ended up landing with our highest chart position in our career and it’s like go figure, we did it our way and the way we wanted to do it not listening to anybody else.
Were you surprised?
It has been really gratifying and we’re still humbled to still be relevant in the industry for as long as we have been out. We’ve worked really hard and it definitely had a good feeling about it.
Do you think the new legion of fans coming through that have discovered Sevendust has helped with the fortunes of the band?
We have been around a really long time and if you have been around long enough the clock will run itself around and will come back being cool again. We have a base of people who come and see us and support the band, who are so loyal, and we’ve been around for so long that those people who were twenty five years old eighteen years ago who have teenagers there’s that generation who are coming to see us like now. This is transcending generations and like I’ve said the people who support this band for a long time, you can run in to bands who are much bigger than us who have more fans but if you take our top one thousand fans or supporters and put them up against anyone’s top thousand ours would beat everyone’s ass. They might have more of them but our top thousand are more loyal than anybody.
Were there the usual sorts of challenges making this album?
It was pretty easy to make, like I said when we took the pressure off it was a lot easier and very quick. We wrote the record from scratch pretty much in the studio, wrote all the lyrics and melodies and tracked it in like five weeks as opposed to with animosity and people breathing down our necks the entire time would take a year. We don’t have the time to be sitting in there second guessing and having people tell us not what to do. The band does not have that luxury anymore and we do not want to spend between two and three years between records.
Will this process set the blueprint for future albums?
Absolutely, I think the way that we did this record is the way we are going to do the rest of them for our career. We own our own record company now and there’s no record company to tell us what to do. I think we were institutionalised in that sense and when we got our own record company a few records ago we were still institutionalised at thinking like a record company. By having our own imprint and being able to call the shots there is nobody who can tell us what to do. We are the company so let’s do what we want to do. We only have to answer to the five of us and the people who buy our music so let’s see if they like what we are doing on our own. There is a really good chance that we can change the way we are doing things as far as releasing music. We’ve had all kinds of talks together and meetings where what if we released a song every month on the next cycle and let people digest it. Then at the end of twelve months put those plus another five on a record with a bunch of extra content and release it as a whole. That was one option we thought about, EP’s was another and the thing is you spend a lot of time doing a full record and as far as singles and videos and stuff like that out of the ten to twelve songs that go on there, two of them are the only ones that get pushed. For the person who is loyal to the band they really love the whole record but to someone who is new they probably only need a few songs.
Is the live DVD still being considered?
Yeah, it is something that we want to do but politics got involved in that a little bit which put a pause on it. Our live show is everything and we want to find a way to be able to capture that and do something special with it. At some point I know we will probably tackle that.
What are you looking forward to the most on this Australian tour?
Coopers! Yeah! I remember the first time I went to Australia I tried Coopers beer and when I came back home I was looking everywhere and couldn’t get it anywhere. I found this one liquor store where the guys are really cool who would order me cases of Coopers. I’m looking forward to not having to chase it down and being right there.
Whether it is rummaging through vinyl at record stores such as Clarity and Title finding hidden gems to scouring the internet to find that album by the next big thing or chasing bands to get that elusive autograph and photo his passion is music all the way.
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