A new album – Next – and new management and a new guitar player – Sonny Mayo – are the changes and additions that Sevendust brings in this New Year, 2006. Guitarist/producer John Connolly is a man of many words and he shares them all with Ultimate Guitar in this vast yet focused diatribe. Here he recounts and revisits the band’s musical history as well as their current work.
Ultimate-Guitar.com: You were born in New Jersey, grew up in Atlanta, moved to Dallas, and now you live in Orlando. Did you pick up influences from these various locations? How did take these geographic elements and distill them into what would become Sevendust?
John Connolly: When I was a kid, I grew up listenin’ to everything everybody else was listening to. I’m 37 so I cut my teeth on Sabbath and Kiss and Aerosmith and anything that was really pretty popular in the early and mid 70s. I guess Kiss was probably the band that really kind of changed my life. I said, ‘OK, this is what I want to do for a living.’ And of course, as soon as my mother saw the cover of Alive II, she was like, ‘Oh, my God, what have we done?’ She knew I was serious, she could tell. As a kid, you want to be this, you want to be that, and you kind of lose interest, but music I never lost interest. But as far as pickin’ up influences in different places that I lived? Atlanta was really where I started to learn about everything; the local scene down there didn’t have a lot of rock bands so my influences were just bands that I was really into at that time. I was really into Metallica; when Metallica came on the scene they were just so far ahead of their time. It was hard to describe, it was just overload. I guess the next thing I got into ironically about a year before I moved to Dallas was Pantera. I was absolutely floored by what Dime could do on the guitar. Still to this day I don’t know if there’s anybody who’s technically as good as he is. Just the sheer talent that he has. The fact that he doesn’t have to practice, he never practices. He just jams. He gets up there and makes his cocktail and goes for it. But movin’ out to Dallas and getting a chance to really hang out with him for a while, that was such a cool period of my life. That was really where it all kind of gelled. That was on the second record, Home, was where I really started to spend a lot of time with Dime.
Did you actually have the opportunity to sit down and trade licks and talk shop with him?
He actually came out on the road; he and Vinnie followed us around for about five or six days. We didn’t really get to trade licks or do anything like that. Number one ‘cause I was scared shitless to get in the same room with him. But we did jam on stage together. We actually jammed ‘Walk’ because we were doing a little piece of ‘Walk,’ we had like a medley of five or six songs and we ended with that. And we ended up and learned the whole thing and sure enough we showed up in Dallas, he strapped a guitar on, plugged him into a rig, and just had a great time. Just to watch him play, you know and it wasn’t even in the Pantera stuff that was mindblowin.’ We went to his birthday party one year and it was always a surprise party but it was never a surprise because he knew it was gonna happen. But what Vinnie would do was he’d clear all the furniture out of his living room and Tres Hombres which is one of the baddest ZZ Top cover bands that I ever heard (would play) and Dime would get up there and he’d jam for 3 ? or 4 hours. He knew every ZZ Top song that was ever written. Not a lot of people know that about Dime; just the way he could transition from the Dimebag that we all knew in Pantera to being able to play straight up blues rock was just phenomenal. So, as an influence, yeah, he was probably one of the most influential people. And most of it not because of the guitarist that he was but just the sweetheart of a human being that he really was. After getting to hang out with him for a while, you realized he was the farthest thing from what you saw in the videos. He was the nicest guy on earth.
But yeah, definitely where I’ve lived has influenced me for sure. I’m living in Orlando now and Mark Tremonti and Scott Phillips are right around the corner from me and we’ve toured with Creed several times and just watching what Mark has been able to do with the guitar for the past eight years has (been) pretty inspirational too. Because he just became a guitar junkie; he might need therapy to be quite honest with you. He plays guitar, I’m not exaggerating, at least 8 hours a day plus the show. His wife, she’s like, ‘What do I have to do to get him outta there?’ I’m like, ‘You need to put guitars in every other room in the house.’ I’m totally influenced by just the fact that he’s pursued that art to the degree that he has. Because on the first Creed record he was a good guitarist but he’s not half the guitar player that he is today.
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| "I was always the guy who brought the heavy end of things into the mix." |
When you went in to do the first Sevendust record, were you thinking about Metallica and Pantera? Did you think that you wanted to distill those influences and come up with something original? What were you trying to say musically on that album?
Oh, it was funny; we’d written so many songs for that record. They weren’t specifically for the record but we had such an immense catalog of stuff that wasn’t getting played. I think we were just kind of searching for what kind of a band we really were. I was always the guy who brought the heavy end of things into the mix and being one of the riff writers it’s kind of what it is. Lajon has a completely different take on music; he appreciates Metallica and Pantera but it’s not what he listens to. He listens to anything from Stevie Wonder to Nickelback for the love of God. He won’t stop playing Nickelback. But he’s more of a pop/rock oriented guy so I knew no matter what we wrote musically, LJ was really really gonna have to try hard to make it sound like Metallica or Pantera because that’s just not the kind of singer that he is.
The first record may have been one of the heaviest that he did vocally but we realized he sounds better when he sings than when he tries to be the heavy guy. So when we went into that first record, I think it was just a question mark. We knew we had a couple of really really great songs: ‘Bitch’ and ‘Black’ and ‘Too Close To Hate’ were the first three that we really focused on. And it was just a real big guessing game because we hadn’t played live that much either. Our live show was terrible to be honest with you. On the first record, it was so, I don’t want to say weak but just unexplored; we didn’t know what kind of a band we were. And ironically we went on tour with Snot and quickly discovered what kind of band we would have to be to compete with those guys every night because they were phenomenal. We co-headlined every night so it flipflopped and it wasn’t like we got to play before ‘em every night. Some nights we had to play after ‘em and they were just so intense live so our learning curve was incredibly steep. We had to immediately figure out, ‘OK, how do we take those songs and put the amount of intensity that Snot’s putting into their show into our show?’ And ten years later we got Sonny Mayo in the band so it’s funny how things work out.
Was that the first time your path crossed Sonny’s?
(During) that first record, yeah. Actually I’ve known Sonny my entire career; they were the first real band we ever toured with. We did a handful of shows with Gravity Kills and with Henry Rollins and nobody would give us a tour. We weren’t selling enough records to matter and we were on an indie and Snot had the same thing going on. They didn’t sell enough records to matter and they were super super over the top intense and they couldn’t get a tour and we couldn’t get a tour and we said, ‘Well, shit.’ We’d seen ‘em at Foundations and they saw us and we made friends with ‘em and so it was, ‘Man, let’s just give Snot a call and go do a tour with them since nobody ‘ll take them either.’ And that was basically what we did, that’s how we kicked off the first record. Our first real touring cycle started with Snot. We did over 7 months of touring with them and then after that we did Limp Bizkit, then we did Megadeth, and then we went straight into the Ozzfest.
That is a pretty extraordinary leap in career.
Yeah, it was incredible; it was like out of nowhere. All of a sudden Limp Bizkit calls and wants us to go on the road and then as soon as we got out there we started to create a little bit of a buzz and Megadeth wanted to go. The funny thing is Snot, Megadeth, and Limp Bizkit were all on that Ozzfest so by the time we got to Ozzfest, the only new people I got to meet was like the guys in Ozzy and Tool. We knew everybody else on that tour. It was like a big summer camp. It was like, ‘Hey, man, I haven’t seen you in what? Three weeks.’
When the band started elevating its status, is this when you began work on the Home album?
Home was in its infancy stage towards the end of that tour. Coming out of Ozzfest, honestly we didn’t have that many riffs or songs at all. And of course going into your sophomore record, everyone says, ‘Oh, that’s the most important record you’ll ever do.’ The funny thing is we had our whole career to write our first record and then we had about six weeks to write and record our second album. The only thing I really regret about Home was how unmotivated we were really to make the record. A lot of people don’t realize that but we did over 460 shows on the first record and we were on the road for 24 months. And when we were finished we hadn’t had a break for more than 3 or 4 days in our whole career up to that point. So when they asked us, ‘How much time do you want off?’ we were like, ‘How about two weeks?’ Well guess what, two weeks is not enough time to re-set and to write material for your next record. It’s just not. The last thing I wanted to see was a guitar after I got off the Ozzfest. It was like, ‘I played too much, I’ve done too much, consumed too much, hung out and partied too much, time to decompress and to re-evaluate.’ So going into Home was exciting but God, it was just hard. Because every time you picked up a guitar it was like your favorite thing on earth, you can get tired of it. And I think we were all at that point when we started Home.
Another problem in addition to the fact that we were a little uninspired was we’d already booked the Warped Tour. Warped tour wanted us on there. We had talked to the Deftones, the Deftones had done it and they said, ‘You gotta do it, you’ll be a standout, it’ll be completely different from the Ozzfest’ and it was the year that Suicidal (Tendencies) was on it, Eminem was on it, and these were all like new artists at that point. And it was too good to pass up so we confirmed it but that only gave us about seven weeks to write, mix, and produce and get an entire record finished so it was a sprint. So every day we had work and we were in the studio literally 24 hours a day. I took the night shift, Clint (Lowery) took the day shift, and I’d start tracking guitars at about 2:00, 2:30 in the morning and went until 7:00 or 8:00. It was literally a tag team; we had our Pro Tools operator who ran the computer while I was in there and Toby (Wright, producer) ran the computer pretty much for everybody else. By the time we were finished with it we were just like, ‘Is it good?’ And ironically that’s a lotta people’s favorite record until today and people still tell me, man, ‘Home was the one.’
After the experience with Home, did you seriously want to take time off to create the Animosity album?
That was an experiment. We sold some records and had a little bit of money in the bank, we had just changed management, and we had a change of scenery. We went down to Florida, to Orlando, and we took about six months to make Animosity. Probably wrote for about 3 ? or 4 months of that and we just over-wrote. That record was pretty much a huge turning point for both Clint and myself as writers. Mark (Tremonti) gives me shit about it all the time because he’s like, ‘Man, I’ve never written more than 13 songs for any record I’ve ever done.’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve never written any less than 40.’ It’s a completely different take; he writes just what he needs and I just write and try to out-write each batch of songs. We got into a habit of where Clint would go home, I’d go home, and we’d try for the next two weeks, we’d get together for 2 or 3 days at the end of that two weeks, but each of us wanted to have 4 or 5 really strong pieces of music. And when you do that 5 or 6 times, it kinda starts to add up and then you have a lotta shit to go through.
Animosity was tough only in the problem I think we kinda over-wrote and we kinda over, over-wrote. Like we had so much material to sort through that it was really hard to get the things that were gonna make the best record because there was stuff all over the place. Bein’ that ‘Angel’s Son’ had been an experiment that actually went good; it kinda opened up the door for us to be able to do super super mellow stuff. So Clint kind of chased that direction and I was really really really trying to pull the band back closer to where we were on the first record. And it’s that give and take. I love bein’ able to pick up an acoustic guitar and do softer stuff but what this band is really about was based on stuff that had no really no acoustic instrument involved in it whatsoever. It was definitely a cool experiment; I don’t ever want to take that long to make a record again. I think after the three or four month period, you just start doing things just for the sake of doin’ ‘em instead of it necessarily bein’ better than what you had before.
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| "I love bein' able to pick up an acoustic guitar and do softer stuff." |
And is this the philosophy you adopted in recording the Seasons album?
Yeah, we did and we condensed everything. It was funny on the fourth record, we knew we didn’t want to drag it out like we did on the third record. But I think we had gotten really really efficient at songwriting; instead of finishing everything that we’d start, that was the record where we realized if it wasn’t gonna make the record then why bother finishing it? I’ve got a computer just full of a decent verse and a bridge that didn’t have a chorus that went with it. Just musically I knew it wasn’t ever really gonna get put on the record so why spend time on it? That was my theory. We only worked up the things that we knew that were gonna be considered for the record and we decided to work with Butch Walker again. Our label had put a lot of pressure on us to work with a quote/unquote ‘songwriting producer’ is the way they put it. They felt Toby (Wright) didn’t have enough songwriting influence on Home and they felt that Ben Grosse didn’t have enough songwriting influence on Animosity. And we were weird about that because I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I really want to give over the reins to anybody telling us how to write songs and stuff like that.’ It’s not something we’ve ever done. And we kinda made a compromise and said, ‘Look, Butch Walker did the demos that got us signed in the first place, so would you guys consider us workin’ with him?’ And the label thought it was a great idea. And I loved that record but vocally it was one of the most demanding records that we’ve ever done. There is so much backup singing on that thing. Sometimes I sit there and I look at LJ and he’s just sittin’ there smilin’ while I’m singing. I’m like, ‘I’m singin’ more than you’re singin,’ what the hell is goin’ on here?’ We continued in that direction and Clint continued to push the lighter envelope and I continued to try to push the heavy envelope and it’s hard to do that when you’ve got a producer who is very very into pop music. Everything gets a little shined over and a little popified but it’s a great record. I think we took a step, I don’t want to say in the wrong direction, but we gave our label what they asked for and they came out of the gate and it looked like they were just killin’ with it. Because ‘Enemy’ came out of the gate, it was the highest we’d ever had at radio, the biggest flash we ever had, and then as usual TVT went and screwed it up on the second single. They dicked around for too long, they waited, the gap shut down, there were a bunch of other bands that released songs and records, and we were a day late and a dollar short basically. That was our biggest problem with TVT honestly is they were great for the first single and the second single was just never 100% pushed.
So, goin’ into this record we said, ‘Look, let’s not frontload this thing, let’s not put all our ducks up on the front like we did. Let’s kinda ease into this thing and commit to goin’ three or four singles deep on the record.’ Like we always said we would with TVT but by the time we got to the third one they were pretty much out of money and we were spinnin’ our wheels and it was time to start thinkin’ about another record. So, I would like to see this one go the full three or four and actually have work done behind ‘em. That was one of the reasons that we chose not to go on the road right when the record came out. We’d always been used to bein’ on the road for two and three months before our records were released and this time we said, ‘You know what? Let’s do the opposite. Let’s release the record, do a couple press tours, do a lot of things to let people know that yes, we’re still alive and we’re well but no, we’re not gonna tour 150 shows before the record ever comes out.’
So January is really our kickoff. We did a short blow with Mudvayne; they called us up and asked us to go out in November and December and we love those guys so we said, ‘Man, we gotta do it.’ But really the beginning of January was the official kickoff of the touring cycle of this record.
So, what you’ve just described – record labels dropping the ball, dissatisfaction with the direction of the band – is the reason for the label change?
TVT had just gotten to the point where I think they really wanted us to be something that we were just never gonna be. They thought emo would get big and they really started to drop a lot of bombshells about listening to the Hives and the White Stripes. We were just like, ‘Wait a second – this is Sevendust. This has nothing to do with emo whatsoever.’ I appreciate it, it’s not my thing but I can understand why a lot of people would be into it. No, I don’t think Jack White is the 17th best guitar player of all time. I wanna shove it up Rolling Stone’s ass (referring to the magazine’s list of the 100 best guitarists of all time).
Billy Gibbons wasn’t even nominated.
Eddie Van Halen was like 69th on the list and Steve Vai wasn’t even mentioned. But the whole emo thing wasn’t us. And we realized they’re never gonna figure out how to market and really do what we’re hopin’ they can do with a band like us. If they want us to be a different kind of band, it’s time to go. TVT did great things for two records; the first two records they were completely revolutionary with their whole take on the business, how we worked the video side of things. It was time to take our career back.
And this meant finding a new second guitar player. Was Sevendust the kind of band that needed two guitarists to make the music work?
It could have been a trio with a singer but there were two things: number one, I wasn’t strong enough as a guitar player because I played drums my whole. This is the first band I ever played guitar in. ‘Black’ was the first song that I’d ever written. I never owned a strap; I was sittin’ on a drum stool. Playing drums all those years, I just had a guitar in my lap. Vinnie handed me a strap and was like, ‘Saddle up, man, tear it up. Time to go.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’
Pantera definitely works with one (guitar); he had so much to say and could fill the space so well. And there was a certain thing about the Metallica sound and having those two guitar players. Iron Maiden, Priest, stuff like that I was always into. Sometimes I was kinda bummed out – you’d go see Van Halen and then you’d get up to a lead section and if it was one of the later records where they did tons of overdubs, you get to the lead section and all it was was bass and drums and like half the music will kinda drop out. That was the beauty of the old Van Halen records; when he did a lead, it was a lead, there wasn’t any rhythm guitar, they didn’t have Sammy in the band. But this was always set up to be a two-guitar band.
And what types of guitars were you drawn to when you started playing?
Les Pauls. I had an Ibanez, I had an RG 550 that was the first guitar I ever played and I will give Ibanez credit for one thing – that is why I play maple fretboards to this day. Which is kind of a tall order with a Les Paul. I have a ’79 and an ’80, both Customs; one’s a custom shop and one’s not. And the one’s that not just smokes the custom shop. And that’s the one that I actually had Epiphone design. I said, ‘Build this, a newer version of this.’ There’s just something about a maple fretboard that’s different, it feels completely different. I Just got used to that. I really do like the softball bat effect of a Les Paul; it was just something that you could beat on and being that I was a drummer it made sense. I’d pick up a Strat and I’d play it and it just sounded like I was mangling the shit out of a guitar. Whereas when I picked up a Les Paul and played it, it sounded perfect. Strats need to be played whereas Les Pauls can really be wailed on. You can just beat the shit out of ‘em and as long as the guitar is set up right for your string type, it’s always gonna bounce back.
I owned a Jackson for a little while as a backup to that Ibanez but once I got my first Les Paul it was over.
It sounds like there are various types of guitars on the Next album.
There are some single coils on there; Sonny played a Strat on a few things and I tried the Strat but the Strat wasn’t really happenin’ for me. I played a Telly on all my single coil stuff believe it or not. There was a Telly in the studio that was noisy as all hell but it just sounded great when you dropped it in the mix at the right spot. Everything else for the most part is all Les Paul. Even Sonny’s stuff. He’s got two Les Pauls; he plays Washburn live but he’s got a couple Les Pauls that are just awesome.
What types of amps were you running through?
In the studio we tried everything. Usually I’ll start with an old Marshall; I’ve got a ’71 Super Tremolo that’s God in a box. Every time I’ve plugged it in with every producer I’ve ever worked with, I fire this thing up and everyone is like ‘Wow.’ And they spend 30 minutes tryin’ to make it sound bad. It’s one of those amps where it’s like no matter where you put the EQ it sounds amazing. That and the Randall stuff, the RM100s and the Vmax Series have just been solid as a rock. The RM100s I’m just in love with. Just being able to fire a channel at will. I’ve got one amp and 15 different modules and if I want to do a different clean or a different rhythm or a different lead, I can switch ‘em all or switch one or switch two and it takes about three seconds to do it. You just grab a soldering iron and some different tubes and just get on the phone and say, ‘I want a little bit more of this and less of this’ and they’ll tell you, ‘Put that in there, put this in here’ and it’s a very cool tube amp. And it’s a huge step for Randall bein’ that they’ve never been a tube amp company. Ever.
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| "John Connolly Sevendust guitar tone is probably 1/3 Les Paul and 2/3 Marshall." |
What is the John Connolly Sevendust guitar tone? How do you describe it?
It’s probably 1/3 Les Paul and 2/3 Marshall because I’m using the Randall Super Lead mods and we’ve actually got those modded very very close to the mod I had done on my ’71 Marshall. So it is a Marshall with not nearly as much gain as you would think. Most of the choruses on most of these songs, when you listen you hear all 6 strings on the neck that are ringing at once. That’s a very difficult thing to do when you got a lot of gain goin’ on. It’s a beautiful thing when you get the gain to just sit in the right spot where you can actually hear all of the voices in those chords. And like I said with 6 strings ringing on a neck it’s a tall order because if you’re the slightest bit out of tune or have just the slightest bit too much gain, it all just kind of mushes together and doesn’t make sense. So it’s a real fine line because you got to be able to pull that off live. But in the studio it’s easy, you just gain up your verses and when you get to the chorus you just kind of gain it back a little bit so you can hear everything. But it’s Les Paul, Marshall, with a very heavy hand.
And the band is involved in various de-tunings?
Oh, yeah, we live in de-tune land. I think our highest tuning is dropped C#, dropped B, and then we have dropped A#. But the dropped A# is basically the exact same thing as B except we only tune down the heavy strings, the lowest strings. So you can’t play a traditional barre chord. It’s a staggered barre chord that you have to play if you’re playing that tuning. It’s a difficult tuning to play in because the guitar is never really in tune with itself.
If you were to do like drop D, for instance, which is the easiest, you can take one finger and pretty much barre and play your chord. If you were to take that bottom string (6th string) and tune it down one ? step, it would force you (to fret in different ways). If you were on the 5th fret for your barre, you would have to use your middle finger to fret on the 6th fret of the low string where you were fretting on the 5th frets of the other strings. It’s kind of an awkward position but we will beat this shape to death. But it’s easier than taking a whole guitar and tuning it all down to A#. But we definitely live in the world of being de-tuned for sure.
And there’s some acoustic on this record?
Yeah, actually there’s a lot of acoustic on a lot of Sevendust records to be honest with you. It’s funny, when we did the Southside Double-Wide, the acoustic thing, Clint was a little tripped out about it because he was like, ‘Oh, we need to really sit down and figure out how to play these songs on acoustic.’ And ironically the place that most of the songs that I write usually originate in my living room, not in my studio. And it’s on an acoustic guitar sitting in front of the TV. So I’ll kinda be beating out, searching, just doing whatever, trying to find a cool chorus or a cool verse and if I get an idea then I’ll run up and grab the electric and play it. ‘Enemy’ was all acoustic, 100%, and then we took it into the studio and translated it over to electric.
There’s actually a lot of acoustic (on Next); we use it for layers. We use it in there, we kind of tuck it in. There’s stuff in choruses that’s not real obvious but if you were to take it out, you’d miss it. The last song on the record called ‘Shadows in Red’ is the first time we’ve ever done all acoustic. They wanted to put loops and samples and triggers and all kinds of stuff and it was like, ‘No, no, no, no – acoustic drums, acoustic guitars, acoustic bass, viola, and voice, and that’s it.’ I think we cheated and ran a DI on the bass.
I have a Taylor that I absolutely love. I think it’s one of the 814s (CE). But the problem is it’s really made for fingerpickers and it really really doesn’t like to be hit hard. And I like to hit it kinda hard so I think I’m gonna go with the 914 (CE). They didn’t have a 914 in stock when we were doin’ the record.
I’ve got a Martin that just sounds unbelievable but there’s something about the Taylor that’s so musical to me. And it’s a couple thousand dollar guitar, it’s not anything that’s out of control; it’s not like a $20,000 instrument. I’ve got two or three Epiphones that are absolutely unbelievable and they just sound great. We used a couple Epiphones, we used a Washburn 12-string, and we had a Gibson that sounded great for about six seconds and then we put the heavier strings on it and started to tune around with it and it just would never sit. The Taylor? We put the strings on it and let it sit for about a day-and-a-half and that thing was dead on. And the Gibson had the exact opposite problem; the intonation from the 12th fret to the open string just never happened. When you tuned down that low, the Taylor would let you know that you were right on the edge but it was musical and usable.
And how do you approach the guitar as a layering instrument? There seem to be multiple overdubs on the new album so how exactly do you orchestrate the parts and keep everything in balance?
Each record is a little different. On Animosity there was an insane amount of guitars; you would shit if you knew how many tracks per song there was. Next was probably the most straightforward in terms of the traditional way of making music. Put drums down, guitars, and then you track the bass. And the only reason we do that is because we ran into some tuning issues on Animosity that we couldn’t necessarily hear when it was just bass and drums. Even with like a scratch guitar track through a POD or something, you really don’t realize what kind of a tuning issue until you’ve got the left guitars and the right guitars. Typically what we’ll do is two tracks of everything on rhythm; I’ll put down a main and double that with my second. Sonny will put down his main and double with his second and ironically his second amp was my first amp, so there’s a lot of Marshall on the record. So there are two tracks left and two tracks right and they are basically mirror-image tracks of each other. There are a couple sections like the intro to a middle eight or a lead section where the double may drop out for four bars before it kicks back in.
Then we start trackin’ vocals; we don’t put another guitar part in the house until we start puttin’ vocals up in the mix. Clint was a big advocate of putting a lot of different guitar parts in but sometimes we’d have so much shit crammed in so many holes, that by the time we got to sing we were having to sidestep things for the sake of it just being there instead of being really useful and necessary. From that point, what we’ll do is usually put down the skeleton; we’ll get verses and at least choruses up in the hole, maybe not with harmonies and stuff, but at least we’ll get things in so that when we do go for a B part or an extra little whatever, at least we’ve got something in there we can play off. Instead of trying to work the vocals around the guitar part; we work the guitar parts around the vocals.
Certainly it’s premature to start thinking about the next album but do you have any ideas? What seems to happen with a lot of metal bands is that they paint themselves into a corner stylistically. They tend to be one-trick ponies and that’s really the downfall of so much modern music.
On this record we said, ‘OK, we’re going to focus on being a heavy band again.’ But I think the next record is gonna focus on not only being a heavy band but being a band that pushes music a little bit. Instead of sitting back and going, ‘OK, this is what radio expects or the label expects,’ instead of doing that we might write some 2-minute songs and some 10-minute songs. We might write a song with one section that never gets repeated again. Music shouldn’t have those boundaries and I think when you start to try to sell records, that’s when you put the boundaries up.
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