Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Sevendust

February 15, 2007

More than a decade into their career, Sevendust is running stronger than ever, gearing up for the release of their strongest album to date, Alpha (available March 6, 2007). The road hasn’t been easy for the Atlanta-based quintet, which has struggled with a record label that didn’t understand the band (TVT Records) and another that mysteriously vanished following the release of their previous album, Next, in 2005 (Winedark Records). But even frustration and uncertainty has its benefits; the band has channeled both into Alpha, an ambitious effort chronicling one person’s descent into madness. The strength of the new album, combined with the band’s impressive catalog, landed them a prime deal in which Asylum Records, part of the Warner Music Group, is distributing the new release on the band’s own imprint, 7Bros. Records.

Staying true to their well-earned reputation as relentless road warriors, Sevendust started the Alpha tour about a month before the album’s release. Guitarist John Connolly recently checked in from the road to discuss the new album, touring and more with Greg Maki of Live-Metal.net.

John Connolly: Yeah, a couple shows in, I guess, two shows in. We’re on our third show today.

The first one was a little rough, just gear issues more than anything. I think we were alright, but we were just trying to get all our equipment to work after it’s been sitting in storage for a while. No matter how many times you rehearse it, you know, it always works fine when you’re jamming by yourself, but as soon as you add people to the mix … [laughs] … all the gremlins come out. But last night was great. We got all the gremlins worked out, so tonight should be the first one where I think we’ve got all the problems worked out. It’s good, man. Long set, it’s a lot different from most of the recent tours that we’ve done. We’re a little over 90 minutes. I think it’s 18 or 19 songs in the set right now. It’s a nice set, man.

When you’ve been off the road for a while and you’ve had some time off, do you starting getting that itch like you really want to get out there and play?

Yeah. Sometimes it will take a little while, you know, we’ve all got kids now. So you lose yourself in wearing the daddy hat and doing that kind of thing. It’s cool to get domesticated every now and again. But, you know, you start watching TV and I notice that I’m skipping MTV and I’m not watching VH1 and stuff like that, and it’s all because when I do watch it, you kind of do get that itch. It’s one of those love/hate relationships. You hate to be away from your family, but it’s the coolest thing in the world to get up on stage and do what we’re able to do for a living. It’s just incredible.

I’ve seen Sevendust live a bunch of times, so I know that your shows are just filled with energy. What do you do before you go on stage to get yourself ready to go out there and do that?

Honestly, we hang out, we warm up a little bit. I probably play guitar for 35 or 40 minutes to kind of get the blood flowing. We warm up our voices a little bit, do a little stretching. It’s a lot more mellow than you would think it is. You know, most people assume when they see the set that there has to be some really crazy thing that you’re doing before you get out there, but it’s just the basic stuff. Warming up, more than anything. We’ve learned from experience that’s the key to everything, especially vocally. When you’re doing 18, 19 songs and there’s that much singing going on and you’re doing it four or five nights a week, after three or four weeks it starts to take a toll. We just want to be able to stay healthy so that we can finish the tour, because it is pretty physically demanding.

If it’s a good night, everyone’s pumped up and ready to go and meet the fans. If it’s a bad night … [laughs] … everyone’s pumped up and ready to go sit down with the crew and start buying plane tickets. [laughs] No, I mean, it’s always good to come off stage and know that it was a good night. If it’s a bad night, we’ll usually be in a bad mood, but generally we’re pretty much ready to go, we’re ready to meet the folks who came out and jammed with us.

When I saw you guys last year, I really enjoyed seeing “Wired” back in the set.

This time around, “[Too] Close to Hate” is back in and “Home” is back in. “Home” was one of the top-requested ones when we did the fan requests, so we figured we needed to go ahead and do that one. [Guitarist] Sonny [Mayo] had never played “Home” before. He’d never played “Close to Hate” before either, so we had to kind of get him through those. So those two and most of the rest of the additional songs are all gonna be new songs, pretty much.

The album doesn’t come out until next month, so how much of the new material are you playing?

Right now, we’re doing four and everybody’s arguing about another two. [laughs] It’s nice when we’re sitting there bitching that we don’t have enough slots for the new songs. But it’s tough because if you play that much of the set for people who have never heard any of it, it’s cool, but you don’t quite get the reaction that you expect because they don’t know the songs. They know “Praise,” they know “Face to Face,” they know “Enemy” and stuff like that, but you play the new stuff and all they can do is sit there, bob their heads and smile. So you can’t expect too much. But after the record comes out, we’ll probably start rotating a handful of songs. Ideally, we’d love to be able to do as many off the new record as possible. We’re even discussing later on in the year picking a handful of markets and actually doing the album in its entirety, actually perform it as one piece and come back and do an encore of six or seven songs to kind of cover the basics from the rest of the records that people really want to hear.

You’ve got Diecast and Invitro out with you on the road. Invitro is [former Snot guitarist] Mikey Doling’s new band. What’s it like being back out on the road with him?

Ten years after the fact, man. It’s exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. That’s what’s so cool. [laughs] It’s awesome, man. He’s got such a good thing going on there. The band is great. He’s happy. He’s the same guy that he was 10 years ago and we’re just kind of pinching ourselves every night when we run into each other, like, “How weird is this, man?” But it’s cool, man. It’s definitely nice to have him back out with us, for sure.

I’ve been a fan of Sevendust ever since I heard “Black,” I guess 10 years ago now.

Well, thank you very, very much. Thank you.

I understand you guys took some time off before making the album, is that right?

Actually, it was after. It was right after the album. We did that April-May run and when everything started going a little sideways with the Winedark group on our last record, we said, “You know what? Let’s try to get in”—it was kind of a strange call to make because on one hand you sit there and you go, “You know what? We really need to sit down and spend a bunch of time making a record.” But on the other hand, I was like, “Well, the best records we made are the ones that we didn’t spend much time on at all, so let’s not go down that road. Let’s make something kind of quick, like we did on the first two records.” Because, you know, the vibe of the music was a lot more along the lines of those first two records anyway. So it was like, instead of sitting there and rethinking things—I mean, honestly, we spent six months making Animosity and that’s probably as long as I ever want to try to spend making a record. But the funny thing is after the third or fourth month, you kind of start deconstructing perfectly good songs because you’re just bored with them at that point. This time, we didn’t have that chance to deconstruct anything. We basically just went off our gut instinct and said, “OK, that’s the way it’s supposed to be because that’s the way we all felt it.” At one point in time when everybody comes to an agreement and says that that’s how we feel that the song should come across, then you leave it alone. If you spend too much time in the studio, I swear, we’re the worst. We’ll go in there and we’ll second guess stuff and listen to it and tear it down and we’ll turn it into a record like Seasons or a record like Animosity, which I love those records, but there’s a certain element of simplicity and—I don’t know, our arrangements on the first couple records were a little all over the place, a little crazy, we had a lot of extra stuff in the songs—but those are the records that our fans want to hear the most. I mean, when we talk to these fans who sit outside the bus for hours after the show, they’re very nice about Seasons, they like Next a lot, Animosity is usually one of their favorites, but they always have an affinity for Home and the first album. I do, too, to be quite honest with you. It’s funny; you sit here and you’re in a band for this long and usually we only listen to, like, one record back. What did we just do and what are we not gonna try to repeat again? It’s been a long time since I actually put the first record in, and when all these songs started coming out for possible songs to be added to the set on these fan set lists, I was like, “Man, I’m gonna go jam that first record again and check it out.” And it’s a trip because it’s been a while since I listened to that stuff. But it is cool for a lot of different reasons. I totally understand what is different from then to now. A lot of it was just sitting in the studio. You sit in the studio too long, you’ll second guess everything. You’ll edit everything. You think you’re doing positive things, but after a point it’s time to just leave songs alone and let them be.

Honestly, it was fast. As soon as we got the studio booked, it was maybe about three weeks. We had about three weeks to pull as much music together as possible and immediately I just started slamming as much stuff on CD, just working quickly. I wouldn’t sit there and dwell on “OK, I need to write this, I need to write that.” I basically picked up a guitar and jammed and whatever came out, I went back to it later and I went and found the songs. They were there, I just had to find them. And then you just kind of put things together and started sending CDs to [vocalist] Lajon [Witherspoon] and [drummer] Morgan [Rose] so that they could kind of get a jump on the vocals, and I guess once I got up in Atlanta we probably had five of the 15 that we ended up recording finished, and two weeks after that everything else was done. We went in, we did all the music in eight days and then the vocals took another two and a half to three weeks. So it really happened fast. When the record was finished, that’s when we took the break. We sat back and went, “How did we pull this off?” It was one of the smoothest—you know, it’s definitely nerve-wracking when you’ve got your entire career based on what you think is gonna be good for you and for your fans, and a lot of people would say, “Well, you need to get a big name producer and you need to go off and write songs for two years and release this gigantic whatever.” We were like, “Let’s self-produce it, let’s do it as fast as humanly possible.” Because for some reason or another Sevendust works better that way. We learned from experience. Less time is better. I don’t know why. I guess it’s more instinctive that way. You don’t let your head get in the way. You just kind of react, you let your hand and your heart kind of do what it’s gonna do, and if people are digging that riff and that song then you move on.

When you’re producing, like you did on this album and Next, how do you see your job? What are you trying to accomplish?

Just making sure that Sevendust sounds like Sevendust. We’ve done this so many times, even aside from records we’ve been in the studio. Every time we go into the studio, we’re basically doing the record twice anyway. We do demo versions of everything and get all the vocals mapped out before we actually go and track. This is the first time we didn’t do that—actually, this is the second time, because we didn’t do that on the first record either; we didn’t need to, you know, we pretty much already had those songs done. It’s just basically making sure that Sevendust sounds like we’re supposed to sound and the songs come across the way they’re supposed to. A producer’s job, for the most part, is number one make it sound good, number two make the songs make sense and have some kind of musicality about them. I’m not a real big guy on saying I have a writing style and if I’m gonna go and work with somebody you’re just gonna have to deal with my writing style. Most producers are like that. The best producers are the ones who don’t inflict any kind of writing style on the artist whatsoever. They get the most out of the band. So that was pretty much my job. Instead of throwing a million ideas down and going, “OK, because I wrote this, it needs to stick,” it was my job to listen to everything that Morgan would contribute or Lajon would contribute and having enough humble quality about me to go, “Alright, well mine isn’t as good as that, so we’re gonna use that.” Whatever is best for the band, you know, and sometimes seeing that what you tried to contribute just isn’t up to par. But if you have a band where you have so many different sources of input, if you’re just not having a good moment on a part or you’re stumped for something, there’s four other guys chomping at the bit to have a whack at it. But things can happen kind of quick. It’s not like one guy sits there and says, “Well, I’m really not sure what we’re supposed to do here, so we’ll come back to it later.” It’s the exact opposite of that.

Is that something you enjoy? Would you want to produce other bands somewhere down the line?

It’s something that I love. I’m a studio rat. I love being out on stage and I love being out on the road, but there’s something about just creating. I have a certain love for just putting the headphones on and just going into my home studio and just creating songs, just building things and then swapping things out and trying different things, trying different things sonically, from an engineering standpoint, more than anything. Because as far as the songwriting part goes, like I said, my job is not to try to inflict what I am as a songwriter onto something. It’s to try to get the best of whatever I’m working with out of it, even if it is my own band, and the best parts of this band, for a lot of reasons, happen to include everybody but myself. I know I’m good for certain things in the band and I’m not at other ones. But producing is definitely something that Morgan and myself have taken great affection for. I’ve got no problems being in the studio. I love it.

The songs on Next were mostly written before Sonny joined the band, right?

How did having him in the band throughout this process this time affect Alpha?

It was cool. Like I said, once we all got together in Atlanta , it was having an extra set of ears and eyes to kind of see what was happening. Honestly, the bulk of the record was pretty much done over the computer, just sending demo stuff up to Morgan and Lajon so that they could start getting their heads wrapped around what they’re gonna want to sing or want to say, just different ideas, which songs they were into and which songs they weren’t. And having him be there as an extra guy to throw the insight in—him and [bassist] Vinnie [Hornsby] would just sit there tweaking things, moving this, let’s shorten that, add this little thing. It definitely helps a lot having another guy over there who knows what the hell he’s doing and can definitely throw those things out there and have them stick. It’s awesome to have a band where there’s contributions coming from everywhere.

This album and the last one, too, really seem to be taking the band back to a heavier sound. What’s inspiring that aggression?

Honestly, my inspiration comes from my roots, the things that inspired me in the first place. I came into the music business a little strange. I’m a guitar player in Sevendust, but this is the first and only band that I’ve ever played guitar in. I’m naturally a drummer, so when I made the transition from that instrument over it was around ’93, probably ’94, and that was right about the point where Nirvana had exploded and the whole Seattle scene, grunge scene had just gotten huge and everyone said, “Fuck the guitar solos. We don’t need guitar solos.” And I was thinking the whole time, I was like, “Thank God,” because I’m a drummer. So I was like, alright, this levels the playing field a little bit more; all these great guitar players don’t want to play solos right now. So I was like, alright, at least I’m not going to embarrass myself by the fact that I’m a drummer and I really don’t know how to play the guitar at all. [laughs]

But the first records I ever got into as a guitar player were Master of Puppets and everything that Metallica did after that and then [Pantera’s] Vulgar Display of Power. Those are probably the two yardsticks that I use more than anything, and that’s where it came from. I’ve never been big on listening to music when we write our records. I usually just listen to what I’m working on and sometimes you get tunnel vision when you do that because you kind of lose perspective. You think you’re in a cool spot, but unless you have something to compare it to you’re really not that sure. And honestly I just spent a lot of time with those records again. I hadn’t for a while and when I went back to them it was so inspirational, and now I know going back and listening to them again why they affected me the way that they did.

It was more just that. Like, life is short, what kind of record do you really want to make? We went as far in the commercial radio direction as I think we were comfortable attempting with Seasons and we got as experimental and out there as we could on Animosity, but we still hadn’t done the one record that I really wanted to make and a lot of that had to do with the fact that I just wasn’t talented enough to be able to play the guitar. [laughs] It took me a little while to be able to catch up and kind of at least get back into the same ballpark. And now all of a sudden you’ve got the whole shred thing that’s just coming wide open again. You’ve got bands like Soilwork and Lamb of God and Mastodon and others just like, holy shit, man, there is a serious movement with heavy music going on right now. Regardless of whether radio wants to accept it or not, it’s happening and it’s still there. We’re probably one of the few bands out of the bunch that’s had the luxury of being able to have some radio. Having Lajon gives us that accessibility. That factor is huge, it does mean something, but I don’t know, man. I watch a band like Lamb of God and I don’t think they’re worried or need radio whatsoever. I don’t think that band’s concerned about it. But it’s nice and it’s refreshing. I kind of got back to my roots and the ironic thing is it seems like a lot of these other bands are kind of doing the same thing. I like metal with solos, I like metal being heavy, I like it being metal, I don’t like it being—trying to water it down and sell it off as emo, you know, put a cardigan on and maybe you won’t be so hard. You know, whatever. Music is music and if you’re inspired to do something, buy something that is that and that’s what you honestly feel and what you honestly love, then that’s what you should do. If you’re honestly into emo and that’s your thing, that’s cool. But I’m honestly not and I’m into my thing.

Aside from “Alpha” being one of the songs on the album, why did you choose that as the title for it?

Well, the whole record is a bit of a concept. It was kind of one of those strange things where it happened to cross us, because usually what’ll happen is as we’re doing the record, as the songs are going down and you’ll have the last two or three songs that we’ve already tracked musically that still are missing a few vocals, things that we need to kind of start to fool around with. As we were rounding everything out, usually at that point we start getting all the lyrics written entered into the computer so that we can make sure we’ve got everything right for copyrights and for the album art and for the liner notes and all that stuff, and we go through the meetings, sit there song by song, go, “OK, what’s the song about? What was it inspired by? Who contributed what?” And we would kind of have these discussions so that if someone says, “What’s that song about,” at least we kind of know, because sometimes, you know, Lajon might write a line in a verse and Morgan may write a chorus and I might write a bridge and they all kind of mean something based on what was there before what we did, but sometimes you don’t really know. Sometimes you’re just kind of going off what your interpretation is. It’s funny, sometimes there’s songs that are written about three entirely different things but find one unanimous vision for everything.

With Alpha, we noticed that as we were going through it, it was like, alright, every song is a conversation between these two people, but the two people are really one person. It’s basically just voices in someone’s head. And slowly but surely, we started going through and I was like, “Dude, all these songs are this.” And Morgan kind of looked at me and was like, “Yeah, strange, isn’t it?” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s really strange.” It’s basically Fight Club. It’s Fight Club the record, except the only difference is you don’t find out that there’s another entity [inside his head] at the end of the movie, you find out at the beginning. So it’s basically about someone who is slowly but surely losing their mind and they know that they’re losing their mind, and there’s a couple cries out for help as it goes through. It’s definitely a darker piece for us, for sure. But it’s just one of those things. Everything we do reflects something that we’ve had going on in our lives and when we finally got out of our TVT deal and the whole Winedark thing really, really started getting weird, you look back and you’re like, “Man, when am I gonna do the right thing and why do we continue to have all this weirdness?” And sometimes it just drives you nuts and it definitely influences the way you write and what you write about. It’s a darker piece and, like I said, every song kind of relates. As you take the journey through the record and listen to it from that perspective, all these arguments within one person’s head, it’s definitely a darker thing for us, for sure.

I was going to ask about the album cover, but I can definitely see how that fits in.

Exactly. A lot of folks have been like, “Whoa, wait a minute. What’s going on here?” I’m like, “Yeah, well, that’s what the record is about.”

You mentioned Winedark. What was the reason for the split there and how did you end up with the Warner Music Group?

There was really no split. I believe they ceased to exist.

They just kind of up and vanished. It was kind of one of those deals where they just all of a sudden, you know, there were five or six and then there were three or four and then it got down to two or three and then the money ran out and then it was just like, OK. We got our lawyers involved, basically got the record back and basically just sitting on it, just waiting to do a re-release. We’re gonna do a re-release at some point, probably throw a few bonus tracks that we didn’t finish back on the Next sessions that we did finish when we did Alpha. We’ll probably do some kind of a re-release at some point in time.

But they basically just up and vanished and, literally, when we went into the studio to do this record we didn’t have a record deal at all. We didn’t even call anybody up and say, “Hey, we’re looking.” We said let’s go make a record and then let’s go shop the record. Let’s not shop the fact that Sevendust is looking for a deal. ’Cause a lot of people would be like, “Oh, Sevendust, didn’t they get out of the TVT thing and then the other thing?” We said we’re gonna shop a piece of music, a finished piece of music. ’Cause another thing we wanted is regardless of our situation, if you go into a deal where you’re the record company and it’s a distribution deal, which is ideally what we wanted and which is what we got, you’re calling the shots on everything, but in the event that you do end up getting courted by a record company that wants a standard kind of deal, we wanted them to understand that there was no going back in the studio and re-recording this song because, you know, one of the suits in the offices wasn’t feeling it. It was like, “This is a finished piece of music. If you don’t like that song, don’t listen to it.” Unfortunately, that’s the way it was. It was just like I’m not gonna go back to what we did. With TVT, we had a lot of that happen, where the powers that be would start to sit there and voice their opinion on what they thought—“Maybe you should rethink this or rewrite that chorus,” and I’m like, “Why are we doing this? You’re job is to sell records. Our job is to make music.” There’s very few records where I absolutely love every song that’s on the record, but I gotta be honest with you, usually the songs that I don’t like I can name 10 people that love those songs. Music is totally subjective and I think too many people want what’s perfect for them and it’s not supposed to be that way.

That’s where the Warner deal came in and they honestly said, “We don’t give a shit what you put on there. We don’t care.” They said, “We love the record. We think it’s great. We love the band. Let’s do this.” They said, “You pick the singles, we put the money in, we’ll give you a marketing strategy and we’ll sit down and decide to do stuff and do it.” It was plain and simple. There were a couple other labels that wanted to do a standard, more of a standardized kind of deal. One of them was hoping that we were gonna go down the Seasons road, like, two steps further. When they heard the record, they were just like, “Whoa, this is the polar opposite of where we thought you might go.” [laughs] But that’s what Warner loved about it. Warner just signed Mastodon. They’re like, “We don’t give a shit. We understand that people want this.” They turn on the radio and they hear a song—unfortunately, there’s a lot of bands out there over the past two or three years that I can’t tell them apart. There’s carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies, and it’s like wearing your influences on your sleeve is one thing, but when I can’t tell who, that’s when it starts to get confusing.

It’s so nice to see a lot of these bands who are kind of going back to their roots again and kind of getting away from “Alright, we’ve gotta write it for radio.” ’Cause a lot of the labels are still into that. But, honestly, radio is going away. Unfortunately, radio is something that’s taken huge hits by the Internet. Between the Internet and satellite radio, it’s getting really, really hard for the stations to compete. So it’s funny because the labels are still hanging on to a part of the business that’s been rapidly shrinking. I don’t know, maybe two, three years ago we probably had 85, maybe 86 stations, now we’re down to 29. That’s a lot. So you’re talking about, like, a 50-percent drop-off every year. That’s how big a chunk the Internet, XM and Sirius have taken out of it. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing for us because, honestly, with the Internet and with satellite radio we’re probably exposed more to more folks, but it’s just not what you’re used to. I’m used to being able to go into these towns and sit down with these people and have a meal and shoot the shit, and it’s disheartening when you realize that that part of the business is getting really, really small. It’s just going away, so the ironic thing is the labels still focus on “You’ve gotta have a hit single.” Well, there ain’t no radio stations left to play the damn things hardly at all. Most people get their stuff online and on satellite, and on that level we’re on a level playing field. We probably get just as much exposure as Celine Dion. It works out for the artist, for sure.

Absolutely. It’s something that we’re gonna take very, very slowly. We’re not gonna pull a we’re-gonna-sign-10-bands-a-year and just kind of throw all kinds of stuff out there. First of all, the hardest part is it’s got to pass everybody in the band. Everybody in the band has to agree that we’re gonna sign the band, and that’s probably gonna be the toughest thing because we all listen to different kinds of music and we all hear different things. I’m not saying that we’re gonna sign something that sounds like us or is gonna be heavy because I like heavy stuff. That’s not how we’re gonna approach the label at all. It is gonna have to be something that all five of us believe in, and it’s gonna have to be something that we can afford to actually spend some time on. Because that’s another thing we’re not gonna do is just chuck some money at something and see if it sinks or swims. If we really, really believe in something then we’re gonna get behind it and make it happen. Once we get our album out, kind of launched, later on this year we’re gonna start going over—we’ve got a handful of bands that we’ve kind of been sitting with on the backburner—nothing that I can really speak of right now. But eventually we will get a band into the studio and there will be another band on 7Bros. Records, for sure. But we’re just kind of neck-deep with us right now. Especially after the whole last thing, it’s like, alright, I really, really to make sure this album and this band is completely stable before we start messing around with other bands careers. I don’t want to half-ass anything when it comes to somebody else’s life. We want to be able to get behind this and do it the way that I would hope that it would be done for me if I was in that band’s spot.

Sevendust has been around for more than 10 years now. What is it that keeps you going and motivated?

Just love of music, man. I mean, honestly, love of picking the guitar up and just playing. It sounds corny, it sounds cheesy, but it really is the honest to God truth. After you don’t do it for a while, we really start to miss it, and then we get back in the room together and it’s just all smiles. It’s the coolest situation in the world when you look around and you go, “Damn, I’m in my favorite band.” Right now, my favorite band is Sevendust and it has nothing to with me. It’s the other guys in the band that I’m a fan of. It’s a great spot when you can sit there and still say that about your friends and your brothers, the brothers that we are in the band. I’m an only child, so these are my brothers. These are the only brothers that I’ve ever really known. And that’s it, man. You know, honestly, getting out there and meeting the fans and just playing new music and being excited about playing new music. Playing the old stuff is cool, but we love playing the new stuff. Everybody needs to hurry up and get the record and listen to this stuff so we can jam it.

You know, I’m sure one way, shape or form or another it will be. The funny thing is as we’re sitting here releasing Alpha, a lot of fans last night we’re asking if we were gonna do an acoustic record. I’m like, “Well, you really need to hear Alpha before you think we’re going in that direction.” But, you know, I’m sure at some point in time we’ll probably do something more along those lines, because that acoustic thing was only 14 shows. I could see us doing something like that again, just because it was different and it was cool. But, honestly, 10 years from now, I hope, you know? It would be nice to be able to say that we were gonna be able to do this for that long, I mean, God willing, we can all keep our knees attached to our bodies. [laughs] But, yeah, health permitting, I’d love to be able to do whatever version of Sevendust, whether it be the full-on electric onslaught or whether it be a more mellow acoustic version, because we definitely love doing that stuff, too. I’m not gonna lie, you know? A lot of people are like, “You’ve gotta keep it real, it’s gotta be heavy.” It’s like, man, some of the heaviest shit I ever heard is a dude sitting down, singing with an acoustic guitar, no amps, no effects, nothing to hide behind. That’s when you’re laying it all out there. Honestly, it’s easy to hide behind distortion and effects. When you’re just up there with an acoustic guitar and a microphone, that’s just the purest form of music, and to me that’s pretty heavy. Especially when you’ve got a singer who is as gifted as Lajon is at actually being able to sing, having that outlet is an incredible advantage, I think, that we have on a lot of other bands. It’s just because it does give us that accessibility factor. My mother will call up and, I mean, she can’t stand the music heavier than hell, but she’ll be like, “Lajon really, really sang this beautiful part.” And I’m like, “See, there’s stuff on there that even a mother could love.”