What ever Shinedown is doing, it is working. Here is a band who have not released a full studio album since 2022’s Planet Zero, and yet this year – once again – they have been tearing it up on the festival circuit and will be spending the hottest months of summer packing out arenas across the US.
This time they at least have a double A-side single behind them, a taste of things to come from their next studio album, which frontman Brent Smith tells us is “roughly 85 per cent” finished, pencilled in for a release in the first quarter of 2026.
Dance, Kid, Dance!/Three Six Five made a little bit of history for Shinedown, too, as the pulled ahead of box-office heavyweights such as Metallica and Foo Fighters to become the first band to reach 20 Mainstream Rock Airplay number ones on Billboard. It’s not all about the numbers, of course, even if they do go some way to explaining how Smith, guitarist Zach Myers, bassist Eric Bass and drummer Barry Kerch have become accustomed to adding venues like Madison Square Garden to the itinerary.
It’s all about the songs, and how they connect, and how they work in all kinds of environments. This is why Smith and Myers can step off the main stage at Download then pare their set down to a duo for an acoustic show in north London.
Okay, they threw in a handful of covers – Valerie by the Zutons, Oasis’ Don’t Look Back In Anger – but even the Shinedown tracks that were written with Myers’ electric guitar parked in Drop D, with a tone dialled in for the pit, could translate to a more intimate setting. Surely, there’s some secret to it.
That’s why Smith joins us on an unbearably hot morning in London; to share that secret. Smith makes an interesting subject. He doesn’t play guitar. At least, he doesn’t consider himself a guitarist. It’s seemingly at odds with the advice he heard the legendary producer/songwriter David Foster (Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, etc) share, that all aspiring songwriters should play an instrument.
“I always thought that was interesting, but where I am and how I’ve always looked at myself as a songwriter is that I’ve never compared myself to anybody,” he says. “From a very, very young age, it was always about the melody and the lyrics – the message was always the main focus for me, and so I always looked at the melody as the musical instrument aspect of the song as well.”
Maybe Shinedown’s making the people wait for a record is working for them, too. In this conversation, Smith reveals he is at odds with the 24/7 pressure to create, to feed the streaming platforms with new material. Artists, need time to reflect.
But Shinedown’s success? Well, he sees them as “everyone’s band”. They are stylistically malleable. That set he performed with Myers included Robbie Williams and Lynyrd Skynyrd covers.
“When I think about certain songwriters or people that influence me the most, it’s all over the map. You should listen to a lot of styles,” he says. “Songwriting, there’s no rules to anything. That’s the beauty of it. You’re creating something out of nothing.”
You’ve said you don’t really play guitar but you do use it to write?
That’s probably the most profound thing I can tell anybody that’s a songwriter – be okay with the days where you’re like, ‘You know what, man? I’m gonna call it… 'Cos I just don't have it’
“Even though I couldn’t necessarily get a guitar and show you what these notes were, I could just pick it up and kind of hunt for the notes that I needed, for whatever the melody was in my head.
“I know how to play guitar for the stuff that I’ve written, but I can’t play you anybody else’s material. I’ve never wanted to be in a band that did cover songs or anything like that. From 10 years old, that’s pretty much the time I started to write songs.”
How do you communicate your melody ideas?
“I can sing it. I can sing it to whomever I’m working with. Like, I can sing to you what I’m feeling. I can find the picture, the key that I want to do it in, and I can hum it to you. Literally. And that’s what I've done my entire career.”
And you can do that with riffs too.
“If I have a type of a guitar sound [in mind], I’ve never cared about looking foolish or silly when I’m like, ‘Da-dun-dah-dun/dah-dun!’ [Hums riff]. I’ve never been shy about that kind of thing.
“That’s also where the balance of the vocalist – if the vocalist is a lyricist, like myself – and then the musicians that you’re working with [matters]. A lot of times guitar players, piano players, anyone that’s building the track, they’re like, ‘Give it to me, man. Like, what have you got? And let’s find it.’”
What comes first for you, the lyric or the melody? It can be a symbiotic relationship. Lyrics have a certain rhythm to them that can dictate how the melody might work.
If you’ve got one really, really powerful line that knocks you back in your seat, you can build off of that
“I’ve really never put any boundaries on that. The lyric can sometimes come first with no melody. If you’ve got one really, really powerful line that knocks you back in your seat, you can build off of that.
“So sometimes I’ll come in with an idea from the message standpoint of things, and I’ll have – what I believe anyway – is a very profound or a very strong statement, and we’ll go off of that. Sometimes it can be, I’ll walk in, and I’ll literally just look at the guys and say, ‘What have you you got?’ They’ll just kind of fumble through something, and then we’ll lock on to something.
“There’s no rules. There is not a particular way that we write something out, or that we come up with something creative. Some days you have it, and some days you don’t. We’re actually a band that’s okay with that.
“Like, if you’ve been working a month straight, and you’ve been writing every day, and, you come in out of the 30 days that you’ve been writing, and you come in on day 18 or 19 and you look at everybody and you’re like, ‘I’ve got nothing!’ [Laughs] It’s perfectly okay to not beat each other up on that day and spend 12 hours, because if you’re not into it, man, like, go! We’ll leave and go out on the boat, or we’ll go for a drive – or we’ll just call it.”
You can’t force it. The breaks are important. Some days are meant to be rest days.
“Yeah, I can remember there are certain years, early days of the band, and even before the band. I mean, me and Barry have been together for 24 years, and way, way back in the very beginning I remember there was one year – either 1999 or 2000 – when when I tell you, there’s 365 days in a year, I was in a studio or I was writing.
“It was trains, planes, and automobiles. I was working with so many writers all over the country. It was just go, go, go, go! And I understand why that was happening. It was you’re really trying to sharpen your instincts. You’re really trying to sharpen how versatile are you as a songwriter? And can you work with a lot of different people? And do you have what it takes to really come up with material on any given day?”
You can’t sustain that pace over the course of a year.
“I learned that I was beat up after that, and a lot of the stuff, towards the back half of the year, it really just all sounded the same. And I said, ‘I don’t want to do that. I’ve got to at least listen to my my own creative soul, if you will.
“That’s probably the most profound thing I can tell anybody that’s a songwriter – be okay with the days where you’re like, ‘You know what, man? I’m gonna call it… 'Cos I just don't have it.’ Because I guarantee you, at least for me, the following day, or two days later, I’ve had something that it just fell in my lap.”
The rest works.
“You need a bit of reflection. I think that sometimes songwriters forget to reflect because everything is so hypersensitive now in regards to, ‘You gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go! There’s gotta be content.’ Everything’s like… Listen, quality over quantity is my number one school of thought.”
Going back to letting the melody dictate the song. Is that why a track like Three Six Five you go straight into the verse. Songwriting is sometimes about hiding the football. This is so direct.
Three Six Five is truly about the people in your life that you just really wish you had one more day with. Or even if you just had an hour, one more hour with them.
“Honestly, that song, I think, at that moment in time – especially the day that me and Eric wrote it – it was such a necessary song that needed to be born that particular day. Once again, that song is truly about the people in your life that you just really wish you had one more day with. Or even if you just had an hour, one more hour with them.
“But in a lot of ways, it’s a celebration of life. It’s about understanding that we have an interesting relationship with death as human beings, and it’s a subject that not a lot of people want to talk about because it makes them feel uneasy, and it makes them sad, but the reality is this, when someone passes away, it’s interesting to have people come up to you and they say, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, and I can’t believe they’re gone.’ The fact of the matter is that they’re not gone. They’re everywhere.
“They’re still in you. They still represent who you are. If they meant something to you, and they taught you something, and they had a profound impact on who you are as a person, they’re always gonna live in spirit forever.”
What is the story behind Three Six Five?
“That particular song, last year, Eric had a very, very difficult year. He lost his father last year. He lost his aunt last year. His wife, Kelly, she lost her sister. I lost my Granny. A lot of people that we cared about passed away. With Three Six Five, it was one of those days where we were in the studio and it was a writing day but we were just not coming up with anything.
Song wrote itself in about an hour. And that’s how it happens sometimes, man. It just happens that way
“I walked outside. The studio that we work at is on Eric’s property. During the pandemic, Eric and his wife, they built a barn from the ground up, and now they have 20 stalls with horses, and we built a recording studio in, like, eight weeks! This was during hurricane season, and my son lives in Florida, and if you live in Florida, hurricane season is like sport for us.
“If you’re going to go to Florida, man, it’s something you’re going to have to deal with. They call it hurricane season for a reason, and it’s a part of living in that part of the world. So I called my son just to check in on him, because I was in South Carolina, he was in Florida, and he answered the phone, and I was like, ‘Hey!’ And he’s like, ‘Hey.’ And I’m like, ‘You doing okay?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing great.’ And I was like, ‘How's the weather?’ He was like, ‘Ah, you know, it’s starting to pick up. It’s gonna come through in like an hour.’
“They were just kind of batting down the hatches. There could have been like some electrical [issues], lights go out for a minute or whatever. No big deal. But when I call them, I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he goes, ‘I’m just sitting here waiting on a hurricane.’ It didn’t dawn at me on the time. But we finished our conversation, and then I walked back into the studio, and Eric had started playing the pattern for what would become the verse.”
Which goes back to what you were saying about taking moment away from the studio to think about life can open everything up.
“I remember, he was just sitting there with the acoustic guitar, and we went from having absolutely nothing to me walking outside 20 minutes, coming back in, and we didn’t even really speak to one another, I just heard what he was playing and sat down, and I waited for the one to come back around – at least what I thought was the one – and I said, ‘There is a hurricane and it’s on the way.’
“And then Eric was like, ‘Been sitting in this house for days.’ And then I was like, ‘I’m in here.’ And then he goes, ‘…waiting on the flood’, and it literally was back and forth like that. Song wrote itself in about an hour. And that’s how it happens sometimes, man. It just happens that way.”
And it is not like you were intentionally trying to write a song about dealing with grief and what all that entails when you woke up that morning.
“I can talk about this because me and Eric are so close, and he’s literally a genius. Myself, Zach and Barry, we’re very well aware of the type of individual that we are in a band with. He’s such a creative force. But he was having a really having a hard time dealing with his grief that he was feeling for the loss of his dad and his aunt.
“We didn’t walk into the studio that day with the mindset of, ‘We’re gonna write this song, and it’s going to heal those wounds… and what have you.’ I think what happened was that the song was so necessary, and it was something for him that he probably needed more than anyone, and that’s the beauty of music.
“It’s why music is medicine. It can heal you. It really can. So I just think that the song was just really necessary, and the universe lined us up a certain way.”
Songwriting is often hard work but sometimes it's effortless.
The flood is a flood of emotions. It’s coming to grips with what you have to face from a personal standpoint, from a philosophical standpoint, from an emotional standpoint
“These types of songs, you’re not on them for days at a time. These are called gifts. You don’t get a gift on every record. I would say on the last album, Planet Zero, A Symptom Of Being Human, that was definitely a gift. But essentially, with this record as well, 365 in a lot of ways, the song really wrote itself.”
You’re talking about hurricanes but moments of inspiration, creative epiphanies like this, they’re almost like meteorological events. They just arrive and you can’t control them.
“And the metaphor inside of that also too, is, ‘There’s a hurricane and it’s on the way/ Been sitting around this house for days/I’m in here waiting on the flood.’ Like, the hurricane is your mind. You know what I mean?”
The mind is never at rest.
“The flood is a flood of emotions. It’s coming to grips with what you have to face from a personal standpoint, from a philosophical standpoint, from an emotional standpoint. The band has always been a bit cerebral, lyrically. We work really, really hard on the lyrics. The message and the melody is a very important thing in what we do.”
![Shinedown - Sound Of Madness (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/WGt-8adyabk/maxresdefault.jpg)
You worked with Rick Beato before he was famous. What was he like? What makes him a good producer?
I’m so proud of Rick Beato, man. That guy, dude, that man. When you talk about just knowledge of music and of instrumentation, he is a literal genius on a lot of different levels as well
“Oh, my God, man – he’s the best! I have so many fond memories from working with Rick. I’m so proud of Rick Beato, man. That guy, dude, that man. When you talk about just knowledge of music and of instrumentation, he is a literal genius on a lot of different levels as well.
“You know what, Rick is? Back in the day, when we were writing with one another, Rick was what we call a great hang. He really, really was. Rick was so childlike in a lot of ways, like, he was a kid.”
You wrote with him as well.
“It’s so interesting, because writing songs for him, he has this theory and this musical knowledge that is profound, but at the same time, he was really just a great innovator… Especially on guitar. He had so much knowledge of the guitar. He was very eclectic. He just knew how to use the instrument.
“He could find, like, the emotional side of the instrument, but he could also find the technical – if you will, music theory – but I think also, Rick would tell you, it’s who you would work with.
“Our first album, Rick and I wrote Lost In The Crowd. On that record, we wrote Stranger Inside together. We wrote In Memory together. He worked on the song All I Ever Wanted. He was a producer and a songwriter on the first record.”
And you were quite open for that. You were quite open for the producer to help write and arrange?
“Totally, 100 per cent, yeah. But there were three producers on the first record. There was Bob Marlette. He had material on the album. He probably had the bulk of the record. Tony Battaglia, who ended up being the producer for the second album, [Us And Them], was a producer on Leave A Whisper.
“On the deluxe version of The Sound of the Madness album, me and Rick wrote the song Son Of Sam. Hopefully, later this year will be able to reconnect with one another. But, man, he has carved out many, many lanes for himself now.”
He’s box office now.
“But he’s also put the work in. I was probably one of the early subscribers when he had roughly… I found out that he was doing YouTube [and] He was probably 200,000 subscribers in when I found him, so to see him grow to – you know, he’s approaching six million subscribers now on his channel, and then the other channel is, like, almost at two million. Just tenacious, man. The guy works really hard.”
Who for you is the definition of a great songwriter?
“It’s hard for me to pinpoint one particular writer. My favourite artist and songwriters are the ones that don’t make the same record over and over again, and don’t write the same. Try to not write the same song twice.”
- Three Six Five / Dance, Kid, Dance is out now via Atlantic.
- Shinedown will be touring the US from July 19. See Shinedown for full dates and ticket details.
- “I wanted to play like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddie King, but I wanted to be Garth Brooks”: Zach Myers: 10 albums that changed my life
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