“I am very fortunate to be able to do this for a living, but it is a job. “During the process of writing, I really questioned whether I was a good dad,” Smith admits. The responsibilities of fatherhood have, he says, been crucial when it comes to coping with his addiction issues – ensuring his “survival”. Myers, drummer Barry Kerch and aptly named bassist Eric Bass are all married, and while Smith is single, he has a seven-year-old son. Theirs isn’t a world of groupies and promiscuity. And while Smith and Myers knock back suggestions that Shinedown are a ‘Christian band’, their religious beliefs and the idea of family play a central role in what they do. There’s clearly an emotional connection between Smith and their audience, thanks to his confessional lyrics. People come to see something larger than life, and we give it to them.”įor all the swagger and bulletproof self-belief, there is another, more vulnerable side to Shinedown that’s not so obvious. Quite frankly because we work hard at it. “We’re known for being, and we consider ourselves to be, a very good live band. Smith doesn’t even blush when he sings his own band’s praises. They’re certainly not hiding their light under a bushel. “Cos if you’re not confident, you’re in the wrong business.” “We only put on a character in the sense that we have to become these very, not cocky, but…” ![]() You get the feeling it doesn’t take much for him or his bandmates to get into character. On stage, standing on a raised dais, Smith cuts a striking, almost militaristic figure. I’m in better shape now than I was in my twenties.” “If we weren’t in shape, we wouldn’t be able to do the show we put together. ![]() “We all get older, but we still perform a very physical show,” Smith says. We do two workouts a day: the show and Insanity.” “But if we didn’t do it, halfway through the show someone would pass out. “What he does is terrifying,” says Myers. These days they all do workouts together – in dressing rooms or spare backstage spaces, for up to an hour at a time. He lost 70lbs, and even introduced the Insanity workout to the rest of the band. As the name suggests, the workout was punishing and relentless, but for Smith – who was handed boxing gloves at the age of 10 by his father, who told him, “I don’t ever want it to come to this, but you need to learn how to fight” – something clicked. With encouragement from his bandmates, he stopped drinking, began eating healthily and purchased a workout DVD by ‘fitness motivator’ Shaun T, titled Insanity. It took an appearance on daytime TV show The View, in which the female host mockingly compared him to Meat Loaf, to snap him out of it. He successfully quit both after he began to struggle with live shows, only to replace drugs with another addition – alcohol and sugar. ![]() During the band’s early years, Smith’s addiction to cocaine and Ox圜ontin – the latter a heavy-duty painkiller usually prescribed to cancer patients – pushed the band to the edge. “And we don’t make records real quick, we take care over it.”īut it hasn’t been a smooth path. “The one thing we have been able to do consciously is play live, a lot,” Smith tells us, when we meet at London’s Holborn Studios. ![]() They did it the old fashioned way: hard graft and earnest, impassioned tunes. They’re part of the last generation of bands who broke big without the help of relentless online hype or viral campaigns (or much in the way of mainstream media coverage for that matter). Shinedown date from a pre-YouTube, pre-social media era. “That whole, ‘It’s all rainbows and puppy dogs!’ outlook. “Coming from Amaryllis, that over-positive terminology gets really old,” adds Smith, rolling his eyes (or at least he seems to – it’s hard to be sure what he’s doing behind those Ray-Bans).
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