Godsmack are back! After four years of no new material for their fans the hard rockers are now back with their album When Legends Rise. Not only is it their first piece of new material in a while it also celebrates the fact that the bad have now been together for twenty years… during which time they have also managed to sell a lazy 20 million albums as well.
When HEAVY Mag caught up with Godsmack’s Shannon Larkin he said the band’s anniversary played a big part on influencing the album. “We typically put out an album every four years,” he says. “It’s not because we are lazy or anything but it normally takes us about a year to write a record, we always take our time and try to make the best record, then we tour for two years and then when you ahve the recording and the production and all of that it is always about four years between each record. This time after we got off the 1000hptour we realised that this year would be our 20th anniversary and we realised that every time we make a record we make a change so that we don’t become static and keep making the same record over and over again, we done trippy albums and bluesy albums, but it seems the critics always say the same thing ‘oh they have made another record and it sounds just like the last record’ so this time Sully really wanted to make everything different so we worked with outside writers and make a more melodic record – a more mature record – as we all turned 50 recently so we wanted to be real to ourselves so that we can continue doing Godsmack.”
Larkin laughs when I ask what it was like to work with outside writers. “Well it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be… I mean there are egos involved,” he says chuckling. “Song-writing is a very personal thing and so to give up that side of your band and let somebody in that isn’t part of the awesome band that we are was tough in the beginning but what made it easier was the fact that the guy we picked to produce the record is also one of those producer/song-writer guys so he right away brought the first single, Bullet Proof, to the table and that was a track that he wrote solely for Sully and when we heard that we were like ‘wow’ because it still had all the elements of our band, and I can’t talk for every single one of these writer/producer guys, but this guy had listened to every single of one of our albums so he got the vibe of what we were trying to do.”
When Legends Rise is out now and can be bought right here https://caroline.lnk.to/WhenLegendsRise
