INTERVIEW: Burden of the Sky to join Sevendust for fall tour
Photo: Burden of the Sky’s new single is “The Flood.” Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by O’Donnell Media Group with permission.
Burden of the Sky, the alternative metal band originally from Illinois, are ready to have a solid fall season. The rockers have caught a major break and will be touring with heavy power weights Sevendust, Nonpoint and Bastardane, starting Sept. 9 and continuing through Oct. 1. At the same time, the band recently released their new single, “The Flood,” which is a deeply personal tune for the group.
“One of our founding guitar players [Bradford Shaw] passed away in the last year or so, and ‘The Flood’ was our way of expressing how we felt,” said Scottie James, lead vocalist for Burden of the Sky. “Josh [Appel] started writing the guitar riff and music for it, I think the day after he passed, and we sat on it for a little while.”
They hit the pause button on the song because they started working with Ricky Armellino, producer and guitarist for Ice Nine Kills. Because of this collaboration, they temporarily shelved “The Flood” so that they could learn some techniques in the studio from the maestro and then return to the song with these newfound skills intact.
“And we came back from Pennsylvania, and we were like, ‘You know what, let’s pull this out. Let’s try working with it again,'” James remembered. “And that’s when Morgan [Rose of Sevendust] hit us up, and Morgan said, ‘Hey, I really want to do some work with you guys.’ And we were like, oh man, this is perfect because Sevendust was a big influence on us.”
Shaw was also a big fan of Sevendust, James said, so the band sent Rose a couple songs to consider. Rose chose “The Flood,” and Burden took to the studio to record the track — finishing the work in approximately two days. The style of the single is a mixture of the old, classic Burden and the new direction for the band.
“I hear a lot of the older Burden in there,” James said about the band, which also includes Appel, TJ Duckwiler, Rick Streeter, Dustin Tritsch and Mike Mahoney. “We’ve always done stuff on our own. Just ever since the beginning, we wrote everything on our own, never really worked with anybody, just did it ourselves, and these past few months was the first time we actually worked with real producers. So going into the studio with Ricky and just learning his style and process, and then going into the studio with Morgan, we picked up a lot. … I feel like the older Burden style is there, but you can also hear us transitioning and evolving to our new sound, too. And I think ‘The Flood’ does a great job of showing that growth that we’ve had, so a little bit of both of our old and new mixed together.”
So far, Burden of the Sky have played “The Flood” a handful of times in front of a live crowd, and James reported that each time the audience ate up the new tune. They were actually stoked when a circle pit formed at one gig in Joliet, Illinois.
“I turned around for something in the breakdown, and I turned around again, and people were going nuts, just throwing down in the pit,” the vocalist said. “We all just kind of looked at each other and were like, oh yeah, this is exactly what we wanted.”
He added: “I think going on the road with Sevendust, people are going to get the full experience because we really have it down now. … We played a handful of shows with Sevendust in the past, so we kind of knew the guys. And we got along well, but we never went on an actual tour with them. It was always just a couple dates here and there whenever we could meet up, and we always got along well with their crowd. We knew about this tour, but we weren’t really thinking. We were like, it’ll be cool if it’ll happen, but we know those guys are busy, and they’ve got a lot of stuff going on — whatever, we’ll see. We got the call and were like, oh my God, this is actually going to happen. We were beyond stoked. We’ve gone on the road for a couple weeks at a time before, but this is our first full tour. It’s a full month, so it’s just amazing to get out to some new cities, meet some new fans.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Burden of the Sky’s new single is “The Flood,” and they will open for Sevendust, Nonpoint and Bastardane this fall. Click here for more information and tickets.
