INTERVIEW: Brent Smith of Shinedown: ‘We’ve been talking about mental health for 20 years’
Photo: Shinedown’s new cinematic experience is based on their 2018 album Attention Attention. Photo courtesy of Sanjay Parikh / Provided by Press Here Publicity with permission.
Hard rock icons Shinedown — featuring Brent Smith on vocals, Zach Myers on guitar, Eric Bass on bass and Barry Kerch on drums — continually add to their fanbase and impress listeners with their driving, infectious brand of rock ‘n’ roll. The multi-platinum musicians, who have sold more than 10 million albums, up the ante each time they head out on the road or release new material. Case in point: 2018’s Attention Attention, a concept album that was unique for the quartet, and now fans can dive deeper into the world of this recording with a new cinematic experience, courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.
Billed as a stunning sonic and visual work, Attention Attention the film features each of the original recording’s 14 songs, everything from “Get Up” to “The Human Radio” to “Monsters.” The visuals are thanks to director Bill Yukich, who has worked with Beyoncé, Metallica and Wiz Khalifa. Ultimately the album and this complementary film are Shinedown’s statement about humanity — both the highs and the lows — and how one can overcome struggles in life, in particular the struggles that come with mental health.
“There are never any rules with us,” Smith said in a recent phone interview. “That’s the beautiful thing about being in a band and being songwriters, there’s no handbook, so when we walked in, we just began writing songs. And then we didn’t really realize that it was going to turn into this conceptual piece, and to us we don’t even really look at Attention Attention as a traditional concept record. It’s more of a story album.”
When the band members wrote the song “Get Up,” they came to a turning point in the creative process. They realized that the tune featured a full story and could work in a longer conceptual piece, so after “Get Up,” they devoted themselves to building a 14-chapter song cycle that touched upon common themes.
“Ultimately it’s an album about the human spirit,” he said. “It’s about perseverance inside that human spirit. … You’re not going to be remembered for your failures, but you’re going to need to fail in life to understand what to do next time. But your legacy won’t be built around your failures. Your legacy will be built by the fact that you refused to give up, and I think once we understood that, that gave us so much creativity. We had so much direction at that point to make Attention Attention what it ultimately became.”
Shinedown has earned 14 platinum and gold singles, and the members have never shied away from the topic of mental health in their lyrics. If one were check out their previous efforts, including several successful albums that have garnered 4.5 billion total streams, it becomes evident that serious topics matter to the band and have mattered since day one.
“We’ve been talking about mental health for 20 years, and it’s something that we know a lot about,” Smith said. “It’s something that we are very aware of, and I look at society now and the way that people are interacting with each other, I appreciate the fact that mental health is not being pushed in the corner anymore. … Listen, you have to fall in a hole sometimes to figure out how to get out of the hole, so for us it was about all these years trying to be a voice to people. If you’re having issues with depression, if you’re having anxiety, if you’re just off all of a sudden, you shouldn’t be made to feel inferior or embarrassed or ashamed to ask for help.”
Attention Attention was the first Shinedown album completed in house, with Bass, the bass player, taking care of producing, engineering and mixing. The four members worked together as one team, and they soon realized that what they were creating had a visual component that would lend itself nicely to a movie in the future.
“Once we started to figure out the sound of the record, what the record was saying, we kind of all looked at each other and were pretty on the up and up, saying we’re going to have to show this all visually,” Smith said. “We can’t just do the singles and then leave it at that. That’s where Bill Yukich comes in because once we decided on the first single, which was ‘Devil,’ we worked with Bill for the very first time on that particular video and that particular single. … And then he did ‘The Human Radio,’ and then we were like, well, let’s see what he does with ‘Get Up.’ So he did ‘Get Up,’ and then we did ‘Monsters.’ And then all of a sudden we regrouped with each other.”
They were on tour at the time when the movie Attention Attention was coming together, and they knew they had something different and exciting in the works. So the guys decided to carve out two weeks in their packed schedule and head to Los Angeles, where they shot the nine remaining songs in 11 days.
“I have to say, Bill and his team and that cast that we worked with and all the crew that was a part of those nine songs in those 11 days, it was remarkable,” the vocalist said. “We knew we wanted to show it all visually, but we worked with Bill to kind of Pulp Fiction the audience a little bit because as the singles were being released, you were seeing these videos. People were noticing, well, wait a minute, that person was in this video, and that person was in this video. … So people were going, what’s going on? It was cool, man, because three years later we released a film after this record. We had been touring it, and everything that had been going on. We thought that was pretty ballsy to release the film three years after the project had been released sonically.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Shinedown’s new cinematic experience is called Attention Attention, available now on digital platforms and VOD from Gravitas Ventures. Click here for more information.
