Miranda: This is Miranda Wilson with the-voices.net and I’m sitting in a production office with the bass player of Shinedown Eric Bass.
Eric: yup Eric Bass, the most unfortunate name for a bass player ever.
Miranda: (laughs) Eric Bass plays Bass.
Eric: I know it’s terrible.
Miranda: Were you ever picked on?
Eric: For that? Yup when I was a kid. One of those high school kids would come by the house and peel the “b” off the mailbox and it said the Asses. It used to really piss my dad off but he refused to take the name off the mailbox he would just keep replacing the “b”. He would do it obnoxiously and use like a different “b” then the rest of the letters. About every two weeks it would need to be replaced.
Miranda: he could have painted it on or used a marker
Eric: yeah!
Miranda: and it would never need to be replaced.
Eric: see it could have been done different
Miranda: But your dad wanted it the way he wanted it so.
(laugh)
Eric: yeah he’s not going to be defeated
Miranda: Is this ya’ll tour? And you have other bands that have joined with you?
Eric: It is this is our last larger headlining tour for this record.
Miranda: It’s a good record
Eric: Thank you so much
Miranda: I’ve had 4 hours of sleep so I’m here because of after seeing you guys with the Sick Puppies at the Municipal Auditorium I was impressed by the white lights and everything about the show I was in awe.
Eric: We love the Sick Puppies man, they are one of our favorite bands to tour with we worked with them again we did a month to almost 2 months with Nickleback and they were on that tour, and we got to be out with them again. We are glad to see all of these bands, we’ve toured with all of these bands at one capacity or another. But we haven’t done as much touring with Sevendust in the past couple of years, just because for some reason it just didn’t work out we did some shows with them in Europe. But with the Chevelle guys we did a tour with them last summer to stimulate this tour, we did tour with Puddle of Mudd and Skillet recently and 10 Years we toured with them but that was , it seems like forever ago but it’s been like a year and a half. We’re glad to be back out with all of our friends and able to put on a very large rock show.
Miranda: Well tell me how ya’ll came up with the band name.
Eric: the band name came from a friend of Brent’s had a painting on the wall in his dads house, the light was shining down on the painting, and that’s how Shining down came out of it and it got shortened to Shinedown. That’s where the name came from, but Brent likes to say (well he’s a little more eloquent then the rest of us he’s the lyricist)well it took on a whole different meaning after that he likes to say sometimes you “shine” sometimes your “down” and it kind of encompasses everything that the band is about and has been through.
Miranda: Lyricists are very in touch with themselves.
Eric: They are and their very sensitive. I have a thing with lyrics were I’m very fascinated by them, but that is just one part of music I’m just not the best at. I can write music all day long I can write melodies and all this stuff but when it comes to lyrics it’s just something that your born with I think When you find a lyricist or somebody from a band and they can say more in six words then you can say in six hundred words.
Miranda: and you get the same meaning or feeling in those six words that you would in the six hundred words.
Miranda: on ya’lls album Sound of Madness, is it on that album the track is called “The Dream” is it on the the first album or the
Eric: It’s on the second album
Miranda: Okay because every time it cycles through my playlist that little girl that’s reciting The Dream, is that somebody ya’ll know?
Eric: That was Tony Battaglia, the guy that produced the record, it was his daughter.
Miranda: is that something that you thought about doing (having her to recite on your album)?
Eric: It was some song lyrics that Brent had that wasn’t getting used and Tony had the idea of “Hey this would be a great poem” and we can have a child come in and read it, and it ended up being his daughter.
Miranda: It worked out
(laughter)
Miranda: It sets the mood for the album.
Eric: Great!
(laughter)
Miranda: And then you’ve got the sound of madness the song some of the words talking about people with bi-polar and social diseases it reminds me of so many people I know.
Eric: That’s in the whole record the lyrics to the sound of madness came from experiences that the band have had and people that we have met and it’s very personal record so.
Miranda: So how long have you been playing Bass?
Eric: I have been playing Bass and Guitar; I actually started playing guitar well both at the same time I got guitar first and a bass second, since I was 12 years old. And I’m getting up there now, I’m and old man now. I’ve never really counted so since I was 12 years old and I’ll be 36 this year so, I’ve been playing for a while.
Miranda: I’m catching up to you I’ll be 32 to this year so, no no no no your not old I met Carlos Cavazo of Ratt a couple of weekends back and he’s 50 and still rockin’ so you will be rockin when your 50 too.
Eric: We were rehearsing at Bridgestone Arena when they came through, we were rehearsing in the annex room over there. So that night we all got passes to the show that was cool.
Miranda: Yeah they told us you guys were through the other door but we couldn’t bother you.
(laughs)
Miranda: I told him I was seeing you guys in a couple of weeks I could wait.
Miranda: So the tour is still fresh, it just started
Eric: Yup! This is day 6 of the tour like date 5 or 6. I want to say the 6th show yeah.
Miranda: So is it getting cranked up and your getting settled in?
Eric: Oh yeah. The first show was a little testy we had a couple of you know it’s like anytime you can rehearse all you want but the first time. It was our first time being back out on tour and back onstage and it had been 6 weeks so for us being on tours all the time it’s like a year off so it was a little unusually for the first show and so we’ve cranked back into it and it been there ever since.
Miranda: your aloud to have a couple rocky edges the first show.
Eric: Yeah you know especially with something this big with all the lights, the video, and the stuff that is going to happen, trying to keep it all together. Miranda: Shane came up with some questions for me so here we go, Since the live DVD from Knoxville was scrapped in ’06 are ya’ll gonna come out with something different.
Eric: Yeah we did the Site of Madness which is available on iTunes, which is 4 or 5 songs I forget which one. I think we filmed that one around the time of the Sick Puppies run. I don’t know if we’re going to get to do a full DVD, Originally we had some thoughts about trying to do it with this but if that didn’t work it wouldn’t really be my problem, with the video screens and all. We had another thought were we are doing an acoustic tour at the end of the year to round out the whole record, and it’s probably gonna be a month and a half of all acoustic theaters and that type of thing and we thought maybe we need to do something with that, something more stripped down. But like I said we did get the iTunes album for the Site of Madness. People got a taste it’s Devour, Sound of Madness, If you on Knew, Call Me, and Second Chance; those are the ones we did for that so. You got the feel of the band on this tour granted it’s not a full DVD but it’s DVD quality so. It’s out there and there are other stuff out there from this tour. So hopefully we get to do something for the acoustic tour.
Miranda: When I buy CD I like to see clips of the recording process and how the album was made.
Eric: Yeah man, making a record is such a labor of love, and such a roller coaster ride. You get mad at each other you yell at each other, you love each other, you cry, you scream, you laugh, you go through all this stuff making this record it’s like making a movie and people don’t understand that. You see stuff like Project Green light show. Bringing these people in and showing how a movie is made, it would be really interesting to do something like that with a record, if you could find the right band to do that with, it’s such an amazing process.
Miranda: How do you guys determine what songs you are going to play in a set?
Eric: Being a band that is blessed to have 12 singles, or I guess 13 now since “Crow and the Butterfly”. That’s like a full set, you know if you’re going to play all of that. Some night we, like for this we had to go “ Okay, we’re not going to be able to play all the singles. It’s not going to happen we need to pick and choose.” So that was defiantly the first thing that entered into it which singles to play and in which order. What we’re going to start with, we found a couple songs that worked really well at the front end of a set, so we keep them there and they stay there, and we have the song we like to end the set with. So we have our bookends, from there we, for this we sent out a message via twitter, facebook, and our website to the fans asking them what they want to hear, and they wanted to hear some stuff we haven’t played in a long time. There was some b-sides to the Sound of Madness that we released on the limited edition version that they wanted to hear so we put those in the set, a lot of people wanted to hear the song for Alice in Wonderland soundtrack so we put that in there and the new song from the Sylvester Stallone movie. Songs we wouldn’t normally put in, we put them in because the fans wanted to hear them, and that’s a huge thing for us, it’s like what do the people want to hear, give them what they want.
Miranda: At least your actually listening to the fans. You not just going off doing whatever you want to do.
Eric: right, some of them are painful, it’s amazing how you can record something, for instance “Her Name is Alice” is something we did over the course of a month and a half, some of the stuff was done on the bus. All acoustic guitars I recorded on the bus in England, and the drums we did in a dressing room in and arena. We’ve never really played it, we just kind of put it together. So when it came down to we have to play this now live as a band, alright now I have to go back and learn how to play this on piano. Because I wrote, it and I never thought I would have to play it again. So it keeps you on your toes that way rather than just doing what is comfortable, we’ve really decided to come out and do some stuff that hadn’t really done before as a band. We’ve got one or two songs off “Leave a Whisper” that we maybe prior to this tour played a handful of times live. So even those older songs so it’s kind of like having to relearn some stuff.
Miranda: So do you have any message for your fans?
Eric: The same message we always have for our fans, which is we love them very much, and there the reason why we are here. They are the reason why we get to do what we do. It might start to sound scripted because we say that in every interview but it’s very true it’s how we feel it’s what believe. If it wasn’t for them, we couldn’t do what we do and wouldn’t be able to do what we love to do. And we absolutely 100% appreciate them more then they know.