Shannon Larkin - Godsmack (06/10/2014)
As I was connected to the call with Shannon Larkin, I was greeted to a loud and chirpy, “Hey Matthew!” before I could even think about introducing myself. Larkin, drummer of alternative metal band Godsmack, has got to be one of the nicest and most open people I have ever had the pleasure to interview.
It surprised me because he wasn’t as gruff or as stand-offish or even as direct as most metal artists tend to be; and considering the style of drumming and music his life revolves around, he was surprisingly welcoming to actual conversation as oppose to back and forth questioning.
Yet it also made sense about halfway through our fifteen minute chat. Godsmack to me have always had that charm about them. They have a sense of boyish charisma mixed with burning audacity that in its own is welcoming. Whether you’re a veteran or new to metal, Godsmack will still hold you in a choke lock and rub your head till you say uncle. They’re essentially, the middle child of metal.
I am excited, as should everyone else be, to see the band venture for the first time ever to our shores for Soundwave 2015 and Larkin shares this feeling very vapidly.
“Well its exciting man, we’ve never been there. I had the pleasure of coming to Australia in my old band, Amen, we played Big Day Out but so I’m the only [member] who’s been there and I’ve been telling them they’re in for a treat,” the drummer says rather complimentary. “The crowds are crazy, the lineup is fantastic. I’m hearing good things about the Soundwave Festival."
These huge stages and open air setting are no stranger to Godsmack; in fact, they pretty much welcome open air festivals as a part of their lives.
“We’ve been quite successful here in America and we’ve done many huge European festivals. We know how to bring it in the festival situation, don’t you worry, my friend!”
Larkin just called me his friend; yes you should be jealous. And as a ‘friend’ of the drummer, he was more than keen to tell me how they haven’t always been playing huge festivals. Yes, even Godsmack have played club shows. But I did have to see just how he weighs the different settings against one another.
“There used to be huge differences between clubs, theatres and open air festivals. But with the invention of the in-ear-monitor, it’s changed. You used to just have stage monitors and you’d get whatever ambience of whatever hall or club or open air thing you were playing at. Now you’re in-ear-monitors allow you to have a killer sound whether you’re playing to one hundred thousand people outside or five hundred people in a club. You get a pretty killer mix no matter what you know?”
“My favorite [venues] are the fifteen to twenty thousand open air amphitheaters. They have seats but only about fifty rows are covered and the rest is all open and to me those are the best sized places to play. But there is something to be said about the theaters too. [It’s great] When you’re playing a two to three thousand seat theater, especially in America where we have these old beautiful theaters that were built ages ago. But there was so much detail spent in the acoustics so these rooms sound great. They have wooden stages too and that makes the drums thump and warm. I would have to flip a coin, the amphitheater or the smaller theater.”
From the stage to the studio, I quickly hook turned the conversation onto the band’s latest effort, 1000 HP and just at the drop of the name, Larkin fired the entire process of making a Godsmack record straight at me.
“Every record is a process to us. We make a record and then we tour for a year or two then we take a break because tis four dudes on a bus travelling together and you can get sick of each other. So to keep our band from imploding it is always smart to take time off. That’s I think how we’ve kept the longevity of the band going. That said, we got together in the fourth year since our last record after a year off and we had spent that whole year writing riffs. We’re pretty much a riff band,” he says like it’s a very good thing; which it definitely is!
“We make a killer guitar riff then come the bass and drum grooves and the lyrics come last. We then make a skeleton on the board and we put up all the songs we’d thought up. This time, on 1000 HP, out of thirty ideas we had, sixteen made the board. We then got our producer, Dave Fortman and we got him to bleed through those sixteen songs with us and we ended up with an eleven.”
“Thematically we know what we’re going for. On IV (Four) it was a bluesy record and on Faceless was a more metal sound and The Oracle was a more metal heavy record with Dave also on that just coming off of the success with Slipknot. We wanted this one to be fresh, bare and raw and all that shit. We wanted to go back to what we had in the beginning, the energy and the dream. Rather than our typical influences of Anthrax and Pantera and Metallica we took some more influence from our punk rock days like early Ramones, Bad Brains and AC/DC especially. That high voltage, high energy rock sound. That’s how the whole ‘1000 Horsepower’ idea came about.”
In the study of economics, the more there is of something, the more its value decreases. A weird tangent I know, but when you have six records like Godsmack, surely some sort of value must have been lost? Sort of, but not really.
As the second law of thermodynamics states, no energy is lost nor destroyed, only converted. That goes just for the same with Godsmack. The value and the meaning of making albums doesn’t decrease, it simply changes.
“It certainly hasn’t lost meaning. We’re quite successful in America and obviously we want our music to spread as far as possible but the main thing to us is to keep making good records. I can crap on and on about the crashing of the music business because I mean, what we’ve sold and what Linkin Park’s new album sold is a quarter of what we sold seven years ago. The album has been out for a while and we’ve been on tour and we’ve played to huge crowds. It doesn’t really correlate the sales to your popularity anymore. No matter what Gene Simmons says, rock ain’t dead! Each record me make is a gift to us and blessing and we will never take that for granted.”
“We obviously would like to have a Gold Record but that’s just a trophy. We’re looking at the signs of the times and trying to role with the punches. I mean, the record before sold one-hundred and fifty thousand ad the one before that sold two-hundred thousand in its first week ages ago. We’ve got to look at it from the crowd. We are looking at the same amount of people every night that we were when we sold a double-platinum album and this one has only sold fifty thousand. We can’t let that bum us out because there are still rock fans buying tickets and coming out to see us. If we had gone from headlining festivals here to playing nightclubs then yeah, maybe we’d be done but the truth is that we’re out here headlining a festival in America and our album only sold fifty-thousand copies. We gotta look at it how it is and how it is that one day after the record was out, the whole thing was on YouTube for free. For what it’s worth, a kid without ten bucks in his pocket can go online and have the album in five minutes and that is the world we live in. We think it’s all about the live show now, we try and put out good records out but if it doesn’t sell it doesn’t sell. Yet if we’re out there and we’re still playing to great crowds then that’s what counts. Money wise too that is where you make most of your money. Playing concerts. No one ever got rich in this band from marketing. We got out there, toured our asses off and got rewarded for the hard work.”
As the timer clicked down and we hit our time mark, Larkin couldn’t help but throw in a bit of anecdotes on the whole topic of why you buy records (and weed).
“The world has changed drastically. I mean, you look at DVD’s and it’s the same thing. Best Buy and Walmart used to sell thousands of DVD’s and CD’s and there would we walls lined with them and now there’s like ten DVD’s at Best Buys. I know vinyl is making a comeback but that’s a very niche market whereas when we started out, we were the kind of people that would buy a vinyl so we could hold it in our hands you know. We would buy an album, go home and maybe smoke some weed out the headphones on and listen to records front to back. Nowadays, kids just download one song.”
I said goodbye to my new found “friend” of whom is more than ready to come rock it at Soundwave 2015 with every single one of you and who is also more than keen to open for AC/DC on their next tour. That boyish charm was proven with the sole fact they still have dreams.
SOUNDWAVE 2015
SATURDAY 21 & SUNDAY 22 FEBRUARY - ADELAIDE
SATURDAY 21 & SUNDAY 22 FEBRUARY - MELBOURNE
SATURDAY 28 FEBRUARY & SUNDAY 1 MARCH - SYDNEY
SATURDAY 28 FEBRUARY & SUNDAY 1 MARCH – BRISBANE
Matt Sievers
It surprised me because he wasn’t as gruff or as stand-offish or even as direct as most metal artists tend to be; and considering the style of drumming and music his life revolves around, he was surprisingly welcoming to actual conversation as oppose to back and forth questioning.
Yet it also made sense about halfway through our fifteen minute chat. Godsmack to me have always had that charm about them. They have a sense of boyish charisma mixed with burning audacity that in its own is welcoming. Whether you’re a veteran or new to metal, Godsmack will still hold you in a choke lock and rub your head till you say uncle. They’re essentially, the middle child of metal.
I am excited, as should everyone else be, to see the band venture for the first time ever to our shores for Soundwave 2015 and Larkin shares this feeling very vapidly.
“Well its exciting man, we’ve never been there. I had the pleasure of coming to Australia in my old band, Amen, we played Big Day Out but so I’m the only [member] who’s been there and I’ve been telling them they’re in for a treat,” the drummer says rather complimentary. “The crowds are crazy, the lineup is fantastic. I’m hearing good things about the Soundwave Festival."
These huge stages and open air setting are no stranger to Godsmack; in fact, they pretty much welcome open air festivals as a part of their lives.
“We’ve been quite successful here in America and we’ve done many huge European festivals. We know how to bring it in the festival situation, don’t you worry, my friend!”
Larkin just called me his friend; yes you should be jealous. And as a ‘friend’ of the drummer, he was more than keen to tell me how they haven’t always been playing huge festivals. Yes, even Godsmack have played club shows. But I did have to see just how he weighs the different settings against one another.
“There used to be huge differences between clubs, theatres and open air festivals. But with the invention of the in-ear-monitor, it’s changed. You used to just have stage monitors and you’d get whatever ambience of whatever hall or club or open air thing you were playing at. Now you’re in-ear-monitors allow you to have a killer sound whether you’re playing to one hundred thousand people outside or five hundred people in a club. You get a pretty killer mix no matter what you know?”
“My favorite [venues] are the fifteen to twenty thousand open air amphitheaters. They have seats but only about fifty rows are covered and the rest is all open and to me those are the best sized places to play. But there is something to be said about the theaters too. [It’s great] When you’re playing a two to three thousand seat theater, especially in America where we have these old beautiful theaters that were built ages ago. But there was so much detail spent in the acoustics so these rooms sound great. They have wooden stages too and that makes the drums thump and warm. I would have to flip a coin, the amphitheater or the smaller theater.”
From the stage to the studio, I quickly hook turned the conversation onto the band’s latest effort, 1000 HP and just at the drop of the name, Larkin fired the entire process of making a Godsmack record straight at me.
“Every record is a process to us. We make a record and then we tour for a year or two then we take a break because tis four dudes on a bus travelling together and you can get sick of each other. So to keep our band from imploding it is always smart to take time off. That’s I think how we’ve kept the longevity of the band going. That said, we got together in the fourth year since our last record after a year off and we had spent that whole year writing riffs. We’re pretty much a riff band,” he says like it’s a very good thing; which it definitely is!
“We make a killer guitar riff then come the bass and drum grooves and the lyrics come last. We then make a skeleton on the board and we put up all the songs we’d thought up. This time, on 1000 HP, out of thirty ideas we had, sixteen made the board. We then got our producer, Dave Fortman and we got him to bleed through those sixteen songs with us and we ended up with an eleven.”
“Thematically we know what we’re going for. On IV (Four) it was a bluesy record and on Faceless was a more metal sound and The Oracle was a more metal heavy record with Dave also on that just coming off of the success with Slipknot. We wanted this one to be fresh, bare and raw and all that shit. We wanted to go back to what we had in the beginning, the energy and the dream. Rather than our typical influences of Anthrax and Pantera and Metallica we took some more influence from our punk rock days like early Ramones, Bad Brains and AC/DC especially. That high voltage, high energy rock sound. That’s how the whole ‘1000 Horsepower’ idea came about.”
In the study of economics, the more there is of something, the more its value decreases. A weird tangent I know, but when you have six records like Godsmack, surely some sort of value must have been lost? Sort of, but not really.
As the second law of thermodynamics states, no energy is lost nor destroyed, only converted. That goes just for the same with Godsmack. The value and the meaning of making albums doesn’t decrease, it simply changes.
“It certainly hasn’t lost meaning. We’re quite successful in America and obviously we want our music to spread as far as possible but the main thing to us is to keep making good records. I can crap on and on about the crashing of the music business because I mean, what we’ve sold and what Linkin Park’s new album sold is a quarter of what we sold seven years ago. The album has been out for a while and we’ve been on tour and we’ve played to huge crowds. It doesn’t really correlate the sales to your popularity anymore. No matter what Gene Simmons says, rock ain’t dead! Each record me make is a gift to us and blessing and we will never take that for granted.”
“We obviously would like to have a Gold Record but that’s just a trophy. We’re looking at the signs of the times and trying to role with the punches. I mean, the record before sold one-hundred and fifty thousand ad the one before that sold two-hundred thousand in its first week ages ago. We’ve got to look at it from the crowd. We are looking at the same amount of people every night that we were when we sold a double-platinum album and this one has only sold fifty thousand. We can’t let that bum us out because there are still rock fans buying tickets and coming out to see us. If we had gone from headlining festivals here to playing nightclubs then yeah, maybe we’d be done but the truth is that we’re out here headlining a festival in America and our album only sold fifty-thousand copies. We gotta look at it how it is and how it is that one day after the record was out, the whole thing was on YouTube for free. For what it’s worth, a kid without ten bucks in his pocket can go online and have the album in five minutes and that is the world we live in. We think it’s all about the live show now, we try and put out good records out but if it doesn’t sell it doesn’t sell. Yet if we’re out there and we’re still playing to great crowds then that’s what counts. Money wise too that is where you make most of your money. Playing concerts. No one ever got rich in this band from marketing. We got out there, toured our asses off and got rewarded for the hard work.”
As the timer clicked down and we hit our time mark, Larkin couldn’t help but throw in a bit of anecdotes on the whole topic of why you buy records (and weed).
“The world has changed drastically. I mean, you look at DVD’s and it’s the same thing. Best Buy and Walmart used to sell thousands of DVD’s and CD’s and there would we walls lined with them and now there’s like ten DVD’s at Best Buys. I know vinyl is making a comeback but that’s a very niche market whereas when we started out, we were the kind of people that would buy a vinyl so we could hold it in our hands you know. We would buy an album, go home and maybe smoke some weed out the headphones on and listen to records front to back. Nowadays, kids just download one song.”
I said goodbye to my new found “friend” of whom is more than ready to come rock it at Soundwave 2015 with every single one of you and who is also more than keen to open for AC/DC on their next tour. That boyish charm was proven with the sole fact they still have dreams.
SOUNDWAVE 2015
SATURDAY 21 & SUNDAY 22 FEBRUARY - ADELAIDE
SATURDAY 21 & SUNDAY 22 FEBRUARY - MELBOURNE
SATURDAY 28 FEBRUARY & SUNDAY 1 MARCH - SYDNEY
SATURDAY 28 FEBRUARY & SUNDAY 1 MARCH – BRISBANE
Matt Sievers