Shinedown’s Brent Smith Calls GRD to Talk Grand Rapids Concert, New Album + ‘State of My Head’

WGRD is proud to present Shinedown and Five Finger Death with P.O.D.at Van Andel Arena May 4, 2016!

To get everyone excited for the show, Shinedown frontman Brent Smith called WGRD to talk about the upcoming concert, the new album Threat To Survival, and the single "State of my Head"!

Shinedown is on the road in Europe now and will return to the U.S. this spring-- to rock Van Andel Arena May 4, 2016! Tickets go on sale this Friday at 10a.m. at all Ticketmaster outlets.

Brent talked about the current tour, how excited Shinedown is for the show at Van Andel, and the new album Threat to Survival:

We just don't necessarily go into any kind of album cycle or any kind of recording and pull songs out of thin air, you know we write from a place where we have to live through it and it has to be a situation that we've gone through--  people we've met, places we've been too, and just where we are particularly in our life at that moment...

 

There was a lot of subject matter that I hadn't tackled in previous years that I wanted to talk about and I think I was in a place where I could do it... I think I was just ready to talk about these scenarios. There's 11 songs on the record, but I kind of made a point that they're really 11 scenarios, and there's a fluidity to the album where you're really supposed to listen to it from the beginning to the end and then hopefully it's something that connects with you and you just want to keep listening to it over and over again."

On the new song "State of My Head":

We were at a place when we were writing Threat to Survival where we were probably 30 songs deep...  we kinda hit the reset button and looked at each other and realized that we all just kinda wanted to dance, because it was all like thrashing guitars and these heavy drum patterns... and we were just like you know what, we wanted to do something clever and hip and really, really fresh. And really the song was built around a drum loop. It was the first time that we kind of built a lot of, I would dare to say, even hip hop influence that's inside of it and more of a pop-based influence. Because we're rock and roll to the bone, anyone that knows anything about Shinedown knows that, but we wanted to do something that was completely outside of the box, and I think we accomplished that with song."

 

Check out the full interview with Brent above! And make sure you're to stick with GRD to win tickets to the May 4 concert!