Godsmack has been part of the hard rock environment since 1995, found almost immediate success with their debut album and from that time have remained one of America’s biggest rock bands – three consecutive #1 albums, more than 20 Top Ten hit songs, sales in excess of 8 million and massive arena tours with every release. With their seventh album Lighting Up the Sky, the Boston four piece are looking to draw a line under their recording career with the recent announcement that this will be their final studio release. For a band that is still enjoying an enviable level of success that has barely suffered a dip for 25 years, it’s a remarkable and surprising decision to make. But as founder and frontman Sully Erna explains, it’s about time to start thinking about a new chapter.
Hot Metal: I know you’ve said this will be the last album from Godsmack. How committed to that are you, because it seems like an interesting statement to make from a band that would seem to still have some way to go yet?
Sully Erna: I don’t know. It feels like this record is very complete. Here we are, 26 Top 10 singles and 12 #1s, and we could possibly get three or four off this new record, which means we’d be at 30 Top 10 singles, and that means we could 15 shows a night back to back and never play the same single twice. At what point do you start thinking about the fans and honouring the career, and start putting together the greatest hits show. We’re not announcing the breakup of a band, we’re just closing one chapter and realising it’s time to move on to the next chapter.
HM: The next chapter then is obviously you playing those greatest hits, but what about you as a songwriter? Surely you’re not going to stop writing songs.
SE: You know what, I don’t really know what I’m going to do. I really don’t. I’m at that crossroads in my life and I’m really not sure what I’m going to do after this. Right now my focus is this record and what we’re going to do with this record, but… I don’t know. I always think about a quote [Aerosmith’s] Tom Hamilton said once in an interview. He said, “Music is something I’ve always wanted to do with my life, but it’s not everything I’ve wanted to do with my life.” I’m getting to a point where there’s so many other things that I’d like to do, and what kind of life I’d like to live and I’m not sure that it’s always going to mean being on the road and writing records and all that stuff. I’ve had a great career, I’ve had a great time. I’m very gracious for it and I’m very humbled by the whole experience, but there’s still a lot I’d like to do with my life, and I’ll take it one day at a time and see where that leads me.
HM: You are now in your mid-50s. That is a time for reflection for most people, regardless of success or career or anything else. You have had a long and outstanding career, so if you put down the guitar tomorrow and just went out now and then with Godsmack, what’s one thing that you think you’d like to do? Have you thought much about that?
SE: No I haven’t, but I know it would be simple. I would just spending time with my family, spending time with people that I love and not always having to be running around the world. The one thing we can’t slow down is time, and as we get older we start to reflect on our mortality. Years can by go very, very quickly when you’re on the road, and we’ve done a lot of them! So that’s just how I feel.
HM: There must have been a period where you may have thought the band wasn’t going to continue for a long time, with restrictions in place on playing live and touring. How did you manage to get through that?
SE: It was perfect. We were just coming off the Legends album, all the touring we’d done with that. So we were going to take some down time anyway, in 2020, and write a record toward the end of the year, and probably deliver something in 21 or 22. Obviously, with everything that happened, it created the luxury of time for us and with that we took advantage of slowing the process down and waiting for the biggest and best songs to come out of us. That’s part of the reason why I think this record came out as strong as it did.
HM: So it gave you time off from the album cycle of recording and touring, but did it also give you time to reflect on whether this should be Godsmack’s last album?
SE: It kind of came up in the middle of the recording and the writing. It wasn’t something we planned from the beginning. We just started thinking about all the things we had done, the success we have, how the fans wanna hear certain songs, and there’s a lot of them to play. Like I said, there’s a good chance we’re going to be at 30 Top 10 singles at some point and when you go see your favourite band, do you really want to hear Aerosmith play their new album, or do you wanna hear them play Dream On and Walk This Way? And so, being a fan myself, I’m trying to be mindful of that, and deliver a show for the fans that is built off the greatest hits. That’s when we started thinking, What else can we do at this point? What else do we want to do? When is enough, enough? We do we know we’ve arrived and we can lay back and enjoy that? What is it we’re looking for, at that point? For me, I feel very complete. If it all ended tomorrow, I would have no regrets. I would give all my guys a big hug and call it a deal, and move on with my life. So I think we just want to start enjoying the time we have in different ways, enjoying the things we’ve worked hard for and earned over the years.
HM: You’ve never really come out in the past and said that this album or that is your best, or that an album is the best you’ve done. But you’re saying now that this is most complete Godsmack record – that must feel a bit like shutting the door in some way.
SE: I really haven’t [said that before]. And because it feels very complete, and very well-rounded, and I feel there’s a beautiful balance of all things Godsmack on this album, even some new textures that people haven’t heard us do yet. It’s very satisfying, right now, and I wouldn’t even know how to top it. I feel in my heart that this is, by far, the best work we’ve ever done. And again – it just happened! This record wrote itself. It really did. One song came after the next. It didn’t happen all in a row. It literally took a couple of years to get it written and recorded, but it wasn’t like we were in there for a couple of years. It was like, ‘Hey, let’s live our lives. We’ve got all this time off, the world is shut down, and when someone has a great idea we’ll meet up, we’ll work it out and we’ll record it, and we’ll see ya when we see ya.’ That’s all we wanted to do, just the best of the best. I told the band that. We’re not going to accept anything less than something that can potentially be a single. I want every song on this record to be really, really strong. That’s what we focused on at first, and then after we heard it, and after we sequenced it, and after it started to tell this whole story, that’s when we thought… Wow, we were guided on this one. It’s hard to take full credit for it, because some of these songs and melodies came together so well… Such big melodies, and I don’t know where they came from. When we started the process, we had no idea. There was nothing to go off.
HM: The songs that have been made available aren’t so far apart that you can mistake them for two different bands, but Surrender for example is quite a heavy track and You and I is quite expansive, with some of those layers you were talking about before that people may not have explored with your music.
SE: There’s a lot on this record. There’s stuff that I feel is classic Godsmack power, like Red, White and Blue, and there’s some new songs on here like Truth and Soul on Fire that are just like high voltage rock n roll, and there’s some other stuff as well that I just enjoy. We were just experimenting with writing and when it came to songs like You and I and Let’s Go and those middle sections that take you on this Zeppelin-y journey, those things are just like part of who our inspirations were and things like the kind of music that we grew up listening to. So we didn’t want to have limitations on the songs, or have them completely sculpted just so we could have a radio song, we were just like, ‘Let’s just let the song write itself, and whatever it takes, it takes’.
HM: So that was a process you really enjoyed, then, just throwing ideas around and seeing them through?
SE: I enjoyed all of it, because halfway through we started discussing that this might be the last one. When that realisation hit, then the whole emotion changed and people wanted to be there for every part of it, ‘cause they knew this could be the last one and they didn’t want to miss any of the moments. It became a very special thing and bonded us, and even became a very emotional thing for us. And it still is. This has been a huge part of our life, and to think about a part of this ending, it’s sad but it’s also happy. It’s inspiring to know that there’s something new coming.
HM: What then do you think the next chapter for Godsmack will be?
SE: I don’t know, man. I’m just taking it day by day. I don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring and I certainly don’t know what’s going to happen a year from now. But if there’s one thing I know, and I’ve learned from life, 100%, it’s that I don’t know shit! Everytime I think I have it sorted out, it throws a curveball at you. So you can never say never, but I think this is the way it’s going to go, and this is probably going to be the last one.
