Black Stone Cherry is a band that is pretty new to me but while they are new to me, their style is very familiar and comfortable. Creating a unique blend of hard rock and southern rock to create a hybrid all it’s own. Black Stone Cherry is currently on tour supporting their new album “Between The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea and I was lucky enough to hang out with drummer John Fred Young on their air conditioned tour bus (it was hotter than hell out side!). We shared a couple of cold Cokes and he talked about how being from Kentucky shaped their sound, the importance of good songwriting and how working with outside songwriters proved to be a positive experience. I hope y’all dig this one.
Welcome back to Atlanta! How has the crowd been taking to the new material on this run?
This is the sixth show so far and it’s been really good. We’ve been opening with “Change” off the new album and we’ve doing 4 or 5 others mixed with stuff from the first and second album.
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With three albums under your belt now, how hard is it to make a setlist for the shows?
It’s hard man. It’s hard because you’re trying to balance every album. It’s hard enough when you’re headlining a tour, but it’s worse when you’re the opening band because then you only have 30-45 minutes and we’re like, “Man, what do we do?” [laughs]
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Speaking of new tunes, you guys just released your new album ““Between The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea.” In all due respect, it seems to have a bit more commercial appeal to it and less dark than the previous two. Was this something you guys were shooting for with this record?
Honesty, that’s just a result of us trying to keep the roots we have, but at the same time try and make it a little more accessible to radio here in America. We’re pretty much a word of mouth band. We really don’t want to sell out, but we do want to become successful. We spent an entire year writing this record from like January to November. We did co-writes with other people starting in July. We had like 55 songs and we just went in and did the record.
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Was it hard for you guys to narrow it down to 12 songs?
We got out to Los Angeles and narrowed it down to 15 songs. It’s hard getting 15 songs out of 55 songs and then narrowing it down to 12. It’s hard to put all personal attachments aside and figure out what songs are really best for the album.
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You just mentioned bringing in some outside songwriters for this album. I feel like you guys write some great songs on your own! Was it hard relinquishing control and opening yourselves up to that?
It worked out really good. At first we didn’t want to do it at first and we were against it 100%. Our A&R guy wanted us to do it and we begged him to please not make us do this [laughs]. Honestly, looking back on it, it was great that we were that concerned, but we were also being really bull headed and closed minded to think that we could be the most creative thing in the world all the time by ourselves. Dave Bassett who’s worked with Shinedown was really, really fun to work with. We went to California to work on some stuff with him. We also did a song with Bob Marlette and John 5 from Rob Zombie’s band called “Killing Floor” which was great. We also worked with Zack Malloy from The Nixons on the song “White Trash Millionaire.” We made a lot of good friends and wrote a lot of songs.
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That was a real surprise for me to hear that you worked with John 5. I really didn’t know how it was going to work, but that guy is a really versatile writer and musician.
He’s one of the best. You just look at him on stage and he’s so theatrical, but the dude can sit down and chicken pick like Merle Travis and Jerry Reed [laughs]. He was the nicest guy to work with.
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You said you guys had about 55 songs written for this album. Will the songs that didn’t make this album ever see the light of day?
We obviously couldn’t use all of them and I know some of these songs will come back around. We have a song called “Such A Shame” on this album that was originally written on the headline tour for the first album in Europe. We’ve had that song that long and it’s just now getting used. Sometimes you have a song that it just might not be it’s time, but it’s meant to be later. Things may change with it and then eventually it has it’s time. Songs are funny little things. They always keep you guessing. You want to write the best songs possible and you always wonder what people are going to think of them when you get them done. It’s always a test for yourself and you wonder if you’re writing songs better than you did for the last album. I listen to our first album sometimes and I’m really proud of the writing we did on those albums so for this 3rd one. I’m glad we did get to that level of writing with other people. I’m glad that the songwriting took a step up. It’s all about the song.
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You guys have been rooted in Kentucky for so long, but for this album you ventured out to California to make this album with Howard Benson. Did the change in geographic environment and new producer influence the overall sound of the album at all?
It’s definitely really different. You really grow into your environment and things can rub off on you, but I think for us when we got with Howard (Benson; producer) we told him that we just more than anything wanted to make this album rock. He told us that we needed to not ever be scared to show our roots. The only two things on this album that we really knew had to be perfect was the drums and the tuning of the guitars. As musicians we tend to overlook the little stuff like not playing as much or is the song too fast. Anybody who does this always wants to play their best. We also learned how incredible it is to have the guitars in precise tuning instead of them being slightly off. Between each song take he made the guitarists tune. On this record we didn’t want to do a lot of post production with adding strings and back up vocals and other shit. With Chris, he’s 10 times the singer he was when we first started like 10 years ago. He’d go through each song like twice and we would just pick the track that had the most emotion. We weren’t so worried about it being perfect, but we wanted that emotion.
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It’s so important to have a solid album, but it seems like full albums just don’t sell like they used to. Radio even seems to be a lost medium for promoting a lot of new bands. What’s your outlook on that?
Back in the day you used to go on tour to sell a record and now it’s like you make a record so you can go on tour. The industry has changed that way. It’s hard to think about how the industry has changed so much. When you think about it from the days of the chitlin circuit with 45 singles, the 70’s with full length albums and now it’s back to the old days of 45’s only now it’s with an iPod. It’s weird. I really enjoy listening to Sirius radio and stuff, but the problem with radio these days is that they play that great classic stuff like Floyd, Zeppelin, and The Rolling Stones eight times a day, but they don’t make any room for the new bands coming out. That’s why it’s been hard for us. When we first came out and they heard that southern sound, it was an automatic red flag [laughs]. Every new band has a problem with that.
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You mentioned how having that southern sound drew a red flag, but you guys also have elements of hard rock and metal to your sound. Does straddling genres like this make it hard for you guys to find a comfortable home in the music world?
Definitely. I think it’s hard to even know what the hell we are man [laughs]. People in Europe categorize us as metal. If you go to the metal section of a music store, we’re in there. In America at places like FYE and stores like that, it’s in normal “rock.” Once we were in Saragosa, Spain in the desert playing a festival called Hellfest which was like a total metal fest. We were playing the song “Things My Father Said” which is like a country ballad at this metal fest and it was debuting on CMT in the US at the same time [laughs].
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You can tell a lot about a band based on their geographic and regional setting. Did you feel like being from Kentucky inspired your sound?
Yeah, I think so. I think it did. I grew up practicing in a rehearsal house on my grandparent’s farm. It was nothing but 60’s posters everywhere and music by bands like Cream, Mountain, The Who, The Faces, Howlin’ Wolf, Lynyrd Skynyrd, anything you could think of. That’s why we sounded like we did on that first record. It was just that this was the music we grew up on. We totally listened to a lot of the more modern bands, but we just had a greater appreciation for what my dad and my uncle (Fred & Richard Young of the Kentucky Headhunters) grew up listening to in that house. That music is just such a great part of our chemistry and who we are. I think it probably made us more conscious of bluegrass, gospel, country, and southern rock music. I think if we had grown up in California or New York I don’t think we would have the close knit bond or the sound that we have now. You never know. We might have just been a great punk band or whatever type of band [laughs]. We definitely had this thing going on being from Kentucky.
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Black Stone Cherry is definitely a hard band to pin down because of the many influences you guys have.
Our music has so many influences like southern rock, classic rock, english rock, motown, blues. Chris loves Freddy King and the Beatles are my favorite band. I love reggae music, Ben’s a huge gospel fan but loves metal. John’s a huge Alice In Chains fan. I think it’s cool to not be classified as just one type of band. Who says you can’t be more than one thing? Some artists just hop to and from different genres but I think it’s better to just create your own road.
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I feel like Black Stone Cherry has done a great job creating its own little genre, but does this make it hard for you guys to get the right kind of tours that are best for you?
I think it’s cool that we can tour with all kinds of different bands. It’s weird going from those different genres sometimes. We did a tour in 2009 with Motorhead in Europe, but then we did a tour with Whitesnake and Def Leppard and even toured with Collective Soul. We went out with Staind for some dates and then went out with Black Label Society. Festivals are fun because we get to play with a lot of great bands. Festivals just make us want to go out there and whip everyone’s ass, but that’s a good thing. It’s healthy competition. You just want to go out there and put on the best live show you can. The summer festivals are the best. We got so much shit thrown at us on the Black Label Society tour, but that’s the tour that made us a good live band. We had to go out there and really kick ass every night. Honestly the live shows are something we’re extremely proud of. We want to keep doing that and not ever leave anyone unsatisfied after a s how. That’s the most important thing for us.
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How was it being on the road with Motorhead?
I think we probably talked Lemmy twice on that whole tour but he’s a cool guy. I didn’t see the sun once when we did that Motorhead tour [laughs]. Lemmy is the godfather of rock n’ roll. You think about how much stuff he’s contributed to. Phil and Mickey were just great and watching them every night was amazing. Their fans are just rabid.
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This has been a lot of fun talking to you today! What does the rest of 2011 have in store for Black Stone Cherry?
We’re actually going to do the Carnival of Chaos tour with Alter Bridge and Theory of a Dead Man which will be a cool tour starting in August. We’ll do that for 2 months and then we’ll head to Europe to co-headline arenas with Alter Bridge so that will be cool.
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Best of luck to you guys with all that and thanks again so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Thank you brother. I really appreciate it and I’ll see ya at the show tonight!
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