Rock Sins recently conducted an interview with SHINEDOWN guitarist Zach Myers. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below. Rock Sins: How far along are you guys with a new record. Have you started writing it yet? Zach: "Yeah, we probably have twelve songs done. Most bands go in and write and twelve songs and that's the record. You are very confident in yourself — you think you can just write the first twelve songs and that's it; you like what you do, I guess. [Laughs] For us, I think we have four great songs, we have six that are good and we have five that don't even have a chance to make the record. But that's the way we do it, and I think we are getting better as writers. because [2008's] 'The Sound Of Madness', I want to say there were close to forty or fifty demos that I still have, [2012's] 'Amaryllis' was twenty-eight and [2015's] 'Threat To Survival' was eighteen to twenty, so we're getting close. Soon maybe we'll be able to write twelve songs and say, 'Hey, here's the record.' [Laughs] You see a lot of people that write two singles and two really good songs and go, 'All right, we've got the singles.' If you keep track of our band, we wanna go six deep on every record. We started that with 'The Sound Of Madness' — we had six singles on one album, which is insane. 'Threat To Survival' was five or six. We could probably put out these first twelve songs and the record would still do fine, but I wanna write a twelve-single record every time." Rock Sins: When writing, do you guys write on the road or will you be taking time off after this tour to finish off the writing for the record? Zach: "We've never really written on the road until now. We have always been of two brains — we've always been of the brain that there's touring, and when you're done touring for that record, then you start writing, and that's how we've done it until 'Threat To Survival'. This record we're writing, we're recording and playing shows in the middle, which we've never done before. This time we've written twelve songs. On the last record, we didn't write one song until we finished the record cycle. Eric [Bass], our bass player, is kind of the patriarch of the writing process because he's an amazing producer and engineer, so he writes a lot on the road. So on this last arena tour we did in U.S., he was trying to do a song a day, so three of the songs that we have that are already done is stuff that he started in dressing rooms on the road." Rock Sins: I Being in the position you are in, you have to be careful [with social media], because all it would take is for a fan to take something the wrong way, screenshot it and then you see a headline on Blabbermouth: "SHINEDOWN guitarist called me blah blah blah…" Zach: "'SHINEDOWN guitarist says European audiences are smarter than American audiences' [was] probably one of the best headlines I ever read. [Laughs] I try not to do interviews as much as I can. We were over here [in Europe], and we were in the arena on one of the first nights of this tour [with IRON MAIDEN], and I walked passed the room where I did that interview. That was not even what I said, and he wouldn't release the audio, which really pissed me off, because if you heard the audio, that's not what I said. Me and Chris Jericho talked about this on his podcast. I love Blabbermouth, I check it every day, but the comments… I don't even read them anymore, if you're in there shitting on Ozzy [Osbourne] or METALLICA, then you are gonna destroy me, so I don't even bother anymore. [Laughs] But I still read Blabbermouth daily." Read the entire interview at Rock Sins.
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