I recently had the opportunity to speak with John Seether’s Humphrey front band for a few hours at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena. The full-length audio podcast of my interview is available online at www.marshall.edu/wmul.
TayKuy: Who are you listening to now?
Seether: Well, we all have iPods, so we’re listening to a variety of things now, not a whole lot of new stuff I’m Carl, but one of the most recent things I bought from iTunes was Iggy Pop and Raw Power’s Stooge album. It’s just a freakin’ honest raw album. I had it in the final, but I had to upgrade to digital.
TayKuy: Where do you fan three days grace and Benjamin Fractis before the tour with them?
Seether: I have to be honest, when I started to learn his music I was just drinking. Actually, I had heard details from Benjamin and Grace on the radio for three days, but not my own. what are their CDs? It’s cool to go out and buy this album and hear that now we have this personal connection with the band.
TayKuy: Are you close enough to the other bands?
Seether: Yeah there’s a lot of camaraderie between us and the other guys, it’s a great tour and we have a lot of fun. For Halloween we went to Fort Wayne Indiana, we all dressed up and had a lot of fun.
TayKuy: Aren’t you asking about this year’s tour, how did it make the experience different?
It’s cool, it’s not on our shoulders to sell these places. It can be a little intimidating when your name is on the market. It’s your fault it does. If the price doesn’t sell it’s on you. This was really low key for us, everything about heating up, we’ve been in performance form for about a year, and we wanted to get our feet wet and get back into it. The next year is going to be a roller coaster ride.
TayKuy: Do you have another big tour coming up?
Seether: We’re doing three thanksgiving days in Canada and we’re talking to ourselves with Flyleaf to co-headline a Tour in spring.
TayKuy: Seether has been playing for a while in South Africa, where some of the band members come from, what is the difference between playing there and playing in the US?
Seether: Not American, the country is a little different, but the people and fans are very similar, it’s international music. Language We supported the collective spirit and the metal in some huge stadiums there and in these huge rugby stadiums they were bigger than any of our football stadiums, which held fifty to sixty thousand people. It was amazing, and when the band triumphed, sometimes we got better reactions than the other, maybe bigger bands because it was a chance. the children did well in the country.
TayKuy: Has anything crazy happened on the road so far?
Seether: No, low key, unless we had a blast on Halloween. Talk to us after the tour, we always do that big string covered silly, whipped cream and who knows what liquors and other things . The last show is always a pretty crazy night.
TayKuy: While preparing the new album, you ran into a lot of trouble, including some pointing the finger at Amy Lee in one of his songs, family death, drug rehabilitation and even medical problems, how did you get through all this and manage to compose the album?
Seether: Shaun (Morgan, lead singer) has done really well with all of these issues, and we’re just helping him out. It’s been a crazy year for all of us, which helped us all find ourselves in May to review this new album. It was really the best experience for all of us.
TayKuy: Since No Jesus Christ, you guys have entered the direction than you have released on previous albums, how did this song come about?
Seether: We were lucky that in the production that song came back it was more like the original form. We did an awesome job doing it. It was one of those tracks that we as artists wanted to release without worrying about whether it was going to be a single or not. There was a review that really cut the song but it just wasn’t cool at all. I think it’s one of the greatest heavy rock tracks that Seether has ever done.
TayKuy: A lead song about finding beauty in negative spaces, Fake is also pretty unique; can you tell us a little about that?
Seether: It started with this cheesy little “Alley Cat” swing set that was on Shaun’s keyboard. She was kind of light hearted and when we started following her we didn’t know the way she was going to go, but she turned out to be really great.
TayKuy: So what’s it like making a video?
Seether: Well, making a video is not an ideal thing. We work hard in the studio and we love to drink, but I see a fever of 16 hours a day, with a lot of investment, and waiting for a shot. We really like the Fake It video, and we’re pretty proud of it.
