Jan 24 2025 27 mins 3
Shinedown frontman Brent Smith joins host Abe Kanan today for a special Audacy Check In, filling us in on the band's 2025 plans, including their upcoming live dates scheduled for this spring alongside Bush and Beartooth, and their double dose of brand new singles released today (1/24) -- "Dance Kid Dance," and "Three Six Five."
Shinedown is kicking off the new year with new music and an impressive touring itinerary, after just revealing their 30-city Dance, Kid, Dance Tour -- featuring guests Bush on the summer dates and Beartooth in the spring -- scheduled to make stops in most major markets including Boston, Detroit, Nashville, New York, Seattle, Atlanta, and more before wrapping up at the end of August.
First touching on the two new tracks the band just offered up, “Three Six Five” Brent tells us, “We kind of felt like it definitely had a bit more tempo than maybe the last song that people were familiar with -- maybe the more mainstream leaning, Pop leaning-type songs. So, we kind of bumped up the BPMs a little bit on that. And ‘Dance Kid, Dance,’ we just went to the wall with that.”
“It's interesting,” he explains. “I had a friend of mine the other day say to me, ‘Are you a rock band? Are you a metal band? Are you an Alternative band? Are you a Pop… what are you?’ And I'm like, ‘We're just Shinedown.' We play in a big sandbox. We've always been a genre-bending band, because we're inspired by a lot of different styles and we're constantly evolving. We felt like the right move with the first new material that people would hear from us, that we gave them two sides of us.”
“I think along the way people started to get pigeonholed,” Smith adds, “or they started using boxes, or ‘stay in your lane,’ or you know… ‘You're only this genre.’ When you expand your palette, sonically or what have you, you're just trying to reach as much of the audience as you can. Some days you feel like you want to throw down and rock, some days you're a little bit more emotional, but that's the beauty of music, man. It constantly evolves and the only thing that we've ever done in this band is, anybody from anywhere at any time we wanted them to be able to know that Shinedown has a lot of peaks and valleys -- kind of like a roller coaster ride, but there's something for everyone.”
As the band gets ready to hit the road on their 2025 Dance, Kid, Dance Tour, Brent, obviously a fan of their tour partners Bush growing up, revealed that he had recently been on a call with frontman Gavin Rossdale “just kind of reintroducing ourselves to one another. We met a while back and we really hadn't had a chance to connect, but I got to give a lot of credit to Zach Myers and Shinedown for Bush coming on this tour. He really was like, ‘Man, it would be amazing if we could get them for this!’ And then obviously having who we think is the epitome of the fearless female outlaw, Morgan Wade, is coming out on this tour as well, so there's a lot of diversity. But Bush specifically, having a 30-year anniversary for ‘Sixteen Stone,’ also I think the 20-year for ‘Razorblade Suitcase.’ I might be getting those confused, but they have this kind of nostalgia era coming into their new record where there's still this band that is very much very current, and they they're just a force to be reckoned with.”
Making their way back to the new releases, “There's so much wrapped up,” Brent says in “Three Six Five” -- “That one really took hold very quickly. There was a lot of loss last year, personally in our families, and friends of ours that it was their time, and none of us know when it's our time. Our fanbase over the years have really talked about how our music and the songs that we write really helped them at times when they're going through difficulty with what their daily lives can be and how Shinedown is kind of like a security blanket in a way.”
“It's very emotional when I think about it, but we've always bee ...
