Carnival of Soul

Over the last two decades, Seether have remained a quintessential band in the hard rock and radio rock realm. Now with their eighth studio album, Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”), the band is continuing their dominating stride in the post-grunge and melancholic-rock world. However, unlike many bands in their particular rock community, there’s a certain authenticity that has always come with Seether and their song-craft.

It’s hard to find a dent in their discography or a lack of hit singles, to which they prove in their 4 platinum records, 15 number one singles, and over 600 million YouTube views, thus far. And by the looks of their latest singles, specifically the track “Dangerous,” Seether are off to a pretty decent start in 2020, as the song not only hit number seven on Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs, but it also managed to get lead songwriter/vocalist Shaun Morgan the number one spot on Billboard’s Hard Rock Songwriters Chart, as well as the number two spot on the Hard Rock Producers Chart (week of August 1st).

And despite being in the middle of a pandemic, one where live shows seem to be a distant memory yet a hopeful a reality in 2021, Seether have still stuck to their 2020 agenda with releasing their new record, today, August 28th. In accordance with the album drop, the band has also planned their own virtual album release show, “Locked & Live,” which is set to broadcast on Sunday, August 30th at 3 pm EST.

Considering the litany of bands and artists that have chosen to delay their music into 2021/post-pandemic, Seether once again prove their shade of authenticity, and they’re doing so in an era where pure sonic relief is desperately needed.

Diving into the topic of Seether’s brand new album, Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum, vocalist/songwriter Shaun Morgan shares his thoughts on the writing process for the album, what’s it’s like to release a record under the current climate, and the industries controversial reliance on music streaming platforms, namely Spotify.

What has it been like getting ready to drop a huge rock record in the midst of a pandemic? How have you, the band, and all the crew been holding up?

It’s interesting times, I came to a realization very early on in this lockdown that my entire life revolves around touring. It’s interesting not having that going on right now, because as far as the bulk of any band’s income, touring is really how it’s earned. So that’s been stressful, but we had some savings in the touring account, and we managed to keep some of the crew guys on with payments so they wouldn’t have to go hungry. We’re doing what we can, and we were really excited to go out and tour because it was the first time in about two years that we had actually been on tour. And right after you get your whole mental game ready, right as they’re about to drop the gates so you can start the race, they then call the race off. All that mental preparation kind of felt like it went to waste, but they are looking at touring possibly starting next summer, but that also depends on what winter and fall look like as far as viral resurgence, etc.

We’re just excited for this album, and it was already delayed once because of COVID-19, it was supposed to be out originally back in mid-June or beginning of July. But I’m just glad it’s out, and I think it’s important to put music out right now. I know the status quo is that you go out and tour for eighteen months to two years on an album, and then you go home and you repeat the process. However, I think it’s kind of cool that it’s at least shaking up the business a little bit in that sense, because we’ll see, we’ll if the success of an album is tied into touring, or if it’s the other way around.

Were there ever talks about delaying the record even further, or until you all can start touring again?

Well, there are a couple things there for me, if you don’t release it then it stagnates and then in my mind it’s no longer a fresh album. If you don’t put it out now and at the time it was finished, and at the time it was good to go, like if you put it out next year, at that point I’ve already written another albums worth of material, if not more. It’s far more exciting to put out an album closer to its completion because then it’s still fresh to us, and still exciting to us as well. And of course, as the touring cycle goes on you get to play the new songs, and a new excitement is in the live shows as well, but I didn’t want to partake in this ‘experiment’ against my will, and it should be easy to see just how much one requires the other.

For example, I certainly know that we get very horribly underpaid by the streaming services, but if you have a successful podcast they’ll give you millions and millions of dollars, all the money they don’t give to musicians. So that’s f**ked this thing up as far as income-wise, and when you look at touring being the main driving force behind our active income, that’s the big thing that we have to figure out, is there a way to replace that with a different side of music? I would say well sure, glaringly obviously Spotify should not be paying 0.004 cents or whatever it is per stream, that’s disgusting. But if you’re entertaining in a podcast for two and half hours then you get paid disgusting kinds of money, again it’s a big slap in my face and I’m having a hard time swallowing that.

We can’t all be Billie Eilish and have 40 million streams every 3 seconds and make a s**t ton of money. It’s been a little disconcerting, and Spotify is also the company that doesn’t want to pay artists more, everybody else is kind of cool with it. And they, being the giant are the ones that are fighting it. That’s something that’s so upsetting, is that we rely on services that don’t give a damn about us, and they make huge money off of us, and they pay us very little of that. It’s just a strange business to be in, I think I should have started playing video games (laughs).

As it relates to streaming, you guys are doing your first ever-virtual album release show on August 30th? What’s the process been like preparing for this big live stream event, you mentioned you’re also using this to support your crew?

It took us quite a while because as these live streams started rolling out we saw what everyone else was doing, and some were kind of just set up in a living room or a couch or in their backyard and they’d just kind of jam. We’ve taken a different route for better or worse, we’ll see how it works out, but we hired our lighting guy and his lighting company to borrow some lights, and we flew out our monitor guy, and all of the guys on the crew that were available to do it, and we got them in for a week so they got an extra weeks worth of full-time pay. The thing is when they’re not on the road with us they’re usually working for other bands, it’s a cyclical business, but now that there’s nobody touring they are all hurting.

But we’re playing just over an hour, and we picked the songs that we think people most want to hear, and we’re going to throw in some new ones too. But preparation wise we wanted it to look really good, so we had the lighting guys contact some audio/visual guys, and they set up like 11 cameras, there’s a drone, a couple RovoCams, so yeah it’s a full-on production. And it looks as if we were playing a real show, but it’s difficult because we’ve seen some of the test footage and it looks great, it sounds great so far, but it’s really bizarre finishing a song and there’s zero feedback. So that’s interesting, but I’m sort of looking at it as if it’s a rehearsal, and it’s a rehearsal for a tour, and like a “hey by the way, if there wasn’t any COVID this is what the show would be like.” And again it’s kind of a celebration of the album release and we just want to put on a big show.

The title for the new album, “Is Vis Pacem, Para Bellum,” (if you want peace, prepare for war) rings very relevant to themes of 2020. Was the title at all inspired by the events taking place in 2020? Or generally, was it a concept you had in mind prior to 2020?

It was very much inspired by this year, and this album is odd because it has many differences to what I’ve been used to, because usually an album title jumps out at me halfway through writing demos and I’ll remember it, retain it, and move on. But nothing like that happened this time, we had recorded drums in December, and then we took a break because we couldn’t find a studio, and then we came back for guitars and vocals and we were done by middle to late January. We had it mixed and mastered and then we were in the middle of February, and I still didn’t have an album title. I was kind of getting stressed out about it, I just didn’t know what to call it, nothing jumped out at me, no little catchy slogan or anything that I could think of.

Everything that I wrote sort of rang hollow with the music so I almost gave up, but I scrolled the internet and I was probably looking up car tires and ended on a Latin phrases page, you know how it is on the internet, the rabbit hole goes deep. I found a phrase and I thought “oh this is a cool one,” and then I just saw “Is Vis Pacem, Para Bellum,” and I thought “man that’s really cool.” I almost wanted to use the English translation but I felt like it had more gravitas if it was the Latin version. As annoying as it is to pronounce, it’s more authentic and it felt like it needed to be the Latin version.

It’s not me trying to be pretentious, but it just made sense if you look at everything, not just society, not just what’s happening amongst communities and inner human interaction, but the planet too, it’s starting to feel like it’s trying to shrug us off. I came up with the name somewhere in March, and by March it already felt like how much more of this can we take? It also encompasses my feelings toward social media and how that’s just a battleground, and how people can just not conceive the notion that they can be friends with somebody that doesn’t think the same way as they do. And apparently that’s a completely alien concept, so that also felt like it was part of this title.

You stated your approach to songwriting with this album, and how it’s one of the only times you wrote lyrics prior to the instrumentals. What inspired this approach and how did it affect the overall outcome and your feelings toward the album?

The big change for me this time was that I usually go into the studio and we have the music, we record the music, and then it’s time to sing the song and I still have zero lyrics. Then I sort of scribble something down and allow my subconscious stream of thought to take over and hopefully put something down that’s coherent enough to put alongside the music. This time I took a couple of weeks, way before we even went into the vocals, and I was writing out lyrics and analyzing them, and I would play them over and over in my head and decide if that was the right direction I was going in, or if it wasn’t. But I was able to look at them critically and make changes, whereas if I’m only scribbling them down right before I’m about to go sing them, that’s it, there are no changes.

Often when I’ve finished an album I’ll go “damn, I wish I just changed that one word,” like “take a look in the mirror,” or “take a look at the mirror.” “In” or “at” to me can be such a grinding one if it’s not the one I wanted to use, and it’s always something as small as that. So I wanted to prevent that as well, but it was cool because I thought look, I’m going to put as much effort into the lyrics this time as I put into the music, because it doesn’t make any sense to just work for 10 months on these songs and then come in at the end and just sort of half-ass some lyrics. I don’t think that does the song any favors and I feel maybe it’s just been lazy all along (laughs). So I felt like I wanted to be more prepared, and then when I went in to sing the vocals this time I could sing them with more conviction.