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Lou Brutus with Jacoby Shaddix of Papa Roach
Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix told Detroit radio station WRIF that 2019 will mark his seventh year of sobriety. Shaddix explained, “That’s probably one of the best decisions I made in my life, one of the biggest changes — putting down the bottle. I’m coming up, actually, in February on seven years of not partying and drinking. And it saved my life. Honestly, I don’t think I would still be doing this if I stayed partying.”
Shaddix added, “You hear these stories, these tragic stories about these rock and rollers dying at such a young age, and I felt like my clock was ticking . . . I just don’t wanna go before my time. I’ve got so much more to do and so much more to say. I wanna be doing this for a long time. I wanna be a grandpa. I’ve got all these other things I wanna do with my life that take time. I need it.”
Seven years ago, as the band was working on its 2012 album The Connection, Shaddix hit rock bottom. He had been battling his addictions for a decade, cleaning up and then relapsing over and over. After the near-dissolution of his marriage and a battle with suicidal depression, Shaddix finally got sober once and for all.
Shaddix told us a while back why he had to put the brakes on: “It’s like a major change in my life, you know, something like — I use, like, booze as a way to, like, not deal with life, you know what I’m saying? And you know, I came to a point, something in my life had to change. I was just like, it was either, like, I was coming home in a bodybag or something had to give. And I just kind of, like, hit bottom and realized, like, that was it — like, I had to, like, kick that.”
Shaddix’s sober anniversary will come a month after the release of Papa Roach’s 10th studio album, Who Do You Trust?, which arrived last Friday (January 18th). The title track is currently Number Four on the rock radio chart.
Halestorm has announced a month-long North American tour, kicking off April 12th at Ladson, South Carolina’s 98 Rockfest and running through Columbus, Ohio’s Sonic Temple festival in mid-May, while also including a stop at Mexico City’s Domination Festival in early May.
Tickets go on sale to the general public beginning on Friday, January 25th at 10:00 a.m. local time. Halestorm is out on the road in support of its fourth album, Vicious, which features the singles “Uncomfortable” and the raunchy “Do Not Disturb.”
Singer Lzzy Hale told us that Halestorm will be out on the road for most of 2019: “We’re booked throughout the end of the year now, pretty much. It’s tour, tour and more tour, and keep on doing what we’ve always done. It’s mostly us, so it’s mostly, you know, headline tour type of things, and then we have a couple of new surprises that we can’t wait to announce, coming up a little later.”
Meanwhile, Halestorm’s tourmates for the better part of last year, In This Moment, will also launch their own spring trek, starting on May 3rd in Jacksonville, Florida and winding down three weeks later on the 24th in Kansas City, Missouri.
Support on the trek will come from Sevendust, as well as Light The Torch and Hyde. In This Moment and Halestorm will cross paths for one show on May 9th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Tickets for this tour also go on sale Friday.
In This Moment has spent the last few months working on music for the follow-up to 2017’s Ritual album.
Bring Me The Horizon has released another new song called “Mother Tongue.” The track is taken from the band’s upcoming album, Amo, which will be released this Friday (January 25th). Singer Oli Sykes told Beats One host Zane Lowe about the song, “It’s probably the most gushing, out-there, just straight-up love song we’ve ever written. This was one of the easier ones to write, because it was positive. It’s about when I first met my new wife. She’s from Brazil, and she didn’t speak so much English . . . but from the very start, we had a really, really strong connection, and it was just a crazy time.”
Sykes added that Amo as a whole “kind of explores loving and different aspects of that. Toxic relationships and the end of relationships, really. It’s also about the positive side of love and obviously when you first fall in love, it’s got to be the greatest feeling.”
The vocalist added about the LP’s musical direction, “We didn’t really know what we wanted, but we just knew we wanted to be different. We wanted to still be Bring Me The Horizon, but make people feel the things they felt with us in different ways and try to do it sonically different.”
Bring Me The Horizon has spent the last few days in Nashville preparing for the start of its North American headlining tour, which kicks off Wednesday night (January 23rd) in Music City. Current single “Mantra” is Number Five on the rock radio airplay chart.
Green Day is about to begin selling iconic, used Dookie memorabilia online to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1994 breakout album’s release. More than 100 iconic pieces of Green Day history are going up for sale on Reverb.com, starting on February 7th.
The band have teamed up with the online instrument marketplace to sell a selection of items including almost 50 personal guitars from Billie Joe Armstrong and five drum sets from Tre Cool. Among the items for sale are Armstrong’s first guitar ever, a Harmony Stella Parlor acoustic, along with the cabinets used for the band’s 1994 Woodstock performance and on both the Dookie and Insomniac tours.
Armstrong remarked, “Every guitar has its own character. Each one reflects who you are — the kind of songwriter you are, the kind of guitar player that you are. Used guitars, in particular, come with a history to them. I love the character you can see looking at a fretboard that’s been used. After 30 years of collecting odds and ends and really good stuff . . . I have to sell some of it off.”
Cool added, “I hope whoever buys this stuff gets some enjoyment out of it . . . rocking it on their stage or putting it in their studio. I really hope they just don’t sit around and get dusty.”
Armstrong hinted to fans on Instagram last month that he was writing new Green Day songs but did not share any more details. The band kept a low profile for much of 2018, although they posted photos over the summer indicating that they had been rehearsing classic early albums like Dookie, Insomniac and Kerplunk! in full.
Slipknot turntablist Sid Wilson, also known as DJ Starscream, will play the lead role of “John” in a new horror/comedy project titled The Midnight Snack. Wilson’s numerous tattoos, including his trademark gas mask face tat, neck ink, and hand tattoos were all covered by the film’s makeup artists, while his red mohawk was changed to a dark brunette hair style, making him almost unrecognizable.
The Midnight Snack is a short-form series from Deathaus Films. The pilot segment, titled “Oh Yeah!”, is now available to watch online via Amazon’s Prime Video. Wilson’s character stops by a retro 1950s diner called The Midnight Snack one night for a bite, and ends up finding himself in peculiar circumstances.
Slipknot percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan said a while back that there’s always been room for outside projects within Slipknot: “I feel the ‘Knot has always preached personal freedom. You know, ‘Don’t ever judge me.’ That’s what we do, man. We do what we want, we do as much as we want. We’ll go shed light to what we are individually out onto the world and then we’ll come together like we always do.”
Crahan himself has both acted in and directed a feature film, while singer Corey Taylor has also done some acting in addition to his other career as an author and speaker. Slipknot is currently in the studio working on its sixth album, which will follow up 2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter.
Metallica‘s James Hetfield will be one of the artists interviewed for a new documentary about the life and career of late Thin Lizzy frontman and songwriter Phil Lynott. The film, titled Phil Lynott: Songs For While I’m Away, is in the works from award-winning Irish filmmaker Emer Reynolds.
It will also feature interviews with Thin Lizzy members Eric Bell, Scott Gorham and Darren Wharton, along with U2‘s Adam Clayton, Suzi Quatro, Huey Lewis and more.
Metallica has acknowledged Thin Lizzy as a major influence and even covered the band’s arrangement of the traditional Irish folk tune “Whiskey In The Jar.”
In other documentary news, Korn members James “Munky” Shaffer, Brian “Head” Welch and Jonathan Davis are featured in a new film called Mind Over Matter. The film tells the story of Brandon Mendenhall, a musician born with cerebral palsy who was told he would never be able to play an instrument. But he battled the condition and eventually strengthened his left hand enough to learn guitar.
Mendenhall was deeply inspired by Korn, and later went on to form his own band, The Mendenhall Experiment, which he used as a platform to spread awareness about disabilities. The band released their debut EP in 2017.
Shaffer said about the documentary, “This film is truly evident that the power of music has the ability to inspire and ignite people’s passion to overcome our own obstacles and achieve our dreams, no matter how difficult it may seem.” Mind Over Matter opens on January 25th.
That’s a wrap, have a great day!
