I recently got the opportunity to talk to Seether’s John Humphrey just a few hours before the band took the stage at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena. A full-length audio podcast of my interview is available online at www.marshall.edu/wmul.
TayKuy: Who are you listening to right now?
Seether: Well, we all have iPods, so we listen to various things right now there is not whole lot of new stuff that I’m lovin’, but one of the most recent things that I have purchased from iTunes was Iggy Pop and the Stooge’s album Raw Power. It’s just a raw unadulterated freakin’ visceral album. I had it on final, but I had to upgrade to digital.
TayKuy: Where you fan of Three Days Grace and Breaking Benjamin before you went on tour with them?
Seether: I have to be honest, I just started learning their music when we started touring. Of course I had heard the singles from Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace on the radio, but I didn’t own any of their CD’s. It is cool to go out and buy these albums and listen to them now that we have this personal connection with the band.
TayKuy: Are you pretty close to the other bands?
Seether: Yeah there is a lot of camaraderie between us and the other guys, it’s a great tour to be on and we have a lot of fun. For Halloween we were in Fort Wayne Indiana, we all got dressed up and had a lot of fun.
TayKuy: You’re not headlining this year’s tour how has that made the touring experience different?
Well it’s cool it’s not on our shoulders to be selling out these places. It can be a little intimidating when it’s your name on the marquee. It makes it your fault. If you don’t sell out the pressure is on you. This has been really low key for us, it was all about warming up, we had been away form live performance for about year, and we wanted to get our feet wet and get back into it. Next year is going to be a rollercoaster ride.
TayKuy: Do you have any other big tours coming up?
Seether: We are going to be supporting Three Days Grace in Canada and we are talking with Flyleaf to co-headline a tour in the spring.
TayKuy: Seether spent some time playing in South Africa, where some of the band member came from, what’s the differences in playing there and playing in the U.S.?
Seether: It’s not American, a little different country but the people and fans are really very similar, music is the international language. We supported Collective Soul and Metallica in some huge stadiums over there and they were in these huge rugby stadiums that are bigger than any of our football stadiums, which held fifty to sixty thousand people. It was amazing, and being a homecoming band, we sometimes got better reactions than the other, maybe even bigger bands because it was this case of hometown boys done well.
TayKuy: Anything crazy happen on tour so far?
Seether: No, pretty low key, except for Halloween, we had a blast. Talk to us after the tour, we always do this big hazing with silly string, whipped cream, and who knows what kind of liquids and other things. The last show is always a pretty crazy night.
TayKuy: While you were preparing for the new album you ran into a lot of troubles, including some finger pointing by Amy Lee in one of her songs, a family suicide, drug rehabilitation and even some medical problems, how did you get through all of this and manage to put together an album?
Seether: Shaun (Morgan, lead singer) has been doing really well with all of these problems, and we support him all the way. IT was a crazy year for all of us, what helped us all was getting together in May for rehearsals for this new album. It was really the best therapy for all of us.
TayKuy: With No Jesus Christ, you guys went into a direction that you had released in previous albums, how did that song come about?
Seether: WE were fortunate that in production that song came back to be more like it was in its original form. Our producer did an awesome job. It was one of the tracks that we as artists just wanted to put out without worrying about whether or not it was going to be a single or not. There was an edit that really cut the song but, it just was not cool at all. I think it’s one of the heaviest greatest rock tracks that Seether has ever done.
TayKuy: The lead song off of Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces, Fake It is also pretty unique; can you tell us a little bit about it?
Seether: It started out on this cheesy little “Alley Cat” swing setting that was on Shaun’s keyboard. It was kind of light-hearted and when we started tracking it we didn’t know it would go the way it did, but it really turned out great.
TayKuy: So, what is it like making a video?
Seether: Well, making a video is not the ideal situation. We work great in the studio and we love touring, but the video is a hectic 16 hour day, with a lot of sitting around and waiting for a shot. We do really like the video of Fake It, and we are quite proud of it.
