Mope rock has a new face. Literally. Seether’s music combines the sounds of 90s grunge with a more updated hard rock edge for the 2000s. In theory, it’s pretty generic on paper, but that is without taking in the oh-so-pained vocals of Shaun Morgan, who puts such an honest yet not overly soppy edge on life, and has won the band a loyal fanbase worldwide along the way.
Perhaps the biggest band ever to come out of South Africa, Seether now has not one but two recent albums out on the shelf: One Cold Night, a live acoustic disc with DVD, and Karma & Effect, last year’s studio release. You’d think that this would present a travel opportunity for the band, and Morgan tells me, without hesitation, that he has been whining to whoever the people are in charge to come back after last year’s Sydney tour at the Roundhouse.
Morgan says of the new release Karma, “It’s more mature songwriting. I wrote Disclaimer between the ages of 17 and 20 and Karma & Effect between 25 and 27, so it’s more mature.” And less obviously drawn from the band’s deep love of Nirvana. ”Most of it just fell into place,” he tells me.
The lyrics on Seether’s latest album also hint at PG, with lines like ‘Frail / This skin is dry and pale / The pain will never fail’ and ‘I can’t face myself when I wake up and look inside a mirror.’ I had to ask what sort of personal experiences these come from. ”I’ll have an idea or a direction and then the stuff that I write is something I don’t consciously think about,” he admits. ”Which, I wish I did – because then it would make me super-deep or something.” It’s already pretty deep, I promise him. He laughs, but… “Nah, it’s all just stuff that comes out when I need to get rid of it.” They’re open to interpretation, basically.
Out at the end of next week, One Cold Night is a bridge between studio albums and something to share with the curious, I find. ”People have been asking us to release an acoustic album for a long time so we finally got round to doing that,” Morgan says. ”And putting it out to us feels like it’s a bridge and something in the meantime for people to listen to. Which gives us time to go into the studio and record the new album and have it ready for release next year.” Did I hear that correctly?
Yes, apparently. There’ll be a new album from Seether in March 2007, or May at the latest. ”We’ve got two songs written and demoed.” Luckily, he also gives me a sneak peek into the direction it could take the band. ”It’s different to what we’ve done… I mean, one song has piano on it, which we haven’t done before. The other song is pretty much a straight-up rock song, but… there’s gonna be a lot more experimentation with different instruments on this album. It’ll still be a guitar-driven band, with bass, drums and vocals and all that kind of stuff, but I think we’ve reached the point where that’s not enough anymore. It’s still going to have a heavy edge, but it’s gonna be a little bit more colourful.
“Also, we want to put out more material than normal bands do. Most bands now wait two to three years between albums. It’s kind of important for us to have music out all the time, I mean, not being played on the radio, but just building up a catalog that one day is up there with… The Rolling Stones, if you can last that long.” This is clearly a major dream of Morgan’s, and he brings up more examples. ”Artists like Bob Dylan, or Johnny Cash, or all those guys that just have large bodies of work. And then, some of them do amazingly well and others don’t.” Seether is quite ready for the ups and downs of rock, it seems.
Does it piss him off that so often he’s compared to Nirvana by the press? ”I don’t read those,” he says straight away. ”They’re lame. They think that bands like My Chemical Romance are cool, who are about the image rather than the music. And bands like Wolfmother are really big, but to me they just sound like Led Zeppelin. How come the 70s are cool but the 90s aren’t?”
Influences. Nirvana, of course. Who else? ”Growing up as a kid my mum played ABBA a lot… I’m still a big ABBA fan.” I don’t bother to ask him how much ABBA lives in Seether’s music. ”When I was finally getting into music myself it was Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, then going to Pantera and the Deftones. The reason I picked up a guitar though was obviously Nevermind and the way it sounded.”
I apologize, but bring up ‘Broken.’ That inescapable mega hit. Morgan groans. Some have even suggested he was a little angry by all the success the duet had. “I wasn’t angry by it, no, I wasn’t angry at all. What pissed me off is that people were saying that we needed Amy (Lee) to do it. I think it’s unfair that people say that… I mean, it’s understandable too. But the thing is, our original intent with that song wasn’t at all what it ended up being. That was one of the times when a band was subjected to what a record company wants for them rather than what a band wants.”
It seemed the appropriate time to ask if they had a good relationship with their record label. To my surprise, I got the thumbs up. “In general the label’s really good to us. They’ve kept us touring, and kept us supported all this time and they still believe in us. It’s good to have a label that actually cares about a band’s career,” he says happily.
“Subsequently, it (Broken) did amazingly well. It gave us an introduction to the pop world, and to some degree I guess gave her some credibility at rock, cos she’d lost that with all the Christian crap and all the ‘I’m not Christian, yes I am, no I’m not…’ that whole debate. But it was good for us man, and it’s not something I could be mad about.” Apparently turning to God in the rock world is not as cool as some KoRn guitarist thought it was.
And in an event strangely similar to KoRn’s guitarist leaving the band, Seether’s lead guitarist Pat Callahan also walked out about a month ago (but not because of his faith). took the time to ask Shaun how he felt about that. ‘Um… relieved a little… actually a lot,’ he decides. ”He was the guy in the band that was always our naysayer, and he was the negative energy as far as writing. I personally have no love lost, which is weird for some reason ‘cos he was my friend for four years. But when he walked out – it kinda walked out with him.
“We can now go back to being the concentrated threepiece with three guys that want to be here, and don’t think they’re not getting enough attention, and all that kind of shit.” You’re getting a lot of attention already, I assure him. He laughs. ‘We’re getting it, but it’s not something any of us crave,’ he says wisely. ”If you have a group of people and there’s always someone that’s negative, it just brings the whole vibe down.” So they will be just as strong a unit without him. No questions there.
Karma & Effect is out now through Sony BMG.
One Cold Night will be released on July 22.
