SHADOWS FALL
With the release of their major-label debut, metal’s reigning regular dudes prepare for an extraordinary future
By Mikael Wood
Photo by Ari Michelson
“Fuck music!” Brian Fair is yelling. “All that matters is football!” It’s a sunny January afternoon in Los Angeles, and the dreadlocked Shadows Fall frontman is pounding his fists on the table at Saddle Ranch, a rowdy Western-themed joint on the Sunset Strip, as Fair’s beloved New England Patriots battle the Indianapolis Colts for the privilege of playing in Super Bowl XLI. The singer’s bandmates—football fans, to be sure, but not ones whose zeal quite matches Fair’s—are discussing setup strategy for Threads of Life, Shadows Fall’s first album for Atlantic. A question arises regarding CD signings: Does it make a signing more special if the band appears at fewer of them, or do they it owe it to their fans to make themselves as accessible as possible?
Fair’s opinion is solicited, but his mind is occupied by the Patriots’ slimming lead. The result? His bare-bones declaration of priorities, a swift reminder to the rest of Shadows Fall that until the game clock winds down to zero, Fair isn’t the frontman of one of metal’s most dependable, well-regarded outfits—he’s just a guy from Massachusetts with a rapidly dying dream. As if to underscore the point, Saddle Ranch’s 700 TV monitors simultaneously flicker with another disappointing turn of events. “No!” Fair screams, the psychological torment audible in his voice. It continues that way until the Patriots finally succumb to the Colts, at which point Fair stands up from the battered table and announces his new plan: “I’m gonna go kick a puppy.”
A week and a half later, Fair sounds not just healed but downright cheery. “You just have to learn to get over some things,” he says breezily, on the phone from his home outside Boston, where he’s resting up before touring begins in support of Threads of Life. He’s right to be stoked: A powerful, nuanced blast of post-thrash muscle, Threads proves that Shadows Fall—which also includes guitarists Jon Donais and Matt Bachand, bassist Paul Romanko, and drummer Jason Bittner—are primed for the mainstream breakthrough they’ve been flirting with since 2004’s The War Within, which earned the band a Grammy nomination.
“We really tried to write a record that we thought would appeal to a wide variety of fans of heavy music without losing sight of who we are,” Fair says. “With each record, we’ve kind of tried to capture the sound we always had in our heads, and I really think this is the closest we’ve ever come.” To make the album, the band spent six weeks in Los Angeles last year with producer Nick Raskulinecz, whom the band knew through his work with the Foo Fighters and Fireball Ministry. “We didn’t wanna hook up with someone who was gonna try to turn us into some polished pop band,” says Bachand. “The first time Nick came down for preproduction, he was rocking out while we played the tunes. He really wanted to jump right in.” Now that the record’s out, he won’t be the only one.
REVOLVER You guys are poised to enter a new world with this record. Has what it means to be a member of Shadows Fall changed over the last year?
BRIAN FAIR Our goal has always been to write some kick-ass tunes and get out and tour as much as possible. And that hasn’t changed in the least. We’ve already exceeded every goal we’ve set for this band. Our original goal was to get out of Massachusetts on the weekends, and now we’ve been able to tour the world and we’ve sold a lot more records than we ever thought possible. The day-to-day has changed a little bit. Atlantic has really gotten behind this record—which has been awesome—but it’s definitely added to our daily workload: interviews and photo shoots and stuff. But I can’t complain about that.
Why do you think Shadows Fall excites Atlantic?
FAIR It’s so different than everything else they’re working right now. We’re definitely the heaviest band they’ve got. Also, we’re a band with a 10-year legacy. We kind of did it the hard way, where we came up on our own, putting out our own first record, then getting onto an indie and going out and touring nonstop. So I think they’re kind of inspired by that work ethic, by knowing that they aren’t trying to break some new band by throwing a ton of money at it and seeing if it sticks.
Did you have conversations with label execs about what kind of direction the music was going in before you started recording?
FAIR There weren’t a lot of expectations from them. We just went in and started writing and played some demos and were like, “Well, hope you wanted a metal record, because that’s what you’re fucking getting!” And their response was honestly like, “We’d be a lot more worried if we didn’t get a metal record—then we wouldn’t know what the hell to do with you guys.” They just wanted us to write what we thought was the next progression of Shadows Fall.
Talk about that progression. Does Threads of Life represent the biggest leap you guys have made from one record to the next?
FAIR Maybe a little bit. For us, it’s natural—but we were also immersed in these songs for a full year, so now they feel like part of what we’ve always done. I guess if we looked at it in perspective, then, yeah, this was definitely a good step forward from the last record. But, really, I think there was almost that big of a gap between each record: From Of One Blood to The Art of Balance was a huge step, and then from The Art of Balance to The War Within was another huge step. This is just kind of following that pattern, just pushing ourselves a little bit further. Playing with the same guys for this long, we’re starting to get to a point where we’re practically reading each other’s minds. We know what we can do and what we do well, and we focused on that. As a singer, too, I feel like each year I get a little more confidence to try new things, to see what I can accomplish.
A lot of the new stuff sounds like it was built around your vocals.
FAIR Yeah, I can see that. I think progressively there’s been a little bit less of the full-on brutal screaming because the music has gotten away from that. To just scream over a big open-chord rock riff makes no sense to me. And I think it also diminishes the impact of when you do need to scream, when the song builds to that kind of crescendo. As a singer, I’ve been a lot more conscious of singing to the song, as opposed to what people may expect from us. I don’t ever wanna be like, Oh, I haven’t screamed enough in this song, so just throw it in to maybe please a few fans who want only screaming.
You’ve described Shadows Fall as a rock band that plays heavy metal. What does that mean?
FAIR Individually, we all listen to a ton of different stuff. But our common ground is old-school metal and old-school rock—everything from Seventies Aerosmith to the Bay Area thrash stuff. There was a sense of melody in that music that really has been more where our heads are at. But we also know what we do well, and that’s playing metal. We’re not gonna suddenly become a Southern rock band out of nowhere. We’re dudes who have a real sensibility of rock and roll, but that’s filtered through years of playing in metal and hardcore bands.
Have rock and metal grown apart over the past 40 years?
FAIR Totally, and that blows my mind. The same bedrock that it all came from is just heavy, dark blues. To deny that seems silly, because without bands like Black Sabbath and AC/DC—and before that, the Yardbirds and Cream—there would be no metal. To put yourself in such a limited little area of influence seems crazy. For me, as a singer and a lyricist, I don’t wanna always dip into the well of what’s considered true metal. You’ll just end up stealing from the same influences and going to the same clichés over and over again, to the point where you’re not pushing the genre in any direction. Metal is such an expansive, progressive, experimental form of music that to never break those quote-unquote rules just seems kind of silly.
Yet plenty of bands do adhere to a set of rules about what metal is. Why?
FAIR Maybe they just think that that’s all they’re supposed to do, and that if they don’t they’re not metal. But that’s looking at it the wrong way; that’s not looking at it as a musician. When we first started 10 years ago, we were too metal for the hardcore kids and too hardcore for the metal kids. We never felt like we fit, so we stopped worrying about it a long time ago.
Because it’s being released by a major label—or maybe because it doesn’t sound like your first record—Threads of Life is destined to be called a sell-out move by some. Does that bother you?
FAIR Selling out is almost impossible—records aren’t selling at all! Look, music is so much more accessible than it’s ever been, whether it’s through the Internet, digital radio, whatever. There’s such a massive amount of music out there right now that covers everything. And the playing field is so even right now between majors and indies that it doesn’t matter anymore.
Is it still possible to sell out?
FAIR I guess what happens is that a lot of younger bands that see some band getting successful may have some sort of formula or business agenda when they start their band. That to me is worse than a band getting more mainstream as a natural evolution. To set out like, “If we do two parts of this and two parts of that, we’re gonna have a hit”—that to me is starting on the wrong foot.
What would a sell-out Shadows Fall record sound like?
FAIR I don’t know. If people wanna consider this a commercial rock record, I’m like, “Shit, I haven’t heard anything like this on the radio. I would love to!” I guess compared to some of the more brutal stuff, it may sound commercial or whatever. But to me this is still metal. If anything, it’s more old-school metal, which I don’t really see as a commercial choice.
That we’re even talking about this reflects the fact that we’re in the middle of a particularly good moment for metal bands with a desire to break into the mainstream.
FAIR It’s a rare time where a lot of bands have been able to make a living doing music that five or 10 years ago would’ve been considered like, “Yeah, go out on the weekends and play shows, then go back to work.” In that respect, it’s awesome. But at the same time, that’s not the goal that any of these bands set. If that happens, that’s a great byproduct. That’s the difference: We were doing it before there was that option, because we love to do it. And I think that’s true with a lot of the bands at the forefront of this movement, whether it’s Hatebreed or Mastodon or Killswitch Engage. I remember playing basements with Hatebreed back in the day to 10 people because we loved doing it. There was no agenda at all.
Why is the mainstream especially receptive to metal right now?
FAIR I don’t really know. I always thought that if there was an outlet for these bands to be heard, people would respond. There just never really was an outlet. If you didn’t have a cool friend who told you about this awesome band and gave you some 7-inch, you never found out about them. Now, whether it’s through MySpace or the second stage at Ozzfest, people are finding out about these bands, and they actually are responding the way I thought they always would. The availability has proven that this music has an effect on people. Maybe metal’s bigger now because the world’s kind of a fucked-up place, and people are a little more on the aggressive side of things—that could be part of it. But I think it always would’ve happened if people knew it was happening.
Does a band’s music change as a result of where it fits into the world? You think about Metallica making The Black Album, which is a record that seems hard to imagine being written in a basement.
FAIR It could’ve been that feeling larger than life made them write music that was larger than life. It’s also the confidence that comes from that: “We can fucking do anything!” You may finally start doings that you always wanted to do but were afraid to because you were worried about how people would react.
Have you guys benefited from that confidence?
FAIR I think so. And also just years on the road. We probably rehearsed more than we ever have for this record. By the time we hit the studio, we felt 100 percent confident in the material. And Nick helped take it to another level, because having never worked with us before, he didn’t know our limitations. If he thought something would work for a song that we didn’t even know we could do, he was gonna try and get us to do it regardless.
Was that what yielded “Another Hero Lost,” the acoustic ballad on Threads of Life?
FAIR I don’t think that ever would’ve happened if I hadn’t had the year I had. My cousin passed away this past year in Iraq. He was someone I grew up with, who I’d known since we were little kids. And the thought that he was never coming back—knowing that he probably knew before he passed away that he’d never see his 2-year-old son ever again—was so mind-blowing. I went to the cemetery with my grandmother, and standing in front of that stone had such a huge effect on me that I got home that night and the lyrics just all came out. And I couldn’t imagine screaming those words or putting them over something brutal. At first I didn’t even know how I felt about expressing those emotions publicly, but it ended up being such a positive experience for me, a way not only to remember him but to deal with some things in my own mind. I know there’ll be people who’re like, “Oh, here’s their big radio ballad.” But to me, this is the most honest and heartfelt song I’ve ever written. And I could fucking care less what anyone else thinks.
