By Andrew Bansal
Three years after their stellar fourth studio album ‘Apocryphon’, Austin TX heavy riff worshippers The Sword are branching out into unconquered territories on the new album ‘High Country’, slated for an August 21 release via Razor & Tie. I recently spoke to guitarist Kyle Shutt to discuss it in detail. Enjoy the conversation below:
Kyle, let’s talk about the new Sword album ‘High Country’ which is coming out 8/21 via Razor & Tie. I’ve been listening to the album for quite a while now, and I’ve had a chance to really soak it in. I think it’s the most diverse album you’ve done so far. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, yeah. We wrote a lot more material than we ever did before. Usually when we go into the studio, we would have 10 or 12 songs or whatever, but I want to say we had 18 songs this time. Only a couple of them got the axe. We recorded 17 and 15 of them ended up on the album. We talked about cutting it down to a single LP but we were so in love with all 15 tracks that we decided to go ahead with a full double LP. It has also been three years since we put out the last record ‘Apocryphon’, so we wanted to give people a lot of music. There are so many different flavors on it, and as you said, it’s very diverse. It was like a litter of puppies. We couldn’t give any one of them away. We had to keep all of them for ourselves (laughs).
Do you think it will take people by surprise, specially those who’ve been listening to the band for a number of years?
Yeah, there’s definitely some stuff on there that will make people do a double take, like ‘Seriously Mysterious’, and some slower numbers towards the end of the record. It is different and we’re just trying to stretch our legs a little bit, and keep growing. I don’t know if they are expecting us to release our heaviest record or something (laughs), it’s not going to be that, but we’re being heavy in our own way and doing everything that we want to do.
There’s always going to be people who’d want you to stay the same and sound like you did in the early days. But obviously you’re not doing that. What do you think about that? People have their expectations but you’re going your own way.
Right, you’re never going to live up to everybody’s expectations. But I’m really proud of the way this one came out. It was natural. We kind of just jumped around a lot too. We went in without any preconceived idea of how everything was going to sound. Finding those sounds as we went along was really interesting and fun. At some points we realized that it was very different.
As you mentioned, it’s been three years since ‘Apocryphon’ came out. How did you go about writing this album? Did it come through in parts or was it written altogether?
We took about a year off after we got back from the ‘Apocryphon’ tour. The Warp Riders and Apocryphon tours were kind of back to back, so we were on the road for about five years, and we had used up everything we had written at that point. Apocryphon had the last of the songs by the band at the time. So, we took a year off and came back with tons of ideas. It was a lot of deal with, so we were just throwing around what we liked and worked on that. It really came about like that, and little pieces at a time, it evolved. Our singer doesn’t live here anymore, and neither does the bass player, actually (laughs). So we were just doing everything on the internet and trading parts back and forth. So it kind of happened all over the place. Each song came together pretty quickly once we landed upon an idea of what we were doing. It was cool, and it had never happened to us like that ever before.
You think that’s also part of the reason why the album is so diverse?
Yeah I think so, because I couldn’t even tell you which amps I used for what song. We were moving so fast, every time we had to do something else, we would just completely unplug, plug into a different setup and do that. So, at the end of the whole thing I really couldn’t tell you what I used on a particular song (laughs). We just wanted everything to basically sound different from what we did before, just a different sound altogether. We played around with a lot of stuff we’d never used before. I played a lot of piano. Not that there’s a piano part on the album or anything, but there was this big-ass piano sitting in the studio, and we figured let’s plug it in and may be we can use it for something else down the road. For a song like ‘Ghost Eye’, we would record all the drums, put that through an amp and then just mic the amp and that would be the drum track. There was a lot of experimenting and jacking around. We had a really good engineer-producer combo with us in the studio, helping us jacking all the sounds. It was a lot of fun.
So you actually used more gear for this album than you did on anything ever before?
Yeah, totally. I feel like when we made Apocryphon, that was The Sword at the peak of that particular time period. And then we were like, what do we do next? We can’t take that any further. So I just borrowed a bunch of amps from various studios, basically just threw 20 amps in a room and plugged them all in. So, it was fun piecing together what we did in the studio, and we’re playing 10 of the 15 songs on the next tour, so we’re trying to figure out how to create live versions and arranging them in a way that would make them sound good.
That’s what I was going to ask you. It’s quite a good number of new songs that you’ll be playing live, and obviously you’re not going to use all of the gear you used in the studio. So you’re adjusting to that and trying to create the same sound live, right?
Yeah, live I’m just running my little pedalboard, which has a gain booster, a wah pedal and a delay reverb thing somebody gave us when we played the Psych Fest. It’s real barebones. I’m just trying to piece all the parts together because it was all tracked differently. I can’t really speak for JD because I wasn’t there for most of his tracking.
You mentioned that two of the members don’t live in the same town as you anymore. How has that impacted the band’s overall working process?
JD moved when we did Apocryphon, but by then we had already written the songs. He would come in town for a little bit and we’d write like six songs and work on those. But this album was a lot different. He would send us demos of completed songs and we would jam on them and add our parts with some ideas that we came up with. So, we communicate a lot more now. In the past it would just be four dudes jamming in a room together and we would know what to do without having to discuss it much. We went over ideas for the vocal lines a lot more this time too. It’s good to talk about stuff when you’re not in the same town. We’ve never done a record the same way twice, and this one is definitely a departure from the records we’ve done in the past. We’re talking about this album now but it’s going to be even more interesting to find out what happens with the next one.
You said that after the five-year touring cycle you took a break for a year to write. So I take it that during tour itself you’re not able to write anything. Or do you still come up with ideas and record something on mobile devices?
A lot of bands do that, and that’s what bands used to do back in the day anyway, just write the record on tour and then go make the record when they’re off tour. But we’ve always written when we’re home. There’s a handful of songs that I kind of wrote on the road, but never really the whole song. I might get an idea somewhere, I would figure it out real quick on the guitar, and I’d record it on my phone. I would say that’s the extent of the writing process on the road. I think I wrote ‘Lawless Lands’ when we were on the Metallica tour, and I wrote ‘Dying Earth’ when we were on the Kyuss Lives! tour. So, some songs came to me when we were on tour, but usually it happens when you’re home, smoke a bowl, drink coffee and start writing (laughs).
Sounds about right! So, you’re breaking out musically on this album in terms of variations and styles but when it comes to touring as well, do you think it will make you branch out and tour with other bands you haven’t toured with?
You know what, the last headline tour that we did with Big Business and O’Brother, I thought that was a really good match of high-brow rock bands that are still underground. But yeah, we’d love to do more high-profile tours that are kind of more mainstream or whatever you want to call it, not necessarily in-your-face metal. I’d love to go out and tour with ZZ Top or Cheap Trick, kind of like the classic rock bands. There aren’t really many big ones now. Queens Of The Stone Age is about the only one that I can think of as a really huge rock band. That’s sad for the state of rock ‘n roll, I guess, but we’re still out here and we’re holding it down (laughs). But that Metallica tour that we got was such a godsend, specially back in those days and for a band like that to take us out. It was huge for us and we thank them forever, but those things don’t happen everyday, so you cannot really count on going out and supporting some huge band all the time. It’s one of those things where if it happens just be eternally grateful but if it doesn’t, just keep working hard and do what you do best.
And obviously Queens Of The Stone Age, Cheap Trick and ZZ Top are not going to be around forever, so it is up to you guys to keep it going.
Right (laughs). One can only hope!
And lastly, I saw some dates that you announced for a UK and Europe tour coming up pretty soon, but other than that, what plans do you have touring-wise?
We’re touring the States from October to December. It’s getting finalized now and I don’t know the exact routing or anything but that’s the plan. We’re doing that, I think we’ll take January off and then hopefully hit Australia and the Asian territories in February and March, probably do more of the States in April and then head to Europe for the festivals. So we’re going to be busy for a while. I get a feeling this is going to be a doozy and we’re going to hit it hard. We took a lot of time off, it’s the first time we’ve taken three years to make a record, and I think people are going to be hungry for it, specially once we hit the States again. It’s been a long time!
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