Rival Sons guitarist Scott Holiday: ‘In the US, everybody was divided – and everyone was on their soapbox’
Explosive American hard rock quartet Rival Sons are to make their long-awaited return to the UK and Europe this autumn, taking their two new albums Darkfighter and Lightbringer out on the road.
Darkfighter was released on June 2, while Lightbringer is due to follow on October 20. The two new LPs mark the first new music from Rival Sons – who formed in Long Beach, California in 2009 – in more than four years, following their sixth studio album Feral Roots in 2019.
A fan of the Grammy-nominated band, which comprises Jay Buchanan (lead vocals, harmonica, guitar), Scott Holiday (lead guitar, backing vocals), Mike Miley (drums, backing vocals) and Dave Beste (bass, backing vocals) for more than 10 years, I put some questions to Scott, who happened to be in London as part of an 11-day promo press trip across Europe.
I gather the title of the new album, Darkfighter, was partly ‘inspired’ by the pandemic?
I guess not in a direct way… but yeah, sure, I think we were all going through a really strange time; in the States we were going through our own really weird, divisive, strange, social, political, racial, gosh, just everything.
It seemed like everybody was very divided, and there’s just a way to be really loud these days with the internet. So not only were people divided, everybody was on their soapbox screaming as loud as they could.
We saw families split up and great friends and all sorts of things like that, businesses, just people disagreeing on politics, which is age-old, that’s why we have these different parties.
People are going to have different views on things but it wasn’t splitting up families necessarily.
It just seemed like we were going through a time where we couldn’t agree on anything, and then we had this terrible thing with George Floyd in the States… and with this president we had, it was just bizarre the things he was saying.
Every time we get people in office – and it doesn’t matter which party they represent – in their inauguration, in their speech, the first thing they say is, “Now I’m president to everyone”, not just president to the Republicans, or the right or the left, “I’m president of everybody now so we have to make this work, and that’s how I want you all to feel in America.”
That is not the feeling we had and it created a real energy in our country, a real – in my opinion – negative energy and it was just one thing after another – and then the pandemic hit and it was just terribly divisive.
People not even believing at how the virus came over, where it was from, if there was a cure, if the vaccine was legitimate or was it going to get you sicker, was a mask going to help or were you an idiot for wearing the mask, and kids were getting pulled out of school…
I’m just illustrating everything that we know that happened but this all played in my mind and played in Jay’s mind, besides personal issues being home for a long amount of time after being on tour for the larger portion of our career, having to just stop and stand still and take a break.
You get used to a rhythm and seeing the world and performing and being that part of you that you are, and when you stop it dead in its tracks that’s different, and it can throw a lot of artists into a little anxiety or depression and just be a little disorienting.
So with all of this, thematically, I don’t want to speak for Jay, but I think he was writing about his own struggles that this time caused and also doing what a lot of artists do: you be a mirror for the times.
You should look at our art and listen to our music from the times that they’re being created and it should be at least a little bit of a reflection of that time, reflect people’s feelings and where we are, right?
And it took you longer to make Darkfighter than any of your previous albums?
Well, were we going to get anything done quickly anyway? We couldn’t get into the studio, we couldn’t get together, we couldn’t get on flights so yeah, our records generally get made inside of 30 days, 40 days at the most, so this was over two years we worked on this.
We were only in a week with our producer [multiple Grammy Award-winner Dave Cobb] in Nashville and then there would be a lockdown, or he would have another artist come in – this guy Dave Cobb, our good friend, he’s working with some pretty big artists and everybody got inspired at the same time to record.
Everybody wanted to record at the same time and that was fine – that was one part of it. The other part of it was we got in our own kind of rhythm where we would record and come home and work on those songs at home, record at home, write a bunch of new songs after we lived with those tracks.
How does the new record differ musically from Rival Sons’ previous efforts?
Every record we make sounds a little bit different. From my own standing as a guitar player, I try to use different guitars, different tunings, different effects and sounds and textures, colours, so it feels different, and that’s very literal.
On a deeper level, I think the band is reaching less for our influences and reaching much harder to just depend on sounding like ourselves, if that makes sense. We’re relying less on creating things that sound like things that you’ve heard and trying to create things that more reflect musical ideas that we have.
It’s really just about the raw music, I guess, melody and chordal movement, and we’ve done that forever but I think more than ever you could look forward. I also think the record sounds a little more modern in comparison to some of our older records.
I loved that early 70s-esque blues rock groove in some of your earlier songs like Electric Man and Pressure and Time…
It’s funny, you cite Electric Man off of [2014’s] Great Western Valkyrie and by no means is that song trying to sound like a song from the 70s, at all. That is not what we’re going for, that is not what I’m going for.
If you can reference one song from the 70s in your entire collection that sounds like that, I’d be impressed. I’m using modern stuff, I’m dealing in modern movements, rhythmically and tonally, but that’s what people get from us…
It’s not like I’m surprised, it’s just people take it in such a face value and refuse to look deeper into the band. They kind of lock into this idea, “Yeah, they’re a blues rock band, they’re a 70s blues rock band” and they refuse to hear that we’re moving forward. It’s hard for them to hear it, it’s probably hard for you…
Well I just love that kind of music so much…
Me too, and I think that still comes out on a lot of the records and it still comes out on this record, that side of rock ‘n’ roll – because that’s the sound of rock ‘n’ roll.
The music with guitars that isn’t doing that, it’s probably not rock ‘n’ roll, it’s something else – it’s alternative or it’s indie or it’s punk or it’s pop, and I love all those too.
We are a rock ‘n’ roll band in part, but I think on every record we have been kind of letting everybody know it’s a little bit more than that, it’s not so trite or kitsch or one-sided.
Not to put any other band down but there’s bands that are like that – and that isn’t our band.
That’s never really what we went for, we kind of got pinned with that and we’ve worked hard to get rid of it. You named that track [Electric Man], that track does not sound like a 70s track to me and I’m pretty sharp on that kind of music.
Although there are tracks on that record [Great Western Valkyrie] that could, there’s tracks on that record that absolutely are not.
Rival Sons have a slight connection to Cambridge, in that Storm Thorgerson, who designed the cover for the band’s 2011 album Pressure & Time, was also famously behind most of Pink Floyd’s album covers
And so many others… I’m actually sitting here at the record label looking at a few of his other works. I have a couple of Zeppelin things and I have Pink Floyd’s Shine on You Crazy Diamond…
Yeah man, that was our first record with [record label] Earache and Dan Tobin was the president and really the main quarterback for that record and for the band at that time.
He asked: “Who do you want to do the cover?” They loved the record, the record was done, we loved the record – we thought we had something great – and he asked us if we could do it with anybody, who would we do?
And I think it was almost like a joke for me, like cheeky, just like: “OK, if I could do it with anybody, I would do it with Storm Thorgerson, of course, because he’s the guy that sticks out – he’s the quintessential album hero.”
And Dan said, “All right” and I went, “All right?!” and he said, “Yeah, let’s at least try”. He emailed out to him and said, “I have a meeting with Storm, he got back to me actually, he likes the record” – which already for me on its own was incredible.
He met him at a pub and they talked and Dan called me the next day and said, “I can’t believe it, you guys are getting a Storm Thorgerson album cover, he wants to do it. It’s on.”
We were really fortunate to work with him, one of the last ones that he got to do.
Rival Sons will be performing at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Friday, October 20. Tickets, priced £30.50, are available at cornex.co.uk. For more on the band, go to rivalsons.com.
