DROWNING POOL Bassist Talks About Upcoming Album

June 9, 2007

In a recent interview conducted by Greg Maki of Live-Metal.net, DROWNING POOL bassist Stevie Benton discussed the band's upcoming album, "Full Circle" (in stores July 24, 2007),new singer Ryan McCombs (formerly of SOIL) and more. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Live-Metal.net: How is DROWNING POOL with Ryan McCombs different from DROWNING POOL with Jason "Gong" Jones or Dave Williams?

Stevie Benton: After Dave passed, Ryan was the original singer, I think, we wanted, the reason being we knew the guy, we were friends with the guy. We just thought he'd be a great fit, both musically and personally. Unfortunately, he was still working in a band, so we didn't want to go in there and break up that whole rig. So instead, we held auditions and just wound up getting a total stranger in the band. We'll always be proud of the record we made with Gong. That was never a problem. It was once we got on the road touring together every day that we realized the personality conflict was not gonna allow the band to continue that way. With Dave, we had always been such a tight-knit group, such a family — brothers, basically. So we weren't used to having to deal with these personal issues that we had with Gong, just the personality conflict. I would say probably he didn't handle that very well and neither did we. So that's what ultimately led to us parting ways. By the time that happened, luckily Ryan had quit his former band, so we didn't have the guilt of breaking that whole rig up. We called him one day, you know, "Hey, bro, you wanna tour? You wanna make a record?" It all fell together quite nicely after that. The situation is just so much better because we do have a past with the guy. We toured with him lots of times before, done a hundred shows with him in his old band. So we had that tight-knit circle again.

Live-Metal.net: Are the new songs that we've gotten to hear so far — "No More" from "Saw III" and "Soldiers" — are they an indication of how the rest of the new material sounds?

Stevie Benton: One thing with this record, we wanted to try to make it as diverse as possible, go a lot of different directions that we hadn't had the opportunity to do yet. At the same time, there's a lot of stuff on it that's gonna sound like old DROWNING POOL stuff. You can't change who you are. You can't just one day wake up and decide to make a record and be a complete 180. But we did try to throw a few curves in there and kind of pursue some avenues that we hadn't had the opportunity to do so far. But I'd say the two songs you've heard so far — "No More" and "Soldiers" — those are two completely different ends of the spectrum, as far as the record goes. That's definitely one thing we were going for with this record, so hopefully that comes across once you have the entire collection of songs together and are able to listen to it from start to finish.

Live-Metal.net: Ryan's been in the band for about two years now and you did a whole lot of touring before actually finishing the new album. What effect did that have on the finished product?

Stevie Benton: It gave us the opportunity to test a lot of these songs out live before actually going in and recording them. When we did "Desensitized", it was one of those situations where you jump into a studio, record the songs kind of in your own world, in your own bubble. You never get to have that fan interaction with the songs. We were fortunate to do those tours. I know when Ryan first got in the band we were all very excited, very anxious to get in and make a record. And we almost did that, but then the opportunity came up to do those USO tours and different little things like that, things that we didn't want to pass up. So we jumped in the middle of that. Hopefully, having those songs tested live so much, hopefully it's made them better and made them more audience-friendly. We've been able to test them and get that immediate feedback. There were a number of songs that we played live that we just never felt like the connection and vibe were there on the songs, so we just put those on the shelf for now and really just focused on the ones that really got a great response night in and night out.

Read the entire interview at Live-Metal.net.

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