Drummer MORGAN ROSE: 'The People That Support SEVENDUST, Those People Are Hardcore'

LocalBozo.com recently conducted an interview with SEVENDUST drummer Morgan Rose. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

LocalBozo.com: Morgan, let's get into the new album. We're a week into the release of "Time Travelers & Bonfires". It's got six new songs and some re-recorded acoustic versions of SEVENDUST classics. How is the new album being received and how satisfied are you with the finished product?

Morgan Rose: The response has been overwhelming. I mean, we went into this thing looking at it as a novelty and looking at it as something special for the people that support the band and you know the people that support us have been asking for an acoustic record, so we kind of looked at it like this would be just for them, you know? And we'd do it together. When we threw it together, the idea was to do an EP and it took on a bunch of different ways- we looked at it a bunch of different ways. We were, like, "Well, should we just do six of our own songs — the old ones — and do an EP? Should we do six new songs? Or wait, we'll do a full-length, we'll do six new, six old and we'll let the people pick the old ones and we'll knock out six new songs and that should be done pretty quick and we'll get them involved and have a good time with it." And now, it's just taken off. The shows have been huge. This thing that started off, as just as I said, as a little thank you to our people, has turned into another album cycle.

LocalBozo.com: Now you mentioned there's been a lot of clamoring for a new acoustic album since 2004's "Southside Double-Wide", but as a band that's built itself off of its incredible live show, was there any talk of doing a full-on live album rather than an acoustic one or was this always the plan?

Morgan Rose: Well, this was the plan, as I said, it kind of took on three different options that we were looking at. But during this, like we're filming for a television show tomorrow and when we heard about that, we were, like, "Man, we got approached by somebody about doing another live acoustic DVD,' and, you know, with the DVD and everything with it and we were, like, "Okay, why don't we talk about doing- because the other thing everybody's been asking for is a live DVD of us playing the heavy stuff," so we were, like, "Maybe what we should do is we should double this thing up. We'll do the acoustic live and then we'll do the heavy live and we'll double it up and do a two disc set of us in both formats." So that's what we're talking about doing now, something to maybe tide everyone over in between the end of this acoustic cycle and the next heavy cycle.

LocalBozo.com: You guys have been doing a good amount of press leading up to the new album and tour. Obviously everybody's talking about the PledgeMusic campaign. It was a massive success for SEVENDUST, which took all of two days to raise the money to create the new album. What is that like for you guys just to know that there's so much support for a record before it's even made?

Morgan Rose: The people that support this band, that have been there for so long… We know the strengths and we don't take it for granted. I've said this a million times, but I've said if you take our best thousand and you put them up against anybody else's best thousand, we're just gonna kill everybody because we just have this loyal base of people. And we don't like to call them fans — it just feels strange, you know? We've never called them fans, we've always called them friends and supporters and they have become family to us because now it's turning into generations coming to see us where people that were, you know, twenty years old coming to see us at the beginning are now 37 years old and now they've got their 16-year-old kid with them and the kid is into it. And then his friends are into it. So the demographic is widening and so when the idea came with Pledge, the people that were running this were, like, "How much money would you need to do the record?" And we're, like, "Well, we can haul ass through it if we do it like this," and they were, like, "Okay, well, we'll put the money up at this." And I was like, "That's going to get hit in no time man." And what nobody really knows is that they actually changed the pledge number because it got hit in a few hours. You know, everybody thinks it was a few days, but really, the number was hit in a few hours. The minute that thing went up, it was, like, it crashed the server. So we were, like, "I told you," you know? I said, "We're not trying to get rich off of this. We're not trying to make money on this thing as far as, you know, from the people, in that way. We're trying to do the best record that we can do without using any machine other than the most important machine — which is the people. So whatever it costs for us to be able to live up there long enough to be able to have the studio, to be able to travel back and forth —that's what we need to be able to do the thing." So they upped the number immediately. Then in two days, that number was hit and I'm, like, "You guys are not understanding what I'm telling you. These people are serious business. I mean, the people that support SEVENDUST — those people are hardcore." So, then it was done. Then it was, like, well okay, these people really want to see this thing. So now, instead of it just being us just doing a record — it started off as, "We'll do an EP," then it was, "Okay, we'll do a record," then it was, "Okay, I guess we're gonna go on tour with this thing" to "I guess we're gonna have an album cycle." I mean, we thought we were done in a few… I thought I was gonna be done off this whole cycle for the year by now. And now it's turning into… they've booked the second leg and they're getting ready to book a third leg of it, so half a year of being home just turned into half a year of being on the road.

Read the entire interview at LocalBozo.com. You can also listen to the chat below.