Guitarist CLINT LOWERY Is 'Excited' To Get Back To Writing With SEVENDUST

The Rockvine recently conducted an interview with Clint Lowery and Morgan Rose of SEVENDUST. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Rockvine: How do you guys feel about the SNOT reunion and have you talked to Sonny [Mayo, former SEVENDUST guitarist] or Mikey [Doling] at all?

Morgan: I talked to Mikey — he came out to the show we played when Clint first came back. I love those guys and that's why Sonny was in the band. In the Cliff's Notes version, I'm real happy that they're playing together. I think it's real good for Sonny — it would have been a shame for him to stop playing altogether obviously and I'm happy that he got back together with his brothers. Of all the negative things that have been said about how all this went down — we got our brother back and he got his brothers back. We had a cousin come in here and play with us for a while and now we got our brother back and he's back with his brothers.

The Rockvine: When you guys were naming "Chapter VII: Hope and Sorrow" — all of your music is about hope and sorrow, anger and feelings like that — what made you actually name this album "Chapter VII: Hope and Sorrow"?

Morgan: It really wasn't as deep as what anybody might think. We were actually looking at some artwork that somebody had and we had a track on the record called "Hope" and a track on the record called "Sorrow". We didn't think of naming it that until we saw this guy's artwork and he named all of his pieces and had one called "Hope" and one called "Sorrow" — we thought we could name the record one of those. We didn't want to call it "Sorrow", so we thought we could call it "Hope" but that's a little contradictory to some of the words on the record so we thought, why don't we combine the two?

The Rockvine: How have fans reacted to Chris Daughtry being on a SEVENDUST record?

Morgan: What do you think Clint? There hasn't been much talk about it other than before it happened…

Clint: I think that people who have a really negative outlook on it that voice their opinions too much when we see them — there's always going to be extreme thoughts. There are people who are really big SEVENDUST supporters that go, "Okay, we'll let them get by with this," even if they're not really big Chris Daughtry fans. I think there's a big group of people who ordinarily wouldn't listen to the band who say, "Hey, what's this about?" who are in that Chris Daughtry universe. It's definitely an extreme situation — you got a guy who's not in the exact demographic of a SEVENDUST fanbase and you mix those two you'll have people on both sides of the fence. There hasn't been that much of a negative reaction. A lot of people thought that was going to be like the first single that Chris Daughtry card played real hard, but we didn't. I think ultimately the guys were just friends with the guy, and he's a big SEVENDUST fan and they had a track that fit his style and they loved him as a singer, and I did too. They let him come in and sing off the verse. It's simple, I don't think there was a big master plan behind it all.

The Rockvine: Have you been writing at all with Clint back in the band? Do you write on the road?

Clint: We haven't really dove into it like when we go into full writing mode. We just kind of told ourselves at the beginning of this that we're just going to get used to writing together as a band. We're one of those bands that talks about musical directions and the guys in the band will hear something and say, "I like this vibe," and we have a lot of in-depth conversations about direction and things we want to do which is part of our writing process. We'll start talking and I'll take those ideas and Morgan and John will take ideas into their memory and we try to take those conversations in mind. I haven't written with these guys in so long, it'll be a new experience — even though I've written a million songs with these guys it'll be new. We've all grown and they've got their producing chops up so I'm really excited to get back to writing with these guys.

Read the entire interview from The Rockvine.

The video for "Prodigal Son", the first single off "Chapter VII: Hope & Sorrow", can be viewed below.