MORGAN ROSE Reflects On SEVENDUST's Retirement Talk: 'ALTER BRIDGE Saved Us By Allowing Us' To Support Them On European Tour

In a new interview with U.K.'s Grave Noise, SEVENDUST drummer Morgan Rose spoke about the band's upcoming first European headline tour in eight years. Fresh off an arena support slot with ALTER BRIDGE in March, the Atlanta quintet will return this winter for an extensive 16-date run across Europe in November/December 2026. Asked why now was the right time for SEVENDUST to return to Europe, Morgan said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET):  "We were toying around the idea of retiring and shutting it down. It's funny 'cause we were just really a North American band. I mean, we would do, as you could see, very little [touring] overseas, through Europe in general. Australia was about the same — very few. Every five to 10 years we'd go over there [and play shows]. It's just not committing. It's not building a real relationship. It's almost, like, 'Hey, it's us. We'll see you in another 10 years.' And while that's happening, there's eight to 10 years more of traffic coming from everybody else in our genre. So when the retirement idea came, it really came from just saying, 'Listen, I don't wanna beat our people up in the United States because we're just touring here.' So if you wanna call it making a living doing this, you can only do it for a certain amount of time in the same territory, and then you're gonna burn the market out. So that was really the tipping point, was me sitting in a room saying, 'If we're not gonna retire, then we're going to do something super strange, and we're gonna try to unload on the rest of the world and do it consistently.' And that's gonna be interesting because you can't make any money for a while. We didn't make any money on the run that we did with ALTER BRIDGE, and we're not gonna make any money on the trip that we're doing over there to headline because there's not enough people to... We've gotta prove a point of consistency. So that was the idea. Can we make enough money in the United States to be able to counter that and use our money to be able to go over there? And we need something to help push this along, and the only thing that would do that would've been ALTER BRIDGE. ALTER BRIDGE saved us by allowing us to do it.

Reflecting on the ALTER BRIDGE tour, Morgan said: "Contrary to what people might think, and I totally understand it, it was not welcome by a lot of the people that were booking that tour to have us over there because they didn't trust us. And our manager pushed that through. And thank God they agreed to it. And that was the most fun I've had on tour maybe in my life, was that tour. 'Cause it made me feel like I was a kid again, because we would go out there, and I'm not kidding you, it was wild. It got to a point where we would be really quiet and wait for the lights to go out when we would start the show, because we'd go out there and the lights would go off. We're used to the lights go off and people make noise. And Europe is, like, 'Yeah, we'll make noise if we know you and we like you.' And we realized, 'Wow, man, they don't know us. A lot of these people don't know us.' We have a little group of people that are super loyal to us over there, but most of the people didn't know us. And it would be really wild to play a song. You get the nice clap, and then we'd play another song, and then I could see the faces. I'm, like, 'We got 'em. We got 'em.' And by the third song, it was crazy. So then I would look over at my guy and I'm, like, 'We got 'em. We got 'em.' And so the respect level was building and building, and the love affair between us and the people that support us was starting to build. And for us to be able to say, after this long, we're gonna go from playing first on a tour with ALTER BRIDGE to doing a club headline run, and then we're gonna be right back again."

Admitting that it was a huge financial risk for SEVENDUST to return to Europe as the support act for ALTER BRIDGE, Morgan said: "It was definitely, 'We're throwing a lot of chips on the table, and we'll see what happens.' If it would've been dead, we would've known. I mean, it went from some people that didn't want us to come to literally trying to book us immediately after the show. So it was, like, 'Oh, man, this is happening right before my eyes.' And that's what it was like when we started as a band a million years ago, was going out there, nobody knows you. They're kind of looking at you like this. All of a sudden they're looking around. They're, like, 'I think I might like this.' And then a few songs in, they're, like, 'I'm in.'"

Rose added: "We knew that this was happening because I'll just tell you a quick little story that was, like, the coolest thing ever. The merch. So what would happen is the first few shows, they would load in merchandise. And the merch guy that was out there was doing all three bands, and he said, 'I've never seen anything like it. It's really crazy. For a band that has been over here,' he said, 'there would be nights through that first week or so, week or two, where we would sell sometimes one or no t-shirts before we went on stage.' And then, at the end of the night, they would be scrambling because they re-up on merchandise during the show. They bring in a bunch of boxes. You sell a bunch of t-shirts, and then they're, like, 'We gotta go back to the truck and get more merchandise.' Well, with us, they'd bring in a few boxes. Nobody'd buy anything. Then the show would be over. It'd be mad dash to the merch area. And then they'd run out of stuff, and they don't have time to go back. They have no time to go back to get more merch. So the vendors that were there, they would see this weird thing start to happen where they'd bring in a few boxes. We wouldn't sell any merchandise — maybe a few shirts — and then our guy would go running to the truck while ALTER BRIDGE was in the middle of their set, and the vendors were, like, 'Wait a minute, what are you doing going and getting more merch? Nobody's bought any t-shirts.' And he goes, 'Just watch.' And then the mad dash would happen. So we did 95% of our merchandise business at the end of the show. That was it. That was the proof is where the proof is. I mean, it was beautiful that we had that information so we could really see in real time what was happening as it was happening. It was awesome."

This past March, Rose admitted to Stan Bicknell that he and his bandmates were discussing the possibility of calling it quits less than two years ago, prior to beginning work on the band's fifteenth studio album, "One". He explained: "We went through this period of time where we just weren't touring as much. We were kind of thinking that we were gonna land the plane a little bit, like, 'Let's slow it down to a farewell thing,' which we had discussed, for sure. And then some other things happened, and we decided, 'You know what? Instead of parking the car here, why don't we just put it all the way into drive, like all the way in, and let's tour like harder than we've ever toured and just burn the car out. Like, 'Let's tackle things that we haven't done.' So that happened. Just overnight, it was a decision that went from 'We're gonna retire' to 'No, no, no. We're gonna actually put the afterburner on now instead.'"

Asked by Bicknell "what year" it was that these discussions took place, Morgan said: "It was recently. It was, like, a year and a half ago. This was gonna be our last record. We had a blueprint for it and everything. We actually had like a whole layout. It was that thick, of going through everything that we were gonna do and how we were gonna do it. And, I mean, I cried a few times thinking about it."

Rose continued: "We've had so many people that we've met. The SEVENDUST community is a very close thing. We did not have the luxury of a major label or the major label money, so we grinded it from the beginning and then got really mistreated in the middle of our career, like horribly mistreated. And the people stood there long enough for us to get our legs back, and then when we finally found somebody that really knew that we could trust that knew the game and knew how to make it work, we were so beat up. And the people started coming back a little more and more and more, and it just became this thing where it's, like, 'Oh, man. I've known these people from being out there so much.' And when you overtour yourself, you see these people a lot. And they become people you're going to dinner with or going to lunch with, or having coffee with, or whatever it might be. And you're doing it consistently. And then one day you're just, like, 'We're gonna wrap it all up.' And I'm, like, 'That means they died.' Because I never see them outside of this. So that means it'll be like every gig will be another death in the family. It'll be another group of people that I know from that, and I also know from being around them, and it's, like, there's thousands of them. So that's like a thousand people that you care about dying in a year and a half. So I got really emotional about it, and then when it was decided we're not gonna do that, I got just rejuvenated. [I didn't have to] face that now. It got really exciting. I hadn't felt that kind of, like, 'I'm ready to break some shit now. I wanna tear something up.' And we just got back from a two-month run in Europe, and I felt like it was '97 again."

"One" arrived on May 1 via Napalm Records.SEVENDUST once again worked with producer Michael "Elvis" Baskette at Studio Barbarosa in Gotha, Florida. Baskette had previously worked with ALTER BRIDGE and Slash, among others.