SHADOWS FALL Singer: 'We Have Always Looked Up To Bands Like IRON MAIDEN'

SHADOWS FALL frontman Brian Fair recently spoke to The Free Lance-Star Publishing Company about the group's sudden surge of success, like debuting at No. 20 on The Billboard 200 chart, and selling nearly 250,000 copies of their latest album, "The War Within".

"Yeah, it's crazy, man," he said. "We've been a band for almost eight years, with a few lineup changes here and there. We've just been working hard. We would play anywhere, anytime for years and we kind of slowly built this thing up, and it's just cool to see where it has gone, because we know it was one step at a time on our own terms and through our own hard work as opposed to getting signed to a big label, getting a million dollars dumped into you and just breaking overnight. And it's cool because we have always, the bands we always looked up to were, say, bands like IRON MAIDEN. Twenty-five years later, still touring, still putting out records. They never had a hit single, they never had major commercial radio play, but they never turned their backs on their fans. That's kind of how we have gotten here. We never tried to catch up to anything cool and try and guess what's going to hit. We were always doing something which for years was pretty uncool [laughs] And we were, like, the only band at the time with long hair and guitar solos. It was funny; we were the token thrash band at every hardcore show for like four years [laughs]."

Asked to point out the differences between the new album ("The War Within") and the previous two ("The Art of Balance", "Of One Blood"),Fair said, "Probably the most noticeable thing is definitely production. The overall sound quality is a huge step forward, and a lot of that has to do with, uh, we had a little more money and time to work with. If I told you how much we spent on this record compared to like [what] a normal major label record costs, it's ridiculous. It's not even a drop in a bucket. It wouldn't even cover probably their catering budget, and so when I say 'a little more money,' it is literally a little more money [laughs]. Also, I think the songwriting has stepped up. I think the performance has stepped up. Everyone really understands their role. We've been on the road for two years as a unit before we came back to write any music, so we were just super tight and really confident because we had the success on our own. We didn't let anyone — outside of the band, Zeuss, our producer, and Justin, our sound guy — no one heard a note until it was completely finished. Not a demo, not a rough mix, not a single sound, until it was finished. So, like, label management and all of them had to wait. They were pretty cool with it. They were like, 'Whatever, man. Why [expletive] with the program. You guys know what you're doing.' It was cool, though, because we didn't have to hear that, 'Oh, I don't want to hear this or that. I wanna hear a big chorus or I wanna hear a big single.' So it was like, [expletive], you won't hear anything [laughs]."

Read the entire interview at this location.