SEVENDUST came close to calling it a career, and the guitarist who would have had to sign off on it says he has stopped trying to predict when the real ending arrives.
Clint Lowery was asked by Thinking About Guitar's Jonathan Graham about drummer Morgan Rose's admission earlier this year that the band had a farewell plan drawn up roughly eighteen months ago, before work began on their fifteenth album "One". Lowery's answer was less dramatic than the question.
"Well, I think everyone in the band has their own threshold," he said. "I'm in a season where my kids are young, they're in high school, very involved in sports… Other guys have kids that are out of the house, so they wanna tour more. So we're coming into that part of our career where there may be a time where I'm, like, 'I can't do a whole [tour].' So we respect each other enough to allow that to happen. But I take everything as a tour at a time. I don't try to predict when the end will be. I think God will do that for me."
He is not pretending the road has stayed easy, and he named the people he measures himself against. "I still love playing. Touring is harder than it was. You're an old man. But we see bands… Ronnie James Dio — I'm a giant Dio fan. [IRON MAIDEN's] Bruce Dickinson's still singing great. As long as the quality's there and we're not like a shell of what we were… But honestly, full disclosure, we need to survive. It pays our bills. It's our livelihood, and we love the people, man. I mean, that's a hard thing to give up."
Lowery was also asked about SEVENDUST's standing billing as one of the most underrated bands in metal, and made the case that the flatness of the graph is the achievement.
"The longevity, that's our legacy. The original members, the fact that we haven't hit these huge peaks, but we haven't hit the lows either, where some bands come and they go," he said. "And we rode that wave for almost 30 years. So that underrated, the definition, I think we've been very blessed to remain somewhat relevant in the metal scene and the rock scene, and that's the win."
He went further, arguing that a bigger break early on would have cost them more than it paid. "We like being the underdogs though, man. We don't mind it. That's what we are. We're a mid-level, very grateful band, and we still care about it. And I think if we would've made it bigger, one of us would've been dead, with the abuse of alcohol and the things that we've done when you're young."
Rose's version of the near-breakup, given to Stan Bicknell in May, was rawer. The band had a complete farewell blueprint — "it was that thick" — and he cried over it, because ending the touring cycle meant losing a community he only ever sees at shows. "That means they died," he said. "Because I never see them outside of this."
"One" arrived in May via Napalm Records, again produced by Michael "Elvis" Baskette at Studio Barbarosa in Gotha, Florida.