This past week I was able to schedule a Zoom call with the lead vocalist of Silverstein, Shane Told, to discuss the band’s “25 Years of Noise” tour with Thursday, as well as what went into the writing and recording process of their recently announced two new albums, Antibloom and Pink Moon. Shane dove deep into how the two records were shaped while recording in Joshua Tree, and how the vibe of that place started to seep into the new material. I also asked Shane to walk me through the “personality” of Silverstein’s last five LPs, plus much more. Antibloom will be released on February 21st via UNFD and pre-orders are on-going here.
Thank you for your time today, Shane. Good to see you again as well! Silverstein will be celebrating its 25th year of existence next year, an incredible accomplishment, and you’re going to be doing a comprehensive tour with Thursday. What goals did you and your bandmates set for yourselves in creating another memorable show for your longtime fans?
That’s a good question! Goals? Yes, we’re very goal-oriented as a band here! <Laughter> 25 years. It’s a really big milestone, quarter of a century. Especially the way we started…we started as a side project. We didn’t have great goals of doing anything big. I didn’t even know if we were gonna put out a record. I thought, just like for the summer we’d play some shows and maybe record something. So 25 years later, if you told me this, I would never believe you. I think now that we’re here, we are really just keeping our eyes on the prize. Let’s put together the greatest show we can using everything we’ve learned in two and a half decades, and just put together an amazing show of all these songs that we’ve written. Over 11 albums it’s about to be, right? It’s crazy! So we really just focused all year this year on preparing the setlist, the production, and just kind of everything…and curating the exact support bands that we wanted. Having Thursday supporting us is truly amazing. It’s such an honor to have them on board to celebrate this with us. So, yeah man, I think if you’ve seen us before, this is going to blow everything else away. That’s just the truth. We’re going really hard on this on this run.
That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ll be at The Fillmore Silver Spring show coming up in January. So it’ll be good to see you guys live again!
Yeah man, that’s a great venue.
I listened to the advance of Antibloom. A lot of the lyrical material seems to focus on getting older, and coming to terms with mortality…Was that intentional? Can you walk me through your lyric writing process?
That’s interesting. I don’t know about that really…I think, with the two albums, because there’s another one coming…But you didn’t hear that one yet, right?
No, not yet.
They were written together. I wrote stuff. Paul Marc wrote stuff. We wrote stuff together, and we co-wrote with some other people too. So I wouldn’t say that there is one theme tying it all together…at least not intentionally. But what does sometimes happen is that sometimes the music will tell you more about yourself than you know. It reveals things. So maybe there are lyrics about that that are kind of like poking out more than I thought. I mean, the truth is, I am in my 40s. Now, other than Paul Marc who’s the young man…I mean, he’s still 35. So, we’re not kids anymore. If you’re gonna write honestly, I’m not gonna talk about my high school locker, and going to the football game, and I hope the girl I like is going to be in the stands…<Laughter> I think it’s super cringy when anyone over the age of 22 sing songs like that, right? So, you have to grow with your fanbase. You have to grow up with them. And I think that everything we write is real, and everything that we write is meaningful to us. So, if that’s what comes out, then it comes out. We’re not trying to steer the lyricism in any direction to try to be something we’re not. We have those conversations as a band now, which we didn’t really have in the younger days, where I just wrote everything. So I think it’s really healthy to have those conversations when you’re making a record as a band.
Yeah, definitely. And it could’ve just been something that kind of stood out to me on the first few spins of the record. So, it’s great to hear your perspective on things like that. Anyways, Alternative Press readers voted you as one of the five best post-hardcore vocalists of all time. What does this honor mean to you, and what vocalists did you admire growing up?
Oh boy, yeah that’s cool. You know, I think there’s so many people that are great and so many people that are better than me, but I just try to do my best every time I get on stage. And for the most part, my voice has held up pretty well, and even improved a little bit. So that’s kind of a good feeling. But thinking about some other people that I admired…I think the number one guy that I sort of looked up to would have been Kyle Bishop, from the band Grade. They were also from our hometown area, and they were on Victory Records, and they’d gone to Europe, so they’d done all this really cool stuff. And he was a singer and a screamer, and I think that that was, to me, just really cool and really difficult to do both things. And he was kind of the first guy I ever heard do it. So, I think my goal was to sing better and scream better. And that was it. I just wanted, basically, his vibe, but to try to evolve it a little bit more. And, obviously a lot of people came after me that do it really well too, and some of them are on that reader’s list, I’m sure.
That’s pretty cool! Many fans of Silverstein, myself included, were surprised by the announcement of a second record, called Pink Moon. What was the band’s reasoning behind having two full creative statements during that short period of time.
Creative statements! You have a way with words, Adam. I love it!
<Laughter> What can I say? I’m a writer!
Well, the truth is we wrote more songs than ever before. Part of it was that myself and Paul Marc are both big writers in the band now. And also I moved out to Las Vegas now. So, a big change from Canada, but I’m only a hop, skip and a jump away from LA, where basically all the rock music industry people are. For the first time in my whole career, I took a shot doing some co-writes with some other people, and…to be honest, I didn’t really want to do it for a lot of years. I wrote songs in my bedroom or in my studio, and this is just what I did. So I was like, I don’t know, I’ll give it a try. And honestly, man, I really, really enjoyed it. Working with a bunch of people, a lot of them were younger than me. A lot of them grew up fans of my band, and they kind of just understood what I was trying to do. But more than anything, it just kind of lit a fire under my ass, really, to work harder and put in the time and be like, “Alright, today I’m writing a song.” A lot of times for me, it’s like, okay, I start writing a song, then I gotta go downstairs, watch some football, make lunch, play some pinball. Oh, then. I gotta go run an errand. And then like three days later, I’m like what was that riff again? So I’m all over the place…I have a bit of the ADD, so being able to help people just kind of focus me was super, super good for me.
And for Silverstein’s songwriting process, because we ended up with 25 complete songs. And I mean, complete, complete. And they were all good. We already threw away the bad ideas. And we’ve never done that as a band before. If our records are 11 songs, we had 11 songs we wrote. We didn’t have a bunch of songs that were B-sides. A couple times we did those B-sides on purpose. They were intentionally gonna be for a Best Buy exclusive or iTunes, whatever bullshit you have to do…But this time, we had 25 <songs> and we went, “This is going to be hard. How are we going to make an 11-song LP? How are we going to cut more than half of these songs? Because they’re good!” And not only are they good, but they are all kind of different. Sometimes when you write 25 songs, three of them are kind of in the same lane. They’re kind of doing the same thing. But these all kind of had their own voices. And so we didn’t know what to do. We were in the studio, and we had all these demos, and they were all great. The songs were mostly completed, and very quickly we realized a lot of people were going to be disappointed with an 11-song record. How are we supposed to cut 14 fucking good songs? So I think it was Paul, our drummer, who’s like, “Would it be too crazy to try to do two albums? And my eyes just kind of lit up. This was totally what I wanted to do. But the execution of it I worried about because it’s…a lot of songs. It’s a lot of vocal takes. It’s a lot of long days to just get this all down. But the good thing was we had a lot of the songs mostly fleshed out already. So there wasn’t a lot of time where we had to figure out, like changing around structure too much, or oh shit, there’s hardly any lyrics for this song. We got to write lyrics. Most of the stuff was done, which was great, because then we could kind of focus on making the songs the best that they were, the production, the layers of instruments, and just great performances. So, yeah when we were able to whittle it down, it was still hard to whittle it down to 16 songs over the two records.
But, we’re so stoked on it, because one thing that was really killing me when we had so many songs is we had two really great album closers, that I thought were album closers, and I wanted them both to be on the record. Then there were also songs that I like to end of Side A, and then there’s the album openers. I wanted the two albums to open very differently. There were a lot of sequencing issues we had when it was like we were going to have to get it down to just 11 or 12 songs. So being able to do the two records, it’s just exciting. And then we get to <support> it all year. We get to roll out singles throughout this alongside our touring. And I feel so good about all the songs. They’re just awesome.
Do you consider this a quote/unquote a double album? Or, do you think they each kind of speak for themselves, even though they’re recorded around the same time?
I don’t know…some people, even in our band, are calling it a double album, but it’s weird, because they’re not coming out together, they’re coming out apart. So I guess in that sense it’s a double album. But when I think of a double album, I think of The White Album by The Beatles, or Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie, or I even think of like Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion I & II, which were single releases, but they came out on the same day. Bright Eyes did that too, right?
I think so, if I remember right…
But our two albums are coming out the same year, and were recorded together. So, I mean, you could call it a double album. They’re not concept records. Sum 41 did the Heaven :x: Hell record. It’s not like that. These songs could be on either record, in terms of conceptually, but I think the flow and everything with these songs works really well the way that they’re split.
Yeah, it’s one of those things you’ve never done as Silverstein, a double album. So it’s kind of cool that they’re coming out in the same year.
And when Paul suggested it in the studio that’s the first thing I said. I said, “Hey, even if we fall flat on our faces, at least we are doing something we haven’t done before.” We’re calling <Antibloom> LP 11. And <Pink Moon> will be LP 12. But when you’ve made that much music, it does get harder to come out with new ideas, especially on how to release it, or whatever.
Was the writing process, the recording process, or both done in Joshua Tree?
It was the recording process. When we went to Joshua Tree, we had all the songs, pretty much all demoed out. We knew what they were. There were a few songs that we did use the space and the vibe <of Joshua Tree> to complete the opening song on Pink Moon, which you haven’t heard yet, nobody’s heard yet…We recorded some of that out in the desert. It was like an old piano that was just out, literally out, in the elements in the desert. And it still kind of worked. And we found a way to use some of the notes from the piano. We had to pitch shift them a little bit to make them in tune. But we did some cool things like that. And there were a lot of things where the studio space had these big windows…I’ve never seen a studio with windows before!
Yeah, usually the studios want to remind you where you are and not know what time of day it is…
Yeah, exactly. Like is it light or dark outside? You don’t know when you’re recording a record, but this time, we did, and we were constantly reminded of where we were. And I do think that that totally helped shape the environment. And a lot of the…maybe loneliness? That kind of feeling. Some of this record comes from that. But it was a great experience. And yeah, we would love to do it again there.
That’s awesome! The Antibloom song, ”A Little Fight” sounds a bit different than what you guys have done in the past. The only real comparison I could find was on the record A Beautiful Place To Drown. But still, so different than what you guys have done in the past. Can you explain the significance of this brief song on the record?
Yeah, “A Little Fight” and a little song. It’s kind of got a little story too. It’s this short story in a song that doesn’t really repeat in and it’s got a vibe, almost like The Postal Service. But, not really…Paul Marc wrote that one. And I said, “Dude, I think this is great and perfect, and I don’t think we need to add on to it. I don’t think we need to make it any longer than it has to be. I think this is just like a cool little story, kind of in the middle of a record.“ And it’s funny, you brought that up. No one’s really asked me about that song yet.
That song is one of the ones that really stood out to me on the repeat spins. It’s over really quickly, but it sticks with you after the fact.
And that’s I think the end of Side A on the LP there too. So yeah, it’s a really fun little ditty that I think right away I knew that it was special. And I think that that’s one of the songs too, that when we had the 25 I was like, we could cut it. I guess you could cut it, but it’s also got such a different sort of aura to it that I think maybe is just something that should be heard.
Many music writers have mentioned that when bands have been around for 20+ years and created this many records, as Silverstein has, that each album tends to take on its own personality. If that holds true to you, how would you describe the personality of your last 5 albums, starting with Dead Reflection.
Dead Reflection…it was a dark time in my life, and a hard time in my life, recording that record. I was living in an Airbnb in Toronto, a very depressing place. And I went to the studio every day, and just poured my heart out through just straight-up depression. And it’s kind of a weird-sounding record. The mix is really different. We sort of went for that on purpose, but the mix is kind of different. And also my vocal performance is kind of different. A lot of “yelly” kind of screams, and when I listen back to it, I really feel my own pain coming through that record. That was kind of a hard one.
Alright, how about A Beautiful Place To Drown…What’s the personality of that one in your mind?
So, with A Beautiful Place To Drown we broke all the rules we had for ourselves before we said we’re going to do what we want to do. We are not going to worry about the punk rock rule book, if you will. And we did all kinds of weird things…there’s a saxophone solo on that record! I mean, that record was Paul Marc’s baby. I mean, that way I really let him take the reins and run with that. He had a lot of really strong, strong visions. And that record has some great songs, some classic songs now, like “Bad Habits” and “Infinite”. Those are songs that we’re probably going to play every show for the rest of our career. And I was much in a much better headspace at that point.
That’s good. What about the one over my shoulder here, Misery Made Me?
That record was the COVID album, and we wrote it apart. All the songs are quite dark and quite depressing. But the thing about that record is I look back at it with a huge smile on my face, because after we wrote those songs kind of separately and we got in the studio, it was the first time we hung out. We all lived together because of the COVID rules. We all lived together in the studio. We played golf every morning, because that was one of the only things we were allowed to do. And we had an absolute blast recording that record. And it’s funny, because I think you can hear it, you can hear the exuberance and excitement in the record, but the lyrics are so dark. Yeah, it’s kind of a cool duality, if you will and I had a blast being that writer. So it’s one of my favorite albums we’ve ever done.
It’s got a lot of energy behind it too.
So totally, “energy” is a great word for it.
So, now the two records that are freshest in your mind, hopefully. Antibloom is up first.
Antibloom is the record that wears a lot of hats, I guess is a good way to put it. You have the first track, “Mercy Mercy” which is really in your face, and really aggressive, but also has some kind of cool, sort of symphonic elements in a way. And then you have something like “Confession,” which definitely seems like a song that maybe could be on A Beautiful Place To Drown. It’s got a little bit of that vibe, but I think it’s one of the best songs we’ve written.
And “Don’t Let Me Get Too Low” is super cool. It’s like a punk rock kind of song that has sort of a hardcore bridge, and it’s super fun. I love that song so much. And then we have “Stress,” which is almost like a Nu-metal influenced song. So I’ve already spoken about the vibe of it and everything, and it’s so fresh in my mind that it’s hard to reflect back because it hasn’t even come out yet. But, I think that <Antibloom> will have something for everybody. I think all of the songs sound different, but all of them come from a pretty cool space.
And then finally, Pink Moon. What’s the overall vibe of that one? What can I look forward to when I hear that album?
I think it’s just got a lot of energy and emotion. It starts off with a super emotional intro track, and then it goes into an absolute banger. I think it is one of the best songs we’ve ever made. We just shot a video for that song, actually, too. And it’s probably my favorite of all of those songs from the two records. And then there are two really cool features on it. And I think that there’s also a couple songs on the record that are really kind of like a throwback this sort of sound like they could have been on Discovering the Waterfront.
Oh, wow!
And then there’s just a really great energy, I think, to this whole whole record, and being able to switch from kind of emotional energy, kind of the whole time is something this record does really well. So I think I might like it better than Antibloom. So it’s exciting.
I’m looking forward to it! Thank you for walking through those five albums with me. The most recent record, Antibloom, ends with a cool, pop-driven ballad called “Cherry Coke” that I think fans are really gonna enjoy when they spin the record. Why did you think this was the right choice to end the first of the two records with?
I feel like this just has this sort of feeling of looking back on who you are, and how you became who you are and it’s got a cool vibe. It’s interesting, you called it pop because I don’t think of it as very poppy at all.
Well, to me, It’s almost like a slightly more polished version of what Silverstein would do in the past. But, I think it’s gonna really resonate with your fans.
Yeah, I do too. And I don’t know, it just felt like the first time I heard it all fleshed out, I said, “I think this is the closer.” I don’t have much to say about it other than that. I think it has a great feel to it. I mean, also it’s pretty brutal. It’s pretty intense, but I think it’s a great song, and I definitely think it’s a great way to close the record.
Yeah, it’s a nice cliffhanger for Pink Bloom, too. I can’t wait to see the tracklisting and put my ears on the next one!
Thanks, Adam. It was great chatting with you, and I’ll see you next month in Silver Spring!
I appreciate your time, Shane!
