Interview: Godsmack Drummer Shannon Larkin

After 20-plus years as the drummer in Godsmack, one would think drummer Shannon Larkin had seen it all – and undoubtedly, he has seen a lot. But he said when the group wrapped up rehearsals for the first leg of the band’s current tour, he heard Sully Erna, the singer, songwriter, rhythm guitarist and founding member of Godsmack, say something he’s rarely expressed ahead of the launch of a tour.

“By the end (of rehearsals), Sully isn’t usually like ever ‘We sound great.’ It’s always ‘Ah, you know, we’ve got work to do.’ Even (after) a year on tour, he’s still messing with the set list,” Larkin said. “We ended this with him (Erna), who never really gives it up and says we sound great, he says ‘We sound great. We’re going to be OK.’”

The guys in Godsmack – Erna, Larkin, guitarist Tony Rombola and bassist Robbie Merrill – had good reason to be on point right from the start of a tour that began last year and is extending well into 2024. This will be the last time the band does what’s known as a cycle tour, where music acts typically spend a year-plus on the road promoting their latest album or EP.

Erna and his bandmates have recently announced that their current album, “Lighting Up the Sky,” will be their last as Godsmack. With that, the band will no longer need to do the cycle tours that have followed each of their eight studio albums.

It’s not the end of the road for Godsmack, just time to ease up on what has been a rather all-consuming career.

“I hope everybody knows we’re not going away,” Larkin said, reassuring fans that Godsmack is not breaking up. “We will go out and play after this (cycle tour promoting) ‘Lighting Up the Sky’ is all done. We’re going to call each other up and say ‘Hey man, let’s go rock two or three weeks of shows this year.’ And that’s it. And we can actually ask our families and be like ‘Hey, we’re thinking of (doing some shows) and what would be the best time? And (we’ll) be able to control our lives for once instead of music controlling us.”

That last sentence gets to a key reason Godsmack are done with making full albums. Since seeing their 1999 self-titled debut album go quadruple platinum and spawn four top 10 singles, Erna, Larkin, Rombola and Merrill have felt pressure to live up to the successes of their previous output every time they’ve started in on a new album. They’ve thrived despite that, building a catalog that includes 26 top 10 singles, 12 of which have gone No. 1 on “Billboard” magazine’s mainstream rock chart. But it’s time to say goodbye to the weight of expectations.

“You have lots of pressure to be successful and to continue to be successful. And the pressure sometimes is in your own mind and you’re putting it on yourself,” Larkin said. “It’s not like the (record) labels or management don’t believe in us. They’ve always believed in us. And the radio particularly, a big shout out from the band to radio, we would not be where we are without them embracing our songs.”

And the fact is, Godsmack have achieved everything the four band members set out to accomplish.

“We finally came to the decision that gosh, we’ve climbed the mountain that we envisioned reaching the top of when we were 10-, 12-, 13-year-old kids picking up our instruments. So putting your whole life (into the band), you know, Sully and I both missed our daughters’ first steps, man,” Larkin said. “That’s the sacrifice we’ve made to be able to say at this time in our lives it’s time for us to take a step back, and not break up or do a cash grab, like most bands do, ‘Oh yeah, our last tour,’ because it’s not and we don’t want to quit. But we do want to just, I like to say, jump off of the machine and not have to sell product after so many years of touring and selling product.”

There are other reasons why Godsmack will gear things down after the “Lighting Up the Sky” cycle. Some of the band members want to spend time with their families or have other hobbies and interests they want to pursue.

And yes, there are outside music projects. Larkin said he expects Erna to make solo albums, and the drummer himself has a psychedelic blues-rock band, Spirit Wheel, that has an album of his songs finished and ready to release when the time is right.

The age issue also figures into wanting to lighten up on touring after the “Lighting Up the Sky” cycle. The band members are all in their 50s, and Larkin, for one, isn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to meet the physical demands of playing Godsmack’s hard-hitting rock music if the band kept playing extended tour cycles.

The band members also feel with “Lighting Up the Sky,” they’re ending their run of Godsmack albums on a high note.

Over the years, Erna and the rest of the band have moved away from the grungy elements that early in the career had Godsmack being branded by some as Alice In Chains imitators. The band’s sound has evolved into something closer to melodic hard rock, and on “Lighting Up the Sky,” Godsmack does it very well. Energetic songs like “Surrender” (a No. 1 mainstream rock single from the album), “What About Me” and “Soul On Fire” come loaded with appealing vocal melodies, stirring guitar riffs and Erna’s usual emotional lyricism. But the album also has variety, with the piano-led power ballad “Truth” offering one of Erna’s most vulnerable lyrics and the rollicking “Let’s Go” giving the band room to stretch musically with an extended guitar solo/instrumental segment.

Larkin said “Lighting Up the Sky” was the easiest album Godsmack has made, and to a man, the band members consider it their best release yet.

“For this one, we wrote over 20 songs. We had three years, with the pandemic and stuff. In fact, at one point we had written pretty much a whole record of music, and it was a totally different thing where it was like Pink Floyd, long-ass songs,” he said. “We wrote like 11 songs (initially) and we ended up keeping ‘Surrender,’ ‘Growing Old’ and ‘Red, White & Blue.’ Those three stayed. We had taken a break from writing and he (Erna) comes back with ‘Soul On Fire’ and God, it was just relentless, ‘What About Me’ and ‘Let’s Go.’ Just all of these songs started just pouring out and it was so easy for us and we were like ‘Wow!’ So that was another blessing from the pandemic. It gave us time to take off and kind of reflect on the direction the record was going.”

Now back on the road, Larkin said several of the new songs will be in Godsmack’s visually spectacular shows. (“We blow a lot of stuff up live,” Larkin noted with a chuckle.) The band members, after all, are promoting “Lighting Up the Sky.” But fans will hear plenty of the hits, too.

“We know that look, even if our new record is our favorite one and it’s great, we can’t oversaturate a set list when we have all of these radio hits that people expect to hear,” Larkin said.

Godsmack comes to the  Duke Energy Center in St. Petersburg on March 15. Click here for ticket information.