Step into a closet and you might find yourself in the middle of a frozen forest.
Step into the flames and you might find yourself adorned with dragons (though probably best not try this at home, kids). Step into a certain house in Kentucky, however, and you might just discover a different type of magic. Black Stone Cherry have been plying the rock trade for 15 years now, but at their heart sits a house with a history. Frontman Chris Robertson talks about the path to their latest album, Kentucky.
“That place has influenced the way we sound and who we are more than anything the four of us had done before,” Robertson says of Practice House, the isolated getaway inherited from Kentucky Headhunters (who just so happen to be related to Black Stone Cherry drummer John Young). “It’s practically where we learned to play instruments, where we write songs together. You just walk into that house and it oozes soul and music. You can’t describe it, and if you’ve never seen it it’s hard to understand what I mean, but when you walk in you just know: this is a house that was built for music. It’s old and in bad shape, but still we go there to rehearse and write. It’s as much a member of the band as I am.”
Such is its significance that it even features as the new album’s cover art. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate symbol for Black Stone Cherry – the rooms where rock first stitched the band together, and which have been the fulcrum for every step the four-piece has been inspired to take.
“I think collectively we have our own sound, but obviously we still want to evolve,” says Robertson. “But we’ve never said, ‘We’ve done heavy Southern rock, so let’s try something different.’ It’s always been, ‘Let’s just write Black Stone Cherry songs.’ The evolution that’s going to happen is because of us as people. Every day we’re playing music, that’s always been how [we work]. As long as people like us doing what we do, there’s no need to change.
“You look at the great bands throughout history, and there are two different kinds. Led Zeppelin never made the same album twice, but then you get bands like AC/DC who have always just done what they do best. I think what we’ve always tried to do is keep a consistent effort in maintaining the sound, but never getting it too similar to the previous sound. It’s kind of the best of both worlds. I feel like on this record, maybe more so than any other we’ve done, we’ve captured the essence, the integrity of what we’ve always done, but embellished it, given it something slightly different.”
Listening to Kentucky, this is no offhand sentiment. It is markedly different from 2014’s Magic Mountain – darker, yet ultimately an optimistic record – and may well be the high watermark in the band’s already impressive career. Traces of Black Stone Cherry’s evolution are embedded across the album, in part through the inevitable development of their musicianship. But it is the ordinary passage of time, of life and death, that gives this growth substance.
“I think what keeps us from doing the same thing over and over is the fact that you experience different things at different times of life, and then you experience the same thing again at another point in life, and the way they translate becomes different too. ‘Remember Me’ off Magic Mountain was written on the day of my grandfather’s funeral on my mother’s side. And then you look at ‘Long Ride’ on the new record. The first part of the song is talking about my son and my wife, and the last part is about my grandfather on my father’s side, who passed away in 2014. There are two songs that both deal about the loss of my grandfathers, but they’re two totally different songs. Lyrically, the vibe, they’re totally different, but deal with the same thing years apart. You start to get older, you start to see things in a new light. The same thing might happen to you at different times of life, but they can affect you in very different ways.”
As Black Stone Cherry have developed, so too has their audience grown, but the sheer number of fans they have amassed still strikes Robertson as incredible – seeing international crowds swell from a hundred punters to hordes a thousand strong has blown his mind. Suffice to say, let’s try not to disappoint them during their imminent tour across the country with Steel Panther.
“The hardest part now is just working out the setlist. I mean, we’ve got five albums, and you don’t know which ones the fans like better there. The setlist we’ve been doing now, we’ve been trying to keep songs from each album. The new fans who come to the show, whether it be in the UK or back home in the States or Australia, they might not be that familiar with us, and so we try to make it so they have a little bit of everything. It’s like this nice, small painting of the band’s career … So really man, that’s all just a long way of saying we’re excited to see how it goes down there.”
[Black Stone Cherry photo by Rob Fenn]
Black Stone Cherry’sKentucky is out now through Mascot, and theysupport Steel Panther at the Big Top, Luna ParkonFriday June 17.
