Eric Bass, bassist and pianist for chart-topping rock band Shinedown, always knew that he wouldn’t be making a conventional living.
Growing up in musical family, his mother a vocal and piano teacher, he learned to play piano and discovered the guitar around the age of 12 or 13, learning all the Skid Row songs he could. He would soon take up drums in the high school marching band.
“When I was a young teenager, I always knew that I was going to do something different. I wasn’t going to do the normal thing…I wasn’t going to settle for a desk job,” Bass emphasized.
“I eventually picked up the bass. I came to the bass more from being a producer and engineer in the recording studio and just kind of playing bass out of necessity and finding that a lot of these kids that come and play bass in the studio are just guitar players. They didn’t really have a bass sensibility, so I’d end up kind of having to go back with them and walk them through the process. So the bass kind of came to me in that way.”
But after playing in regional bands in the southeast, he found that he was more comfortable in the recording studio “on the other side of the glass,” spending about six years producing, engineering, and writing songs. But when he was hired to work with Shinedown in 2007 on their third album, “The Sound of Madness,” their attitude and “commitment to excellence” made him reconsider the road after making an album that “needed to be made.”
“Our personalities really worked together, and fast forward a couple months later I get a phone call about the bass player position and kind of came out of retirement. When I got on stage with Shinedown for the first time, that was the first time I had been on stage in over six years. It took a little bit of transitioning back into it, but it was like riding a bike,” Bass recalled.
“My personality is one of, ‘Nothing’s ever good enough. There’s always another step to get to. There’s always something more you can do. There’s always another bar that you can reach.’ And I’ve done that in everything that I’ve ever done in my life, and anybody who knows (singer) Brent Smith and (drummer) Barry Kerch and (guitarist) Zach Myers, of course in the band, knows that our personalities are like it. It was just a perfect match.”
The album spent 120 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 chart, but after finishing the “Anything and Everything” acoustic tour on Dec. 10, 2010, the group was right back in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2011 writing their next record, “Amaryllis,” which would be released on March 27 of this year. The pressure was on top their “juggernaut record,” but Bass’ fears quickly faded after the first song was completed.
“For Brent and myself, ‘Enemies’ was the first song that we finished, and when that was done, when that first one was done, it was like, ‘OK, we can do this. It’s OK. You realize you haven’t forgotten how to do that. And as we went through the process of writing ‘Amaryllis’ and we started collecting more songs, it became less about beating ‘The Sound of Madness’ and more about making, what would become ‘Amaryllis,’ the best record we could possibly make it,” he said.
The productive session produced 34 songs, recording 17 and putting 12 on the final record.
“The analogy of the amaryllis is that it’s a flower that blooms in the desert where it shouldn’t bloom. It grows in an area that it shouldn’t grow in and it blooms in a time of year when it shouldn’t bloom. There’s no other vegetation around, so it transcends and goes beyond and it’s unexpected,” he explained.
“It’s just a really good analogy for kind of where the band is. Not only musically have we been pushing ourselves but personally. All of us have gone through this metamorphosis, this personal change in each one of our lives.”
This underlying theme of the underdog’s triumph can easily be heard in the band’s first single from the record, entitled “Bully.”
“The whole bullying thing was just starting to kind of become a hot button issue, but it’s not like it hasn’t been going on for years…It was just a really sad thing,” Bass felt.
“The subject of that came up and it was like, ‘Let’s write a song about this.’ There was really nothing more than that, but it really became something that was really special to all of us because I was a band nerd when I was a kid. Zach got picked on when he was a kid. We’ve all had bullies in our lives whether it’s in our adult life or our young lives.
“At the end of the day, the song is more about survival. We’re not condoning violence, but we are condoning survival, and if you get picked on and somebody pushes you, I was always taught to push back.”
Currently headlining the “Avalanche Tour” with Adelitas Way and Art of Dying, which stops on Sunday, April 22 at the Scranton Cultural Center, Shinedown continues to push themselves with no end to their determination in sight.
“There’s never been any ultimate goal endgame for me. Like I said, it’s always just raising the bar a little bit. Our record debuted at number four on the Billboard Top 200, whereas ‘Sound of Madness’ debuted at number eight. It’s one more step up. I don’t know if I ever want to achieve ultimate success because I would be bored out of my mind without having a goal to reach for,” Bass admitted.
“I’m so blessed. We’re all so blessed to do what we do, and I think as long as we can sustain and keep a career and continue to play music for people and get that reaction from the crowd and the fans, I’ll be really happy. And just continue to climb. Yeah, you want to be one of he biggest bands in the world, and I think we’re working really hard at that right now.”