RIVAL SONS Guitarist On 'More Focused' New Album 'Feral Roots': 'I Think It's Our Best Effort To Date'

RIVAL SONS guitarist Scott Holiday recently spoke with United Rock Nations. The full conversation can be streamed below. A few excerpts follow (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On the group’s producer, Dave Cobb:

Scott: “I don’t consider him a member of the band… He’s our longtime producer and my good friend and an invaluable resource to us making these records. Close, though — close to a bandmember.”

On whether the band thinks they’ll work with other producers in the future:

Scott: “That may happen in the future. I think at this point, we’ve been capable of changing to a degree that we wanted to, and I think things work nicely. We’ve been able to grow inside this confine, but you never know what the future holds. This would have been a bad area for us to switch, I think, given the direction that we wanted to go, and just where we are all as people and where Dave is in his career. This is a wonderful time to collaborate more than move on.”

On the group’s writing process:

Scott: “This whole record was written with me and Jay [Buchanan, vocals] getting together at the beginning of the sessions. We went to a place called Howenwald, Tennessee. It was this remote writing cabin between these two little lakes, and that’s how we began writing, just the two of us, starting with a bunch of songs that we had been working on and stuff that we came up with while we were there. From there, we went home and traded stuff back and forth… Then we got together in the studio with everybody else after we’d agreed on the group of songs that we wanted to work on. It was a lot more focused and also less collaborative with the rest of the group — it was more myself and Jay just working the whole time — but between the two of us, [it was] very focused. It really worked out much more than the previous albums… I think it’s our best effort to date.”

On the cover art of the group’s new album, “Feral Roots”:

Scott: “I’d like to leave some ambiguity to it, but I think if you look up ‘feral’ and think about roots, it’s pretty within the title, and I think the cover tells a story that seems pretty obvious. How it relates to the music, I would prefer to leave it ambiguous so people can kind of read into it and enjoy it for themselves.”

On new song “Back In The Woods”:

Scott: “This was a song I mostly wrote from my bedroom musically… I wasn’t sure if this would be a song that would be even on the record until I brought it to the guys, into the band room. It took a little longer to get what needed to get done rhythmically with the drums, but I think it became a standout track. I think Jay wrote a really wonderful hook over it. It’s a really fun song. As far as the album goes, that’s a much… for the mood of the record, I think a much lighter, kind of straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll track. I think emotionally, it’s probably one of the lightest, if not the lightest, on the record.”

After releasing four albums through Earache Records, RIVAL SONS signed with Low Country Sound, a Warner Music Group imprint run by Cobb, a Nashville-based country and Americana producer, last year.

“Feral Bones”, the group’s debut release for Low Country Sound, will be released on January 25. A video for the album’s first single, “Do Your Worst”, can be seen below.