As children, we all rode bicycles and climbed trees and had a jolly good time just being a kid. Seether’s frontman Shaun Morgan wasn’t that different from you and me … except he grew up in a turbulent South Africa. Calling in before a show in northern Mississippi, Morgan talked at length about his childhood, his influences, his band’s latest CD Holding Onto Strings Better Left To Fray, and how it was actually a song in a movie that showed him the power of music.
Shaun, you were born in South Africa. What was it like growing up there?
I grew up on a pig farm. My dad bought a farm when I was about five or six years old. My brother and I moved from my mother’s house and in with him. I actually lived on a pig farm till I was eighteen and it was like a twenty mile drive every day to get to school. He would drive one way to drop us off and drive another hour and a half yet to go to work every day and then turn around and come back and pick us up. But it was basically running around doing kid stuff on a farm, like climbing trees and riding bicycles and stuff, a really standard farm upbringing. As time went by things got more dangerous so we moved into the city cause farmers were getting chopped up and stuff on their farms. So we had to move into a safer environment.
That sounds scary.
Yeah, we moved to a farm and everything was open. Then having been there for four or five years there were bars on all the windows, there were security gates, we had to put in electrical fencing. It just became farmers were an easy target. You’re so outlying and so far away from your neighbors that they would just come on your property and attack farmers. Mostly it was the older farmers. But yeah, a lot of my family farmed all over the country so you hear stories from all over the place of farmers being attacked, just hacked to pieces. In Zimbabwe was the worst, just walking on and claiming the land and then just killing the farmers; but here, they were just taking what they could find and running away. It was an African country and it’s run by one of the more corrupt governments of all time, I would say. It promises it’s people a lot of things it doesn’t deliver on, so people are poor and they have to find other ways to make ends meet and unfortunately violence to a lot of people is not a big deal.
Where did you move to?
We lived in a city called Pietermaritzburg and that was basically the last few years of high school and I left and moved to Johannesburg. I started studying and went to college, studying for a bachelor of technology. I was planning to become a jeweler. Basically spent two and a half years on a three year degree and then I bailed at the end to be in the band full time. Thankfully, that worked out (laughs). Otherwise I’d be a jeweler somewhere in South Africa, working for some guy that pays you minimum wage.
How old were you when you moved away?
Right after high school I lived in London for about two or three months and then I went back and started studying. Basically I lived in London and sort of bummed around in 1999-2000, then in 2001, I was in college and basically started the band over those years. Then we got signed and had a record deal in 2001 from a company in South Africa called Musketeer Records. When we got signed, I dropped out of college, which I was in my last semester so I could have finished. But I felt like I needed to take care of the band. We didn’t really have a manager so I was managing the band myself. Also in 2001, the record company flew us over for a showcase and they signed us and basically in January, January 07, 2002, we got on a plane and came to the states.
Oh that must have been extremely exciting.
Oh yeah, definitely. It was one of those moments where you have a shot at a career cause mostly back home musicians and some of the biggest bands in the country still have day jobs. They all work a day job Monday through Friday and then on the weekend they’ll go out and pick up a show here and there. There’s really no way to sustain yourself touring cause you basically play bars and nightclubs. No tour bus, people will rent a van or take their own personal cars and drive to the shows so it’s a very different touring lifestyle over there. It’s a country the size of Texas basically and there’s only about four or five major cities you can play in. You’re touring is very limited.
What was the music scene like there?
A lot of bands, a lot of people, are trying to make it, like everywhere else. Unfortunately, there really aren’t that many bands that get signed. The record companies in South Africa make their revenue from international acts. So basically they just sit on their asses and wait for the international releases to come through in the retail stores and that’s basically paying their bills so why would they need local bands. For a short while there were some local bands getting signed, and they still are to a lesser degree.
It’s just one of those countries that are very difficult to get signed and once you do get signed then you sort of get watered down and you become a sort of adult contemporary act. If they sign you and spend money on you, then you really have to sort of start sounding really, really radio-friendly. And we weren’t that kind of band so luckily we got the Wind-Up deal or otherwise we would have had to reevaluate our situation. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the Wind-Up Records deal I probably would have quit music. My girlfriend was pregnant, I was pretty much broke, so I go back to college to finish and try and get a job. Yeah, if it wasn’t for the deal, I’d be looking for a real job somewhere.
What band first really rocked your world?
Like when I was a kid? Well, the first time that music really affected me was when I was about five years old and my Mom took us to a movie called Jock of the Bushveld. It was kind of like Old Yeller, one of those stories where you fall in love with the dog and at the end the dog dies. And in this story, it’s a true story about an owner who ends up shooting this dog by accident because he mistakes him for a fox. And the song played was called “Spirit Of The Great Heart” by Johnny Clegg and I remember at the time it just moved me so much cause I was like, well, now I’m unhappy cause the dog’s gone, and the song was so powerful and that memory imprinted on me. And every time I heard that song on the radio, even years after that, I’d get emotional. I was like, man, this music stuff is powerful. That was like the first time I really understood the power of music.
I guess there really weren’t many bands for us to watch as a kid growing up so when I was about ten years old or eleven years old there was a band called Mango Groove. They were sort of a very African rhythm with a white girl singing, and they came to the high school and played, and this was a huge band at the time. We watched them at a high school theatre or whatever and I remember thinking it was really cool seeing all these musicians on stage and they were actually playing and it sounded great and everyone was really into it and there was this really great energy about it.
Tell me about first band you were in.
I started playing in my first band when I was about twelve years old and the excitement of that was when you are in a room playing with your buddies and as horrible as it may sound at the time, you think it’s awesome (laughs) and that it’s the most amazing thing ever cause we’re making this noise and nobody else is. That was the first band I was in and it was called Molliestone. Some of the guys lived in a more affluent neighborhood than I did and there was a girls school, a private school. One of the guys was dating one of the girls out of the dormitory and it was the Molliestone building; I guess it was the name of the previous headmistress of the school so we basically just named it after that. It was kind of cool cause nobody knew where the name came from. I’ve been in bands called Monkey Spank and Free Beer. You know when you’re a kid you have nothing to lose, right, so you just kind of go with whatever. Monkey Spank was the band I was in the longest.
Were you singing in all of these bands or were you just playing an instrument?
Yeah, I was always singing, I was always the singer. There were a couple of bands that I played in where I was a guitarist or the drummer or the bassist but bands mostly wouldn’t let me play guitar. You know the first band I was in I was singing and then I joined another band and then I was playing bass but that was Monkey Spank and I was the bassist and singer. I basically learned how to play bass in that band cause I had no choice cause we didn’t have a bassist and it was easier to play than guitar so I did that and sang for a while. Basically the first band that I was in that I played guitar and sang in was this band.
When did you realize you could sing and that you had a really good voice?
I don’t know, I mean, I really don’t like my voice that much but back when I was in school I was in the choir, and I was in the music stuff at school, had a couple solo parts here and there, but when I went to high school it wasn’t cool to be in the choir anymore. So I joined the band instead. But yeah, in high school there was always the musical every year so I’d normally be in that as well and ended up having roles where I had to sing solos and things like that.
Is it natural for you to be up on stage in front of all those people?
There’s always that element of insecurity when you have to go out on stage. With time it becomes easier, obviously, but for example if you’ve been off the road for a while and you haven’t toured in six months and you go back out, it’s like, Oh my God, what am I doing? I forgot how to play the songs, I can’t remember the lyrics. But then most of the time we don’t take it very seriously, it’s supposed to be fun, so you just have fun with it. But I don’t like to get up and try to make it this really serious affair where you can’t make mistakes, it’s bullshit. Music for the sake of music is supposed to be fun and rock & roll is never ever, ever supposed to be anything but freedom. We just kind of look at it that way.
I think John Humphrey takes it a bit more seriously cause he’s been around a little bit longer than we have in the studio and he was the drummer for the Nixons back in the day. He is the one that sort of holds it all together cause Dale Stewart and I have had too many cocktails every once in a while and sort of make the odd mistake here and there. But Johnny is the one that holds it down. Being a three piece it’s good having someone like that cause with John and Dale on the drums and bass it’s a really solid rhythm section. I feel a lot more freedom cause when we did have another guitarist, you have to play with the other guy and now that there is nobody else there, I can pretty much play and be more creative and more spontaneous in places. So for me, it’s like I have a lot more to do but I enjoy it.
Do you remember the first song that you tried to write?
Yes. It was a song called “69 Tea” and it was on Disclaimer. It was the first one I remember writing. We’d written songs in bands prior to that. I mean, I wrote that when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old. So for me it was like, wow, this is just me by myself and nobody else. I spent a lot of my teenage years just in my room playing guitar. I used to have tapes and tapes of songs that I would just sit and record. Unfortunately, I’ve lost all of them but luckily some of them would stick with me and as the years went by, I’d show them to different bands and some of them managed to sort of hang in there. But that was the first one I remember writing. That was actually our first single in South Africa, which basically put us on the map. That’s a pretty fond memory.
On your latest CD, the song I like the best is “Forsaken”. It has some really powerful lyrics to it.
If I look back on the songs I wrote probably ten years ago compared to the songs I write now, I think that a lot of the time the lyrics have definitely grown and have taken on a sort of, it’s become a different animal. I now think about them and I try to sort of craft lyrics that are more easily put together because back in the day it was like, “Ok, let’s write some lyrics, give me five minutes”, and be completely unfamiliar with them, which I enjoyed because if you don’t really know how you’re going to sing these words and you haven’t even become comfortable with them yet, you’re not really sure of yourself around them yet and that comes across as, I would like to think, an interesting vulnerability, like you’re learning the song as you go along.
Then you have other songs that have been around for years and years and years. Say you do a demo a year and a half prior to recording the song. By the time you get into recording it in the studio, you know the song so well the freshness of the lyrics is not quite there. But then you’ve had more time to put something together that might not resemble maybe a hack job. I felt like most of the time I would unconsciously allow things to come out and just write them down and think about stuff.
I think now I have the time to actually look at the lyrics and that’s what Brendan O’Brien [producer] was really adamant about: “Before you do vocals I want a copy of the lyrics to make sure the lyrics flow properly.” He’d look at it far more scientifically, intricately I think would be a better word for it, and he dissected that part of the song whereas a lot of producers don’t really care to. They’re more concerned that you get songs on the album that sound like their albums. But Brendan O’Brien makes band albums rather than Brendan O’Brien albums.
Well, he is certainly one of the best.
Yeah, and there is a reason for that. He’s really easy to work with and he’s a really great guy. He works really fast and a lot of these songs we’d walk in the studio and we’d have the demos done but there were no lyrics and there were no finished songs. But we would sit and work them out in the studio and we’d make changes right before we recorded them so it was a really cool spontaneous process. I like that cause normally you learn a song so well, with the exception of the lyrics, but you’d have an idea. Then you walk in to record stuff that you’d been playing for three weeks straight because you want to rehearse so when you get in there you don’t want to make any mistakes and get through the process as quickly as possible and save money and everything. But by the same token this album took us thirty days to make and it was the quickest of all the albums we’ve done and it was the one we walked in the least prepared (laughs). I just think that’s because Brendan made it so comfortable and he really believed in us and he really stood up for us with the label, which gave us a lot of confidence so we felt sort of invincible for a while.
My other favorite song is “Roses”.
Yeah, those are the two that were a little bit more dramatic (laughs). There’s more drama in them and definitely, even musically, there was a sense of, I don’t know, Phantom Of The Opera (laughs). Brendan even played the piano intro and said, “I feel like I need a cape right now” (laughs) … But those were the ones that have like the big, I don’t know, those are the songs that should be in like a Twilight movie (laughs). There was definitely a little bit more drama in them and I like that. There was almost an operaesque feel to it and that’s not a bad thing. Maybe there was a slight nod to bands like Muse in there or Radiohead as well cause we wanted to do something that was different for us as well. We want to keep moving, keep one foot in the doorway but you can move the other foot around wherever you feel like going. You want to retain the essence of the band without losing it too much but also being free to explore as much as you like and as long as it doesn’t end up a piece of crap at the end we’ll record it.
Who was your biggest influence as a musician and why them?
Wow, I think when I started off my first influence was definitely Kurt Cobain. I was like twelve years old, thirteen years old, and I was really blown away by how honest Nevermind was and how angry it sounded and how emotional it was and vulnerable at the same time. So for me, it was all the things that a kid that’s just hit puberty start feeling and it was really powerful to me. And one of the other things was that my parents hated it (laughs). It was a win-win for me all the way around. I’d crank it up really loud, you know, and sit in my room and learned to play songs. That was what really inspired me to start and honestly, since then, I haven’t really had many people that, I mean there were guitarists like Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, Dimebag Darrell from Pantera; those are guitarists that you learn to play, learn some of their songs as you go along. But I never really aspired to be like anybody when I was a kid. Sure, I wanted to be like Nirvana but as you get older there is so much out there and I really loved PJ Harvey and Portishead and a band called Brand New.
Who do you like to listen to nowadays?
There is so much music that is different from what we do and that’s really what I listen to. I listen to a lot less music that sounds like us or that’s in our genre than people would assume. Most of it just bores me, it sounds the same, bands just writing about jacking off and that just pisses me off. It’s sort of reverting back to the eighties where that was the shit Poison used to sing about and Motley Crue. Nothing against any of those bands, it’s just not what I like to do. But if that’s what people want to do with their thing, that’s cool. I just prefer music with a little more substance to it. I listen to alternative bands, folk rock, singer-songwriters; Ray LaMontagne is one of my favorites right now. And honestly, the new rock & roll, the new music, that pisses your parents off is hip hop. As much as I’ve fought it off, “I’m never going to listen to rap”, Lil Wayne is a smart funny guy. His lyrics are really interesting and creative. These days I get influenced by everything and I’m inspired by everything. It’s interesting that you can combine so many different genres into one bowl and make music out of it. So that is what really inspires me now; it’s not really a singular musician anymore.
Do you remember the first real rock star that you ever met?
The first one that I remember that blew my mind was when I met Dave Grohl. I was like, holy shit, it’s Dave Grohl and he’s talking to me, no way (laughs). “I’ll totally have a sip of your Jack Daniels, totally. I’ve quit smoking but I’ll totally take it over”. I was a kid, man, and he was super cool. I’ve met so many other guys that are not cool. I actually think the first one I met was Chris Cornell, when he did the Audioslave tour. And Tom Morello, I didn’t know what to say cause I was like, “Oh my God, that’s Tom Morello”. You know, I’m a kid from Africa that was never supposed to even be in a band, really, so how am I sitting in these rooms sometimes with these amazing musicians walking around in the hallways? But yeah it was Audioslave and then my really favorite one was Dave Grohl. I was just a kid and he was really nice and really, really friendly and welcoming and really energetic and enthusiastic. And for a guy that’s been through all he’s been through and then to come out on top and is pretty much the coolest guy in the world, that’s pretty rad.
Last Question: What are your plans for 2012?
Well, it’s going to be quite interesting, really. We leave pretty early in January to do some countries we’ve never been to. We’re going to go to Thailand then we’ll go do Russia and Turkey, then we do a European tour with the Three Doors Down guys and that’s going to be great. Then we come back to the states and take a couple weeks off. In the summer hopefully we’ll have a tour we can go on and tour the states for a couple of months and maybe do some more festivals in Europe in June and July. That’s the first six months pretty much right now. It’s looking busy. Hopefully we’ll tour really, really hard and make the most out of the year with a couple more singles and see what happens. Busy is always good (laughs)
In next week’s column we have another frontman who had an interesting childhood and who makes no qualms about speaking his mind. Born in Greece, raised in London, Livan recently opened up for Alice Cooper on some of his American dates.
