The Day I can’t forget_ Shaun Morgan of Seether opens up….
“I describe us as a rock band above all else,” Shaun Morgan tells me. Last October, his band Seether celebrated their decades-long career with a 20-song compilation album, Vicennial: 2 Decades of Seether. And there’s a lot to celebrate: 16 of the songs achieved #1 chart positions; all 20 were Top 5, multi-format radio hits. Carefully curated by the band, the album tells their story since forming in Pretoria, South Africa in 1999, a story that includes three platinum and two gold albums, 17 #1 singles, 21 Top 5 hits, single sales topping 17 million and over 2 billion streams worldwide across all platforms.
Not to mention the album includes the fan-fave cover of Wham’s “Careless Whisper.” The band is currently comprised of Shaun, Dale Stewart, John Humphrey and Corey Lowery.
“Dale and I met in 1999 in Pretoria through the girl I was dating at the time,” Shaun recalls. “Her brother was in a band with Dale and I went with her to watch them play at a local bar. Our original bassist left the band in January of 2000 so I reached out to Dale to see if he was interested in playing bass for us and handed him a cassette with 17 songs that he had to learn by the following weekend. He agreed and we played our first show that weekend to about 4 people.
“John was introduced to us in 2003 through our sound guy at the time who had previously done sound for The Nixons and wanted to include him in the audition process when we were searching for a new drummer. John nailed the audition and we immediately asked him to join the band. We all met Corey on a tour we did with Crossfade and Dark New Day in 2005 and when we were searching for a new guitarist in 2018 he happened to be available and has been with us since.”
According to Shaun, the secret to their success is in embracing their own uniqueness. “We don’t try to fit into any pigeonholes or trends, but choose instead to write and play music that expresses us in an honest and pure way,” he says. “We write and play music that makes us feel alive by evoking an emotional response and giving us the creative release that we crave. It’s a therapeutic process that allows us to purge ourselves.”
Shaun feels that being from South Africa makes them hungrier for success “due to the fact that it was incredibly difficult to make it in South Africa, let alone the U.S.,” he explains. “We always wrote music that we enjoyed and dedicated ourselves to getting our name out and eventually managed to secure a deal with Wind-Up Records in New York. I don’t know that it shaped us in any specific way other than it made us work harder for every goal to be achieved and instilled in us an inability to give up on the dream of being professional musicians.”
In 2020 Seether released their eighth studio album Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (If You Want Peace, Prepare for War), and included the #1 singles “Dangerous”, “Bruised and Bloodied” and “Wasteland.” “The most recent album was mostly inspired by events in my life as well as observations on society as someone who considers himself an outsider looking in. I am fascinated by the level of addiction that’s apparent across all social media platforms.”
Here’s a day in the life of Shaun Morgan of Seether
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