MORGAN ROSE Says DARK NEW DAY Sounds Like 'SEVENDUST With A Different Singer'

James Wright of Blistering.com recently conducted an interview with SEVENDUST drummer Morgan Rose. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Blistering.com: What was your reaction to longtime guitarist Clint Lowery leaving the band in favor OF DARK NEW DAY?

Morgan: "We pretty much understood that it was going to go down. He was always the rumor topic and we'd always hear rumors that he was doing something with somebody else or that he was getting something started with his brother. He is and will always be a brother to this band, but it was one of those things where none of us would have been able to do that the way it was done. He decided to make his move when he hadn't fulfilled his obligation, with six days left to go in a tour right before Christmas. That's just the way it goes, but me, I wouldn't have been able to do that to the guys. At the time, he was going to another thing and he was gonna be able to get paid and move one, when we were in a position where we didn't know what we were going to do; we were really left out to dry. We were ok with him going, but in all honesty, his family pulled him off the road with six days left to go because they said, 'He wasn't stable enough out here with us.' We never fired him and he never quit, we just got another guitar player and he got another band."

Blistering.com: Have you had a chance to hear the DARK NEW DAY record?

Morgan: I am a fan of his writing, so… it sounds a lot like SEVENDUST to me with a different singer and a drummer that does a lot of the same screams as I do. Honestly, I had a few of those songs in my iPod and I would listen to those more than anything else. There were a few tracks that I really liked, one in particular that we used to jam. We used to play the music to 'Brother' at soundcheck."

Blistering.com: So now that you have your own label are you going to be looking into a few bands that you want to sign?

Morgan: I have a few that I was looking at earlier, but we have to get everything dialed in with Winedark and make sure we're on the exact same page. It's never any easy thing going the independent route, because we were going from TVT to a real independent label where they don't have any other major recording acts, only us. There still is a lot of work to be done over there before we can feel comfortable signing another band to our label and putting it out. I don't want to have any band to have to go through what we've gone through. It's just one of those things where when you're looking at the offers from all these labels, there's a million different ways to look at it. You can look at it from the major label, where you have this massive machine there to work your record, but you're not gonna get as much money up front because they don't need me as bad. You also have to wonder, 'Am I gonna get lost in the shuffle?' Then, you can look at the independent route, where you're gonna get paid, but they don't have the reputation to be able to push their way through doors to get things done. On the independent level there is a fair amount of bartering to be done. It's no secret when you take a look at bands on labels and you have the President of the label come in and say, 'Come on! Help me out here. I really want them on this tour.' When you look at management and labels, you always had KORN and LIMP BIZKIT on tour together, or STAIND and KORN, LIMP BIZKIT and STAIND or ORGY in KORN. All these bands that are managed by The Firm, were all touring together and on the same label, so they managed to capitalize on it. It's not hard when you have a big huge band, a medium sized band and a small band; put them all on the same tour and the hope is that the big band will influence kids enough to buy the two bands below them, therefore you get three big bands. That's exactly what happened with The Firm, because the got KORN, then LIMP BIZKIT, STAIND and they even got ORGY to sell a bunch of records. I don't think there would have been any way to pull that off on their own, because they weren't compatible with any of those bands. That was just the way it works and now we're in the same position where we have management that doesn't manage anybody else and a label that doesn't have any other bands. It's a very tough road for us and we have to use our relationships that we have with other bands a bit more."

Read the entire interview at Blistering.com.