No pressure: Shinedown bassist takes control on latest album

Funny how the most obvious choice for a task can be found right at your doorstep.

For its new “Attention, Attention” album, which was released on Friday, Shinedown turned to one of its own, Eric Bass, to produce. A decade-long member of the Jacksonville, Florida rock troupe, Bass (the band’s bassist, of course) was already used to multi-tasking, having co-written and produced various songs on past recordings, including “Cut the Cord,” the leadoff single to 2015’s Top 10, gold-selling album “Threat to Survival.”

“Eric probably got 100 or so gray hairs from producing the album,” said longtime Shinedown drummer Barry Kerch. “He put a lot of pressure on himself and we put a lot on pressure on him. A lot of people say it’s the death knell when you self-produce. But he knew how to do the job. He’s produced bands before, many different styles of bands — rock ’n’ roll bands, metal bands. So we had full faith and trust in him.

“But we also had full faith and trust in each other because we still get along. We still like each other. We still have fun together. We’re friends, and we love each other like brothers. That made it a lot easier. For me, it was fun just to watch him work with the talent that he had.”

“Attention, Attention” widens Shinedown’s already broad musical scope, one that runs from metal-esque crunch to prog-flavored ambience.

“Like Shinedown always does, it’s something different,” Kerch said of the new album. “We don’t make the same record twice. We don’t want to because it’s kind of boring. We just make a record of what we’re feeling at the time, and this one was a snapshot of the past four years of our lives. It ended up becoming a concept record because of that. When the songs started coming together, we realized there was this underlying story. It’s not a concept like ‘The Dark Side of the Moon,’ but a concept just in how the songs relate to each other.”

This story was originally published May 2, 2018 at 2:26 PM with the headline "No pressure: Shinedown bassist takes control on latest album."