By Shawn Perry
It’s a week before another tour and Scott Holiday is tying up a few loose ends. “I got interviews booked and I’m leaving town on Monday. It’s my son’s birthday tomorrow. I got gear getting picked up for the tour. My whole rig is set up in my studio,” the Rival Sons guitarist says. “I’m tearing it up, dude.”
“Tearing it up” could very well describe the whole band, especially when it comes to 2023. Though Rival Sons have been actively playing out since the summer of 2021 as the pandemic was winding down, they’ve already crossed the Atlantic a few times this year with more American and European dates booked through the summer.
Rival Sons also have a new album called Darkfighter. This is the band’s first new music since their 2019 Grammy-nominated release, Feral Roots. It’s also the first of a two-album series with the second, Lightbringer, dropping later in the year.
So, indeed, all kinds of things are happening in the world of Rival Sons. With seven albums and over a decade in the public arena, the band is more than ready to move into a prime-time slot. Better brace yourself because the next year could be the most harrowing in the California quartet’s history.
After Holiday tells me he needs to eat lunch during our chat, we jump right into Darkfighter, which was written and recorded right around the time the entire planet came to a screeching halt. “We started writing immediately after our first and second tours were canceled,” the guitarist recalls, citing the pandemic’s impact. “Me and (singer) Jay (Buchanan) started trading material and sending stuff back and forth. And I worked with (drummer Mike) Miley a bit too — just getting stuff going.”
The group came to Nashville to record with their longtime producer Dave Cobb (“one of the great producers of our time!” Holiday exclaims, adding he’s also a “ sixth band member in this band.”). After a week, they came back to California, their homebase, and continued to refine the material. “It’s interesting like that if you have 30 days, you can wrap up a whole record, but with a week it’s hard to even do five songs,” Holiday notes.
Working at a big studio meant following protocol and getting tested repeatedly for COVID-19. Tests were being administered daily just outside the studio. Over the course of the next two years, Holiday and Buchanan continued writing, and the group recorded whenever they could. If time and patience (as opposed to pressure and time) are any indication to measuring the end result, it seemed to have worked in favor of Darkfighter. Having followed the group since their inception, I immediately picked up on the album’s focus and maturity. Holiday reminds me that having that extra time and space allowed the group, as he explains it, to be more selective and calculated in how they wanted to move forward. “We relied a lot less on the sounds of our heroes and really leaned into the idea of sounding like Rival Sons.”
I’m at once surprised and reassured to hear this. When Rival Sons first burst onto the scene in 2009, it was hard to ignore the influences. When I asked Holiday in 2014 about the “classic rock” label that the band had been slapped with, he was confounded. “Because we have some traits and sounds like those heroes…we are that? We aren’t that. We are rock and roll though.”
A decade later, with bands like Greta Van Fleet and Dirty Honey in their wake, Rival Sons have been called the precursors of what Guitar World termed the “New Wave of Classic Rock.” Ducking the label, Holiday insists Rival Sons have come into their own, refining their sound and style with each passing album.
“I think our last record gave us that head start,” he points out. “From Before The Fire to Pressure And Time, Head Down, Great Western, Hollow Bones, and Feral Roots, each record progressively got a little less retro. We emulate our heroes until we can kick the training wheels off and actually have a sound. Every band does that more or less.”
I have to agree. One spin through Darkfighter, and you immediately pick up on the nuances that separate Rival Sons from the pack — Buchanan’s unmistakable, emotive howl, Holiday’s searing guitar histrionics, Miley, and bassist Dave Beste’s unfurled foundation, all of which gets the occasional brush stroke or two from keyboardist Todd Ögren.
The momentous thrust of opener “Mirrors” pulls you in, and for the next 40 minutes, you’re taken through a collage of crashing tones, lighter shades, swinging moods, and catch-all melodies, instinctively molded into a unified, collective sum of energy, balance, and conviction.
Holiday assures me that the group is at a critical stage in their career. “No one’s going to argue that Rush sounds like Rush, that the Beatles and the Stones sound like the Beatles and the Stones. Rival Sons is trying to sound like Rival Sons more than ever. Darkfighter is a landmark record for us in that way. And Lightbringer as its companion is as well. They’re really peaking out on the idea that we sound like our own band.”
To drive the point home, the members of Rival Sons began 2023 actively promoting the forthcoming albums with a series of videos that share a running theme. “Nobody Wants To Die,” “Rapture” and “Bird In The Hand” follow a fuzzy line of fortune and fable with Buchanan as “The Preacher” with a mischievous streak. His bandmates assume secondary roles as adversaries to his meandering indiscretions. Each is an encapsulated cinematic thrill ride for fans and admirers to mull over and dissect (“What does it all mean?”). Like the songs, the storylines were created by Buchanan and Holiday.
“Let’s write a story!” he laughs. “That wasn’t the idea. We started out just dealing with this monstrous record that we finished. It was big to us. We spent more time than ever on it. We were very focused on how this record is going to come out and how it should feel. When it came time to do the single and do a video, we got treatments. Frankly, the first single is an outlier for the rest of the record. Not that ‘Nobody Wants To Die’ isn’t a powerful big song. It’s just a little bit lighter in its technique. It’s a little bit lighter of a song in general.”
Seeing the mayhem unfold with a slight comic touch in the video for “Nobody Wants To Die” is like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it didn’t come easy. After sorting through nearly a dozen “terrible” treatments and directors, Holiday knew he’d have to take matters into his own hands.
“I looked at Jay and I said, ‘I have an idea.’ And he said, ‘I have an idea.’ I said, ‘I’m going to write my idea. I think this is like a Tarantino-desert-beat-him-up-drag-him…like your story. I thought it felt like this when I wrote the music before you wrote the words.’ And he said, ‘That’s the story. That’s the exact video I feel.’ So we wrote it.”
They secured up-and-coming director Eli Sokhn, called up a few friends to appear as concerned onlookers, and headed out to the California desert to shoot. With a tight budget, every corner had to be cut. “I used my Pontiac,” Holiday adds, “Jay used his Mercedes.”
The narrative carries over into “Rapture” and “Bird In The Hand,” both directed by Kurt Kubicek. “Bird In The Hand” is more aligned with “Nobody Wants To Die” with a similar conclusion, while “Rapture” is far more abstract. “(Jay) had this really beautiful idea, a real practice in simplicity in film, and actually cast my son Devendra as the lead character. He was a trooper. I think we would’ve probably been arrested for child labor laws,” Holiday jokes.
With the album wrapped and the videos in heavy circulation, the next logical step is the road where Rival Sons thrive. A week after we spoke, they opened their North American tour in Oklahoma City, with special guests The Black Angels, The Record Company, and, on select dates, Starcrawler. If you were there on the first night, you saw the band unveil Darkfighter in its entirety. For subsequent shows, they’ve mixed it up a little more, working in new songs here and there.
As usual, Holiday has a long-game strategy. “You’re going to get a lot Darkfighter. By about mid-autumn, you’re going to get some Lightbringer. We’re really excited to play these songs live. We’re going to play these records probably in their entirety, so you can really go down this road with us and we can bring them to life together.”
The last time I’d seen Rival Sons on stage was when they opened for Black Sabbath in 2016. Though it proved to be fruitful opportunity, I was quick to point out the inherent differences between the two bands in my review of their appearance at the Forum in Los Angeles. None of that, as it seems, really mattered. In 2019, Rival Sons were tapped to play a couple Sabbath songs at a Grammy event honoring the heavy metal pioneers. After seeing that performance, it made a lot more sense.
It was a giant step forward in the group’s development. Buchanan called the experience “an education that you can’t get any other way.” Holiday has a similar sentiment, especially when it comes to guitarist Tony Iommi, whom he described as “really welcoming and really normal.” The highlight was watching the Black Sabbath riff meister play to the masses.
“I would be just five feet from him, like right next to him on stage while he was soloing. I did it so many times and it would almost bring me to tears,” Holiday recalls. “He’s connecting every night and not phoning it in. I didn’t expect them to phone anything in, but seeing how much he didn’t do it and seeing how emotionally connected he still was and still is. It was really touching. To watch the level of dedication on 15, 20 different occasions that close. It’ll never leave me for the rest of my life.”
Hearing Holiday reminisce about Iommi brings me back to the earlier point of Rival Sons being anointed the torchbearers of rock and roll. They are in a unique position to assume the mantle left absent by Black Sabbath and so many others of that bygone era. But is it really on them to keep it alive? Holiday thinks it’s bigger than that.
“Rock and roll’s not dead,” he says emphatically. “It’s an art form…an endless wellspring of inspiration that we have in the people that came before us. And just like the people that came before them, there was plenty of inspiration to go around and build on and work off — to create something new and go down different avenues.”
The guitarist feels the widespread availability of music, largely based on a wired worldwide network with multiple distribution channels, means it will always be there, in one form or another, for others to harness. Will it appeal to older and younger fans, alike? That’s hard for anyone to assess.
“You’re going to get a lot of rock and roll bands that a lot of purists like yourself and like myself will say, ‘Ain’t for us, dude. Because we had all the other ones and we know all the details and we know why it’s good.’ But that’s what happens. There’s going to be watered-down emulations and those watered-down emulations are probably going to turn into their own special thing.”
There’s a slight pause before he continues. I can sense it’s a conversation he’s had hundreds of times before. With Darkfighter, the band clearly wants to distance themselves from any and all preconceived notions and labels. They are on a more organic and evolutionary path of their own making, paved with noble intentions and passionate ambitions.
“We’re creating something that is entirely different and new from where we started,” he says. “It’s a waste of time to predict and act like we know where it’s going. We don’t totally know. I don’t even know where I’m going to go. And I like that. That’s a beautiful part of life — the unpredictability of not knowing what really is around the corner, and just hanging on and waiting to see what comes, you know?”
