Kyle Shutt – The Sword

I remember the first time I listened to Texan band The Sword, it was on their album ‘Gods of the Earth’. Their music really grabbed me. It was different and unusual, and quite unlike anything else I’d heard at that time. However, sadly, I didn’t really follow them much until about 2012/2013 when I started getting into bands like Monster Magnet, that I returned to the likes of The Sword; as a means to get away from the usual metal stylings I’d become all too accustomed to at that point. Hit 2015, The Sword released their fifth studio album ‘High Country’, their longest album to date and one that was controversial among their fanbase to say the least. I recently had the pleasure and opportunity to speak with long-time guitarist Kyle Shutt to discuss ‘High Country’, their Australian tour kicking off in a day’s time, and how much Kyle would have loved to do shots on stage with the late Dimebag Darrell if ever he’d had the chance. So let’s get into it!

Opening things up, I asked Kyle what The Sword are currently up to? “We’re actually in the middle of a little break. We did about 75 shows in a row since our album ‘High Country’ came out back in August. We decided we’d take January off, and I actually moved into Brooklyn from Austin, Texas, so for me it’s been a bit hectic, really. And a blizzard just hit, so I’m learning how to wade through six feet of snow, man. [laughs] But it’s been a lot of fun. I needed the change. I’d been in Austin for about 15 years so it’s good to get out of there for a little while, you know?”

‘High Country’, out now via Razor & Tie

The release of ‘High Country’ in August last year was met with quite a mixed reception. Due to how much of a shift in style it was for The Sword, some responded very well to the band’s evolution in sound, others not as much. Being a good number of months since its initial release now, I asked Kyle what his feelings are now towards the overall reception of the record? “You know, right when it came out everybody seemed to kind of be all in a big fuss about some change in direction we made. And I guess you could say we shifted gears a little bit, but the second we hit the road and saw all our fans responses to it, everybody has been so positive about it at the shows and the way we incorporate the new songs with the old material live has just been a lot of fun, man. I think once everybody got over the initial shock of how the album sounded, it’s been a really positive reception. It’s funny, you know, people either gave us 9/10 stars or 1/10 stars. It wasn’t like a single kind of mediocre review. We either pleased everyone eventually or just totally pissed them off. Honestly, it’s just kind of a sign you did it right.” I asked whether this change would remain moving forward, or it was more an experimental phase for the band? “I mean, we haven’t written any new material yet. We put out a new album and then tour it for a while, go around the world and get inspired by different things, and then we come sort of come home and see what happens next. The one thing I can say for sure is that we’re always going to make the record that we want to make. We’re definitely not going to cater to anyone else’s expectations, so I can assure you it will be an honest effort whatever road we decide to continue down.”

‘High Country’ is The Sword’s longest, and arguably most experimental, album yet, clocking in with 15 tracks at a little over 50 minutes. But what amazes me about it all is how smoothly it moves along. It never feels that long listening to it. I asked whether this was something that occurred organically or if it was meticulously planned beforehand? “No, I’d say it’s a mixture of the two. We definitely knew we wanted to make a different type of album going forward, we didn’t want to do the same old thing. We went into the studio with a lot more material than we’d ever gone in with before, and none of it was really finished per se, but we knew that we wanted to explore every single opportunity that we had and flesh it out as much as we could. By the time we were done, we had 17 songs. One of them became a B-side of the first single and then another one was a cover song that’s going to be coming out on a 7-inch for Record Store Day here in the States. We talked about it and argued about it and we decided that there wasn’t a single song that didn’t belong on the album. We’d never done a double album before and having it on two pieces of wax was pretty important to us. Just having that much material to give to our fans after having been silent for 3 years between records, that was what we wanted to do. As I said, it was calculated but at the same time we didn’t realise we were going to end up with that much material. So it was a conscious decision to just let the people have it.”

As we know, February marks the return of The Sword to Australian shores since their last venture over here in 2013 (where they played at the now defunct Soundwave Festival). With the band this time performing an 8-date national tour covering Australia and New Zealand, The Sword have been over to our country a number of times now. I was curious to ask Kyle what it is about Australia that keeps The Sword coming back? “Man, we love it there. We never had the opportunity to go there until we made friends with Metallica, funnily enough, and a very long tour with them back in 2008-2009. We said you’ve got to take us to Australia whenever you go there, and they said they weren’t going there until the summer of 2010. But they made good on their promise and they brought us back because they are gentlemen. We just fell in love with the country over there. We were invited back as a part of two different Soundwave tours and those were a blast, but it was just a lot of go, go, go! We didn’t have as much time with our fans as we wanted to, so I’m so excited to go back there and play a really long set for everybody and have a lot of fun!”

In the lead up to The Sword’s Australian tour, there was quite a bit of drama in relation to Heathen Skulls and their proposed ‘Rolling Thunder Festival’ set for February 21st. Losing venues on two separate occasions, eventually the venue finally settled on Coburg Town Hall. I asked Kyle whether he and The Sword were kept in the loop on all the happenings over the loss and regaining of venues? Kyle let out a sigh and said, “Unfortunately, I was. But I should really not hammer it too much because I was not a part of any of that decision making. But I will say that watching it all happen was not the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He then enthused, “However, we are going to be there! We’re just really excited at the opportunity to come back and play some shows and I’m not going to let a little bit of drama get in the way of us showing up and showing everyone that we mean business when we come over there. We’re there to have a good time and to rock the fuck out, man! That’s what we do.”

One of the songs that really grabbed me the first time I listened through ‘High Country’ was “Turned To Dust”. As a song, it opens with this haunting and poignant intro, and builds so perfectly over those three minutes, culminating in a beautifully emotive guitar solo by Kyle. Its atmosphere and style really separates itself from the others songs on the album and it arrives almost at the very end of the album. After asking if Kyle could tell me a little bit about the genesis behind this track, I was interested to discover this was a song he almost wrote entirely on his own for the record: “It’s funny that you decided to talk about that. That’s one of the ones that I wrote for the record. I pretty much wrote that entire song, except for the lyrics. I wrote the vocal melody which is something I hadn’t really done before with The Sword. It was a little demo that I made sitting in my bedroom one day. I knew I wanted to do something kind of sparse like that. We wanted to cover that Danzig song “How The Gods Kill”, and we actually went to go see Danzig and he still plays it. We go, “Ah shit, we can’t cover this. He still plays it,” you know? So I wanted to write a song like that, and it just came to me.

“I think with some of the best songs, they are hardly written. You just have to be quiet sometimes and listen to the universe and play what you hear. That song was banging around in my head and it just happened naturally. I was playing around with the drum loops on the demo version and when I was playing it in the studio for everyone, I wanted the drum sound to be different from anything we’d done before. What we did is we recorded some drum tracks through an amp and then recorded the amp, and then that was the drum track. It was basically like creating our own drum samples, but with real drums. It was really different. I knew I wanted to put a guitar solo down at some point because JD [Cronise] had written two versions and he’s like “I’m don’t know what I’m going to do with the end”, and I suggested, “Maybe just do a guitar solo?” And I did that in, I think, about 2 or 3 takes; and just made it up on the spot. I really love that song.”

As we closed out our interview, as a fun little question, I asked Kyle that if he could perform on stage with any guitarist in the world, living or dead, who would it be? I adored his response! “Oh man, I would do shots with Dimebag and just go up there and tear ass, man!” He laughed. “I was listening to Pantera when I was 14 and there was hardly any bands that were touring through the tiny little town in Texas where I grew up. But Pantera and ZZ Top always came through. I went and saw Pantera and I thought I was actually going to die. [Dimebag] started playing “Walk” and I actually thought I am going to fucking die! The whole crowd went crazy, and Dimebag took his guitar and balanced it against his stomach. He put a plastic cup with whisky on the headstock, leaned back, brought the whisky up to his lips and did the shot that way. I was kind of shocked when I was a kid, like, “Whoa, that was awesome!” But then the older I got, I got a guitar and thought, “Man, how many times did he have to perform that move?” That’s a lot of whisky!” [laughs]

The Sword kick off their Australia/New Zealand tour tomorrow night in Perth (February 19)! Tickets are available now via Try Booking and the usual outlets.