Shinedown guitarist Zach Myers has opened up about why the band quietly pulled the plug on pre-show meet-and-greets — and it has nothing to do with not caring about the fans. If anything, it’s the opposite.
Speaking on the Beardo & Weirdo podcast, hosted by Five Finger Death Punch bassist Chris Kael and comedian Craig Gass, Myers was asked whether it blows his mind that Shinedown‘s music carries the same deep emotional weight for fans as his own musical heroes did for him growing up. His answer got unexpectedly honest.
“Yes. But it also at times doesn’t feel real, because it’s true,” he said (via Blabbermouth). “Your music does mean as much to you as Bruce Springsteen meant to me, or U2 meant to me, or Stevie Ray Vaughan, or whatever. But when it’s you, it’s hard to… I get a lot of imposter syndrome, so it’s hard to go, ‘Oh.’ Like when people say, ‘Dude, your song saved my life,’ the computer just stops working for me.”
Myers went on to explain that those moments — the ones that hit the hardest — are exactly why meet-and-greets became unsustainable. Unlike the quick photo-line format many bands use, Shinedown did things differently. He and singer Brent Smith would work one end of the room while bassist Eric Bass and drummer Barry Kerch took the other, spending a genuine five minutes with each person.
“We’ve toured with bands — they do 150 people in 30 minutes,” Myers said. “It took us 90 minutes to do 40 people.”
The weight of those conversations eventually became too much to carry into a show. Myers described fans sharing devastating personal stories — a seven-year-old boy lost to cancer — and finding himself unable to switch off the emotional response once he hit the stage: “‘Man, I’ve got a seven-year-old boy. He died of cancer.’ And I’m, like, under my shirt, texting my wife, like, ‘Take our kid to the hospital right now.’ She’s, like, ‘What? He’s on the trampoline.’ I’m, like, ‘He might have cancer.’ And God bless those people, and I want our songs to help them.”
“I am man enough to admit I don’t have the emotional barricade to not walk on stage with that,” he continued. “By the end of it — I think [it was] 2019 when we stopped doing meet-and-greets — I walked out of 11, just walked out. Because I was literally, like, I would start to tear up. And you go to the guy next to you, and he’s, like, ‘Dude, [I’ve] seen you guys 25 times, bro. Stoked to be here.’ And you’re, like, ‘Sorry, man. I can’t turn this off. I’m gonna think about this kid for a year.'”
He’s clear that stepping away from the format wasn’t about putting up walls — it changed the nature of fan encounters for the better. “When you meet people out on the street, it becomes more real,” Myers said. “It’s not this formulative thing, the construct of a meet-and-greet. It’s, like, they get to see the real you.”
Shinedown‘s eighth studio album, Ei8ht, arrives 05/29 via Atlantic Records. The band has also announced the “Dance, Kid, Dance Act II” world tour — 54 dates across 11 countries — with support from Coheed And Cambria, Black Stone Cherry, From Ashes To New, DJ Rock Feed, and Those Damn Crows on various legs.
