Brian Fair of Shadows Fall Talks ‘Fire From the Sky,’ Upcoming Music + Massachusetts Music Scene

Shadows Fall have been touring relentlessly since their latest album ‘Fire From the Sky’ dropped last year. We recently chatted with singer Brian Fair and he not only chatted about 'Fire From the Sky' but the band’s upcoming material, as well. Fair also spoke about being a proud ‘Masshole’ born and raised and talked all about the eclectic music scene in Massachusetts and much more.

You’re latest album ‘Fire From The Sky’ was released last year, with the songs seeping in – what are some of your favorite tunes to play live now or would like to play?

The one I love playing now is ‘Divide and Conquer’ it’s like a three minute tune so it’s really short and an in your face, fast tune – it’s a real crowd involved one. I also like playing ‘Weight of the World,’ I would love to play – there’s a few tunes that are seven minutes long and we haven’t been able to play them because we’ve been playing shorter sets so it would be fun to mix some of those in for a headliner run, we’ll see what happens.

How has the fan reaction been to the new tunes?

The fan reaction to the new record’s been great. It’s exciting because we really pushed ourselves and tried some new things and expand out sound and people are responding positively. Whenever anyone’s singing along to new stuff, you know you did it right.

When I spoke to you last year you told me you were a “Masshole” –

Hell yeah, Masshole born and raised. I just heard “Masswipes” recently, too, so it seems to be expanding any way you can replace the word ass with Mass it works.

Can you describe growing up in the metal scene in Massachusetts?

It was great growing up in the metal scene here because it was very diverse. You would have hardcore shows with death metal bands and thrash metal bands and I think that’s why bands like ourselves and Killswitch Engage and All That Remains have mixed a lot of different styles. When we were growing up, the scene was very diverse and open minded and it was really small.

People always talk about the glory days when all of us played these shows together, there was like forty people at those shows. [Laughs] They were fun and it’s cool to see how much it’s grown and how big [The New England Metal Fest] has gotten. We’ve been here since the first one so it’s crazy that it’s been over a decade of Metal Fest and it’s still getting stronger every year.

You toured with Anthrax on this year's Metal Alliance trek. How would you describe your relationship with Anthrax?

Anthrax, those dudes rule. They [used] our guitar player for this tour, so Jon Donais’ is filling in, which is great because he’s doing double duty and his hands are probably killing him. We’re like the farm team for Anthrax – they borrowed our drummer once, now our guitar player. If Joey [Belladonna] goes down – I’m ready, I got to work on hitting high notes and I don’t know if I can rock the bangs but I’ll try.

Even though the songs from ‘Fire From the Sky’ are still fresh, are there any gears turning towards new music?

Definitely. Since we are going to be taking time off on the road, we want to start writing. There’s already some ideas floating around. I know Jon was working on some stuff on the last tour – we’re just gathering some ideas together and we figured we’d make most of that down time by writing as much as we can. Not sure when we’ll get into the studio but we definitely want to try and make use of this and not just sit around doing nothing.

Do you think this upcoming material will have linking themes as ‘Fire From the Sky’ does?

I have no idea, we never do. When we start writing it’s a clean slate and just let things progress as they come along.