Seether Drummer: ‘Holding onto Strings Better Left to Fray’ Was a Team Effort

When post-grunge band Seether set out to record their latest album, ‘Holding Onto Strings Better Left to Fray,’ they knew it would stand out from anything in the Seether archive. That’s largely because the guys wrangled mega-producer Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine) to do all the taping-- a guy with whom they’d always wanted to work.

"When [vocalist] Shaun [Morgan] called me over the holidays [in 2009] to say, 'I just got out of a meeting with Brendan O'Brien, man, he's gonna do our record, man,' we were just ecstatic and really excited to do that,” drummer John Humphrey told the College Times. “I mean, what could you say? ‘No, we'll maybe work with Howard [Benson] again.' I mean, at that point, it was Brendan all the way. We're such a big fan.

"I think each time we [made an album], maybe we didn't find the guy we wanted, [and we didn't want] to go back and repeat the same thing again.”

O'Brien is a keeper, but another reason Humphrey is so proud of the album is because it was more of a team effort than most of Seether’s works. “’Finding Beauty,’ more of that was Shaun, musically, having to take the brunt of the work and having to do it all himself," Humphrey said. "I had had back surgery right before that album was recorded, so he kind of did that himself."

He added that Seether "are family. We spend more time together on the road, and have been, for the last eight years than we do with our own family, and I'm even married and have two kids. I love them to death, and that's the other side of me, but the three of us have been through a lot together, and we're family and we've worked together well and lived together and survived together."

Read Loudwire’s review of Seether’s current single, ‘Tonight,’ here.