It’s comeback complete for Staind.
The hard rock band that broke through with its post-grunge sound in the early 2000s, went on hiatus in 2012 with singer Aaron Lewis declaring, two years later, that the band would never again extensively tour.
But the quartet reformed for some shows in 2019, got together post-pandemic to tour with Korn and in September 2023 released their first album in a dozen years. What’s more Staind has gotten back to playing a healthy number of live dates — including a show Thursday at Wind Creek Event Center in Bethlehem.
“When you put it like that, that the return is complete, I don’t really think of it like that, but yeah, you’re right,” guitarist Mike Mushok said in a recent interview. “It was just really nice to be able to make new music, you know what I mean? I’m real proud of the record, the way it came out. To be able to go out there and play some new songs and connect with the fans again, it’s really been great. Very thankful for it.”
That record, “Confessions of the Fallen,” hit No. 4 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart and peaked at No. 2 on the rock and metal albums chart, was also a comeback of sorts, recalling previous Staind releases with its dark, heavy, anthemic music and Lewis’s painfully introspective lyrics delivered in his trademark tortured vocals.
“It’s the same people writing the songs, so there’s going to be some familiarity there,” Mushok said. “I think the biggest thing that kind of separated this from some of the older stuff was that there is a little bit of electronics that were kind of experimented with on this record. I think that that kind of added a different element and might give it a little bit more of a modern sound, maybe,”
Mushok and Lewis wrote most of the album while Staind was on the Korn tour, putting together songs Mushok said he “had kicking around for a little while.” “Confessionsn of the Fallen” has now been re-released in deluxe form with a new single “Full of Emptiness,”
As has been the case since the band began doing their own music in the late ‘90s, those songs are rooted in riffs that Mushok creates.
“It’s really just me sitting down with a guitar and, it used to be, a cassette recorder 100 years ago,” he said. “Now I have a little ProTools thing and I just have a session open and when I come across something I like, I’ll just hit record. So I have all these different ideas we kind of go through, and when I go back and listen to whatever catches my ear, that I think is good, we work on and make a song out of it.”
Live, and on Staind’s recordings, Mushok plays a baritone guitar, a deeper voiced instrument that he discovered out of necessity early in the band’s existence.
“When we started and where we started here, Springfield, Massachusetts. if you wanted to play clubs, you had to play other people’s songs,” Mushok said. “We kind of played all the songs we liked. Korn was one of those bands. They were playing seven string guitars, tuned down to B or B flat or whatever it was. I didn’t have a seven string and I didn’t have money to buy one. So I took a six string, tuned it down and started writing songs like that.”
But the tuned-down six-string didn’t work all that well when Staind went into the studio to record the demos for “Dysfunction,” the band’s 1999 major label debut.
“The engineer said, ‘Oh, have you ever played a baritone guitar?’ because we’re having issues. When you tune very low on a regular guitar, it’s hard to keep the intonation right. The strings flop around a lot. It’s really hard to get it to play in tune. The baritone is just a longer scale. So you can use a heavier gauge string on it. It’s much easier to integrate into playing in tune.”
“Dysfunction” came about after the band was signed by Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst to Flip Records, an accomplishment that Mushok thought would have been the band’s crowning achievement.
“To me, getting a record deal was the biggest goal growing up, but then you realize that once you get that record deal, it’s really just started,” he said. “Now you have to prove it to everybody else because a lot of people sign record deals that do nothing,”
Staind, however, did something. “Break the Cycle,” the 2001 follow-up to “Dysfunction,” sold 5 million copies and generated the Hot 100 hit with “It’s Been Awhile.” It hit No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart as did the 2003 album “14 Shades of Grey” and 2005’s “Chapter V.”
The band’s chart success continued with 2008’s “The Illusion of Progress” hitting No. 3 and the self-titled 2011 album clocking in at No. 5.
Then came the hiatus, during which Lewis pursued a country music career and Mushok played in the metal band Newsted, fronted by former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted, and joined the “supergroup” Saint Asonia, which opened shows for Staind on the spring leg of its 2024 tour.
Perhaps the most notable difference between the original run of Staind and the comeback is a new touring routine that will see the band going out for a month or two at time.
“Before it used to be months and months out of the year we would tour so this is a little different,” Mushok said. “With families and stuff, I mean, it’s a good schedule,”
And frankly, it’s a schedule befitting a veteran band.
“It’s funny when we started playing clubs, it’s crazy that November of (last year was) the 30-year anniversary of our first rehearsal,” Mushok said. “January of ’95 was our first gig. So it’s 30 years from our first show…Like I said before, I’m really thankful, for the opportunity to be able to continue to do it after all these years.”
L. Kent Wolgamott is a freelance writer.
