SEETHER // A Change In The Wind

“Music feels like it’s more necessary now than ever.” Seether frontman Shaun Morgan is right.

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There’s a solace and reassurance to be found in new music in the current climate, and with the South Africans’ eighth studio album, Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum, Seether are taking an opportunity to be blend a primal euphoria and beautiful misery based on their traditionally honest observations. This time, the offering sits far closer to home for Morgan, and continues to elicit some deeply philosophical realisations.

For Morgan, making music is his way of working through things. The album title is bold – translating to If You Want Peace, Prepare For War – and was created to be intentional in describing the release’s thematic and sonic content. “I definitely wanted to make some sort of statement,” he says. “I felt like the title summed up what I was trying to say in the music, and has really touched on what’s happening in society in general, our whole existence as humans.

“It may be a little dramatic, but to me, it made sense.”

To use the word dramatic against this album isn’t misplaced. Though Seether have always explored a path of sociopolitical disdain – particularly in 2017’s Poison The Parish – what’s interesting is how the dramatic nature of Morgan’s personal journey has surfaced. Lyrically, he says, he sits from afar and looks in from the outside. “I’m quite removed from the social stuff,” he says. “I don’t use social media to communicate with people – I find it to be ridiculous.”

Arguably Morgan’s observations have been drawn from what Seether experience when they’re out on the road. But the chance to tour, like many musicians, has been taken away from them, and Morgan is torn between seeing it as a blessing and a curse. “I can’t be [in] the band I want to be in. We’re a touring band. When we finished the album, we were about eight or nine weeks away from starting to tour, and that was taken away from us.

“We’ve lost time until maybe summer next year – my perspective was changed completely.

“The mindset to tour is different to anything else you’ll do. I used to enjoy touring a lot more than I do now – it’s still an adventure of sorts but it’s become a little repetitive.”

At this stage of his career, Morgan’s ambitions to tour are affected by things closer to home. “You don’t have your family around you. You have your road family, your band boys, your crew, the other bands you tour with. For those part, those people, as important as they are to me, they’re not as important as the people I leave behind. That part is quite tough.

“The real scary thing, and it dawned on me, was, ‘This is all you’ve got’. If it’s taken away, there’s nothing else.”
[ Shaun Morgan ]

“I’m very disappointed. I’m actually kind of freaked out by the fact that we live in a world that rips away the chance to go to a venue and play a show due to the risks that are involved. But the other part of me is somewhat relieved; the older I get and the longer the distance is between tours, it becomes more exciting for me but it also becomes more difficult, conversely.”

“My daughter, she just turned three,” he says. “We can talk on the phone; she can have full conversations and it’s great. [Touring] is a very tough time.

“I’m thankful on one level but the other part it’s what I do for a living, it’s my job, it’s what I do to take care of my family and pay the bills.”

In releasing Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum without the prospect of touring, Morgan has realised his own mortality. “The real scary thing, and it dawned on me, was, ‘This is all you’ve got’. If it’s taken away, there’s nothing else.”

A sense of dread when he considers the balance and prospects offered to him by his professional and personal life weighs on Morgan, it seems, a suggestion to which Morgan lets out a hearty but pensive chuckle. “I need to really seize the day and enjoy what I’ve got and get as much joy out of life as possible for the last few decades I’ve got.

“I’m a realist. I think as musicians, we put ourselves through so much. I’ve been touring almost non-stop for 20 years and for most of those years, I really abused myself – booze, drugs – now, I’m kind of becoming the grumpy old man sitting on the back veranda.

“I’m more concerned about my daughter and her future than I am about mine. If my life ended any time soon, I would say, at least I’ve lived a very fruitful life and had a good time – but I don’t know what her future looks like and that’s the part where the dread comes from within.

“I’m not really pessimistic or dead obsessed that everything is going to hell, but I have a new perspective. I’m more cautious than I used to be. I have to look after myself so I can be a dad for as long as possible.”