Skid Row surprised their fans by releasing a new album after a long hiatus of 16 years. ‘The Gang’s All Here’ met the audience last October. In a recent interview with Ear Music, Dave Sabo went into detail about the behind-the-scenes of the record, including their new style of making songs.
“I love the riff too because it’s an odd time signature in the riff, but it still grooves, which was really appealing to me when I first heard that,” Sabo said, referring to ‘Tear It Down.’ “It drives. It’s like one of those songs. And it’s seen many iterations as well. When we got in the studio, there was a lot of movement taking parts out. Scotti came up with some really cool stuff for the chorus and other things as well. And it was a great example of a song that was created by the band completely, like, for real. Like, it started out as something and morphed into what you hear now.”
The guitarist continued, “It’s a lot of fun to play. Something we’ve never done before where basically the whole record was about deconstructing and reconstructing, and we had never really done that before, and we did it with the whole record. And so that was him putting challenges forth, like sitting there while we’re in a circle jamming on these songs musically and [Johnny Andrews] going right there, ‘You need to do something like you did in the second verse of ‘Big Guns.’’ I was like, ‘Oh, crap, I don’t remember that. How did I do it?’ That was part of the process.”
The fact that all the band members work together on ‘Tear It Down’ added very different and unique touches to the song. Dave noted, “So, just the idea of having someone so knowledgeable and again, challenging you. So he goes, ‘We need something different for the chorus,’ Scotti comes up with this great chord progression and totally brought the song to another level. And that stuff is special.”
‘Tear It Down’ was the second single from the album. The song is about breaking barriers, and it looks like the band members could do that by challenging themselves and trying things they hadn’t tried before during the recording process. Rachel Bolan said, ‘coexisting isn’t about building walls, it’s about getting rid of them’ while talking about the song, and the band members all managed to create a piece by making their own unique touches, coexisting in the sound.
