Godsmack frontman Sully Erna has challenged rock bands that depend on prerecorded parts to perform without them, telling Get On The Bus that he could name several acts in his genre but chose not to embarrass them publicly.
Erna was asked about bands that use heavy backing tracks during live performances. He said he could identify specific acts but decided to keep their names private out of respect.
“But go watch one of those bands,” Erna said. “And I could name a handful of them right now and I won’t because I don’t want to embarrass them. Okay? And a lot of them are in our genre.”
“But go watch one of those bands, right?” Erna continued. “And then go over and unplug their technology and let’s see what they sound like.”
He drew a sharp line between live performance and lip-syncing. “But don’t go up there and pretend you’re a rock musician and you have six guitars playing on a computer with you, a bunch of background vocals, half your drum sets playing, all the samples and keyboards,” Erna said. “You at that point you’re no different than sitting in your bedroom lip syncing to the album that you have on into your mirror.”
Erna made these comments during a conversation about the use of backing tracks in rock music performances.
Godsmack has maintained a strict philosophy on live performance that rejects heavy reliance on prerecorded material. The band performs “straight-ahead, no-tracks rock and roll,” with the goal of making performances sound like a conversation between musicians and audience rather than a hyped, produced show. Erna has previously explained that bands layering their music heavily in the studio should not then depend on backing tracks to recreate that sound live.
The debate over backing tracks has become one of the most divisive topics in rock music over the past several years. In 2022, Falling in Reverse was forced to withdraw from a festival when their laptops containing backing tracks went missing. That same year, Kiss faced criticism during a concert in Belgium when a drummer’s mistake appeared to expose a vocal backing track being used during the performance.
Other rock musicians have taken different positions on the issue. Shinedown stated in 2020 that most bands in rock use backing tracks, and the band expressed frustration that people object to the practice. By contrast, Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan told a Spanish radio station that he viewed backing tracks as a form of cheating. In 2019, Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx defended the band’s use of technology, noting that the band has layered backing vocal tracks and other audio elements into their sound since 1987.
Godsmack released their ninth studio album, Lighting Up the Sky, on February 24, 2023, marking the longest gap between two studio albums in the band’s history at that point.
