Interview: Austin stoner metal act The Sword talk return, Austin scene, weed, to play Levitation this weekend

Revered Austin metal act The Sword is back and locked in for a performance on Sunday at Levitation Festival in Austin, Texas. The doom act announced their breakup in 2022 after 19 years as a band and fans have been feigning for a reunion ever since. The local heavy act will close out the Black Angels-produced festival with a headlining set at Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheatre in the Red River Cultural District in the downtown area and will be joined by local acts Gran Moreno, The Well, Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol, and also famed proto metal act, Pentagram. Frontman/guitarist John D. Cronise, bassist Bryan Richie, drummer Jimmy Vela, and lead guitarist Kyle Shutt all showed up to deliver their insight on why it made sense to come back. To get a feel on how the band returned and what the quartet has been up to in the interim, we sat down with them after their rehearsal and discussed what the reunion means and how it all came together.

Case Cockrell: Why a reunion? Why now? 

Kyle Shutt: Revolver Magazine did a blind poll on what bands people would like to see reunite. The Sword was on the top 5 list with Faith No More and Fugazi. It was flattering but that was a wake up call for us. We reached out to Levitation and they threw us an offer and we started having talks about it and now here we are.

Case Cockrell: You guys have played the festival before, so you guys are familiar with those folks. 

Kyle Shutt: Yeah, it’s been a few different things over the years so it feels like the Austin thing to do.

Case Cockrell: I’m 26 so I never saw the big tours with that of Metallica and others. My first time seeing The Sword was at The Granada Theater in Dallas years ago.

Bryan Richie: Oh man, I think I wiped that from my memory bank. *Laughs*

 

Case Cockrell: So beyond this show, are you guys back for good or are you going to see how this goes and go from there? 

Kyle Shutt: I personally would love to play more shows. It’s a long, boring story about how hard it can be for touring bands these days. I want to play more, but it’s going to take some time to get all of those things together. It can be done. But it takes a lot of work.

 

Case Cockrell: You guys have an insane touring resume with Metallica, Primus, Clutch, Opeth, and so on. When you’ve toured with so many big bands and have watched people like Kirk Hammett and Les Claypool night after night, are there any major takeaways?

Kyle Shutt: Yeah, of course. Touring with Metallica and Clutch for so long made me want to get a wah pedal. Seeing how Kirk Hammett could do it, that was a crash course for me.

Bryan Richie: The Primus tour with us was riding the wave of shows being back after the pandemic. It was the wild west for a while. It worked out and it was great, but it presented those challenges of stuff not being open fully yet. Sometimes an overnight McDonald’s wouldn’t even be open. There was one night when we partied with the Primus guys and then the crew Covid tested us. We were sharing cigarettes, ripping bowls, and all that.

Kyle Shutt: Yeah, I think they wanted the tour to get canceled. *Laughs*

Case Cockrell: If I’m on that tour I would be scared to get Les Claypool sick, if that guy goes down we’re all fucked.

Jimmy Vela: Nah, he wanted to hang out. We rolled with the punches and still got some good hangs in.

Kyle Shutt: Yeah, I’ve been on tour where I feel like I’m knocking on death’s door, being sick and all. But now with Covid you sneeze and everyone looks at you weird.

Bryan Richie: There was one night after the show when Les came in when we were smoking weed and his nose perked up like a cat smelling some Whiskas. He said something like “My manager would kill me if he knew I was smoking with you guys!”

 

Case Cockrell: In an interview you said Kirk Hammett (Metallica) has the best weed, is that still true?

Kyle Shutt: Haha, I said that in a very long interview and the clip when I said that went viral for some reason. That went everywhere and I was just thinking, “Sorry Kirk! Didn’t mean to call you out.”

Bryan Richie: I do remember when Kirk smuggled some weed in to bring it to us and he hid the smell with a bunch of garlic.

Kyle Shutt: JP from Clutch gave us a vial of isolated hasch once.

Case Cockrell: I love Clutch, man.

Bryan Richie: Clutch has taken us on tour a bunch of times. While they’re not the broiest of bros, they’re very nice and they’re very keen to have us on tour with them. We’re not the hard partying kind of band, we like to hang out and kick ass. We don’t want to get shithoused all the time.

 

Case Cockrell: What’s touring Europe, Australia, and other places like vs the US? It feels like that kind of art is respected more overseas.

John D. Cronise: I feel the opposite. When you’re touring in America, it’s cool to be in a touring band. In Europe, no one cares if you’re in a band. The fans are the same and great no matter where you go.

Bryan Richie: Australia is fun though, it’s more American than any other place we’ve toured  overseas.

Kyle Shutt: Japan is fun because those places are built to look like American rock clubs but they’re all super clean. You’d try to smidge some dirt off the tables and stuff and it would be spotless.

 

Case Cockrell: Kyle, you had an incredible release campaign for your solo record, I love that album. Is more solo material something you’re interested in working on? And are you still painting? That album cover series was brilliant. 

Kyle Shutt: When the shutdown happened there wasn’t much to do so I just started painting. I think I sold more of the painted ones than the records with the regular album cover. I’d rather play guitar than paint, it was fun but a lot of work and I’m pursuing a lot of other stuff. I had to be busy during that time because The Sword wasn’t working on anything and it seemed like a lot of people weren’t either.

 

Case Cockrell: Bryan, you’ve been working with Spaceflight Records which is representing some of the very best of the music scene here in town. Can you talk more about your role there? 

Bryan Richie: I’m the director of artist relations at Spaceflight. Which means that I help artists move through the release cycle. I also help find new artists for the label. I end up doing whatever needs to be done, getting things from one place to another, whether that be social media or sending a lot of emails to make things happen.

Case Cockrell: I was looking through the roster this week and it has some of the biggest players in the Austin scene. Such as Grandmaster, Die Spitz, Big Bill, and Trouble In The Streets.

Bryan Richie: We have a very robust roster.

 

Case Cockrell: How do you feel about the current state of the Austin scene?

Bryan Richie: It feels very big. There’s a lot of bands that are doing well at the same time. There’s a lot of really good stuff. Austin still feels like a very big percolator. There’s a lot of great bands here in town with tons of talented people that are doing great things.

Kyle Shutt: One thing I’ve noticed is that when we were starting as a band, you couldn’t find a keyboard player to save your life and now almost every band has like two keyboard players. There’s so many piano players in Austin and that’s awesome.

 

Case Cockrell: John and Jimmy, what have you guys been up to since The Sword took their break? John, I know you’ve started a new project called Gold Pyramid. Can you talk a bit about that? 

Jimmy Vela: I try to do what I can. I played percussion on Alex Maas’ 2020 studio album. Bryan contributed too. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of projects going on at one time. I’ve been doing studio sessions and production work here in town. I play with several other bands semi-frequently. Recover is the band I’ve been playing with since high school and we still play ever so often.

John D. Cronise: Gold Pyramid is the project I started with this guy, Evan who’s from Charlotte. He generates all of the material. It’s something that we’ve been working on and we have an album that’ll be released soon. We’ll announce more when we have the details. It’s more of a recording project as it stands right now, we didn’t get together to write or anything like that.

 

Case Cockrell: Why did you guys choose to take some time off? 

John D. Cronise: I quit. This is what people don’t understand about our band. When I quit, there was no Sword. That’s just the deal. We didn’t have this big falling out or anything. That’s how people seem to want to see things when bands break up. We didn’t hate each other. We didn’t need to reconcile. I had to step away for my own personal reasons and that was it.

 

Case Cockrell: I saw you guys said that at one point none of you were residing in Austin. Where did you guys go and what changed for your careers? 

Bryan Richie: I just moved a little outside of the city, but Jimmy over here has always been true to Austin.

Jimmy Vela: I never really left. I toured a lot, and lived in some other cities for short periods of time. Austin has always been home, though.

Case Cockrell: Kyle, I read somewhere you lived in Oregon?

Kyle Shutt: I bounced around a lot. I lived in Brooklyn for a year, too. I feel like Portland, Brooklyn, and Austin have this exchange program where a lot of people bounce around those three places. I feel like you have to live in Brooklyn when you’ve lived in Austin for too long.

Case Cockrell: How did that change things for The Sword?

Kyle Shutt: Not really anything changed, when you have tours and records to make it starts to not matter where you fly home to. Your life is planned out six months in advance. We were so busy all the time. I fucked off a lot and decided to move back to Austin, eventually. 

 

Case Cockrell: What is a Texas Sword show that stands out to you over your existence as a band?

Kyle Shutt: River City Rockfest in San Antonio. It was with Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Living Colour, and Clutch. Just seeing the poster for that was amazing. It was like “What Year is this?” 

Bryan Richie: The Bloody Holly festival in Lubbock. We got to see Nile, Lamb of God, Behemoth, and a bunch of others. 

Jimmy Vela: Mine was opening for Blue Oyster Cult in Houston. It was really random but they were amazing that night. 

Kyle Shutt: Another one that was fun was opening for pre-Slash and Duff reunion Guns ‘N Roses in Dallas at the big amphitheater in Fair Park. They asked us three days in advance. We said yes, but we were like “What? That’s not how this works, but yeah we’ll do it.” They asked us again if we wanted to come open for them in Kansas City and we wanted to say yes but we said we couldn’t. They were nice and went on stage on time. They let us stand where we wanted to watch the show and we caught the stage pyrotechnics and we’d be covered in ash and they’d point and laugh at us. 

Bryan Richie: Apparently they were doing that for the whole tour. Whoever the big regional band was they would see if they wanted to open and it happened to always be on short notice with a lot of those bands.
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Case Cockrell: Your last album Used Future was released in 2018, was there anything in development up until the break was announced?

Bryan Richie: We had loosely been fucking around with some stuff, but not really. 

Case Cockrell: What’s the coolest story Metallica ever told you? 

John D. Cronise: I don’t want to tell their stories but let me give the people some advice when they’re hanging out with famous people or meeting their idols. Be cool. Don’t fanboy out on them. Don’t ask them to tell you stories until you’ve hung out with them a little bit. We got all the stories out of Metallica by just hanging around them when we toured with the band. You let them talk, and you let it naturally come. There are bands way more famous than us that probably never got what we got out of them because way bigger bands than us would act like teenage fans around them. We never did that because the whole situation was so surreal for us in the first place. You sometimes get the dirt when you aren’t digging for it. 

Bryan Richie: Something about us, and the way we resonated with them made those guys feel a kinship to us. It felt more honest. One night Lars came into our dressing room and asked “What’s The Sword doing tonight?” It’s a legitimate question of “What’re you guys doing tonight and can I be a part of it?” 

Kyle Shutt: It ended up with us an hour later getting on his private jet and going to watch Anthrax record in Chicago. Like “What is happening right now?” 

John D. Cronise: If everytime we bombarded Lars with questions about Ride The Lightning, he wouldn’t have wanted to do that with us. Be careful when you meet your heroes, you might want to gush and tell them how much they mean to you, but trust me if you just play it cool, you might have a better experience. 

Case Cockrell: I’ve seen you guys in big, medium, and small venues. Most people say sound and other logistics suck in large venues, how do you think these bigger venues can be better for legacy metal bands like Metallica, Pantera, and so on?

Kyle Shutt: Every band is different and the thing with us is that we’ve never been known to play with in-ear monitors. Depending on the venue you only have so many onstage monitors. We played Radio Music City Hall in New York City and we only had two monitors and it sounded like garbage. It was still cool to check that off the bucket list, though. Huge venues aren’t built for our kind of thing. 

Case Cockrell: You guys said in an interview a while back that labels like “Stoner Metal” can be annoying and can take away from what a band can truly do. Is this something you guys still stand by?

John D. Cronise: Yeah, now more than ever. All of those genres seem so silly to me. We’re in late-stage stoner doom. All the bands are starting to sound the same. It seems like this formulaic thing to where everyone has to have the big amps, tune low, and play slow. I feel like it’s run its course. 

Kyle Shutt: Stoner metal is like death metal in the regard that people think they have to sing about death and dismemberment and stoner metal bands have to sing about weed. We never sung about weed. We did invent smoking weed though. *Laughs*

Case Cockrell: We just had the last day of the Austin metal bar Lost Well. What do you think is the current state of Texas heavy metal where a lot of clubs have closed? 

Kyle Shutt: There will be another one. It had a really good run and they nailed it. So many of my favorite places have closed and I do get sad about it. The older I get, I see the patterns of stuff closing and opening back up. Whenever there’s a void, somebody will fill it and it’s just going to take time. 

Bryan Richie: There’s a perfect set of circumstances that have to come in. With Austin, the pool of those circumstances can be a lot smaller. Someone will get the rad lease in the cool building, but being that it is Austin, there’s just not as many of those things here. Metal will find a way. Texas metal will find a way. 

Case Cockrell: Kyle, I love the Doom Side of the Moon project, what’s another tribute to a band you would want to work on in that heavy style? 

Kyle Shutt: I want to actually flesh out more Pink Floyd. I have some unreleased stuff from that project and I also wanted to do “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” in its entirety and call it “Shine On You Crazy Doom Band” or something like that. It was just for fun and an idea I had when I was super stoned. It was basically the furthest I’ve ever taken a joke. It made the U.S. Top 100 and it was like “Oops!” Turns out people love Pink Floyd. 

Case Cockrell: If you won the lottery, would you open the business idea you had, Woody’s, and if not what would you do with the money?

*For context: In a recent interview, Kyle said he wanted to open a bar with transparent walls that had Chippendales-esque men building furniture and you could drink craft cocktails at the bar and watch the males work. You also have the opportunity to buy the built furniture. He proceeds to fill the band in on the idea.*

Kyle Shutt: Thanks for reminding me of that! It’s still a million dollar idea, I think. 

Case Cockrell: Let’s wrap it up here. What’s something that each of you are hopeful for music career wise or just life wise? 

Kyle Shutt: Go on tour again. I just want to play some shows for people that care. 

Bryan Richie: I will second that. It’s great to be playing Sword songs again and people have been receptive to us coming back.

Jimmy Vela: Spend a lot of time working on music, grind really hard at it, and to live out the legacy that we’ve created. We want to play the songs for fans that love hearing them and just keep doing what we were doing. 

John. D. Cronise: I have nothing to add there.

Tickets and set times for The Sword’s Sunday show at Stubb’s can be found via the Levitation website.