Skillet Are Set To Rock Australia…

Not every rebellion gestates in darkness. As one of the best-selling rock bands of the twenty first century, SKILLET continue to rebel against conventions, doubts, expectations, and rules with the intent to uplift in light. SKILLET have never compromised their integrity or their faith. Instead, they have travelled their own path to unprecedented heights with an urgent sound, undeniable energy, and unbreakable spirit.

The Wisconsin quartet have embodied rock ‘n’ roll’s evolution from day one, selling twelve million albums worldwide to date. Landmark Triple Platinum album Awake, featuring the 2x-platinum track Awake and Alive, 3x-platinum track Hero and 4x-platinum track Monster (one of the most-streamed rock songs in history with over four BILLION global audio streams) went on to pick up the Billboard Music Award. The band’s 2019 album, Victorious, marked the group’s fourth consecutive Top 20 debut on the Billboard Top 200. Their brand-new album, Dominion, is a testament to the band’s enduring appeal, charting strongly and with sales that truly defy the international trend of declining album sales. John Cooper talks to Hi Fi Way about their Australian tour.

Fantastic that Skillet are about to start their Australian tour, it definitely feels like a long time since you were last here in 2018 with a lot happening in that time?
That’s for sure. 2018’s a long time ago, I’m so thrilled to be coming back, so very, very excited.

You must be really blown away by the interest in this tour?
Absolutely thrilling. I mean, you never really know, and you go all right, we’re doing it. We’re doing the flights because the flights are just so long and it’s expensive. You got to get your gear down, but I can see we have fans because we can check the streaming numbers, you can check the sales and I’m looking at streaming, the last several years going it is insane that two of our biggest cities in the world are in Australia and we haven’t been back since 2018. We haven’t been back since the pandemic and that’s just crazy. So, it’s just really thrilling, so thankful that the fans are listening.

Do you ever get a bit worried I guess with the way people’s music tastes evolve and change whether you’d ever be forgotten, especially when you announce a big tour after a long period of time?
Nothing’s a guarantee. Nobody is guaranteed anything and in the music business, I shouldn’t just say music, entertainment world, everything is changing so fast and so I never take anything for granted. I never take a fan for granted and you never know if it’s going to be here tomorrow. So, you do the best you can and then you’re thankful when it goes good. Absolutely, just thrilled people are still listening and coming out.

Do you feel like there’s a bit of an element of still making up for lost time after the last of years?
Well, that’s true. But at the same time the world changed and I think a lot of people started saying, okay, wait a minute, what’s important in my life and what’s not, like who do I want to be? What do I want to listen to? What do I want to spend my money and my time on? One of the cool things that happened, even with that because a lot of people are home for two years and looking on social media, but one of the interesting things happened is that we began seeing a spike in some of our records.

I don’t know if I’m correct, but I think that it might be because Skillet has always been a very positive band. We’ve always sung about extremely positive things and singing songs telling people do not give up on your life. We’ve always spoken out about suicide, especially suicidal thoughts in young people, mental health, we’ve always partnered, we’ve been doing that for twenty years. I think with all this stuff happening, people are like wanting something positive and Skillet’s got eight positive records to listen to. Some of those songs are more relevant now than I think they were when we wrote them. Like our album Rise, that was a good example of that. We started seeing the Rise album spike and you know what, we’re going to put it back in our set list because I can tell that it’s hitting people. People need hope and we’re trying to do our best to give it.

With that in mind have you seen a younger group of fans start following the band?
Skillet always had a really young fan base and one of the interesting things that, that kind of defies logic is that Skillet is always gaining newer young fans. You wouldn’t expect it, you would expect all of our fans by now to be in the thirties and forties, but it’s really not true. We’re always getting these younger fans and I don’t know why that is. There are some youthful aspects of the band, our excitement and we have two girls in the band, which is really cool and clever diversity and people are really looking to a new generation of women to play rock music. Well, Skillet has had girls in our band for twenty five years, so we did it when it before it was cool, but I don’t know if that plays into the youthful thing, but also something interesting is happening in America and I can only assume it’s happening in maybe all western type countries is that I think that all the young people after the pandemic started going, alright, we’re looking for some music that is real and for messages that are authentic and for maybe some more real musicians because everything was leaning so digital. I don’t want to say fake, I don’t mean everything’s fake, but with all the EDM and stuff like that there was a lot of different music that was generated by computers, let’s say it that way because I don’t mean that it’s fake and I’m not, I’m not even criticising it. It’s just a different kind of music. There was a new generation of young people that said, you know what, we want something raw. We want something in your face. We want something that’s singing about something real, rather than pretending that everything every day is amazing, everything is awesome, everything is not awesome and it’s okay to sing a song that says that it’s not. I think that rock music is kind of on the rise because of that.

We’ve certainly seen that sort of intergenerational thing happen and it is so cool. I don’t know how many people I’ve met who like flew to see Skillet. It was like a father and a son flew to see Skillet for their son’s birthday or even for the dad’s birthday sometimes when they’re like, you are the only band we listen to as a family. Things like that are pretty cool because you would see that at maybe Metallica or Aerosmith or somebody of that stature, which obviously is Skillet is not of that stature anywhere close, but we have a little bit of that same dynamic beginning to happen in the last five years. I love it because music should bring people together. It’s nothing cooler than having a family listen to music together because music makes people feel good. It’s like, duh. That’s the coolest thing there is. So I love it!

Is there a particular album focus for the tour?
We always do a mix because we have been around for so long and there are certain songs that I know if we don’t play that song, people are going to like kill us if we don’t play Monster and Hero and Feel Invincible and whatnot. People are going to be so mad they’re going to throw stuff at me. So yeah, we’re definitely going to play those songs and we like to mix it up. I think that people are sometimes like, oh, I can’t believe you played that song. That’s cool. Maybe it was a deep cut or something. Some songs give themselves to a live performance rather than being necessarily like a radio single. There are different songs for different purposes, and we try to do those things. Usually people come away from a Skillet show saying that was so energetic and it was so positive and I love that.

Exciting having another milestone coming up being the thirtieth anniversary.
Yeah, in a couple of years. 1996 is when we began. So yeah, a few years away, maybe it’ll be time to come back down to Australia. Maybe we’ll celebrate 30 years in Australia? Who knows?

The power and legacy behind the music of Skillet must be humbling seeing how much it means to people?
It might sound trite. It is not trite. It is just the truth. When you are on stage and you see people singing your songs, it is absolutely energising. Nobody’s going to expend their own energy for a song they don’t like, there’s just no reason to do that. Nobody’s going to pay money and come to something if it doesn’t mean something to them. Sometimes I get to meet people before the show or after the show, and they tell me these stories, they’re almost difficult to believe. John, your song saved my life. John, your song is the reason I went into rehab. You helped me believe that I could kick this drug habit, John, your song gets me through my recovery every single day. Things like that, these stories are so amazing. I just get jazzed, man. I go, all right, let’s play some rock and roll, because music really does help people. I know that firsthand because I’ve been through hard things in my life just like everybody else. My mom died from cancer when I was fifteen. She fought cancer for three years. So from the time I was twelve years old, my life the next three years was lived with a mom in my house that was just wasting away for three years and absolute agony and suffering chemotherapy and wasting away and throwing up. I lived in a house that was very difficult to live in for a long time. The only thing I had was music. I’d go to my room, I’d put my headphones on, and I’d listen to music and I would pretend that I didn’t have to live with all those problems. Music got me through it, and I know what it’s like to say that’s the only good thing I have right now, and it can help me get through to the next morning and that’s what I hear from fans. That’s what Skillet is for some people out there.

Are you looking to do any special vinyl/CD reissues?
You know what we haven’t spoken about that. We began doing, funnily enough, a twenty fifth anniversary book type thing that is really, really good and beautiful. Because of the pandemic, everything just got messed up and it took too long. Then I started thinking, gosh, maybe we should just extend it and make it a thirty year so we actually release the thing on time. We’re not sure what we’re going to do in terms of the music. We really haven’t begun talking about it, but we need to.

I know this probably gets asked a lot, but being in a band with your wife what’s the secret to making that work and everyone being happy?
Oh man, so me and my wife Korey, and so if people don’t know, Korey plays guitar in Skillet. We’ve been married, we just celebrated twenty seven years of marriage. This is our twenty eighth year of Skillet, so it happened virtually at the same time. It’s been a long road, but we really have made it work. I just usually tell people the honest truth is just this, focus your life on the things that matter most. We all have a ton of things we got to do. You got to spend time on your marriage, you got to spend time on being a good parent. You got to spend time writing new music, then traveling and then doing interviews. You have to do all of those things.

Which one is the most important? You know, don’t do a really good job at number four and a terrible job at number one. You’re going to have to discriminate. What’s the most important thing? The most important has to be the marriage. It has to be my marriage and my parenting. You say no to some opportunities for your business, because you got to keep the main thing, the main thing. That’s been one of the secrets. If anybody really wants to dig into that, I know that not everybody’s going to agree with this, but you asked the question, so I’ll just tell you where I got that from. There’s a really great Bible verse that I love that says, seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and everything else will be added to you.

Really what that means is put your life in priorities. What’s the most important thing? If you build your life on a foundation that is sturdy and that won’t be shaken, then you’ll find that everything else in life flows from that. Everything else begins to make sense and even the things that you, that don’t go the way you wanted them to go, you say, that’s all right because I kept number one and number two most important things. I did those to the best of my ability and I’d rather have those things intact than to have the other things. So, I think that that’s really good. I think that’s great advice and it’s a good way to build your life.

We’re so blessed we got to be together. I mean, it’s crazy. I used to tell my kids one day, you’re going to think this is really cool because they just think it’s normal life. They think that all kids are raised in a bus. I kept telling them, no, not all kids. They would meet somebody and somebody would say, where do you live? They’d say in the bus. I’d say, you have to understand kids when they’re little, not everybody lives in a bus but you know, my kids have done concerts with Iron Maiden and Metallica and Linkin Park, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath. I’m like, one day you guys are going to understand how cool this is.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Skillet on the following dates, tickets from Metropolis Touring and The Phoenix...