Over the course of those nine albums, you can hear the band’s music become more melodic. The group’s musical evolution culminates with last year’s There Are Worse Things Than Being Alive. That album’s meticulously crafted opening tune, “The Devils,” for example, features a mid-song bridge that includes harmony vocals and a soaring guitar solo.
In a recent phone interview from his Nashville home, singer-guitarist Anthony Raneri talks about the tour and what to expect from each night.
On the Tour’s Concept
“With every tour we do, we try to give it a different look. We try not to give the same show. Sometimes, we play bigger venues and sometimes smaller venues. Sometimes, we play with bigger bands and sometimes with smaller bands. Sometimes, we’ll do an acoustic tour. Since it’s the 25th anniversary of the band, we wanted to do something a little special. One thing we knew we didn’t want to do was make it a nostalgia tour. We didn’t want to go out and just play old records and songs. We want to do two nights everywhere. One is the older history of the band and one is the newer history. We took the concept of not making it a super nostalgia-fest. We play about 20 to 22 songs per night. For the last tour and the tour before that, we are filling a set list with 22 songs made up songs from nine records. How many songs from any record can you play? Now, we have a setlist of 22 songs from just four albums. It was fun to go through it, just listening to it. I don’t sit around listening to all nine of our albums. It was a trip to do that.
Soliciting the Fans
“We put out a call to action for the fans to see what songs they wanted to hear. We took that seriously, and we actually have a spreadsheet of the comments that we are referencing. It was interesting for me to see what songs on the old records people connected to. We did the first leg in the UK, we did and then played some of those songs. We played “Guardrail” on the UK leg. Just learning to play it was so alien. It’s not just because it’s a song we haven’t played. The chords are strange. It’s not how my brain works now. I might as well as have been playing saxophone.”
Night One
“[Sirens and Condolences] is one of our more popular albums. We played that record in full at the When We Were Young Festival. Those songs are fresher. Half of it is in constant rotation. We haven’t played [The Walking Wounded and Shudder] as much as full records. The Walking Wounded has deep cuts on it that I haven’t thought about it in a long time. It has that youthful ignorance is important is being creative. You hope to never get to a point where you know too much and you can’t throw caution to the wind. It’s something you want to maintain as a creative. With those old records, I knew nothing about what I was doing. From a production perspective and songwriting perspective, you would never do that and put those two words together or those two chords together. It’s fun, but at the same time, it makes those songs hard to relearn. I didn’t know any chords back then.“
Night Two
“In our minds, Shudder is the end of an era. Those first four records all came out on Victory Records. We worked with mostly the same people to make those records. That’s when we moved on to bigger labels and spending more time writing the record. We were on tours. Sirens would come out and we writing self-titled in the van. And then do it all over again. Killing Time marks the next era for us.. We started taking breaks and going home and spending time in pre-production. The way we worked changed. The way we started thinking changed. It’s a change in eras. With Cult, I feel like I’ve become a student of songwriting and I always want to get better at it. If you listen to all of our records in order, the goal is to hear a progression. I hit a point where I started understanding what I was doing and how to get into the mind of the listener. I say this all the time. We are manipulators as musicians and songwriters. My job is to do something to make you feel a certain way. I tried to hone that more. Killing Time was a big step in that direction and Cult is a bigger step in that direction.”
Big Guitar Riffs
“With Vacancy and Interrobang and There Are Worse Things Thing Being Alive , I hit my stride in my songwriting and knowing what I’m trying to accomplish. I started thinking more along the line of the big guitar riff. I want to write the ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ riff. I started thinking more in terms of the musical theme of this song. With earlier records, I wasn’t thinking about anything.When I started honing in on it, i started honing in from a melodic standpoint and in the later years, it’s more about the iconic riff or musical theme even before the vocal starts. I put thought into melody and what is my iconic riff but on the newer records, I want there to be something dramatic before the vocals start.”
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This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 12, 2025.
