SEVENDUST rhythm guitarist John Connolly was loving the sound of the band’s Truth Killer album as they were tracking it in Florida last summer. It’s easy to understand why; the veteran Atlanta hard rockers’ 14th full-length consistently brings the boom through a series of chunked-out, darkly detuned progressions. But the guitarist also recalls one particular moment — a couple of days after he’d locked in a bombastic, inverted bend motif for the record’s “Love and Hate” — where things got a little weird. As bassist Vince Hornsby began laying down the low end for producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette, a bewildered Connolly noticed the piece had accidentally devolved into a tonal nightmare.
“I walked in and was like, ‘Why does this sound…off?,’” Connolly tells Guitar World. “They couldn’t get the bend; something about being down that low just wasn’t connecting. So I played the riff on my guitar, and they were like ‘Ohhhhhh!’ The bass was just [tuned] a half-step off, but I was having an aneurysm listening to it.”
