Rival Sons are ready to commence work on sixth studio album

Speaking to Planet Rock’s Wyatt backstage at Ramblin’ Man Fair, Scott said their extensive tour supporting Black Sabbath has limited the amount of headline dates Rival Sons could schedule in to promote June 2016’s ‘Hollow Man’ and truly give it the chance to shine.

However, despite this, they’re now ready to move on to a new album once when their current run of European festival dates wrap up on 19th August.

“We put ‘Hollow Bones’ out right when we got the Sabbath tour,” Scott said. “When Ozzy and the guys and Sharon ask you to do… they didn’t just say ‘you guys do few dates. Pick a few dates, will you do 10?’ They said ‘Do the whole tour, we want you to do the whole tour.’ When they ask you, you don’t go ‘well, sure, y’know let me think about it’… you kind of go ‘yep, we’ll totally do it. Absolutely’.

He continued: “There’s this thing called ‘radius clause’ that doesn’t allow us to play any dates when we’re with them (Sabbath), it has to be far enough away. So we did some spotty shows here and there… when that (Sabbath) tour ended we started immediately (with our own dates). Actually, right off the back of the tour, it ended in Birmingham and we jumped right into another headline tour for another like four weeks or something.”   

Looking forward, Scott insists Rival Sons aren’t the kind of band “who’s going to sit too long”. He explains: “We’re gonna move on to a new album. When The End came along it was kind of confusion about how we were going to handle it – I still have mixed emotions about it.

“I feel the record is a great record. I still stand behind our own record without sounding like a complete ahole because you like your own s*. I stand behind the record and it just didn’t get the right look that it should have got because of this and there’s many things that go into that.”

He continued: “We’ve already sat too long on this record in my opinion because we’re creative, we have ideas, we have new things, we’re already to the next place, we’re already writing. It’s not just business believe it or not, it’s actually art too.

“I’ve been watching bands my entire life sit on album cycles for two years at a time. Three years, one record. And I’m thinking on the one hand well great you can just make that one record and let it ride, make a bunch of money and you don’t have to do s*** but tour it.

“But the real tip is when you become a writer and a touring musician, that’s not how it feels. Not to me, not to the guys in my band. By the time you get the record we’ve already written the record, recorded, mixed, mastered it. Come up with all the artwork, send the record out, we’ve lived with that record for six months to a year already. By the time it comes out I’m ready to make a new record! I’m done! I’m sick of that song already!”

Reflecting upon the rest of 2017, Scott finished: “We have something new already happening, we have a plan going on into the new year.

This will be our last… our wrap up tour for Hollow Bones, short but sweet for the tour on ‘Hollow Bones’ headlining-wise. We leave August 20th and we’re gonna stay home until the end of the year and do something we haven’t done in a long time, really ever properly with this group and that’s y’know me and Jay (Buchanan) are going to get in a room, he’s going to come out to California where I live and I’m going to fly out to Nashville – we have a little cabin thing there we’re going to write in.

“I live right by the beach, we’re gonna cabin up, hole up and write some songs. Normally we just write in the studio but we’re gonna take a little more time this time.”

You can watch Wyatt’s full interview with Scott here and check out additional Ramblin’ Man Fair videos and photos from the weekend below:

PHOTOS: Ramblin’ Man Fair 2017 in pictures

Backstage interviews at Ramblin’ Man Fair with Saxon, Steve Harris, Black Star Riders & more