Godsmack are already around 12 song ideas deep into a new album after lead singer and guitarist Sully Erna recently moved the band's studio from their Massachusetts home base to Florida for the sessions.

Why Florida? Well, it seems the Godsmack leader had been feeling the societal strain surrounding the coronavirus pandemic a bit too acutely in his longtime stomping grounds. As Erna indicated to The VR Sessions in a Riff on It video interview last month (April 23), the change of locale provided the jumpstart the band needed to get working.

Watch the interview near the bottom of this post.

"We just started writing again," Erna says, "like, literally a month ago — not even. I bought a property down in Florida recently because I just wanted to get away from all this nonsense that is going around the country. I don't wanna go down that whole conversation right now, but I've learned a lot from this whole political nonsense and crap that's happened with COVID about just people and the way everyone's behaved during it. And I just wanted to kind of check out for a little bit and go focus on myself, my life, my family and my band, who is doing great, by the way." [via Blabbermouth]

He continues, "So I bought a place in Florida, and I actually moved the studio that we had up here in the New England area down to Fort Myers area. And that's where we've been working. It's been going good. We have probably, I don't know, 12 songs written in the last three weeks. And, obviously, as everyone knows, a song isn't a song until the lyrics and melodies are done. So I just started diving into that. And I came home to take a little break from the band so I could literally catch up and start writing some melodies to some of these instrumentals that we have."

Further, it seems the group are erring on the side of caution when it comes to hitting the road again, post-pandemic. Erna says he anticipated from the outset that most concert tours, including those of his own band, wouldn't return so swiftly, though he suggests fall 2021 as a possibility.

Around this time last year, the Godsmack singer explains, when he first noticed "COVID started really becoming a thing and they were starting to shut down the country, I knew right away. … I just knew this thing was gonna make a mess. So we immediately were, like, 'OK, we're shut down, and we're gonna not even think about 2020.' And 2021 is even shady and maybe a possibility by fall, but I still think that it's not gonna be quite ready yet. So we decided to just focus on this year being in one place, working on music with no agenda, with no timeline, with no even plan on what kind of music we're gonna write — it could be piano and acoustic ballads, it could be vintage road rock, it could be a big, fat, heavy rock song."

In the same video interview with Erna, Staind and Saint Asonia guitarist Mike Mushok also dropped in to chat with host Mike Karolyi. Godsmack's last album, When Legends Rise, came out in 2019.

Godsmack's Sully Erna Talks to The VR Sessions' Riff on It Podcast - April 23, 2021

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