Shane Smith and the Saints are a dynamic American music band known for blending a diverse range of genres into their soul-stirring sound. Formed in Austin, Texas, this five-piece ensemble has been captivating audiences with their heartfelt lyrics and high-energy performances for a decade now. Rooted in folk, rock, country, and americana influences, Shane Smith and the Saints have crafted a unique musical identity that defies easy categorisation. Their music tells stories of love, loss, and life’s adventures, often infused with a sense of spirituality and introspection.
Fronted by the charismatic Shane Smith, the band’s lineup also includes Bennett Brown on fiddle, Zach Stover on the drums, Chase Satterwhite on bass, and Dustin Schaefer on lead guitar. Together, they create a sonic tapestry that resonates with fans across the country. You may have seen them recently in the TV show ‘Yellowstone’ with songs like ‘Fire in the Ocean’ and ‘All I See Is You’ featuring on the show, including an appearance from the band themselves too. We were thrilled to talk to frontman Shane Smith as the band made their UK debut at the Long Road festival recently.
Welcome to England, Shane, it’s a thrill to have you guys over here and playing music.
Thank you sir! The closest we’ve been before was the time we played in Ireland. Years ago, it was an acoustic performance with just Bennett, our fiddle player, and I. So this is our first show! We’re excited!
We have tomorrow off so we are going to try and get around and see a few things and do some stuff, the best we can in one day and then we play Bush Hall in London the day after and then it’s back home. That show has been sold out for a while now so it’ll be pretty full.
It’s been great to watch the rise of your profile and career in recent years. I think ‘Hail Mary’ might be my favourite album of yours. Do you have a favourite or is that like asking you to choose between your kids?
I would probably agree with you about ‘Hail Mary’. We have just finished a brand new record and I’m definitely most excited about that one right now. It has a lot of really cool sounding songs on it and it’s a very ‘big’ sounding album, so i’m really pumped about that one right now.
Let’s dig into that a little then because the two songs you released last year, ‘Fire in the Ocean’ and ‘Hummingbird’ sound like a band moving up a level in terms of production and ambitions.
Thank you. There’s a lot of songs in that vein on the new album. Those two songs will also be on the album as well. In terms of the production, this one feels like a bigger album than anything else we will have done before.
There was a four year gap between ‘Geronimo’ and ‘Hail Mary’ and now it’s been four years between ‘Hail Mary’ and the new one. How come it takes so long for you guys to make music?
We stay very busy out on the road all the time and I think I have a really difficult time in getting the writing done on time. I primarily write all the music and the lyrics and my wife co-writes on some songs with me alongside on or two friends along the way but it mostly relies on me to get songs done. I find it difficult to get into the headspace of writing music when we are out on the road and I like to take my time with the process too.
I’m something of a perfectionist and I also have a difficult time signing off on things without going back in and tinkering and tweaking them so that some songs end up being totally different to how they started out when I’ve finished with them! That all takes time! (laughing) There’s several songs on this next record that I’ve had in the bag for a very long time but they kinda got completely re-worked and they became something very different.
Is it going to be a massive 20+ track album, you know, that’s quite popular these days!
It’s not going to be one of those but it will be somewhere around 14 songs or something like that. I do have a title worked out but we can’t talk about that side of things yet. We’re finalising all the masters and the mixes right now so we are nearly close to being able to announce everything. It will take a weight off my shoulders because, like you said, it’s been years and I hate that fans have had to wait on this for so long. My goal, coming out of this project, will be to release more music, faster. We’re building a small studio at my house right now which will help the process a whole lot. We’re also choosing to take some time off, so I can write some songs although I say that but this summer has been chaos! (laughing)
You guys are real road warriors. What’s the most shows you think you’ve played in a year?
I would say somewhere around 230 to 240 shows. There was a period of time where we were just ‘gone’, essentially. It’s not a good way to do things. It’s still insane at times, now, but it’s a little more balanced than it used to be. You end up looking up and realising you haven’t spoken to your family in months and you haven’t seen friends anywhere near enough. It is one of those lifestyles that can really grab a hold of you if you are not careful.
Is it fair to say that Taylor Sheridan and the Yellowstone TV show has had a huge influence in increasing the notoriety of the band in the last couple of years?
Oh yeah, 100%. Man, you talk about someone who works hard, I don’t understand how Taylor does it, he works harder than all of us! I wanna say that he had about 12 projects going at one point recently! He was a fan of ours before Yellowstone but we never knew that. As seasons of the show progressed he had featured buddies of ours like Whiskey Myers and Colter Wall had been on, Turnpike Troubadours were on too and then in season four they hit us up and said they wanted to use ‘All I See is You’ in two episodes – it was the first time we had had a song placed in anything, let alone it being on the largest TV in America!
We had to sit there and wait for 8 months and couldn’t say anything about it, not even our own relatives knew that we were going to have a song on there! Taylor had written in a cameo role for himself into the episode and he was the one who said the name of the band and we were on for two and half minutes. It’s been incredible, man. It had such a great impact on us. All of a sudden everyone who had seen us live over the last decade, or had a cousin or family member that had a small connection with us came out of the woodwork and the dots just got connected immediately and lots of people were talking about us.
Taylor is such a huge supporter of us and he then wrote us into the season 5 premiere of John Dutton’s governor’s party. We were the band on set at the ranch and we’ve done some private events for members of the cast too. We’re doing something soon for Cole Hauser’s fund raising organisation soon and have gotten to know the cast really well. It’s a really cool network of people who are just really good folks, you know?
The cover of ‘Hail Mary’ was very cinematic and the artwork for tracks like ‘Fire in the Ocean’ and ‘Geronimo’ was very distinctive too. Is that side of the business, the artwork side, something that really interests you?
My mother is a really good artist. She taught art and math in high school and I’ve always been really drawn to art. We do care about the artwork on the records and try to put things together in a really cool way. The new album will be no different – a buddy of mine, Teal Blake, who is a painter in Forth Worth, Texas, is doing a custom painting for the album cover for us.
With the ‘Hail Mary’ album we were trying to get a cinematic, movie poster feel to the cover. On the inside there is a legit poster that will fold out into a really cool, full movie poster. A lot of people didn’t know that.
You’ve been playing music in the band since 2011. If I could take you back 12 years and let you give yourself a piece of advice, what would you tell the 2011 you?
Honestly? That’s a difficult thing to do because we did not do things in the right way, we did it in a very scrappy way. We were very rough around the edges, like dogs in the dirt! (laughing) Had we not done it that way, however, we might be a totally different band and I wouldn’t want anything to change who we are today. We had opportunities to be with labels along the way but I did not trust anybody in the industry. I’d heard too many horror stories, which were mostly true, about the financial debt you accrue and the fact that you often lost the rights to your masters. Now the deals seem a little more artist friendly but it wasn’t the case a decade or so ago.
I’m also not sure we would have been ready or even have had the songs to sign with a label. As time has gone on we’ve got better at writing songs too. To my younger self, I’d say that he could be more careful in how he prioritises his time and maybe he shouldn’t be scared to say no to some things because for years and years and years I said yes to everything and we were just gone all the time, that was a tough way to live. It creates a lot of scar tissue whilst being thankful for the opportunities it brought us it at the same time.
