GODSMACK TRIVIA
Trivia
At some point Godsmack simply stopped playing Japan. Drummer Shannon Larkin explained why in a 2023 interview with the Japanese magazine Gekirock: they were no longer being invited. It was not that the band had tired of coming, he said; what they had been told was that promoters wanted to concentrate on Japanese bands in the same genre, and that there was no money to make an offer — while adding that he had no way of knowing whether that was really the case. When they did play Japan, he said, the audience was around two thousand, and he had heard the same had happened to Disturbed, a band of the same generation.
Godsmack's four-times platinum debut album was originally recorded for $2,500. The band's own site puts the session in 1996 and the release in 1997, when they put it out themselves under the title All Wound Up… Republic / Universal Records then signed them to a multi-record deal and reissued a remixed version in 1998 as Godsmack. The same recording thus became, in turn, an independent release and a major-label debut.
Godsmack have put 26 songs into the top ten of Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs chart. According to the band's own site that is the second-highest tally in the chart's forty-year history, level with Van Halen and Shinedown. The same page notes that they have more top ten rock songs than Foo Fighters, or than their hometown heroes Aerosmith. Sully Erna's way of putting it is that they can play fifteen songs a night and still not get through all of their top ten singles.
On 26 October 2024, a sold-out show at Mohegan Sun Arena turned out to be the last night those four men shared a stage. Writing on the band's own site, Sully Erna framed it exactly that way, and said that with Tony Rombola and Shannon Larkin gone it was the final curtain call for the Godsmack people had known for over thirty years. In the statement Blabbermouth published in April 2025, Erna said the two had retired permanently, on good terms, for no reason other than a wish to live more simply and quietly away from touring. The concert was released on Blu-ray, CD and vinyl.
The band started out as The Scam. Songfacts tells the story of the change: Sully Erna spent a day teasing drummer Tommy Stewart about a cold sore on his lip and woke the next morning with a cold sore of the same size in the same place. Someone in the room said that was God smacking him for making fun of Tommy, and the name stuck. They knew perfectly well that it was also the title of an Alice In Chains song from Dirt — the name was simply too good to pass up.
The drums on the first two Godsmack albums were played by the singer. Shannon Larkin, who joined for the third record, Faceless, said as much in his interview with Gekirock: Tommy Stewart was the band's drummer at the time, but it was Sully Erna who played the drums on those albums. That Erna started out as a drummer is also the root of the most famous set piece in the band's live show.
The set piece Godsmack are known for is a drum battle. As Blabbermouth described it in 2026, it began in the mid-1990s when Sully Erna was still behind the kit, starting out as Erna playing congas alongside the band's early drummers, and grew after Shannon Larkin joined into a full rhythmic duel with two complete drum kits and rotating risers. Erna has explained that the piece has staple sections the two of them stick to and deliberate gaps left open for improvisation — built that way, he said, so they could be off the leash once in a while and simply create.
I Stand Alone exists because the band turned down what the film first asked for. In the account Songfacts carries, Sully Erna says the director of The Scorpion King, Chuck Russell, was a Godsmack fan and wanted to use Voodoo in the film — but felt the song was a little dated and wanted it re-recorded, which Erna was not keen on. What he submitted instead was new music he had just written: I Stand Alone. It appeared on the soundtrack in 2002 and on the album Faceless the following year.
The Japanese edition took its time. Universal Music Japan's product page dates the Japanese release of the major-label debut Godsmack (catalogue number MVCU-24068) to 19 April 2000. The album had come out at home in 1998, so it reached Japan roughly a year and a half late. Given that the band's own site describes the recording as having been made in 1996 for $2,500 and self-released in 1997, close to four years passed between the session and the record appearing in Japanese shops.
The Japanese discography Universal Music Japan lists for Godsmack runs to three titles and no more: Godsmack on 19 April 2000, Faceless on 2 April 2003 (UICU-1040) and the EP The Other Side on 10 March 2004 (UICU-1053). The band went on releasing albums — IV, The Oracle and the rest — but the list stops there, and so does the Japanese biography on the same site, which ends with Faceless in 2003.
The last Godsmack record to get a Japanese edition was not an album but an EP. Universal Music Japan dates the Japanese release of The Other Side to 10 March 2004, catalogue number UICU-1053. It is the band's acoustic EP, and among its tracks, according to Songfacts, is a reworking of Awake called Asleep — softer, much shorter, with a piano in it. One of their best-known songs, turned inside out down to the title.
The fourth album, IV, went to number one in the United States in its first week. BARKS reported in May 2006 that it had entered the Billboard 200 at the top, ahead of Taking Back Sunday's Louder Now and Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions — a second consecutive US number one after Faceless. The same piece noted that the band would be coming to Japan that July. The first single was Speak.
Once the band stopped making albums, Shannon Larkin told Gekirock in 2023, the first holiday he intended to take would be to Japan — not as a working musician but as a tourist, to eat well and experience the country again. He also said that of everywhere he had been in the world, Japan had the most beautiful culture he had encountered, and that he believed the band would play there again.
Sully Erna started this band after his previous one ended. Universal Music Japan's Japanese profile describes him as the drummer of Strip Mind, which broke up in 1994; he then began playing with old friends, and Godsmack took shape through repeated changes of line-up. When they started selling their self-financed album in a local record shop the response was large, and around the same time Paul Geary, formerly of Extreme, noticed them and signed them to the management company he ran — which led in turn to a deal with Republic, part of Universal. A man who set out as a drummer ended up fronting the band.
One ballad produced a foundation. Songfacts records that Under Your Scars prompted the band to launch The Scars Foundation, a non-profit working on severe depression, addiction, bullying, PTSD and suicide prevention. In the fifth-anniversary summary the band posted in April 2024, its work to that point included a mental health fund for the music industry, working with over 400 children in rural Appalachia, running a group of more than 4,000 participants, launching a youth ambassador programme and a veterans track, and providing free therapy sessions for scholarship youth.
One music video took two years and a school full of teenagers. As Universal Music Japan reported in 2020, the clip for Unforgettable began with twenty middle-school students recording the chorus in a studio and grew from there: the students were invited to the band's show in Gilford, New Hampshire on 22 August 2018 and sang with them on stage, the band went to their school to teach them the song, and took them to New York to learn something about the music business. For the shoot itself, more than 400 young musicians from across New England were gathered at the SNHU Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire. With music education being deprioritised in many parts of the country, the band said, it mattered to them to make a video about music enriching people's lives.
For the last album, the first team was brought back. The band's own site says Lighting Up The Sky was produced by Sully Erna together with Andrew Murdock, known as Mudrock, who had produced the first two albums, Godsmack and Awake, and mixed by Dave Fortman, who had produced The Oracle and 1000hp. Since the theme of the record was reliving the whole journey, Erna explained, bringing the original team back felt right. They worked at it on and off for close to two years, deliberately at an unhurried pace.
Albums that had gone to number one in America had never been pressed on vinyl. According to announcements on the band's own site, Awake was offered on vinyl for pre-order for the first time in March 2024, Faceless was announced that June as reaching vinyl for the first time ever, and IV was presented the same year as being released on vinyl for the first time. Records made at the height of the CD era only became records, in the older sense, close to a quarter of a century later.
Godsmack's first guitarist left in 1996. Songfacts records that Lee Richards departed for family reasons and later joined a band called Dropbox — and that Sully Erna played the drums on Dropbox's self-titled 2004 record, the only album they ever released. The man who by then fronted his own band turned up on a former colleague's album as the drummer.
The drum stool changed hands for the third album. Songfacts lists Tommy Stewart as the band's drummer from 1995 to 2002 and Shannon Larkin, previously of the hardcore punk band Amen, as his replacement from 2002 — with Faceless in 2003 the first album Larkin played on. Robbie Merrill has been there on bass throughout, making him and Sully Erna the two constants.
The tour that followed the two departures was finished with help from other bands. In the statement Blabbermouth published in April 2025, Sully Erna said that Will Hunt of Evanescence on drums and Sam Koltun of Dorothy on guitar were filling in for Tony Rombola and Shannon Larkin so that the European dates already under way could be honoured and completed, and that no permanent decision had been made about replacements. That 2025 European run had opened on 22 March at Arena 8888 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The drum seat changed twice in one season in 2026. Blabbermouth reported that Wade Murff, who had joined in the spring, played more than a dozen shows between 8 May at Welcome To Rockville in Daytona Beach, Florida and 30 May in Houston before abruptly leaving. Former Dream Theater drummer Mike Mangini filled the gap, making his live debut with the band on 12 June at the Morton Amphitheater in Riverside, Missouri; in his own post he thanked the band for trusting him with no rehearsal. Mangini had spent thirteen years in Dream Theater, having won the seat in 2010 in an audition against six other drummers.
The major-label deal turned on one radio DJ. Songfacts records that Whatever was released independently in 1997 and that a disc jockey at WAAF, a station in Massachusetts, started playing it on his show — which is what led to the deal with Republic Records. Godsmack had built a following through club shows but had never had airplay before. Whatever was then released as a single proper in 1998, soon after the signing.
The major-label debut shipped without a warning sticker. Songfacts records that the record company did not think the album needed an explicit-content sticker, so it went out without one — with the result that Walmart and K-Mart both stocked it. Once word got round about the language in songs like Whatever, complaints from customers led both chains to pull the record. The missing sticker widened its distribution and then cost it.
A song that missed the deadline for their own album was solved with an elastic band. In the account Songfacts carries, Sully Erna says Whatever was not recorded until the 1997 demo album All Wound Up was already finished, so it was not on the original pressings. The band pressed the single onto a CD of its own and banded it to the album — and that, he says, is how the buzz started to grow. The title, incidentally, appears nowhere in the lyrics: the still-untitled track had to go on a setlist one night, Erna scribbled down Whatever, and it was never changed.
Voodoo began with a film. Songfacts records that Sully Erna decided to write it after watching Wes Craven's 1988 picture The Serpent And The Rainbow. Many listeners took the line about feeling a snakebite enter his veins to be about heroin; Erna said it was nothing of the kind, but a metaphor for the rush of spiritual energy during a ritual. The song was written by Erna with bassist Robbie Merrill, and leans heavily on percussion instruments of the sort used in tribal celebrations.
The video for Voodoo came from the same film. Songfacts credits it to director Dean Karr and describes the band performing in a cornfield while zombies rise from a lake and wander the woods. Among those appearing in it are Laurie Cabot, an American Witchcraft high priestess, and members of her coven, performing a ceremony. The song's vocals-only introduction was also used as the title theme for the MTV series Fear.
There was something at the end of the album that the track listing did not mention. On both the independent and the 1998 pressings, Songfacts notes, Voodoo is the last song listed — but about two minutes of silence follow it, and then the same kind of percussion heard in Voodoo starts up. Under a steady beat, the voices of the band and their producers can be heard discussing how the album was put together, until a crowd comes in chanting the chorus. One of the voices belongs to Katrina Chester of the band Luxx. The hidden track is called Witch Hunt, and in the streaming era, where nothing can be hidden, it simply appears on the tracklist under that name.
The melody of Voodoo was worked out in a car. In the account Songfacts carries, Sully Erna says he came up with it during the short drive to the band's rehearsal space and had it roughly sorted by the time he arrived. It was, he says, the only song he had written a cappella before there was any music to it at all. He sang it to guitarist Tony Rombola and asked him to put some music underneath.
Awake was used in a United States Navy recruiting campaign. Songfacts records that the song ran in commercials for the Navy's Accelerate Your Life campaign, and that the Navy also used the Godsmack song Sick Of Life. Asked about it in a magazine interview, Sully Erna said the band had never supported any war for any country, and that what they supported was the troops. Awake reached number one on the Mainstream Rock chart, and is the title track of the band's second album, released on Halloween 2000.
The video for Awake was shot in a building better known from the cinema. Songfacts describes the clip, directed by Troy Smith, as the band performing in a fenced-in prison yard while a riot builds among the inmates — filmed at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, the building used for the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption. The song itself was cut from the album's 5:04 to 4:33 for radio, and turned up in 2001 in the Jet Li action thriller The One.
I Stand Alone was nominated twice at the 2003 Grammy Awards. Songfacts names the categories as Best Rock Song and Best Hard Rock Performance, lost respectively to Bruce Springsteen's The Rising and Foo Fighters' All My Life. The song was also used, along with Straight Out Of Line, in the 2004 game Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within, and Dwayne Johnson, who starred in The Scorpion King, appears in its video.
Serenity grew out of a book by Rush's drummer. Songfacts records that Sully Erna was deeply moved by Neil Peart's Ghost Rider: Travels On The Healing Road, an account of a long motorcycle journey across the United States; Erna, a drummer himself before he was a singer, was a great admirer of Peart and a motorcyclist too. He sent Peart a demo of the song and asked him to play on it. Peart could not, because of touring commitments, but wrote back to say he liked the song and to wish him well. It was the band's first acoustic song, written with help from Tony Rombola.
The title of the fourth album carried more than a number. In the explanation BARKS reported, Shannon Larkin said that in Boston the word four is pronounced closer to fou, and that it had become a piece of backstage shorthand on tour. He also pointed to the sheer number of records called IV — Led Zeppelin IV, Foreigner 4 and countless others — and said that, this being their fourth album as well, it simply fitted.
Bulletproof was the number one song of 2018 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs chart. Songfacts records it as the lead single from When Legends Rise, with a video filmed on 7 February 2018 at a studio in Los Angeles by Troy Smith, the band's longtime visual collaborator. The clip carries cameos from the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach and the television presenter Chris Jacobs of Overhaulin'.
Under Your Scars is the first real ballad Godsmack put on an album. In the account Songfacts carries, Sully Erna traces it to his own background: a great-uncle who was a well-known composer in Sicily and a father who still leads an Italian band in the Boston area, which is why, he says, he has kept returning over the years to a wider range of music and instruments. For this song he called on two Bulgarian players, Irina Chirkova on cello and Zvezdelina Haltakova on violin. He has described it as a gift back to the fans from a band raised on ballads like Aerosmith's Dream On and Guns N' Roses' November Rain. The video was directed by Paris Visone.
When Legends Rise became the first Godsmack album to produce three American number ones. Songfacts records that when Under Your Scars reached the top of the Mainstream Rock chart it was the album's third chart-topper, after the title track and Bulletproof — the first time the band had scored three number one singles from one record. The band's own site describes the same three as having gone to number one back to back.
The last riff on the last album is the first riff from the first one. Shannon Larkin told Gekirock that the big riff which arrives after the introduction fades in on the closing title track, Lighting Up The Sky, is the riff from Moon Baby, the opening song of the debut album — and that it is also the final riff on the record. He described it as putting bookends on the catalogue: the first sound and the last are the same.
The cover of Lighting Up The Sky came out of a commercial shown during an American football game. Shannon Larkin told Gekirock that he was watching the game when an advert showed the Earth from space with the lights of its big cities glowing, and that the image lined up in his mind with an audience holding lights up at a concert. He rang Sully Erna, who liked it enough to scrap the artwork ideas already in hand and go with that design instead. Erna had always handled the band's artwork, Larkin said, which made this a rare chance for him to shape it.
On 30 July 2026 Godsmack headlined the 32nd Pol'and'Rock Festival in Czaplinek, Poland. In the message Blabbermouth reported, Sully Erna put the crowd at seven hundred thousand, said the audience ran two and a half miles deep, and noted that he had assumed Woodstock in 1999, at 250,000, would remain the largest audience of his career until that night. The festival is entirely free to attend, and Erna said the promoter had told him that the proceeds go to children's hospitals.
There is apparently more to come after the album billed as the last one. Blabbermouth reported in September 2026 that Sully Erna, having said the band's schedule was full to New Year's Eve, intended to take a short break and then start writing — and that new Godsmack music should be heard by the summer of 2027. In the same conversation he was firm that the band has never used backing tracks live and never will. The current line-up is Erna on vocals and guitar, Robbie Merrill on bass, Sam Koltun on guitar and Mike Mangini on drums.