Shinedown guitarist Zach Myers had a basketball analogy ready when Nick DeLaCruz asked about his singing voice. Myers feels at home singing onstage. Hearing his voice on a record is another matter. And when Brent Smith is standing at the next microphone, volunteering for lead vocals feels to Myers like asking Michael Jordan to pass him the ball.
Late in the This Is DeLaCruz interview, which arrived on YouTube November 2, Myers put Smith among the best rock singers of his generation and left room for the possibility that he’s the best of them all. Then he offered a three-word challenge. “Prove me wrong.”
Myers spent little time on how high Smith can sing. What impresses him from the other side of the stage is how much force Smith can put behind a vocal and how consistently he can do it over a run of shows. The other quality Myers prizes comes through even if you have no idea which song is playing. As he put it, “He don’t sound like anybody else.”
Myers has heard that voice with a lot less than an arena production behind it. As Smith & Myers, the two took cover requests from fans who wanted to hear what else they could do after Shinedown’s version of “Simple Man.” One of those requests was “In the Air Tonight.” Smith recalled the session for Metal Hammer years later. It was midnight, they’d barely rehearsed the song, and the performance that made the video was their first and only take.
Myers does take the lead when the song calls for it. At Shinedown’s sold out Hershey show in June, he stepped to the front of the Giant Center stage to sing “Kryptonite” in tribute to 3 Doors Down frontman Brad Arnold. Smith took the next song, “Simple Man,” and asked the crowd to sing a chorus for their friend.
