How Donald Trump's 'Circus' Inspires Stick To Your Guns

“I never thought we would reach the age where there would be too much to talk about!” Jesse Barnett, Stick To Your Guns frontman, begins. "The circus that this country’s leadership has become is just, it’s almost become a little bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

“I don’t just want to complain, I want to sit down and say, ‘Okay, here is the issue that I think is important, here are the consequences of this issue and now, what solution can we offer?’ Because, to me, just coming to the table and saying, ‘This sucks, that sucks,’ over and over, then you’re just as bad, you’re still part of the problem. Bring options to the table and try to bring some sort of insight that helps people have another perspective and helps their judgment on things.”

Having been constantly on the road since their last album, True View, was released in late 2017, and with tour dates still stretching out ahead of them, they're having to find inspiration wherever they can: on buses, in aeroplanes, in hotel rooms and during soundchecks.

“I sure do,” Barnett confirms. “Lyrically, I’m always coming up with little lines here and there, I’ll write it on a napkin, or speak it into my phone or whatever. We used to bring an actual recording rig on the road, to be able to write riffs and stuff. I think what [guitarists] Chris [Rawson] and Josh [James] do now is, at soundcheck they’ll come up with a riff, we’ll hit record and then when we get home they’ll put it into Pro Tools or Logic or whatever it is.

“So yeah, we’re always coming up with stuff. We never really sit down formally and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to write a song.' But the ideas are always coming.”

"We’re going to keep milking it while we still can for a while yet.”

Barnett finds that, when he finally comes off the road and comes to start work on the next record in a more formal way, he has an almost overwhelming array of words, lines and ideas in various different formats, and sorting out the good from the bad can seem like a huge task.

“I have a much bigger ideas book at home that I put them all into and try to make something of. Sometimes I look at something and I go, 'That was a horrible idea, what was I thinking?’ and I’ll remember that it was like four in the morning on the back of my tour bus or whatever where I wrote some stupid line.

“Deciding what stays and what leaves is a tough process sometimes.”

A decade and a half and six albums into their career with those ideas still flowing so beautifully and the demand for their live show across the globe still ridiculously strong, Barnett can see no end in sight for Stick To Your Guns. “It’s hard to say, but at this point I can’t really see an end, even though people are starting to get married, people are starting to have kids, I don’t know if there’s going to be a quote/unquote, ‘Ending point.’ I can see a point though where we slow down drastically. But we’re not quite there yet.

“So we’re going to keep milking it while we still can for a while yet.”