![]() We were both like, ‘This is just so weird and so sterile’ - but it just went really good and ‘Surviving The Game’ just kind of exploded out of us. “We decided we’d get on Zoom and just write a song, which neither one of us wanted to do. It was just too hard to get on a plane,” Cooper says. Looking for Churko to play a larger role on their 11th studio album, Cooper says they planned to go write with him - but COVID forced them to scuttle their plans. Best days of my life skillet full#“Kevin has a very unique sound and I love his records,” Cooper says, adding that Churko had produced individual songs for the band before but not a full album. In creating Dominion, Skillet worked with producer Kevin Churko (Disturbed, Papa Roach, Five Finger Death Punch) and his son Kane Churko. He’s the place that I run to and that is how we survive.” “This is no fun, and it feels hopeless at times, but then when the chorus comes you are professing what you know to be true, which is that God is going to be my refuge no matter what is happening. “On ‘Refuge,’ I tried to write some really honest lyrics and my favorite line is the one that says, ‘It’s getting harder to say I’m undefeated.’ We all want to say we’re undefeated, but man, it’s getting a little bit harder now,” Cooper continues. “I’ve held onto it ever since I was a kid and, right now, we are in a time of trouble… God doesn’t tell us that we’re not going to go through hard times. He is always present in times of trouble.’ I love that scripture,” Cooper says. It says, ‘The Lord is my refuge and my strength. “I learned it when I was a kid, and it still sticks with me today. There’s something about all of those emotions that seem to resonate to people coming out of the pandemic.” “It has a feeling of unbridled chaos to it, but it’s very positive as well. “There’s something about that guitar riff in the beginning, it just made everybody feel like this is the song coming out of the gate,” Cooper says of “Surviving,” which is featured in the new Rock Band video game. “Surviving the Game” is the active rock single currently climbing the chart, and “Refuge” is the new Christian single. Stellar musicianship, insightful songwriting and Cooper’s commanding vocals have earned Skillet fans among both mainstream rock and Christian music audiences, and their label serves up singles to both demos. Now it’s actually quite popular in rock music to be positive. Some rock radio stations couldn’t wrap their head around that. Rock music was synonymous with darkness, negativity, anger and angst and we were singing all these songs about overcoming. “I sometimes laugh, because the irony is it’s that uber positivity that used to hinder Skillet because rock music was just not synonymous with positivity. “Skillet’s music lends itself to sports, video games, WWE because it really is heavy and aggressive, but it has this spirit of overcoming - you hear that in all of our lyrics,” says Cooper, who founded the band in 1996. Their songs have also been synched by WWE, Marvel, ESPN, MLB, NHL and NFL. Skillet’s 2019 album Victorious earned the band its fourth consecutive top 20 debut on the Billboard 200 albums chart. It also spawned the hit single “Monster,” which has nearly 400 million streams on Spotify. The Grammy-nominated group’s 2009 album Awake has been certified triple platinum and picked up a Billboard Music Award. Cooper and his bandmates - wife Korey Cooper on keyboards and rhythm guitar, drummer Jen Ledger and lead guitarist Seth Morrison - have long combined aggressive music with positive messages, and it’s proved to be a winning formula for the Kenosha, Wisconsin-based band. ![]()
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