On the road with Shinedown’s 2025 Dance, Kid, Dance tour, Brent Smith opens up about what changed for him after his mother’s death, his close friendship with Brad Arnold, and why the band keeps talking about mental health even when the conversations get heavy.
Shinedown’s 2025 tour runs on schedules, venues, and long stretches away from home. Brent Smith’s travel life is relentless—so much so that he has a pet peeve about hotels with construction outside the room, cutting into the sleep he needs to survive early call times.
“Just tell me if there is construction going on, that’s all,” the Shinedown frontman says. “I’m not staying at a Four Seasons or a Ritz Carlton all the time. I’m staying in a lot of extended stay places where I’m in walking distance to a grocery store.”
He keeps coming back to the same point: the smallest details can wreck the rhythm of a day spent on the road. Even when Smith has to be up at 6 a.m., he says his body clock shuts down at 2 a.m.—which means a bulldozer outside the window isn’t just annoying, it’s disruptive.
The band’s momentum has been steady. Alongside Barry Kerch on drums. Zach Myers on guitar. and Eric Bass on bass. Smith has spent the majority of the year touring. The first leg of their Dance, Kid, Dance tour in 2025 included 54 dates across 11 countries. Act two is underway in the US, with additional stops continuing through Australia and Europe through November.
Shinedown is also tracking the kind of chart strength that makes touring feel like more than a run of gigs. The band holds the record for the most No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, with 22.
This year’s setlist sits on top of a catalogue that has repeatedly crossed between rock subgenres and broader audiences. As 2023’s “A Symptom of Being Human” moved onto pop and alternative charts. Shinedown followed with “Three Six Five” as an equally thoughtful meditation on loss. along with the furious guitar rocker “Dance. Kid. Dance.”.
Now, both songs are part of the band’s meaty, 18-track album “Ei8ht,” Shinedown’s eighth studio release.
For Smith, the theme of time—what it takes, what it changes, what it leaves behind—comes into focus not in the arena lights, but in moments that arrived before the next date on the calendar. He calls it out directly in “Three Six Five,” singing that “a lot can happen in a year.”
In July 2025, Shinedown played Madison Square Garden for the first time. The venue—described as the pinnacle of live success—was a career milestone. It was also the first time all of the band members’ parents met.
But Smith says the night mattered far beyond the spectacle.
His mother, Patricia Ann Smith, had been on dialysis, and in Knoxville, Tennessee she cajoled her doctor into letting her make the trip. Smith recalls the doctor’s question—why go—and his mother’s answer.
“(The doctor) asked, why do you need to go? And my mom said, ‘Because my son is playing Madison Square Garden.’ And he was like, ‘Got it. Go.’”
That visit became Patricia’s first time in New York, and it would also be the last time she saw her son perform.
“I’m always nervous and have to get through the first song. But on that particular night, I walked onstage with a different attitude and I didn’t know why,” Smith says. “In my mind I was like, ‘Watch this.’ And the four of us were locked in out of the gate.”
Patricia died in January. Smith speaks openly about grief, framing it in a way that keeps his mother close while acknowledging the physical absence.
“I choose to understand that she’s not gone, per se. She’s everywhere. She’s just not physically here anymore,” he says. “I am the man I am today because of her. All of my empathy came from her and all of the essence of love that I have in my heart, she taught me that.”
Not long after he lost his mother, Smith also had to say goodbye to another person who shaped his path in rock. A few weeks after Smith lost his mother, he said goodbye to his close friend Brad Arnold, singer of Three Doors Down.
Smith credits Arnold as his teacher when Shinedown opened for the “Kryptonite” rockers 25 years ago.
“We were supposed to be on that tour two or three weeks. It wound up being nine months. Every day, man, I would ask him questions, not just about live performing, but the music industry. He never made me feel like I was bothering him. To this day, he has taught me more than anyone else.”
He describes a more personal final stretch as well. Smith says that a few months before Arnold died, the pair—who had been in texting since Arnold disclosed his kidney cancer diagnosis in May 2025—had a 2 ½-hour phone conversation.
“We were laughing and reminiscing. As soon as he spoke you could just tell that it was still him. But he was just so sick,” Smith says. “If there was ever a soul on this planet where this planet should be grateful he existed, it’s Brad Arnold.”
In the middle of that loss, Shinedown’s public message has stayed consistent. The band has never shied away from writing about mental illness and mental health conversations. spanning from their first crossover hit. 2008’s “Second Chance. ” through songs including “Get Up. ” “Monsters. ” “Daylight. ” and “A Symptom of Being Human.” Smith describes that openness as something fans can meet without fear.
“We’re very approachable,” Smith says. “I walk around in shorts and a T-shirt and at set time at 9 o’clock I turn it on because you know, it costs a lot of money to go to concerts now and you’re going to get every ounce of me for those two hours.”
He says Shinedown represents “two decades of a band not afraid to talk about mental health,” and he likes that fans “don’t feel like there is a barrier.”
Sometimes the conversations turn heavy, and Smith doesn’t pretend they don’t. Still, he frames his role in simple terms when a fan credits the band with saving their life.
“If somebody says to me, ‘You saved my life,’ I will say to them, ‘I didn’t save your life. YOU saved your life’,” he says. “All we did was maybe help you understand that the world is much cooler with you in it.”
There’s a through-line running from hotel windows disturbed by construction. to arenas like Madison Square Garden. to grief that arrives and won’t be scheduled out of existence. Smith’s tour life keeps moving—act two is already underway in the US. with stops extending through Australia and Europe through November—yet the emotional work keeps catching up. song by song. conversation by conversation.
Shinedown Brent Smith Dance Kid Dance tour Ei8ht Madison Square Garden Patricia Ann Smith Brad Arnold Three Doors Down kidney cancer mental health Mainstream Rock Airplay