In a new interview with Donny Fandango of the St. Louis radio station 105.7 The Point, SHINEDOWN singer Brent Smith and guitarist Zach Myers addressed the fact that the band's upcoming album, "Ei8ht", contains 18 songs, which is almost enough for a double LP. Brent said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I think overall, the idea was that we just kept writing, and when we felt like we were in a place that it felt complete... What's the saying about songwriting and putting a record out? It's, like, you don't ever finish it; you just run out of time."

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Added Zach: "Yeah, yeah. That's basically what happens. That was what happened the last three records, for sure. I think that we just kind of knew that these songs were supposed to be on this record, and, again, we kept writing. And that was kind of the main thing for us."

Brent continued: "The biggest thing, too, was the fact that, like, last year, we have to look at... So we're always taking a step back to look at the peripheral. We have a lot of people in our crew that are on retainers, because they're the best in the business. But also, too, as we're developing certain things, you have these timeframes that go by where you're off the road, but you need to facilitate, what's the next visual aspect, the next sonic aspect of things. So we knew that we weren't gonna be able to get a record completely finished before we actually started to release music and/or put a completely different stage together, which Zach did.

"Coming off of 'Planet Zero', we decided that we were gonna release these singles. We knew of the four," Smith explained. "'Searchlight' was actually a surprise, releasing that last year. And then, obviously, with the announce of the album this year, 'Safe And Sound', which is out currently, we just decided to release singles last year, but it was always gonna be a part of this album. But also, Zach built a show from the ground up, which was not an easy feat. We all work with him on it, but a lot of times he has to put it in motion… But on top of that also, I will tell you this. Of the years we've been doing this, it doesn't really have to do with the fact that this is the most current body of work. Me personally, I'm the most proud of this album, of any of them. There's a difference in writing songs or putting singles out, and then artists that still understand that the album is king, or queen, however you wanna look at it. And we still make albums, man. There's a lot of work that went into this. This is a record that took a year and a half to make."