Daughtry On New Music, The Rise Of AI, India and More

Last month, American rock band Daughtry released new music for the first time since their 2021 sixth studio album Dearly Beloved. The group’s latest offering is the anthemic single “Artificial.” We caught up with the band’s frontman Chris Daughtry in this exclusive interview with Rolling Stone India and talked about the new song, how AI is impacting our lives, his love for India, the group’s upcoming album and more. Read below.

You’re currently on an acoustic U.S. tour with the band, where are you right now?

I’m in Seattle and it’s been a nice day off. It’s been kind of chill, we went to Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee’s grave today. So that was pretty cool.

Have you been a fan of them?

Oh yeah, big time. The Crow was a huge part of my childhood and then of course I got into Bruce Lee after the fact actually. I obviously knew who Bruce Lee was, but I was too young when those movies came out, so I had to kind of go back and get my learn on with Enter The Dragon and Game of Death and stuff. But yeah, I’ve always been a huge martial arts fan in general though. That was a pretty cool moment today.

Your new song “Artificial” is the first piece of new music for the band in two years, what have the last two years been like for you?

A lot of touring. A lot of life, some great, some not so great and we’ve been doing a lot of writing for the new record and we’re back on tour now. So, the record is nowhere close to being finished, but once we wrap this tour up, we’ll get back in the studio and get back to it. 

Coming to “Artificial” — what can you tell me about the song itself?

Lyrically it’s very impending doom, there’s not a lot of hope lyrically in it. It’s definitely painting the worst-case scenario of artificial intelligence and we’ve all seen Terminator, you know what I mean? It’s very much kind of inspired by the idea of man creates a machine, machine destroys man, the end. Obviously, that’s the worst-case scenario.

But you know, we were kind of just in the studio talking about it and it started with casual conversations about ChatGPT and just all the things that are happening at a very rapid rate with AI and I think a couple of days later, my producer Scott [Stevens] came to the studio and was like, ‘Dude, you know how we were just talking about all this stuff that’s happening.’ He said his wife had dinner with her friends, who happened to be AI coders and it’s way worse than we thought. The stuff that’s being developed is way crazier than we thought.

It gave him this idea for this riff. And I think we wrote something about becoming artificial. Why don’t we just write the song called ‘Artificial’ and he played the riff and we instantly just started spitballing lyrical ideas. I think AI in and of itself isn’t inherently bad. Obviously, just like social media isn’t inherently bad, but I think social media can be used for good, It can be used to destroy and I think our kind of goal was to kind of just bring awareness to like, ‘Hey, this is this is happening, it’s not going anywhere. This is what could happen if we’re not responsible.’ Now mind you, I’m no pro on artificial intelligence. It’s more of an outsider’s perspective of the way I see it.

As an outsider looking in, AI has kind of entered the music world as well. There are songs being made using AI. What are your thoughts on that?

I say use it to create cures for cancer and to create new limbs or generate new organs. You know to save lives. Let’s leave art alone. Let’s not recreate someone’s voice. I’m sure Johnny Cash would be rolling over in his grave if he knew his voice was being used to sing ‘Barbie Girl.’ I think you got to draw the line somewhere.

The music video for “Artificial” is a visual treat — what was it like putting it together?

Thank you. It was a lot of fun. I had this idea loosely inspired by Terminator. Of course, it’s pretty obvious that we were inspired by that and our producer, Scott Stevens, his wife worked in film and she helped put this team together to create this vision that I had. To see it through and everybody who worked on this video who were so invested in it and creating this really cool piece of art, we’re all super proud. We used this really cool technology called Unreal Engine to kind of create the environment around us. So it wasn’t just being in front of a green screen. We got to kind of feel the vibe of this post-apocalyptic world around us. It was a lot of fun and shooting the lab scenes were probably the most fun. Just because we’re using all practical effects and it kind of reminded me of all those movies that I watched growing up like Terminator. I love all that stuff. So, I thought it was really cool to incorporate that.

You mentioned that you’re working on a new album. What can you tell me about it?

We still have a ways to go and we still have to get the guys to come in and play their parts. A lot of it’s in like demo phase right now and we had about five or six songs written before ‘Artificial’ came along. And when we wrote that it was just like, we kind of knew. It was one of those moments where we were like, this feels like this is fresh. This feels like we need to do this now and we got everybody in and recorded their parts. We leaned in really hard on getting that track done. In the past, we’ve recorded songs and then we’d be really excited about it. By the time the record would come out and we’d finally get that song out or the whole record, it feels like some of the excitement may have been lost. So, we just felt like this felt too exciting to sit on it and wait for the record to be done. Let’s put it out now and give the fans something new to kind of chew on while we’re working on the record. 

I’m not sure if you’re aware but you have a big following in India, tons of fans right from your American Idol days. Have you ever been approached to perform in India?

I did not know that we had a big fan base in India. I’ve never been. I would absolutely love to go to India. It’s one of the places that I’ve always wanted to go. Everything I’ve ever heard about it, I want to experience it for myself. I love Indian food. It’s my favorite food ever. We used to have some neighbors and they would tell us stories about India. And I was just like, ‘Oh man, this sounds so beautiful. I want to go.’ We’ve never to my knowledge had an offer to come over there. But we would absolutely love it.

How is the current run of shows on tour going?

It’s funny because we released the heaviest song of our career right as we are doing an acoustic tour. It’s full band but it’s stripped-down acoustic, and it’s been really fun and even playing ‘Artificial’ acoustic, it’s going over incredibly. It’s a very different version of it, but it’s really cool and very kind of creepy. Kind of has a Halloween vibe to it, but it’s been a lot of fun just to kind of sit down and play all these songs we’re playing. You know, a few of the songs from the first record. We’ve got about two more weeks and then we’re pretty much wrapped for the year and back to making a record.