▼ Music Up From Grey Ashes Grey Daze and Chester Bennington rise again with new album The Phoenix. BY CHRIS COPLAN T here’s that cliché about how insanity is repeating the same steps and expecting new results each time. But what if you don’t care about the ending, and you’re only concerned about doing The Thing? That’s the best way to explain the mentality of Phoenix rockers Grey Daze. Back in June 2020, the band — whose current members include Sean Dowdell, Cristin Davis, and Mace Beyers — honored their fallen former frontman, Chester Bennington, by releasing Amends. (Bennington left the band in the late ’90s, and maintained a friendship and various business dealings with Dowdell through his death in July 2017). And with still more story left to tell, and legacies to further reaffirm, Dowdell and company have opted to release a follow- up, The Phoenix, on June 17. And, yes, they’re well aware of the possible backlash. “I did this for my friend and the music,” Dowdell says in a recent call. “I thought it was meaningful. That’s why we completed the record. If nobody buys the [new] record, I don’t care.” Like its predecessor, The Phoenix is culled from material written by Bennington and the band in the months before his death. And like that LP, Dowdell says the band agonized over how to move forward without tarnishing Bennington’s legacy. “It took months,” he says of the process around Amends’ release. “When he passed away, I said, ‘Okay, well, that’s over with and done.’ And then it took months. We were thinking we’d print 1,000 copies or whatever and put them out on the market for whoever.” But ultimately, the band instead chose to listen to their fans. “We’ve had fans for years asking us to put those records out,” he says. “And that’s how it started. Then once we started getting deeper into the recording process, and certain people got a chance to hear what we were doing, then they came around and were like, ‘We want to put this out and properly curate this music in a way that has a much deeper reach than just you guys doing it on your own.” The public reaction to that first record helped Dowdell and Grey Daze feel vali- dated that The Phoenix was the right choice. “I would say 99 percent of everybody 30 out there welcomed it with open arms, and were emotionally connecting to the music and loved it,” he says. If any of that negative feedback affected Dowdell, it was a perceived ignorance among some of the more verbose critics. “The only thing that bothered me was seeing the ignorance of people [who said], ‘Oh, you’re just trying to get rich off Chester’s death,’” Dowdell says. “I spent tens of thousands of dollars of my own money to make this happen, and I was already a multimillionaire when I started this process. So me trying to make money on this is the dumbest business plan ever, because there’s no money in recorded music. None.” If anything, Dowdell notes that the band’s unwavering belief in The Phoenix was not only about further honoring Bennington but striking back at some of the “nonbelievers.” “One of the things that I remember quite clearly was the last record that Chester did with Linkin Park,” Dowdell says. “He was used to that 99 percent of people loving what they did, and they had an uptick of three or four percent that didn’t like it. And that really hurt his feelings.” He added, “I think with anything, you’re going to have some people that don’t like what you’re doing. You could go on Twitter right now and tell people the sky is blue, and you’ll have five assholes that jump out and say, ‘No, it’s purple or yellow.’” Still, Dowdell explained that the first record affected him on a more personal level. The writing and arranging of Amends was a powerful reminder of the issues faced by a dear friend and collaborator. “While he and I wrote a lot of the lyrics together, I had understood certain things at the time to mean different things,” Dowdell says. “And I think I had a deeper understanding of his lyrical perspective going back into these after he had passed, and I realized that there was some real pain underlying some of these lyrics.” He adds, “Whereas in the ’90s, all the grunge bands were writing about sadness and pain. It was just the way of the world at the time, right? But to be perfectly honest, I think Chester really, really felt that sad shit, and that’s the best way to put it. I just had a different emotional understanding of where he was coming from.” Dowdell expands on those ideas, and explains that this larger creative process helped him grow both personally and artistically. “It made me feel like I didn’t under- stand the pain he was going through as much of the time,” he says. “It’s just that when you lose somebody close to you, and I don’t care who you are, you’ll always feel a little bit of guilt. Like, what could I have done better as a friend? That’s something that popped out as we as we’re going back Sean Dowdell The members of Grey Daze recording 2020’s Amends. and analyzing these lyrics on a deeper level. The one thing I’ll say is that it defi- nitely made me want to be a little bit more understanding from other people’s point of view. Everybody has their own demons that they’re fighting on any given day. I think I just had to be a little bit more open to that.” It’s even helped the band become more streamlined and well-rounded, according to Dowdell. “The ego has been taken out,” he says. “We 100 percent realize this is about Chester. We’re a lot older and wiser now. So the writing process is a lot more fun and it’s a lot more forgiving.” And a lot of that growth shows across the 10 tracks that comprise The Phoenix. For one, they had already built a kind of musical roadmap, and as a result, the follow-up felt all the more cohesive. “We took that idea and expanded on it,” Dowdell says. “So every single song was made into something completely different and more relevant musically for today’s culture. The first album was kind of learning as we go in, creating the process and finding out what worked and what didn’t. 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