Shinedown promises plenty of hard-rock thunder, smoke when band hits Atlanta

“Everything is kind of 360 (degrees) even though the audio is pushed to the back of the house,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that everybody in every corner of the arena was going to be able to be a part of what was going on.”

Credit: (Courtesy of Carter Louthia)

Credit: (Courtesy of Carter Louthia)

What will be going on, Smith said, is a hard-rocking show that’s “quite theatrical” in presentation with the goal that every city will have a different set list.

That goal will, Smith hopes, be met through creating seven different sections of songs that will change from show to show, ensuring that the same show won’t be done twice either in songs or their order.

Shinedown has plenty of songs from which to choose. Guitarist Zach Myers brought 41 songs to Nashville where the band rehearsed for five days. “We wrote them, we performed them all in the studio, but yeah, we had to relearn some of them,” Smith said.

Ranked as Billboard magazine’s greatest all-time mainstream rock artist, Shinedown has had each of its 32 singles in the format reach the Top 5. Twenty of those singles, from 2005’s “Save Me” to February’s “Dance, Kid, Dance,” hit No. 1, a chart record.

“‘Dance, Kid, Dance’ we’re gonna play, obviously. ‘Three Six Five’ (its companion release) we’re gonna play,” Smith said. And now there’s a third new song to play — “Killing Fields,” which was released to coincide with the mid-July launch of the tour’s summer leg.

“But we’re gonna be playing some songs that, quite frankly, we’ve never played, that people have been asking us to play for years, and some songs we have played before, but it’s been years since we’ve done them,” the singer said. “And then some (songs) we’re going to play for the very first time ever in front of an audience.”

Credit: Ebru Yildiz

Credit: Ebru Yildiz

The final rehearsal challenge for the Shinedown tour was the extensive pyrotechnics, both to see them in an arena and for Smith, Myers, drummer Barry Kerch and bassist Eric Bass to work out where they plan to be on stage when the pyro goes off.

“This is a different level of pyro, which is quite intense in and of itself,” Smith said. “We want it to be a spectacle. I think about when I was a 10-year-old kid, when I went to a show for the first time, and I saw fire, I saw pyrotechnics and the bangs and all that, and it just, like, opened this incredible world of creativity. It had a wow factor to me.” That fond memory aside, he described Shinedown’s use of pyro as next level — “like a living art piece.”

Designing the staging, ramping up the pyro, pulling out 41 songs and even adding a mascot was this year’s effort to try to ensure that Shinedown remains one of the best live hard rock bands going.

That’s been the goal since Smith put the band together in Jacksonville, Florida, in the early 2000s and toured for two straight years in support of its 2003 debut album, “Leave a Whisper.”

Moving up from supporting the likes of Van Halen and Rob Zombie, while playing smaller venues on Shinedown’s own, to headlining arenas and doing festivals, the band hasn’t let its foot off the gas for two decades.

“We’re always trying to find the other gear to the machine,” Smith said. “I’ve always told people in this business, the key to success is to never arrive. As long as you never arrive, there’s always another level to go to, We genuinely take live performance so seriously and the production so seriously that it’s a part of who we are. It’s definitely built into our DNA.”

CONCERT PREVIEW

Shinedown

7 p.m. Sunday. $45.80-$106.85. State Farm Arena, One State Farm Drive, Atlanta. ticketmaster.com.