Cold's Scooter Ward had a decision to make.
Sitting on a sandy beach in his native Florida, the singer found himself wrestling with suicidal contemplations, triggered by the dissolution of his engagement, his sister's deteriorating health, and label rejection. A crippling addiction to drugs and alcohol probably wasn't helping matters much.
"It was the worst time in my life," Ward explained. "The band was falling apart. My sister was [diagnosed] with cancer. My fiancee had left me. Our record deal had fallen apart. I was in a pretty dark place. It was either, 'Is this going to be the end, or am I going to keep writing music?' "
As he sat there weighing his options — to be or not to be — from out of nowhere and right on cue, foreboding storm clouds coated the sky and pounded the earth with a heavy rain. "When that happened, the music came back to me," Ward said. "Everything just changed. I guess you've got to be in your darkest place to come through sometimes. They always say when you get to the worst point in your life, you either turn it around or you die. I turned it around."
Ward immediately checked himself into rehab, got clean in three months' time ("I never even felt like I was awake before [rehab]"), and started writing material for Cold's fourth album, the appropriately titled The Calm That Killed the Storm.
"When I started writing the record, it just helped my life, and everything started getting better," Ward said. "By the end of the record, everything was better. Cold went through such a hard time that we made a record that gives us hope when we listen to it. It gives me hope when I listen to the lyrics. This experience just made me a stronger person."
If nothing else, Ward said the new album serves as a chronicle of the personal and professional turmoil and pain he'd endured before putting pen to paper this time around. Ward is close to finishing the record's last track and said the album is targeted for a late June release. The Calm will feature a piano ballad, "Different Kind of Pain," as well as the tracks "Back Home" and "When Angels Fly Away."
Ward said there's a "message of hope" that runs throughout the disc — which is out of character for the normally crestfallen Cold.
"It still has that dark vibe to it, but it's the most real record that I've ever done," Ward said. "With [the last album] Year of the Spider, I tried to be real, and I got there with a couple of songs, but this one is just all real. There's definitely that message of 'Just don't give up.' There's got to be something out there, and if you just hold on to it, it will come to you."
Producer Michael "Elvis" Baskette (Chevelle, Iggy Pop) was summoned to guide the band through the recording process. "We incorporated a lot of piano and a lot of strings on a few of these songs, and we brought Baskette in for the guitar sounds because we love the way he brings the heavy guitars. It's definitely the biggest record we've done yet soundwise, productionwise."
It's also Cold's first complete offering.
"Every time we've made a record, I've always had one thing wrong with it," Ward revealed. "I've always been like, 'Oh God, it's still not the record that I've always wanted to do.' But finally, with this one, we've found what we've always wanted to — a record I am 100 percent behind, that has every element of Cold we could have."
