Staind guitarist Mike Mushok dishes on Pittsburgh anecdotes, new album and tour

Back in 1999, Staind hit the road for a weekend of festival appearances, starting with a Pittsburgh show at the WXDX X-Fest at Star Lake. After playing on the secondary stage, they went to check out some of the main-stage acts, and that’s when Staind guitarist Mike Mushok became, ahem, stained.

“I remember we had gone out for the weekend to just do a couple of shows. And I didn’t pack much stuff. And I had one pair of shorts, I think,” Mushok said last week from his home in Connecticut. “… But all I remember is I didn’t look, and I stepped on a ketchup packet, and the thing squirted all the way up my leg and left ketchup stains all over my shorts. And I had to wear them the whole weekend.”

It’s a safe bet Mushok will pack more clothes on Staind’s co-headlining fall tour with Breaking Benjamin, which kicks off Sept. 10 at the Pavilion at Star Lake in Burgettstown.

This will be the 20th show in the Pittsburgh area for Staind, with Mushok recalling another memorable day at the 2004 Rolling Rock Town Fair at the Westmoreland Fairgrounds, where members of Disturbed and Finch got into a fight on stage.

“It’s so funny that you mentioned that show, because we used to get all these shirts when you’d play those things that have the lineup on it,” he said. “And I had one of those plastic bins, and I had kind of saved them. I never wore them, but I saved them because I thought it was cool.

“Well, I came home from tour once, and my son had, we have a large storage closet in the basement, and he must have been bored and went through it, so he found them and broke out all these shirts. He was actually wearing that shirt yesterday from Rolling Rock, that you mentioned, from that show.”

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Although the tour is starting in Pittsburgh, Mushok wasn’t anticipating much rust since Staind had been out on the road in April and May. That hasn’t always been the case.

“I always feel like whenever you come out of the studio and you start touring on a new record, there’s always a bit of nervousness, and you’re going out and you have new music, and you want everybody to like it,” he said. “I remember everybody being nervous about this first show that we did at a festival, and we went, we played it, and we were like, oh wow, that actually was really good. It was the next night that we were terrible.”

So Pittsburgh will get the good show?

“Yeah, hopefully. It’s the night that’s second that’s gonna suck,” he said with a laugh.

Staind, which broke big in the early 2000s on the strength of songs like “It’s Been Awhile,” “Outside” and “So Far Away,” went on hiatus in the mid-2010s, as singer Aaron Lewis focused on his solo career. Staind only played five shows between 2015 and 2020 but started touring again in 2022 and released an album, “Confessions of the Fallen,” in 2023.

Mushok, who played with Saint Asonia and Jason Newsted’s band during the hiatus, said everything feels normal after Staind’s break.

“I mean nothing had really changed before other than just Aaron wanted to do other things,” he said. “It’s that feeling you get. It’s like you get there, you sit on the bus for the first time and it’s like you never left, and you kind of just get back into that mode of what it is and that mindset. It should be good coming back to things, and it definitely feels like we just kind of kept going all along and you kind of forget that there was that large break there.”

When it came time to start “Confessions of the Fallen” — the band’s first since 2011’s self-titled album — Mushok said there was some anxiety just because it had been so long since the band had written together. But he said getting on the same page with Lewis wasn’t too hard.

“For me, it’s just kind of coming up with things that I think he’ll like, and I always look forward to his input because I feel like it’s that collaboration that really kind of helps make what we do what it is and helps make things better and him happier with it, so that’s always kind of the goal,” he said. “There was a bunch of stuff to choose from, and it really wasn’t that difficult, which was nice.”

Through their career, Staind had balanced heavier songs like “MudShovel” and “For You” alongside ballads like “It’s Been Awhile.”

“I mean, I do enjoy heavy stuff. I’m definitely more of a metalhead at heart for sure,” Mushok said. “But I played acoustic guitar growing up for years before I even owned an electric. It was kind of why I started playing guitar really originally, the folk music my parents listened to that I liked as a kid. I do enjoy that as well.

“I think it’s just kind of having some diversity in what you do and what we do. As I said, I’m a metalhead. I love listening to that, but I like a little bit of a break too sometimes. A whole record of that sometimes for me personally, I like to have a little bit of a break, so I think that’s why we also try to incorporate that a bit into what we do.”

Now that the band’s been back together for a few years, Mushok remains optimistic about the group’s future.

”I’m excited for this tour. I know that we’re trying to figure out what next year might hold, if there’s some shows involved, try to decide if we can do a new record or not. I mean, I hope we can. I think that would be great,” he said. “Right now I’m just thankful we’re working again. It’s great to be back and playing as a band and being able to do what we started, jeez, 30 years ago at this point this year. It’s great to be able to get out there and play these songs and people still show up and want to hear them.”