'I Stayed In an Underground Bunker' — Rival Sons' Jay Buchanan Shares Unique Experience Writing His Debut Solo Album

"This is gonna sound corny, so get ready."

On Tuesday's Loudwire Nights (Feb. 3), Rival Sons' Jay Buchanan joined host Chuck Armstrong to dive into his new solo album, Weapons of Beauty, and the unique — and as he put it, "corny" — journey he embarked on to write it.

Listen to the full conversation in the player near the end of this article.

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"I stayed in an underground bunker out in the middle of the Mojave Desert for three months," he explained.

"I slept on a cot in a tiny windowless bunker alone. I lived off of a gas-powered generator."

As he recalled the experience, Buchanan said it wasn't immediately inspiring and in fact, he admitted he got bored a lot.

"I had to waste a lot of time in order to find what I was looking for," Buchanan said.

"There were so many fruitless searches and fruitless hunts. I had to sit there and grapple with this isolation and get along with the silence. I had everything I needed. I had my guitars and my instruments and I had a place to sleep. I had electricity and I had some food and water and all of that. And I brought my books with me."

Buchanan said during his time in the bunker, he began to adjust to the weirdness of turning off everything that he had grown accustomed to.

"You realize how loud the silence is," he said.

"The silence is really loud when that's all you have. I think it took me awhile to be able to wield that and to use that empty space and use that silence and attempt to play that like an instrument and to dance with it and to treat it as a collaborator."

Because of the experience, Buchanan said he holds these songs on Weapons of Beauty — his debut solo LP — with a different emotional weight than some of the other songs he's written in his career.

"These songs have a spirit of creation that is definitely different from anything I've done before," he said.

"The entire journey of making this record, it was an undertaking that for me, most of the time, was just terrifying because I was venturing out on my own. I was attempting to prove something to myself that I wasn't exactly sure of altogether. I wasn't sure I could do it."

What Else Did Jay Buchanan Discuss on Loudwire Nights?

Why he doesn't feel pressure when he writes and releases albums: "I think I'm just too, I'm too self-consumed. I just don't care. I've got music and the music means so much to me. And the power of creation means so much to me. And in the end, people's opinions about this or that, I mean, nobody knows anything. So when someone posits himself on an authority [or] an album does well, an album doesn't do well — I made my statement and there's gonna be many, many more statements after that."
What it was like being part of Back to the Beginning: "I've already played with everybody. We've been on all of the big stages. I've played to 100,000 people. I've toured with Black Sabbath for a year and a half and we went all over the world on their The End tour. And at Villa Park in Birmingham on July 5, I haven't experienced anything like that. And that's not just my time on stage ... It's the whole rest of the day. It's watching all of the bands. Each one of us, it's like we were just taking turns, each one of us being on stage for our set. All of your friends that are in the other bands, all of your heroes and all of that, they're all lining the sides of the stage watching you. We just take turns watching each other do backflips all day long."
What ran through his head when he found out Ozzy Osbourne passed away: "Immediately I was like, 'Well done.' Immediately. You could not write a better ending. Dude, you got to go to your own funeral, Ozzy. That's incredible. It's complete. It was that sort of a feeling as soon as I heard it ... Rival Sons, we have a debt to Black Sabbath, it's impossible to repay — and to Sharon [Osbourne] as well. It's just impossible to repay such a debt. When I got that news, it was like, wow. Wow. It was just a very powerful feeling, you know?"