Armored Saint's John Bush Discusses the Significance of 'Emotion Factory Reset' Album Title

There are times a title just presents itself perfectly and for Armored Saint's John Bush, Emotion Factory Reset not only encapsulates their latest album well, but is also reflective of their overall process.

Speaking with Full Metal Jackie on her weekend radio show, Bush credited Phil Sandoval with providing the title and shared how well it seems to fit.

"For me personally, I feel like it encompasses a couple things. Number one is I think Armored Saint's music is quite emotional. We can touch on lots of different feelings and obviously we can be powerful and angry, but we could also kind of get into a melancholy state with music that we've made and ballads that we've written as well as just different emotions can come out by the listener by listening to what we're doing," shared Bush.

He then added, "Then I kind of thought of the way we function sometimes is like a factory and I say that in the most endearing of ways 'cause everybody's got their job. There's the drums. Kyle's, he does drums and we do the bass and then the guitar players bring their thing. And it's almost like an assembly line if you're like the Ford Plant and I like that because it's efficient and then everybody's contributing and it feels like this machine that's kind of working as a well-oiled machine.

So I like the idea of a factory and it sounded cool to me. And then the reset, when every time you're making a new record, you're kind of regrouping, resetting, trying to reevaluate what you wanna do for something new. Kind of looking back, but also like Joey [Vera] says, shedding the skin and it's time to move onwards."

Within the chat, Bush digs deeper into the Armored Saint creative process, picks which song from the new album challenged him the most, discusses the power of music as a cathartic platform and he also reflects on 40 years of the Delirious Nomad album.

Elsewhere within the chat, Bush discusses his recent "John Bush Plays Anthrax" dates and clarifies his love for doing that on his own terms while appreciating the support of his farmer bandmates. And Bush concludes the interview by discussing what may come next with his other band Category 7.

Check out more of the chat below.

It's Full Metal Jackie and it is always a pleasure to welcome back a friend of the show. Glad to have Mr. John Bush with us. For Armored Saint fans, we're psyched to have our first new music in a while, a new album called Emotion Factory Reset. John, you talked about approaching this album, any album for that matter, like a shedding of the skin. Obviously, the band has a distinct sound, but does approaching it from a clean slate mentality put more or less pressure on you to reach a certain bar of quality that Armored Saint has always brought?

I don't think it increases any kind of pressure because we're making music and we're making heavy metal music, hard rock music and it should be fun. Here we are four decades later still making albums, so we're pretty fortunate and that's the way I kind of see it.

That being said, we kind of feel like we have our style and I think the goal is to always try to push ourselves and push our style. I'm not sure exactly which direction. It kind of is open to whatever we wanna do, we can do it. I've always said that.

I kind of feel like we can do whatever we want within reason of course. At some point somebody might say, "Okay, what are you doing? I don't know if I can relate to this." But it really is rare when that happens. And I think that we just have this broad mentality that we, we can do whatever we want.

So based on that, I think we open the door and we start working on tunes, writing and see what happens. And that stuff kind of just happened naturally and organically. Next thing we know, we have a bunch of songs and I think the songs are pretty good.

So I'm really proud of this record and I think we kind of built on what we've started the last 20 years in particular and we keep going.

Armored Saint, "Hit a Moonshot"

It's Full Metal Jackie. John Bush on the show with us. We're talking about the new Armored Saint album. It is titled Emotion Factory Reset and I understand that comes from Phil Sandoval. Can you talk about the title, where it comes from and how that applies to working in a band dynamic?

When we started working on tunes for this record, Phil told me, he goes, "I have some lyrical ideas." I was like, "Okay, send them to me." I'm open-minded, of course. I'm not over here trying to hoard. "I write the lyrics and nobody else can contribute." That's not the mindset at all. Bring something in. If it's cool and it's jiving with what I'm doing, it'll only embellish it. So that was kind of the mentality I usually have.

He wrote some stuff and I was like, "Oh, I like that. I like that with those words. That sounded kinda cool." So I was working on the song "Close to the Bone," which was our first single, and it seemed to work with the second bridge of that song, which is funny 'cause that song has two bridge parts. I just thought it sounded cool and it kind of changed the dynamic of the song in that particular part. So when we were going back and kind of reevaluating some of the lyrics and seeing if anything would work as a title, that was one of the lines I liked the best.

For me personally, I feel like it encompasses a couple things. Number one is I think Armored Saint's music is quite emotional. We can touch on lots of different feelings and obviously we can be powerful and angry, but we could also kind of get into a melancholy state with music that we've made and ballads that we've written as well as just different emotions can come out by the listener by listening to what we're doing. It can make you feel like you're energetic or it can make you feel bluesy. We touch on a lot of emotions.

Then I kind of thought of the way we function sometimes is like a factory and I say that in the most endearing of ways 'cause everybody's got their job. There's the drums. Kyle's, he does drums and we do the bass and then the guitar players bring their thing. And it's almost like an assembly line if you're like the Ford Plant and I like that because it's efficient and then everybody's contributing and it feels like this machine that's kind of working as a well-oiled machine.

So I like the idea of a factory and it sounded cool to me. And then the reset, when every time you're making a new record, you're kind of regrouping, resetting, trying to reevaluate what you wanna do for something new. Kind of looking back, but also like Joey [Vera] says, shedding the skin and it's time to move onwards.

So I thought all those things worked really well and in the end that was the title that everyone agreed upon.

John, one of the first songs that we heard from this new record was "Close to the Bone," and I say this with a smile. Got anything you need to get off your chest?

It's actually was an idea that Tracy, Joey Vera's wife, who's the head of the label, said that Joey holds things too close to the bone. It was just a conversation we were having one night just shooting the breeze. And so I was like, "Well, that's a cool title." And so Joey kept saying, "Well, maybe we should write a song with that title."  It's a little bit of how he is. And I was like, "Yeah, great."

So then I kinda tried to expand on it and I was like maybe in this world and society that we live in you have to function with people and sometimes you have to deal with people that you don't like or you don't quite see eye to eye with. So how do you do that? Because it's a challenge for people and it's a challenge in a band. We get along great.

Armored Saint's been together for over 40 years off and on and we've known each other since we were little kids for the most part, which is extremely rare. But it's not all wine and roses. We have some beasts. We have some issues. We have things that we have to try to iron out. So I think that's kinda stands for the rest of the people in the workforce. They have to function and then sometimes they have to deal with people that they aren't the biggest fans of.

So I thought it was a cool topic for a song and went for it.

And how great is it to have the platform of music to work through things, even trying to take the higher ground with someone who gets under your skin a bit?

Absolutely. All this stuff is very cathartic and it's helpful to write songs. I don't know where I'd be actually without being a songwriter and a person making music. I don't wanna think about where I'd be. But the positive is that this has been really helpful and that's why I love making music and that's why I love writing lyrics.

I still feel like I can actually do it pretty well, which is great. Knock on wood, I don't have too many writer's blocks. Hopefully that is the way it will be for my whole career, but I still really enjoy writing lyrics. Really the big challenge always is trying to make sure that you don't repeat yourself. And that's not easy to do when you've been making records for as long as we have. And I've been writing songs not only in this band, but in other bands.

The challenge is to just make sure not, that you're not like, "Did I do that already? Wait a minute. That melody sounds familiar. Wait, did I use that word? Shoot. I gotta try something else." I'm always trying to really push myself and I think that stands for the band as well. You were always trying to kind of build on our sound and I think we did that.

It's crazy we're a band that started in the '80s, but here we are making a record in 2026. And it sounds like a record in 2026, but it still sounds like Armored Saint, so that's the beauty.

Armored Saint, "Close to the Bone"

John, at this point in your career, you're a very well-established vocalist. You've worked with the guys for years. But part of the fun of creating music is keeping it challenging. Was there a song on this record where the musical idea pushed you either as a vocalist or pushed you creatively to a place that felt new and challenging for you?

I'll take the song "Buckeye." A lot of people are talking about that particular tune. It was one of the first ones we wrote. It's a really cool song. It's the closest that we've come to a ballad on this record. It has this cool slow intro where I'm singing and then has the same kinda outro part where it's the same part, but it's the out of the song. Then the body of the song is this heavy, kinda groovy, almost Zeppelin-y kinda thing. Slide guitar solo, which Jeff played really well. It's really cool.

It kinda shows a little different light of the band again, but it's still powerful and heavy. And it was a personal song for me because it was when my daughter decided to go off to college. She chose a school in Ohio and I'm super proud of her and real excited, but had some anxiety and sadness, associated with it as well. I wanted to try write something in conjunction with her being in the state of Ohio. Of course, I've been to Ohio many, many times, all the various cool cities —Cleveland, Columbus, you name it. Cincinnati.

So I was like, "Oh, you know what? Let's do something in conjunction with the state." So, I thought of the title "Buckeye," which is, the famous tree of the state. And it being kind of a shadow and a shade over her, kind of watching over her while she was gone.

So it was just all real personal. I don't mind writing personal stuff. But I also try to kind of keep it in a way where it's slightly ambiguous where the listener can relate to it on its own, on their own terms. But yeah, it was cool. It's the kind of song that when I played it back for my wife and my daughter, we were crying. So it touched on a serious emotion and she's done amazingly and it's just really cool to have that connection with music. That's what it's all about.

Armored Saint, "Buckeye"

At this point, Armored Saint have toured the world over several times. There's more European dates coming up this summer. As a veteran band, do you find you have stops where you like to give yourself a little more time, take a few days, explore or even think about revisiting when you're not on tour? What have become some of your stops that you always look forward to returning to and what makes them special?

Well, we love Europe. Armored Saint can never Europe enough and I love the European crowds and obviously festivals in the summer are always amazing and we're playing some of those this year with Alcatraz and Primal Scream among a few others. We're doing Stone Dead Festival in England for the first time.

We love going to the Netherlands. That was the first place we ever played in Europe. It's always just fun to go there and the European crowds are just very passionate. Not that Americans aren't, but it's just different. It's always cool to just play in front of people who are listening to your music across the ocean. So to me, I'll never take that for granted.

READ MORE: Armored Saint's Joey Vera and John Bush Discuss the Band's Longevity

My wife and I would actually use to do things a lot where at the end of the tour she would kinda meet me for the last couple dates and then we would go on an adventure. We actually did that quite often. We went to Russia once. We went to Italy a few times. Or we stayed in the country that we were in, like France and Spain as well. So we always have a great time doing that.

I haven't talked to her about this upcoming tour yet, if we should plan that. But we did that a lot and it was fun. I embrace the world as one of the beautiful things about being in a band.

To me, it's my college education 'cause Armored Saint was touring when we were like 21 years old and we're going out opening up for Quiet Riot and Whitesnake in arenas when we were first touring and we were like, "Wow, is, this is pretty awesome."

We had a dose of humility not too long after that and like, "Okay, it's not all gonna be this." But we were fortunate and like I said, that was kind of like my college education, so that's what taught me a lot about life and culture and the world and I love that stuff. That's the, the beauty of being in a band.

John, we have now passed the 40th anniversary of the Delirious Nomad album, but I know you've been digging into that a little more while touring. Four decades is a lot of time for perceptions to change. Looking back and having brought back some of the material, what are your thoughts now on that music, who you and the band were at the time and what does the lens of 40 years do to how you feel about the record?

Well, that's a cool record. It was kind of a rebellious record. March of the Saint  had a certain style to it and it was like when we were very first coming out and being this band and at that time we were all wearing the armor outfits that we wore in the early stages, which I look back on and get a chuckle with. But we started rebelling against what was happening pretty early on, for better or worse.

That kinda showed up a lot in Delirious Nomad and we started kind of taking chances with that particular record and writing songs that were not just like your standard rock song. Songs like "Can You Deliver" from March of the Saint and the title track are that. I love those songs. But with Delirious we said, "You know, we're gonna kinda push the boundaries a little bit," and that kinda got the ball going I think for the rest of our career. So we ended up pushing ourselves and writing songs like "Aftermath," which is like one of the most epic songs that we ever play live and songs like "Over the Edge" which is very different from a lot of the things that were on March of the Saint.

One of my favorites is the song "In the Hole." These are deep tracks, some of them. But it was funny 'cause the record company at that time were like, "Wait, you don't have another 'Can You Deliver' on this album? Where's 'Can You Deliver'?" And we're like, "Nah, nah, we're not doing that. This is our second album." So was it the right choice? Probably not.

But in the end, that record stands on its own and to this day a lot of fans think that's their favorite record. So sometimes you make decisions and they're not always the best business decisions, but they can stand the test of time and that record has.

John, last year you had the very special John Bush Playing Anthrax shows, and I see you're also doing that this year at Milwaukee Metal Fest. With those first dates now in the book,  how was that experience for you revisiting that part of your musical life, and is that something you'd like to do more of?

Yeah, it was really amazing actually. It was cool. We played three shows, LA, outside of Chicago, and New York. I finally did it 'cause I've been talking about it for the longest time and I was really happy that I did. And the Category 7 guys were the band that played with me and those guys are incredible musicians.

And so we brought it to the public and people were very excited, especially fans of Anthrax from the '90s, which those are the years that I was really in the band. I went into the zeros and we made We've Come For You All in '03. So a little bit into the zeros. But it was really those '90s years that a lot of people discovered Anthrax. Of course everybody's always gonna connect with the '80s 'cause that's when the band really blew up, and that's extremely valid, but a lot of people did find the band in the '90s and that's when I was in the group.

So playing those songs live, it was real emotional. A lot of people probably felt like they were never hearing some of those tunes again. And so it was cool to play them and play some deep tracks as well. I would love to do more shows.

We're doing Milwaukee Metal Fest thanks to Jamey Jasta and it's gonna be fun. And Armored Saint's playing the day before, so it's gonna be a busy weekend for John Bush. And I'm looking forward to it. But I would love to go to Europe of course with that and play at least some sporadic dates. I don't wanna bite off more than I can chew 'cause I don't wanna take the specialness out of it.

So I wanna keep it cool and I want it to be something that's like, "Oh, he's doing that," and that's fun and, and people are excited instead of like, "Yeah, I've announced six months of dates." Plus I just don't know if I could do it really. I've got too many other things going on. So fitting this stuff in together has been challenging. But absolutely, I would like to do some more shows and again, playing those tunes. It was cool. It was real, like I said. You could see people's smiles on their faces when they would hear certain songs and that's what it's all about.

John, to some extent there will always be a connection to Anthrax, but I was wondering if any of the guys reached out or had anything to say about you doing those performances. Was there any input?

Charlie [Benante] came to the Chicago show, and St. Charles and Frankie [Bello] came to the New York show, and Scott [Ian] was alluding to ... he goes, "Well, maybe I could be another guitar player." And I was like, "But I mean, these are your songs. You can do whatever you want. You can be as involved or you can be not involved at all."

At the end of the day I kinda did it 'cause I felt like I had to do it, quite frankly. But again, those guys, it's their music. They wrote it.  Scott had tons of lyrics and vocal ideas and stuff.

Something recently came out with an interview I did and this is a perfect opportunity to explain myself. I think somebody got misinterpreted what I said and I suggested that I was saying that maybe we should go out as the three singer thing, which Helloween has been doing and I think what they're doing is great and it's really cool. And I would embrace that idea. I think it's a great idea. But it's not like I'm saying, "Hey, let's do this," 'cause I'm quite content of just doing what I just did.

So I want it to be clear that I'm happy doing John Bush sings the songs of Anthrax by myself with The C7 guys. But if that idea came up and the guys wanted to do it, then that's great. But it wasn't me pushing that narrative here. I just wanted that to be clear. And there's no better place to do it than on your show, Jackie.

That being said, it's all been great and those guys are super supportive and they probably miss playing those songs. Charlie said he got melancholy a couple times during the show. And that some people slept on those records. It was very complimentary.

So again, they put a lot of their heart and soul into, that material when we were writing it, recording it on tour with it, doing interviews with it. So everybody's invested in it as well.

John, obviously Armored Saint is front and center for you at the moment, but where do things stand for with Category 7 and what does the rest of 2026 look like for you?

I'm getting some push from Larry, our manager, and some of the guys about working on some new material and I've started to do that. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of making a new record, and especially if it would make it feel like that was not just a one and done thing.

I think that there's a lot of great ideas there. Sometimes for me, what I just try to convey is I need to get some stuff out of my brain so I can put new stuff in my brain so I can just come from a fresh perspective. The last thing I wanna do is go, "Yeah, let's make a new record," and let me just write a bunch of songs and not really give it the energy that it deserves.

And even though I sometimes have taken a long time in the making records in my career,  the records show in the end and I really believe that most that I've done is great. So I think in the end it's all about the quality and not really having all these records and people going, "Yeah, most of them are mediocre." So you wanna give it everything you got.

So that's where my mind is. But I've been writing some stuff and it would be cool to put out a new C7 record. When? That I can't answer.

Our thanks to John Bush of Armored Saint for the interview. The band's Emotion Factory Reset album is currently available. Stay up to date with the band through their website, Facebook, X and Instagram accounts. Find out where you can hear Full Metal Jackie's weekend radio show here.

Below, check out John Bush's 5 favorite albums from when he was a teenager.