Superstar singer/songwriter Kane Brown joins host Mike Adam this week for a special Audacy Check In from the Hard Rock Hotel New York, to discuss his brand new album, ‘The High Road,’ family life as a father of three, and plenty more.

Country-crossover superstar Kane Brown just dropped his fourth studio album, 'The High Road,' on January 24, featuring 18 tracks including his hit “Miles On It” with Marshmello, as well as the previously released singles, “Fiddle In the Band,” “I Can Feel It,” “Gorgeous,” and "Backseat Driver," and the duets “Body Talk" and "Do Us Apart" with his wife, Katelyn Brown.

“I think Country music is just getting a lot of cool, new elements to the music that's getting added,” Kane tells us, “plus the storytelling. There's a lot of cool artists in Country music that's really stepping out, I'd say.”

Now a proud father of three, Kane says aside from 'The High Road,' his kids “will listen to anything. I would say recently, it's been like Dubstep ‘Wheels on the Bus,’ and when that comes on, I usually go crazy too.” His wife, Katelyn, is “a huge R&B fan,” he adds, so the little ones have been getting exposed to “big voices in general… Whitney Houston, anybody with a crazy big voice is what she's trying to get them to listen to… and then of course the Disney princesses.”

Kane says he and Katelyn are also attempting to get the kids to watch the classic flicks they grew up with as well. “I'll be like, ‘This was daddy's favorite movie,’ and then Kate will show them her favorite movies. The funniest story I have is, Kate's deathly afraid of ‘E.T.,’ and so I told my kids about ‘E.T.,’ and so now they love ‘E.T.’ and they've just been walking around going, ‘E.T. phone home!’” Luckily for everyone, play-dates in the Kane household never seem to be too far off. “[In] Country music, everybody has a kid,” Kane laughs. “It’s just a big family.”

With his new record now on shelves, Kane is getting set to hit the road on his 2025 'The High Road Tour' which kicks off on March 13 in San Diego, CA and wraps on July 13 in Chicago, IL. Along for support on select dates with him will be Mitchell Tenpenny, Scotty McCreery, Dasha, and Ashley Cooke. Tickets are on sale now... Click HERE for a full list of tour dates.

Don't miss Mike Adam's full Check In with Kane Brown above, and stay tuned for more conversations with your favorite artists right here on Audacy. Plus, follow along with Kane Brown Radio and more on the free Audacy app.

Words by Joe Cingrana, Interview by Mike Adam

Shinedown frontman Brent Smith joins host Abe Kanan today for a special Audacy Check In, filling us in on the band's 2025 plans, including their upcoming live dates scheduled for this spring alongside Bush and Beartooth, and their double dose of brand new singles released today (1/24) -- "Dance Kid Dance," and "Three Six Five."

Shinedown is kicking off the new year with new music and an impressive touring itinerary, after just revealing their 30-city Dance, Kid, Dance Tour -- featuring guests Bush on the summer dates and Beartooth in the spring -- scheduled to make stops in most major markets including Boston, Detroit, Nashville, New York, Seattle, Atlanta, and more before wrapping up at the end of August.

First touching on the two new tracks the band just offered up, “Three Six Five” Brent tells us, “We kind of felt like it definitely had a bit more tempo than maybe the last song that people were familiar with -- maybe the more mainstream leaning, Pop leaning-type songs. So, we kind of bumped up the BPMs a little bit on that. And ‘Dance Kid, Dance,’ we just went to the wall with that.”

“It's interesting,” he explains. “I had a friend of mine the other day say to me, ‘Are you a rock band? Are you a metal band? Are you an Alternative band? Are you a Pop… what are you?’ And I'm like, ‘We're just Shinedown.' We play in a big sandbox. We've always been a genre-bending band, because we're inspired by a lot of different styles and we're constantly evolving. We felt like the right move with the first new material that people would hear from us, that we gave them two sides of us.”

“I think along the way people started to get pigeonholed,” Smith adds, “or they started using boxes, or ‘stay in your lane,’ or you know… ‘You're only this genre.’ When you expand your palette, sonically or what have you, you're just trying to reach as much of the audience as you can. Some days you feel like you want to throw down and rock, some days you're a little bit more emotional, but that's the beauty of music, man. It constantly evolves and the only thing that we've ever done in this band is, anybody from anywhere at any time we wanted them to be able to know that Shinedown has a lot of peaks and valleys -- kind of like a roller coaster ride, but there's something for everyone.”

As the band gets ready to hit the road on their 2025 Dance, Kid, Dance Tour, Brent, obviously a fan of their tour partners Bush growing up, revealed that he had recently been on a call with frontman Gavin Rossdale “just kind of reintroducing ourselves to one another. We met a while back and we really hadn't had a chance to connect, but I got to give a lot of credit to Zach Myers and Shinedown for Bush coming on this tour. He really was like, ‘Man, it would be amazing if we could get them for this!’ And then obviously having who we think is the epitome of the fearless female outlaw, Morgan Wade, is coming out on this tour as well, so there's a lot of diversity. But Bush specifically, having a 30-year anniversary for ‘Sixteen Stone,’ also I think the 20-year for ‘Razorblade Suitcase.’ I might be getting those confused, but they have this kind of nostalgia era coming into their new record where there's still this band that is very much very current, and they they're just a force to be reckoned with.”

Making their way back to the new releases, “There's so much wrapped up,” Brent says in “Three Six Five” -- “That one really took hold very quickly. There was a lot of loss last year, personally in our families, and friends of ours that it was their time, and none of us know when it's our time. Our fanbase over the years have really talked about how our music and the songs that we write really helped them at times when they're going through difficulty with what their daily lives can be and how Shinedown is kind of like a security blanket in a way.”

“It's very emotional when I think about it, but we've always bee ...

Joining host Abe Kanan for a special Audacy Check In is Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix, giving us details on what's next for the group as they kick off their 'INFEST' 25th anniversary worldwide celebrations with brand new music.

Papa Roach is currently on the U.K. and European leg of their worldwide 'Rise Of The Roach Tour' alongside Rise Against, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their iconic breakthrough album 'INFEST' -- and the band just dropped their first new single of 2025, "Even If It Kills Me."

The band's 2023 ballad "Leave A Light On," made in collaboration with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) for their 'Talk Away the Dark' campaign was a major accomplishment, "one of the big ones for us," Shaddix tells us. “’Scars’ was another one that was really big for us. ‘Scars’ went multi-format as well, but yeah, man, ‘Leave A Light On’ has been one of the biggest ones in years for us… and it's purpose-driven music. But you know, when we zig, then we gotta zag -- this is the perfect zag.”

“It's just got such a cinematic feel to it, and it's just got the big riffs that we are known for, and it's got a hooky chorus,” Shaddix explains of the new track. “I really love the chorus, and it's just one of those songs that when I heard the demo, when the band wrote the music, I just instantly picked up the phone, I called Tobin [Esperance] and I'm like, ‘Dude… I don't even have to think twice on this one, it's go time on this track.’ When we land on those moments, when we're making music, when I just know there's an inner-knowing, there's something magic in that and it always sets a tone for what's to come and what we're gonna write after that.”

“We kicked it off with this one and it just was so inspired. It was the first song that we wrote after we had been touring on our last album, ‘Ego Trip,’ and it was the first one that we went back into the studio,” Jacoby adds. At that point, the decision was made: “'Let's start writing music again,'” he says. “It seems like when we've kind of been out there working and playing songs live, and been out on tour, and hadn't been writing new music in a while… the levee breaks, you know, and that's what happened when we wrote that song -- and we're so proud of it. Just wait till you see the music video for this one ‘cause it's leaps and bounds levels up of what we've done lately with our music videos, and I'm so excited about this one.”

As far as a new album on the way, Shaddix tells us the band had been working in the studio throughout 2024 on a bunch of music, “and we have songs in a lot of different states. There's songs that are completely finished, we have other songs that are like verses and choruses, and we gotta write maybe a bridge or get back there and kind of retweak them and work them. There's another couple songs that are just like acoustic guitar and vocal, and it's like, ‘All right, this one's gonna be a banger. We just gotta go in there and like ‘bandify’ the song. So, we have a ton of material demoed out. Throughout this year, we're just gonna keep jumping back into the studio and finishing up those pieces.”

Jacoby says rather than drop everything at once, he’d prefer to release music throughout the year. “It's going to lead up to an album eventually, whether it's the end of 2025 or early 2026,” he says. “There will be a new Papa Roach album… the music we're making right now is very inspired and it's got us all pumped up. When you go back in the studio, you just don't know what's gonna come, and after we wrote ‘Even If It Kills Me,’ I'm just like, ‘Oh. It's on! Let's go!’”

Now celebrating 25 years since their debut album 'INFEST,' and three decades together as a group, “We have definitely come a long way since 1993,” Jacoby admits. “Over the last six months I've kind of been diving back into the old, early releases of Papa Roach ‘cause I just was doing some purging of things from my h ...

You might not know it, but Amy Allen’s songs have been stuck in your head all year. With songwriting credits on tracks like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” “Please Please Please,” and “Taste,” and actually every other 'Short n’ Sweet' track, as well as Tate McRae’s new single “Two Hands,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “scared of my guitar,” and Justin Timberlake’s “Selfish,” just to name a few, Amy has had an undeniably massive year, and she checked it with Audacy's Bru to chat all about.

Recapping how 2024 has been for her, and what it’s been like to write songs so many people have positively responded to, Amy expressed, “It has been insane, but it's been very fun. And I've gotten to travel a lot for work this year, which has been amazing and really inspiring to be in so many different locations and writing there with friends and collaborators that I love. It's just always like a cherry on top to be able to make music that you love and then also have the world react to it in a positive way, and other people love it as well.”

On top of all her success with songwriting, Amy also dropped her solo self-titled debut album this year. Opening up about her own personal sound, Amy noted, “I grew up on a lot of Classic Rock and then also being a child of the 90s, I fell in love with like Flaming Lips and then for songwriters, I've always loved Dolly Parton and John Prine, so it's very singer-songwritery. But it also has some more Rock elements and then it also goes a little bit into experimental like some electronic bits. But I think the storytelling is like… the heart of music for me and what I love to do the most.”

Sharing why now felt like the right time to put out music of her own, Amy said, “I always had been in bands growing up, like ever since I was 9 years old… And then when I started writing for other people like 7 years ago, I really fell in love with the collaboration process and making songs for and with other artists. So my own music kind of went on the back burner as I made this conscious decision to get better at songwriting. And then I think last year at some point I just realized that it makes me a better songwriter for other people to keep writing for myself.”

“I had just accumulated this like body of work of songs that I loved and they felt really poignant to me, and like an artist statement kind of, and I never really felt like that about a body of work of my own before. So I just felt like, you know, why the f*** not, like just go for it.”

“I love these songs,” Amy added, “and I think it's important for me as a creative to not only be giving my love of music away to other artists all the time, but also to make some just for myself. It keeps me grounded and why I do this. So yeah, it was a very cathartic fun process.”

Amy shared that nerves weren’t really present in the choice of putting out her own work, because she took all the pressure off of it. Unlike when she works with other artists that have massive profiles and this expected response to a lot of the songs, when it comes to her own music, that’s not what Amy expects.

Plus, having her co-written tracks become smash hits, heard on the radio and all over the world, is already fulfilling that part of her life. “So I can totally kind of remove any type of response from my own music that I make for myself, because I already have that part being fulfilled by songs I write with other people.” So putting emphasis on how it's received, "nerves didn’t play much into it."

“It felt good to just put out something that I like and be like… it doesn't matter if anybody besides my mom streams this song… So it was a very freeing place to be creating, and it just makes me a better songwriter all around.”

Her five 2025 GRAMMY nominations including Song of the Year for “Please Please Please," Songwriter of the Year, Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album for her work on 'Short n’ Sweet,' plus a nod for Song Wri ...

Joining host Abe Kanan today for a special Audacy Check In, Neil Sanderson of Three Days Grace is here to talk about the band's brand new single "Mayday," their 2024/2025 plans after reuniting with singer Adam Gontier, and more.

After first teasing fans that an important announcement was on the way, Canadian rockers Three Days Grace revealed they would be reuniting with original vocalist Adam Gontier following a decade away along with co-founders Neil Sanderson on drums, Brad Walst on bass, Matt Walst continuing his vocal and guitar duties, and lead guitarist Barry Stock who joined the band in 2003.

Today, fans get the first taste of what's on the 3DG horizon with their first single of 2024, "Mayday." "Sometimes life is turbulent," Matt Walst told us of the new song's inspiration, "but beyond the clouds is blue skies. So, just keep going."

“First of all, I feel just gratitude for being at this point in my career,” Neil tells Abe at the start of their chat. “We've been doing this almost 25 years, and just to have so much excitement about the new music and, you know, we were able to pull this off, put it together, all good vibes. We don't look back, we only look forward and it's gonna be just bigger and better than it's ever been at this point. I'm in my 40s… it's like, ‘Damn, let's go!’”

With Adam back in the band, 3DG will now have dual singers he explains. “It's kind of crazy to think that we have this huge chapter with Adam and then this massive chapter with Matt and with like 17 number 1 singles thanks to people like you and people that care about the music and the fans… We've got all these songs that were really successful at Rock radio and now we can just play them all any way that we want. I have envy for the singers, because they only have to sing half the show. I still got to play drums the whole damn time."

On the new single, “Mayday,” both singers are featured. “At first it was like we didn't know how we were gonna kind of like slice it all up and who was going to do what,” Neil remembers, “as we first started sitting down and writing new stuff and trying things out and experimenting. As soon as each guy kind of laid their thing in, it was like, ‘Oh man, this is deeper than we would have thought. We played to each singer's strengths and they didn't try to be anything that they're not. It just creates this completely new dynamic, a new facet to the sound.”

“I did see them at one point, like rock-paper-scissors to see who's going to sing the next line, which was kind of funny, but that's how naturally organic it happened,” he adds. “It wasn't forced at all. We started thinking about bands like Pink Floyd back in the day that had two singers and they were both completely different characters with different voices -- but that's part of the magic with it. So, we just really leaned into that.”

The impetus to get Adam back in the band he says started with simple conversations. “A lot of the stuff on the Internet over the years is like all this bad blood and stuff, and I think a lot of people made that up in their mental cinema… We were kind of like, ‘Stuff happens.’ The thing about being in a band is, it's like being in a marriage with three other people. So things happen, people go different ways, people have different life directions and stuff. 13 years ago, we kind of came to a crossroads where that became a major factor, but all this time later, it just made sense to investigate what it would be like to make this thing that would be bigger than better than anything we've ever done.”

After performing guest vocals with them at a concert and seeing the crowd’s reaction, “We're like, ‘Let's sit around with some guitars and see if we can be creative together because that was the only thing that mattered,” he says. “We need to be able to vibe out; it's like we could pull a stunt or something, but that that's not what we wanted to do. He’s coming ba ...

Joining host Kevan Kenney for a special Audacy Check In on the release day of their 2024 comeback album, FROM ZERO, the members of Linkin Park are with us to talk about the brand new record, upcoming world tour, and more.

Mike Shinoda, Dave “Phoenix” Farrell, Joe Hahn, and Emily Armstrong join KROQ host Kevan Kenney today while currently in Bogota, Colombia celebrating the release of Linkin Park's 2024 album, FROM ZERO, and bringing their brand new live show to all corners of the globe.

“It's very rare to play a new spot and it came up somehow on maybe Twitter or somewhere, but the last time we had played a new show I think was in Hungary on maybe the last tour cycle,” Phoenix tells us. “But it seems like these days there's one or two new cities or new countries per cycle that we get to see for the first time. It's always a good time.”

Finally getting to this point, Mike Shinoda says was a complicated process, “For me, two years ago, it was very overwhelming and I think the best thing that we did was to just basically let things happen in the order and at the timeline that they were gonna happen -- let things happen organically and not push too hard. And I feel like what ended up evolving was we just naturally kind of found each other. We found this new line up, we found [singer] Emily [Armstrong] and [drummer] Colin [Brittain] in particular, and the music just kind of came into focus based on what we were having the most fun doing.”

Giving off a smile when Kevan said it felt like the band was getting back to its “roots,” Mike explains, “I love that there's such a strong Linkin Park DNA in the record -- it does really feel like Linkin Park -- but I think there's a part of it that's the old sound, and part of it that's every era of the band, to me, on the record.”

“I don't know if I know well, what the Linkin Park DNA is,” Phoenix admits. “It's kind of like when you're too close to something, you just do it, and then other people tell you, they almost interpret it, and then you kind of say, ‘OK, cool, I'm glad that came across.’ But I think in any and all of that creation of an album, or working on new music, or new stuff, or when there's, I don't know ‘interstitials’ or whatever you might want to call it… for me, those things are just us doing us, figuring that out, and moving forward."

"In this process," he adds, "one of the things that was so fun and rewarding and cool and energizing was just how, when we started gradually integrating Emily and Colin, it felt like Linkin Park. It just felt like it fit for me and for us, and those were the coolest moments in the entire process. Just feeling like things were kind of gelling and coming together, and we're having a blast doing it the whole time. So, at this stage being ready to finally have the album out, having people be excited about it, that feels great.”

Don't miss Kevan Kenney's full Check In with Linkin Park above, and stay tuned for more conversations with your favorite artists right here on Audacy.

Words By Joe Cingrana, Interview by Kevan Kenney

Joining host Abe Kanan today for a special Audacy Check In is Breaking Benjamin's Benjamin Burnley – along with his son Ben Jr. -- giving us details about the band's brand new music, upcoming album plans, and plenty more.

Although Breaking Benjamin has not dropped a full length since 2018's 'Ember,' the longest span of time they have had in between albums, they have kept themselves quite busy in the meantime. The band just wrapped up their most recent co-headlining tour with Staind and special guest Daughtry, and at the start of the month released their brand new single "Awaken," which landed at the top of several Billboard charts.

Before discussing new music, Abe wanted to know from Ben Jr. what it’s like having a mega rockstar dad who performs in front of tens of thousands of people at his concerts each night. “It's like something special to me because, you know, I play on stage. I entertain like thousands of people and I'm grateful for that,” he tells us.

“Every time he's with me, he plays on stage with us,” Ben’s dad explains. “And also too, I want to mention, for real, the last chorus of ‘Awaken,’ there's like a pad vocal that's going on in the background and he's singing that. So, he's singing on the record. Yeah, he's singing on that song.” Giving us a taste of the raw audio featuring his son, Ben proudly says, “Not many people know, but, I mean, I'm kind of just spreading the word that he's singing on that track.”

The new single’s runaway success has, in a way, passed Burnley by since the band has been busy on the road since its release earlier this month. “I had no idea,” he tells us, “because I'm out on tour and just doing my thing out here. We have so much going on during the day… I haven't really checked in. I didn't know it was doing so well. I'm very, very thankful and grateful for that.”

“Our day to day out here on tour, we do a meet and greet and then we do the concert and we're not really, because we're traveling so much -- today is the last day of the tour -- the only kind of interaction that we get with actual people is at our meet and greet,” Ben explains. “So, we've gotten some good reactions from that and out here on tour, in the wild, that's really the only gauge that we get, because the rest of the day is stuff like this and the concert.”

The positive reaction he admits is “definitely gonna give us a little bit of a pep in our step,” to finish the rest of the album, “but we are already the type of band that we're going to give it our all no matter what,” he says. “That's what's taking so long… that and COVID.”

Taking his time writing music during what he considers such an uninspiring period, felt like the best course of action, he believes. “Everybody has a different personality, everybody works best under different conditions, and I'm just the type that I can have the negativity of COVID and all of that be turned into a positive thing. But I'm the type that it has to be after it's over and I reflect on it, not while I'm in it -- and that's like with anything. Like, if something bad happens and I'm hurting or whatever the case may be or even if I'm happy it has to be at a time, which is weird, I guess, but it has to be at a time when that's over and I'm looking back on it, not during. I'm too busy going through it during.”

Looking back now as a major headliner, Ben still remembers the early days quite fondly, playing at 11AM when the festival gates officially opened. “Yeah, I'm kind of surprised we're not doing that,” he says humbly. “I'm surprised we're not playing 11 o'clock. I'm really grateful that we're where we are, but I definitely do. I was just talking about that recently, you know how we've all been there, we've all done that. We all do the same things out here, and every step of the way is its own fun, its own allure, because I miss those days kind of in a way, because the climb, you know, the climb is fun. Reaching thin ...