SHINEDOWN Singer BRENT SMITH Has ‘Full-On Bronchitis’; Knoxville Concert Postponed

SHINEDOWN has been forced to postpone its concert tonight (Saturday, May 7) at the Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville, Tennessee after the band’s lead singer Brent Smith came down with “full-blown bronchitis.”

Smith announced the show postponement in a video message to SHINEDOWN‘s fans in Knoxville earlier today. He said: “I have full-blown bronchitis. I do not have singing voice. I have done everything in my power in the last little while to figure out a way to make the show happen; it’s just not gonna be possible.

“I know that you’re upset,” he continued. “If anyone’s upset the most, it’s me. We will postpone the date. We will come back and we will make this up.

“This has nothing to do with the band. This is on me. I’m human. But I just have no physical way of doing the show tonight.

“I have nothing but love and respect for everybody,” Brent added. “It is my hometown, so if anybody is heartbroken about this, it’s me. But I can tell you that I’ve done everything in my power to try to be able to figure out a way to sing it tonight. It’s just not gonna be possible.”

Back in 2019, Smith shared a video of his vocal warm-up routine from the road. In the clip, which was shot inside the bathroom of the band’s “warm-up room” during SHINEDOWN‘s North American headlining tour, Brent said: “20 years of touring professionally, and people always ask me what do I do with my voice as far as warming up to go out and perform. [It] depends on how long I’m gonna be onstage. These shows are an hour and a half long, so I’m not gonna spend 20 minutes warming up. So I really just do a couple of things. I just start by loosening up all the muscles in my face — yes, you have a lot of muscles in your face. So it looks silly, it sounds silly, but it’s very effective, and you don’t have to do it for very long. You just kind of go up and down. And you can watch me do it. This is all I do.”

Back in 2015, Smith revealed that he developed vocal problems which contributed to a delay in recording the band’s fifth studio album, “Threat To Survival”. Smith explained that his throat was ailing after 21 months of touring for 2012’s “Amaryllis”, telling Full Metal Jackie: “When we got off tour, I had three nodules on my left vocal cord. I had to heal them. I was lucky enough to do so naturally — I didn’t have surgery, but it took two and a half months to get them where they needed to be.”

On top of the nodules, Smith developed another illness, explaining: “I got this thing called thrush, which is normally what babies will get. We have fungus in our bodies that’s dormant and sometimes it’ll unleash, and it unleashed on me. It went all the way down to my esophagus, so that was another two months to heal from that. Four months in all after we got off the road, then we started writing the record.”

SHINEDOWN recently moved the release date of its new album, “Planet Zero”, to July 1 from the previously announced April 22 due to delays in physical production of vinyl and CDs.