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Skillet’s John Cooper has a good sense of humor about some of the hard lessons he’s learned about the music business in nearly three decades as a musician. The outspoken, gregarious singer, fresh off the release of a new album (Revolution) and a European tour, laughs heartily when asked what lessons he wish he learned early his career.

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“I would go back to my younger self and say, ‘They call it the music business for a reason,” he tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast. “That part — ‘business’ — actually matters. Because when you first start — I mean, I don’t know if everybody’s like this, but I certainly was like, ‘No, no, it’s not a business, it’s art. It’s no business involved. It’s just what I want to sing about. It’s all about me and my feelings and my artwork, and I’m never gonna let anybody bastardize my art.’ And you just end up making a bunch of dumb decisions because you don’t realize that, yes, it is about art, but you still got to pay bills. And you’re in the van in the middle of the night — if anybody’s in a band out there, they’re going to know what I’m talking about — you’re driving the van, and all of a sudden you feel something. You look out the side as you’re driving and you see one of the wheels from the trailer going past you [and] it flies off in the middle of the night. And I’m sitting there going, ‘I don’t care. It’s all about my art.’ That’s not real! You’ve got to pay for that, man!”

It took Cooper a few years to realize he needed to be more hands-on and not expect others to handle his business the way he wants. “If you want it done right, you have to get involved,” he insists. “That’s not to say [my manager and business manager] didn’t do their job, but they’re never going to do it the way you want it done. And it’s easy to complain about it, but just get your hands dirty.”

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The need to be more involved in the business side of his career “really hit home” early in Cooper’s career when the person preparing his taxes asked to see his taxes for the band’s first four years. “And I said, ‘Well, we lost money for the first four years, so I didn’t turn them in,’” Cooper recalls. “He’s like, ‘Well, you’re gonna pay for that now. You’ve gotta pay a fee for not doing it right.’ And so I would go back and just say [to my younger self], ‘Hey, yes, it’s about the art, but you can’t be a moron. You’ve got to grow up.’”

Over time, Cooper has learned the business side of music from a variety of people, including a manager that arrived six years into his career and his business manager. He also took inspiration from Mötley Crüe bass player Nikki Sixx, who Cooper says “understood it’s about art, but you got to take care of your business. You want to be around for 30 years? You better get it in gear, son!”

The lessons Cooper learned will help now that Skillet is independent and self-releasing its music. After nearly two decades with Atlantic Records — 99% of which was positive, Cooper says — the band released Revolution on its own Hear It Loud imprint. While Atlantic Records helped Skillet find mainstream success (“Awake and Alive” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Active Rock chart in 2011) there was more bureaucracy than Cooper would have preferred. “A lot of red tape,” he says. “A lot of people having to approve the songs.” Now, Skillet now has greater creative control and can release music more frequently.

“We wrote 11 songs for this record, and I loved it,” he says. “I loved making the project. It was so much fun. We wrote, recorded and released this album in 13 months. And I’ll tell you what, it was so fun, and I love the music.”

Listen to the entire interview with Skillet’s John Cooper using the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music, Podbean or Everand. 

Many bands that rose to prominence in the ‘80s have turned into oldies bands, tied to a moment in history and profiting from fans’ love for nostalgia. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears haven’t fallen into the stagnant rut that has captured so many of their contemporaries. More than four decades after forming in Bath, England, in 1981, Tears for Fears is producing some of its best material.

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Orzabal and Smith began their creative resurgence in 2022 with their first studio album in nearly 18 years, The Tipping Point, which reached No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Album Sales and Top Alternative Albums charts. In October, the band continued its hot streak by releasing four new songs as part of a live album, Songs for a Nervous Planet.

“It’s because we care,” Smith tells Billboard‘s Behind the Setlist podcast when explaining the caliber of the band’s recent songwriting and recordings. “We don’t want to do bad work. We still have a desire to get better. I don’t think that’s ever going to leave us. We look at other artists and still wish we were that good. That will never leave us, because we’re never going to become that good, I don’t think. There’s always going to be someone that’s better than us, without question. So when you still have that desire, you’re going to continue to do good work because you are continuing to try and achieve something better than you’ve done before. And that’s what keeps us going.”

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Songs for a Nervous Planet is the audio complement to a live concert film, Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film), that was given a brief release in theaters in October before being made available online. Recorded at the FirstBank Amphitheater — a former quarry that provides a spectacular backdrop — in Franklin, Tenn., the film captures the band performing at the top of its game. “Everyone that had come to see the show said it was amazing,” says Smith. “We get a limited view of it because we’re looking the other way. So we agreed to record it. And the reason being that we felt the band was the strongest they’d ever been — or we had ever been, should I say. And we were playing great. We sounded great. We were singing better than we ever had, playing better than we ever had. So it seemed like a good time to do it.”

The four new songs make Songs From a Nervous Planet, as Smith puts it, more like an EP with 18 live bonus tracks rather than a live album with a few new songs. “The record company wanted us to do a couple new tracks,” says Smith. “We felt that was kind of a way of saying, ‘Add some throwaway tracks.’”

Instead, they went into the studio and emerged with “four tracks that we felt really strongly about,” says Smith. The Songs for a Nervous Planet opener, “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad,” perfectly captures the political and environmental tension of the day (“It’s no life, this island of fear/ When tomorrow comes, we’ll brave the wild frontier”). “The Girl That I Call Home” is a love song for Orzabal’s wife with a catchy melody (“Princes adore you/ They cower before you/ You’re the girl that I call home”). The stirring “Emily Said” is classic Tears for Fears: a complex song structure that doesn’t distract or become superfluous.

To Orzabal, the new songs “hold up brilliantly” to the band’s deep catalog of beloved songs that includes “Mad World” from the 1983 debut The Hurting and “Shout” from the U.S. chart-topping 1985 album Songs From the Big Chair. He’s particularly proud of “Astronaut,” a song that mixes disillusionment with a space travel theme (“I don’t belong here/ I got one eye on a different world”), which didn’t make the cut for The Tipping Point. “It didn’t quite fit, for whatever reason just didn’t feel right,” says Smith. “A lot of these things are not easy to articulate, because it’s just a feeling you have of what works, what doesn’t work.”

But “Astronaut” was “perfect” for Songs for a Nervous Planet, says Orzabal. “The whole imagery of the astronaut and the field of sunflowers [seen on the album cover], the continuity in the videos with the astronaut and his girlfriend, always featuring them, is superb.” In a couple decades, he adds, “Astronaut” will be “a huge hit for someone — not us, but for someone.”

Listen to the interview with Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith in the embedded Spotify player below, or listen at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart, PodBean or Everand.