In a new interview with Australia’s Metal Roos, STEEL PANTHER drummer Stix Zadinia spoke about the band’s songwriting process. He said: “(STEEL PANTHER guitarist) Satchel is our main songwriter. When you’ve got a guy like Satchel in your band who plays the guitar the way he does, and he’s like genetically engineered to write ’80s-style heavy metal riffs and he’s incredibly talented and gifted…. When we’re on the road, everybody’s throwing ideas out as far as, like, someone says something funny, and we start writing stuff down. And then generally what will happen is he’ll sketch out a verse and a chorus, or sometimes he’ll have half a song or a whole song, and then he’ll generally bring it to me next, because he and I are kind of simpatico in the music department. And if it’s something that I go, ‘Oh, dude, yeah, let’s roll,’ he’ll get fired up. Once we decide what we wanna do on a record, then we go into a pre-production situation where we work out the little details so we don’t spend the time and money in the studio. We’ll go do pre-production at rehearsal studios, but we play so much on the road that we don’t rehearse and we don’t get in a band room because there’s no time and it’s not necessary. With e-mail, we can do ideas at home, just flip something over to the other guy and go, ‘Hey, dude.’ Or he’ll throw me an idea and he’ll go, ‘Hey, what are you hearing on drums for this?’ And that’s kind of how it goes generally. I mean, obviously there’s variations, but that’s the general vibe.”

He continued: “When I was young, you lived near the guys you played with. And as we get older, we moved different places. Satchel lives out in Vegas. I live out in L.A. And so to get together, it’s, like, okay, well, somebody’s gotta hop a flight or make a four-hour drive. So we just throw ideas back and forth.”

Stix also talked about the importance of knowing the ins and outs of music business and learning how to generate profit and endure longevity.

“Fortunately, we are our own record company,” he explained. “We’re like the biggest DIY band ever. We’re the merch company. We do it all. Yeah, we do. So we manage our band. But I have guys who are specialists. I have a merch guy who works with us. And then I have a touring guy who does all the logistics. But we oversee it all. We don’t have a management company. We don’t have a merch company. We do it all, man.”

He continued: “I cannot express how much value there is in knowing your business and doing it yourself. Look, when we got rid of management in 2017 and I decided to take it on, I was, like, ‘Hey, I know that I don’t know everything, but I know specialists who know things about this lane and that lane and this plane.’ So as long as you know that you don’t know everything, you can find the answers. And it’s done wonders for our business, our bottom line.”

Stix added that “you have to have somebody in the band who’s interested and halfway able to focus” in order to be a self-managed act.

“It’s cool, man,” he said. “We really are DIY. It’s awesome.”