Godsmack frontman Sully Erna recently sat down with a radio station to talk about everything from the Mass Chaos tour with Staind and Halestorm to how the band decided on the four covers selected for their new disc ‘Live & Inspired.’

On the recently wrapped Mass Chaos tour, Erna had nothing but positive things to say about his tour mates. “What an awesome tour it’s been, all the bands got along great. [Halestorm's] Lzzy [Hale] is a super rock star, love her to death man, I’m a new fan of hers now,” said Erna to radio station WMMR. “The guys in Staind are our Massachusetts brothers, we haven’t seen them or toured with them in 10 years so it was really great to get back together again.” Making up for lost time, Godsmack will join Staind again in mid-August when the 2012 Uproar Festival kicks off.

Erna said the idea for the cover songs started way back when the band was recording their last disc. “It started when we were recording ‘The Oracle’ and we had that version of ‘Come Together’ we were messing around with and we really liked it a lot. Then we just shelved it because we had nowhere to put it,” explained Erna. “Then when we had the opportunity to do this live record, and it all became about the fans and giving back to the fans and including them in this album. We actually let the fans pick the songs, everything from A-Z, this was all built and inspired by the fans.”

Of the four cover songs included, Erna said the Metallica tribute was probably the most difficult, “’Nothing Else Matters’ was probably the trickiest one for me because I decided you can’t dwarf Metallica right? So there’s no sense trying to do it bigger and heavier.” Instead, Godsmack took a different approach. Sully explained, “What we did, I was sitting at the piano and noodling around, I just realized, when I started playing the chords it was really an emotional piece of music. He wrote a beautiful – I don’t know if it’s him or Kirk [Hammett] that wrote it, I’m assuming it’s James Hetfield – but the music is so well built and so well thought out that when you play it on the piano it just has a strong emotion to it so we went the other route and just decided to do a more orchestrated version.”

In addition to ‘Nothing Else Matters,’ the disc also features the Joe Walsh classic ‘Rocky Mountain Way.’ Check out Godsmack’s video for the latter song here.

Watch the Full MMRBQ Interview with Godsmack’s Sully Erna

More From Highway 98.9