Enter Shikari's Rou Reynolds: Why I don't make New Year's Resolutions
As 2021 kicks off, Enter Shikari frontman Rou Reynolds explains why he's not especially for the idea of New Year’s Resolutions.
So, you've heard from Corey Taylor, Poppy and more about the big changes they're going to make this year. But what about Enter Shikari's Rou Reynolds? Well, it turns out the frontman likely won't be making any New Year’s Resolutions in 2021.
"I’ve never been a New Year’s Resolution person, really," Rou tells Kerrang!, explaining that, "Effectively you’re saying, ‘What do you want to change about your life?’ And we should be thinking about that, not every day, but we should think about it a lot – not just a once-a-year thing.
"I get that it’s sometimes easier to start a new habit or change something about your life if there’s a sense of a fresh start," he continues. "It’s a new year, for some reason it’s easier. Life is so busy and so intense and so stressful, we rarely find those moments to analyse our own lives. I think that’s a real failure of modern life: there’s no introspection, there’s no analysis and we all fall through life just tripping up through it.
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"I don’t know if that makes a New Year’s Resolution a bad thing, because we still think of it as a novelty, rather than a standard thing we think about a lot, but we’re discouraged from doing so because of modernity and it’s, ‘Wake up, go to work, worry about things, get things done, go to bed, wake up…'"
Nevertheless, Rou says that he figured out a lot about himself through the trials of 2020 – and he will at least be taking these lessons with him, whether or not they're labelled as 'resolutions'.
"I’ve learned to what degree myself or my ego is made up of Rou from Enter Shikari," he says. "…I’ve experienced the death of the band [because of coronavirus and cancelled shows], so that part of my life has disappeared – it’s been reduced to going on Twitter and clinging on to being Rou from Enter Shikari (laughs). That’s where it lives, in that domain. That’s been really difficult at points, not speaking to passionate people, people who are as passionate about our music as I am. Not having that outlet has been pretty difficult.
"In many ways it’s been nice to experience a year that has taken all that away because I’ve learned what a massive part of me that is, my inner-world gets so much happiness from it. Not just standing onstage communicating to people through music, but those one-to-one conversations with people about our music, other people’s music – those moments where you meet human beings. A lot of that has been taken away so I feel a bigger appreciation and realised it’s something I very much live for."