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Exactly. Erna is well aware of the potential payoff from this little EP. The disc itself features reworked renditions of four songs already familiar to Godsmack fans (including "Re-Align" from Faceless, "Spiral" from Awake, and "Keep Away" from Godsmack) — it’s a tack that worked well for Stone Temple Pilots when they performed "unplugged" for MTV. And Erna’s deep, ruminative voice is as natural a fit for brooding acoustic songs as it is for brooding hard-rock tunes. It may even work better in this acoustic setting, which also suits the rest of the band — long-time bassist Robbie Merrill (the only member who’s been with Erna since the start of Godsmack), guitarist Tony Rombola, and drummer Shannon Larking, the latest addition to the Godsmack family. And the new material, three songs in all, attests that these guys have yet to lose track of their muse. It’s a calculated commercial move that also appears to have catalyzed an artistic breakthrough of sorts for Godsmack.

"We’ve always had softer stuff like this, but we just felt it wasn’t right to put too many of them on a full-blown Godsmack record," Erna suggests. "So we put ‘Voodoo’ on the first album, and ‘Spiral’ on the second CD, and the third album we had ‘Serenity.’ But we always had these ideas that never quite fit with the vibe of our hard-rock albums. Yet it’s another side of us, hence the title The Other Side. We like to sit around with acoustic guitars and sing and play sometimes and not have it be so produced with all the big electric guitars and all that stuff. And we always thought that this band should never have a ceiling over our heads. We want to have another path to go down, and hopefully that will broaden our fan base as well. And I think it will be a nice buffer between Faceless and Godsmack 4, so while we’re working on the new record, people can digest this, and it won’t feel like so much time has gone by between records. It also helps us not feel so limited. I mean, Zeppelin did it for years: they had so many styles of music. They were always labeled as a hard-rock band, but they had amazingly beautiful acoustic songs. And acoustic stuff is nice because it really shows whether you have a good song there. When you strip it down to nothing, you either have a good song or you’re hiding behind a bunch of electronics."

Unfortunately, the softer side of Godsmack doesn’t quite come together as nicely as the band might have liked at the FleetCenter. Adding a floor of ice to an already acoustically difficult venue and then relegating the band to a small stage stuck up in the stands in one corner of the arena creates enough delay between the actual drum reports and the sound coming through the PA that it’s hard even to make out what song they’re playing between the second and third periods of what turns out to be a 2–0 loss to the Florida Panthers. Although the mix is much better for the post-game set, the mood at the Fleet isn’t all that upbeat. And it doesn’t help when Erna adds some hand drums and a couple members of Dropbox to the already crowded mix.

Not that Erna wants to be thought of as the kind of spoiled artist who’d be bothered by such trivial matters. "I try not to live with one foot in the past and one in the future. I just kind of live for the moment. I try to feel good every day. I’m very proud of what this band has done. We’ve worked very hard, and we haven’t had any major setbacks. So I think we just have to focus on writing for the moment and feeling what we feel is good for that time, and hopefully people will continue to connect with that. As long as I know that when the day comes that we don’t sell any more records or that we don’t want to be a band anymore, we’re able to look back on great times and memories and that we didn’t miss the ride, then I don’t really care about what happens.

"I don’t worry about things. I’m okay in my life. I’m in a good place. I’ve made some okay money. And whatever happens happens. As long as I can provide a good life for my daughter, I’m not worried about anything else. I’m a very creative and aggressive person. I’ll always find something to do. I don’t sit around and sleep my life away. I sit around and write music. I just wrote an autobiography that’s in the editing stages right now and is hopefully going to come out in the next year. And I’m working on a screenplay right now. It’s about these four kids that grew up together, they’re really close, but they’re influenced by the streets, and they end up growing up to control the streets. As they get older, they screw everything up, and all four of them downward-spiral into their own mess. Individually they all turn out to self-destruct. It’s just a hobby that keeps me busy. It’s something to feel creative about instead of sitting in front of a TV with a Play Station all day."