In the early nineties Fishbone burst onto the
scene with a sound like no other. Their mix of
metal, punk, funk and jazz sounds made my head
spin. Albums like "Give A Monkey A Brain
And He'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe"
have become classic listening. In 2007 Fishone
is back with new members and a new full length
CD. I spoke with bassist Norwood Fisher about
Fishbone's new release, arguably one of their
best in an already impressive career.
Jim McDonald: Hi Norwood. What's new with Fishbone?
Norwood Fisher: We're embarking on a tour tomorrow
morning. It's a month long tour of the United
States.
JM: Why so long between releases? It's been a
while between Fishbone albums.
Norwood Fisher: We were recording in September
of 2003 during the course of that recording some
of the guys left the band. We had to regroup and
basically begin the recording process all over
again. We had to re-record whatever we wanted
to keep, and we wrote a bunch of new songs. We
even had to find the right guys to fit the new
songs.
JM: The new CD has a really wide ranging sound.
How would you describe the sound of "Still
Stuck In Your Throat"?
Norwood Fisher: First of all, it represents the
possibility of artistic freedom. It's just kind
of who we've always been. That really is the sound
of the pursuit of artistic happiness.
JM: How has Fishbone changed over the years?
Norwood Fisher: With the lineup changes things
have changed, and things have changed through
the years. One thing we hold dear is that we love
to experiment, so things are always changing.
Our live show has a great amount of room for improvisation.
We always keep it changing in the spirit of experimentation.
JM: When did Fishbone do the Sublime Tribute?
I see your cover of "Date Rape" appears
on "Still Stuck In Your Throat".
Norwood Fisher: We recorded that a few years
ago. I don't recall exactly when it came out.
We're kind of close to the source in that we have
the same management that brought up Sublime. They
didn't know what our reation would be, but they
asked us would we like to be involved. There were
a couple of Sublime songs we could get into, but
I was the one who was like "I want to do
"Date Rape". It was one of them songs
that the lyrics spoke to me. I thought Bradley
Knowles did a brilliant job of songwriting on
that one. I wish I would have wrote it.
JM: Fishbone has some pretty trippy lyrics. Is
there a method for writing Fisbone lyrics?
Norwood Fisher: It goes from song to song. We
don't have any particular method. We edit ourselves
in certain ways. Sometimes we look at it like,
we gotta let that ass hang out on this one, you
know let people figure it out for themselves.
Sometimes it's like yeah, it's out there. Really,
it's just us striving to make great art, and that's
how we look at it. Does the art stand up?
JM: How do you think the new album stands up
to the old Fishbone catalog?
Norwood Fisher: I really intended this record
to sound like the one that could have came between
"Truth and Soul" and "The Reality
of My Surroundings". It's like a combination
of those two. We wanted to updated the sound,
you know make sure we were in the new millenium
with it as well. We also wanted to make sure that
the new band members had some expression on it.
I think we accomplished all of that. I'm really
very proud of the effort.
JM: What are your tour plans?
Norwood Fisher: We just came out of Australia.
We did a couple dates in Canada, and now we're
starting the US. We'll spend a great amount of
the summer in Europe, and we've got a few Warped
Tour dates. We have some confirmed Japanese dates.
Going into the fall we're coming back around the
United States. We'll be going back to Europe in
late fall and going back to Australia in January.
There's a lot of globe hopping going down. I hope
that South America comes through and that we get
to see more of the globe than ever before. |
