Post by tripticket on Feb 17, 2007 19:16:54 GMT -5
BLIND MELON star SHANNON HOON iii three in a bed shocker! But don't worry, he's calling MICK WALL from his boarloit, where he ~s joined by his girlfriend and their new puppy! And he's got news of the Melon 's top new album,, 'Soup'S., a dark saga of suicide,, murder and great, great grandma 's poetry, . ~
HOON calls late because he says, "I'm having difficulty with my pregnancy. Uh. come again. dude? "I think I'm giving birth to a St Bernard!"
It is a beautiful morning in Southern California. City of earthquakes and OJ. We start again.
,*I'm sorry. I've been up all night," he says, sitting up in bed, shaking the sleep out of his head. "I had some friends that I was playing with that ended up keeping me up all night."
We begin with the brand new Blind Melon single, 'Galaxy'. Upbeat and salty. it's not the catchy follow-up to 'No Rain'your mum might have preferred. but it will please the purists no end, Short. sharp, not necessarily straight to the point, 'Galaxy' works its spell best after a few listens. Like all the best records in your collection.
"New Orleans. that's the place. We made the record there and I think that had everything to do with how it all ended up sounding.** he explains. -'Really. at no point did we even consider making a single. We were there to make this one long record that wasn't just about one song or whatever. But was about a state of mind. or a state of place that was whole.
"It's very hard for me to think of any song on this record on its own. To me. they all belong together. We put a lot of thought into the sequencing. It's like the chapters in a book. That's how they were written and that's how they sound best. when they're all played together like that."
THE NEW Blind Melon album is going to be called 'Soup'. "I think so anyway. That's what it was the last time we discussed it," he smiles. His speaking voice is very much like his singing one, high and dreamy. A happy, baffled voice.
Most of the time, anyway. Talking about some of his favourite moments from the new album, his voice drops to just above a whisper as he relates the story of a song he wrote with Melon drummer Glen Graham called'Car Seat'.
"There was a big story iii,the news here about a lady in South Carolina who drove a car into a lake and drowned
her children. She told the police that someone had car-jacked her and made off with the kids. Then it came out that she had been having an affair with a guy who basically didn't want the kids. so she decided to get rid of 'eni."
I can imagine Hoon's eyes going round with wonder ...
"She brutally murdered her own children. One of them was eight months old. and the other one was two years old. But she rolled the car into a lake with the children still alive and it wasn't discovered for five or six days."
And what happened when it was found?
"The lady was charged with murder." Silence. "Anyway. that's what the song is about. I know it's kind of grisly subject matter, but at the end of the song, I try to resolve it. or give it some kind of deeper meaning, I guess. by reading this poem I discovered by my great. great grandmother."
When Shannon inherited his great. great grandmother's personal journal, he was amazed to discover that she had composed "hundreds of these amazing poems."
Over 100 years old now. the pages. he says. "are so dry and old they would break in your hands if you weren't careful. You'd have to see it to know what I mean. but it's bound in this old leather and you put your hand on it and you can just feel this aura kinds emanating from it.
~'So at the end of the song 'Car Seat', we were in New York one night. mixing, and I went
payphone. called 'em up and read this poem that my great. great grandmother wrote.
"It was February 11. 1995, and the poeni was dated February 11. 1884. so it was exactly 111 years from the day she wrote it, and I read it down the phone and they recorded it at the studio and that was how we used it on the album.
"It's a poem called God's Presents. because she truly believed that children are God's gifts to the Earth. you know? So I read it in this pay-phone. barefoot on the streets of New York in the middle of winter. and it felt right."
CHILDREN, OF course. are very much on Shannon's mind rigfit now as his pirifrietid is seven months pregnant with the couple's first child. He says that the doctors have already told them it's going to be a girl and that they have named her Nice Blue. Shannon is already the jealous father.
******"I'm telling you man. if anyone - ANYONE tries to hurt my daughter or come near her ... *' He shakes his head then lauglis. "It's true. I can't help it. I'm a sad case, man .....******
His tousled thoughts turn back to the new album.
"Like I say, It wasn't just about recording the songs the way they were meant to go. It was kind of letting things take their own shape," he muses.
"The aura that surrounded a take was more important than if someone played or sang the notes right, you know what I'm saying?"
Ride on.
"New Orleans is just a city that enhances every kind of... madness," he cackles. "They say that the Devil was bom there and I'm not too sure he wasn't born in the room I had to sleep in! It bought the werewolf out in me, man! That city will clean your pores, man. Let's put it that way!"
'Soup' was produced by Andy Wallace, who first sprang to prominence as the man who bought the best out of Faith No More in the studio.
4'Andy was a psychiatrist as well as a producer," Shannon says. "There was an eight foot groove in the floor behind his producer's chair where he would slide back and constantly go 'Whoooah!' at some idea that one of us had. By the end, we all understood each other real well. Real well."
0NE OF the pivotal moments on the new album is a track called 'St Andrew's Fall'. Once again inspired by a tragedy, but this time, one witnessed first-hand by all the members of the band.
"One night we were playing in Detroit at this old church that had been converted into a music hall, called St Andrew's Hall. And after the show, we were standing up in our dressing room, and it had these windows so you could look down and see all the people leaving the club.
"And I was standing there looking out when I noticed all these people starting to congregate over on the corner. We were
arguing about a monitor mix or something stupid from the gig, I don't know. But my attention was caught by all these people on the corner. I thought man... is there a fight going on or something?
"Then I see someone point up and I look and there's this girl on the edge of the building, 20 floors up. It wasn't someone from the show, it was a hotel next door to th club. I was like, 'Holy shit, you guys, there's a girl up there.' We had the most horrific view.
"There's about two hundred people, all watching by now, and of course you get all the heartless ones that start heckling and screaming when you should really
understand that someone for whatever reason is deliberating life or death here. It was unbelievable. There were people yelling 'Jump!'. I thought, 'My God, what's going on here?'
And did she?
"All of a sudden there was this dead calm, and this girl stood up and she jumped, and we were all standing there. And I mean it seemed like it took forever for her to fall. It was one of those situations where you don't want to look but something in your mind makes you watch and will not let you take your eyes away from it, because you're going to learn something from it.
"I mean, not only did I learn that monitor mixes were irrelevant to life, it just .... phoosh! Nobody was able to say a thing for the next three hours. We just got in the van and drove.
"Rogers (Stevens - guitarist) had actually left the hall and was down on the street when it happened. It was something that really scarred us all. She was just 26, and no-one knew why she jumped. She took her secret with her. They thought she might have tested positive for AIDS, but she wasn't. She wasn't pregnant, she had a job... She just suffered from depression. It could have been anybody. It was really sad. And that's what St Andrew's Fall' is all about."
We sit there, thinking it over.
You will be able to hear'St Andrew's Fall' for yourself when 'Soup' is released in June. It will be worth the wait. And then?
"it begins again!" he howls. 'It' being another prolonged bout of roadwork, which, says Shannon, will "definitely" include European dates as early as this Summer.
A proper tour, or festival appearances?
"I mean both! But we're gonna start with some outdoor stuff, I think. Some festivals in Europe and maybe Reading in England. I like outdoor festivals. You can feel the grass underneath you." END
Bee well Melons! 07 is gonna b great!
HOON calls late because he says, "I'm having difficulty with my pregnancy. Uh. come again. dude? "I think I'm giving birth to a St Bernard!"
It is a beautiful morning in Southern California. City of earthquakes and OJ. We start again.
,*I'm sorry. I've been up all night," he says, sitting up in bed, shaking the sleep out of his head. "I had some friends that I was playing with that ended up keeping me up all night."
We begin with the brand new Blind Melon single, 'Galaxy'. Upbeat and salty. it's not the catchy follow-up to 'No Rain'your mum might have preferred. but it will please the purists no end, Short. sharp, not necessarily straight to the point, 'Galaxy' works its spell best after a few listens. Like all the best records in your collection.
"New Orleans. that's the place. We made the record there and I think that had everything to do with how it all ended up sounding.** he explains. -'Really. at no point did we even consider making a single. We were there to make this one long record that wasn't just about one song or whatever. But was about a state of mind. or a state of place that was whole.
"It's very hard for me to think of any song on this record on its own. To me. they all belong together. We put a lot of thought into the sequencing. It's like the chapters in a book. That's how they were written and that's how they sound best. when they're all played together like that."
THE NEW Blind Melon album is going to be called 'Soup'. "I think so anyway. That's what it was the last time we discussed it," he smiles. His speaking voice is very much like his singing one, high and dreamy. A happy, baffled voice.
Most of the time, anyway. Talking about some of his favourite moments from the new album, his voice drops to just above a whisper as he relates the story of a song he wrote with Melon drummer Glen Graham called'Car Seat'.
"There was a big story iii,the news here about a lady in South Carolina who drove a car into a lake and drowned
her children. She told the police that someone had car-jacked her and made off with the kids. Then it came out that she had been having an affair with a guy who basically didn't want the kids. so she decided to get rid of 'eni."
I can imagine Hoon's eyes going round with wonder ...
"She brutally murdered her own children. One of them was eight months old. and the other one was two years old. But she rolled the car into a lake with the children still alive and it wasn't discovered for five or six days."
And what happened when it was found?
"The lady was charged with murder." Silence. "Anyway. that's what the song is about. I know it's kind of grisly subject matter, but at the end of the song, I try to resolve it. or give it some kind of deeper meaning, I guess. by reading this poem I discovered by my great. great grandmother."
When Shannon inherited his great. great grandmother's personal journal, he was amazed to discover that she had composed "hundreds of these amazing poems."
Over 100 years old now. the pages. he says. "are so dry and old they would break in your hands if you weren't careful. You'd have to see it to know what I mean. but it's bound in this old leather and you put your hand on it and you can just feel this aura kinds emanating from it.
~'So at the end of the song 'Car Seat', we were in New York one night. mixing, and I went
payphone. called 'em up and read this poem that my great. great grandmother wrote.
"It was February 11. 1995, and the poeni was dated February 11. 1884. so it was exactly 111 years from the day she wrote it, and I read it down the phone and they recorded it at the studio and that was how we used it on the album.
"It's a poem called God's Presents. because she truly believed that children are God's gifts to the Earth. you know? So I read it in this pay-phone. barefoot on the streets of New York in the middle of winter. and it felt right."
CHILDREN, OF course. are very much on Shannon's mind rigfit now as his pirifrietid is seven months pregnant with the couple's first child. He says that the doctors have already told them it's going to be a girl and that they have named her Nice Blue. Shannon is already the jealous father.
******"I'm telling you man. if anyone - ANYONE tries to hurt my daughter or come near her ... *' He shakes his head then lauglis. "It's true. I can't help it. I'm a sad case, man .....******
His tousled thoughts turn back to the new album.
"Like I say, It wasn't just about recording the songs the way they were meant to go. It was kind of letting things take their own shape," he muses.
"The aura that surrounded a take was more important than if someone played or sang the notes right, you know what I'm saying?"
Ride on.
"New Orleans is just a city that enhances every kind of... madness," he cackles. "They say that the Devil was bom there and I'm not too sure he wasn't born in the room I had to sleep in! It bought the werewolf out in me, man! That city will clean your pores, man. Let's put it that way!"
'Soup' was produced by Andy Wallace, who first sprang to prominence as the man who bought the best out of Faith No More in the studio.
4'Andy was a psychiatrist as well as a producer," Shannon says. "There was an eight foot groove in the floor behind his producer's chair where he would slide back and constantly go 'Whoooah!' at some idea that one of us had. By the end, we all understood each other real well. Real well."
0NE OF the pivotal moments on the new album is a track called 'St Andrew's Fall'. Once again inspired by a tragedy, but this time, one witnessed first-hand by all the members of the band.
"One night we were playing in Detroit at this old church that had been converted into a music hall, called St Andrew's Hall. And after the show, we were standing up in our dressing room, and it had these windows so you could look down and see all the people leaving the club.
"And I was standing there looking out when I noticed all these people starting to congregate over on the corner. We were
arguing about a monitor mix or something stupid from the gig, I don't know. But my attention was caught by all these people on the corner. I thought man... is there a fight going on or something?
"Then I see someone point up and I look and there's this girl on the edge of the building, 20 floors up. It wasn't someone from the show, it was a hotel next door to th club. I was like, 'Holy shit, you guys, there's a girl up there.' We had the most horrific view.
"There's about two hundred people, all watching by now, and of course you get all the heartless ones that start heckling and screaming when you should really
understand that someone for whatever reason is deliberating life or death here. It was unbelievable. There were people yelling 'Jump!'. I thought, 'My God, what's going on here?'
And did she?
"All of a sudden there was this dead calm, and this girl stood up and she jumped, and we were all standing there. And I mean it seemed like it took forever for her to fall. It was one of those situations where you don't want to look but something in your mind makes you watch and will not let you take your eyes away from it, because you're going to learn something from it.
"I mean, not only did I learn that monitor mixes were irrelevant to life, it just .... phoosh! Nobody was able to say a thing for the next three hours. We just got in the van and drove.
"Rogers (Stevens - guitarist) had actually left the hall and was down on the street when it happened. It was something that really scarred us all. She was just 26, and no-one knew why she jumped. She took her secret with her. They thought she might have tested positive for AIDS, but she wasn't. She wasn't pregnant, she had a job... She just suffered from depression. It could have been anybody. It was really sad. And that's what St Andrew's Fall' is all about."
We sit there, thinking it over.
You will be able to hear'St Andrew's Fall' for yourself when 'Soup' is released in June. It will be worth the wait. And then?
"it begins again!" he howls. 'It' being another prolonged bout of roadwork, which, says Shannon, will "definitely" include European dates as early as this Summer.
A proper tour, or festival appearances?
"I mean both! But we're gonna start with some outdoor stuff, I think. Some festivals in Europe and maybe Reading in England. I like outdoor festivals. You can feel the grass underneath you." END
Bee well Melons! 07 is gonna b great!