Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 1:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
Photo by Greg Aiello
On Friday night, Vince and I saw Living Colour live for what I think must have been the seventh or maybe eighth time. And it’s a testament to the abilities of this band that, in a day and age when so many groups are seemingly just going through the motions, we’ve really never seen the same Living Colour show twice. These dudes just seem to come from another time and place – an era when a live performance wasn’t about doing a note-for-note recreation of your albums so much as it was about creating a unique experience for the audience. In that regard, Living Colour still delivers in spades.
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 2:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
Living Colour performing their new single,”Behind the Sun,” on WYNC’s Soundcheck this past Friday.
Getting to spend nearly an hour on the phone with Vernon Reid was another huge fanboy moment in my life. The band’s debut album, Vivid, was one the first cassettes (!) I ever purchased on my own, making Living Colour one of the first bands I ever listened to that weren’t introduced to me by my parents. Today, more than twenty years later, the band is releasing their fifth studio album, The Chair in the Doorway (Megaforce). The fact that it’s no less powerful or brilliant than Vivid made talking to Reid even more exciting, because my love of the music he and his band make isn’t at all rooted in nostalgia (read my review of the record here).
As you’ll see from the following transcript of our chat, Reid doesn’t exactly think in linear terms. There were definitely moments when I had thoughts such as “Why is he talking about Pokemon?”, for example. But he always comes back around to his original point, leading to many “Oooooohhhhh! I get it now!” moments in the conversation. And given the dude’s music, that makes perfect sense: while Living Colour is ostensibly a traditionalist hard rock band, they’re still constantly and thinking outside the box and trying to navigate unexplored terrain.
After the jump, check out Reid’s thoughts on the writing and recording of The Chair in the Doorway, the meaning of that album’s title, the joys of interacting with fans through the net, and more.
Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 5:00pm by Axl Rosenberg
Are Living Colour feeling doubtful about their own identity? The band’s first studio album in six years, The Chair in the Doorway, deals largely with questions of self. “Gonna strip it all away,” vocalist Cory Glover repeats over and over again during album opener “Burned Bridges.” “I am the role I play,” he declares on “The Chair,” before wondering “Who am I today?” On “Out of My Mind,” he talks about “losing myself” and “shedding my skin.”
If Glover and his band mates – guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun – really are feeling doubtful about themselves, they’re being neurotic for no reason. The Chair in the Doorway cements the band’s identity as one of the best American rock bands of the past two decades.
