Jason Newsted is Working on Something New and Heavy
Jason Newsted of Metallica fame just announced that he is working on a new, heavier band after finishing up the first album from his long-time project, The Chophouse Band.
While the band formed back in in 1992, they started off as a more acoustic-drive band, Newsted said in a recent radio interview with Gator 98.7 FM’s Gator Garage that he’s looking to put something together with heavier riffs and more traditional metal vibes.
“Actually, I spent six months of last year putting together The Chophouse Band ‘Volume 1′. The Chophouse Band has been together (and) making music since 1992. So it was our first album after 30 years. I spent a lot of time on that. And then, once I got that under my belt, I’m kind of stepping back into the heavy now. So the last couple of weeks I’ve been auditioning guitar players for a heavy project. I’m back on bass and singing with a metal drummer—double bass, you know, getting’ loud again. So I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire. I’m putting two new projects together right now—but loud.”
“The Chophouse Band started out as almost a bluegrass-tinged thing, and now it gets to some places that are as heavy as anything else that I’d been involved with—Voivod, Ozzy, Metallica, Newsted band, any of that stuff—It gets to those places now,” he adds.
Newsted also explains in the interview that he loves singing, and that there are now “four singers in the band.” This allows him to focus more on guitar and just do background vocals, both clean and screamed.
“You can take the boy out of the metal; you can’t take the metal out of the boy. It’s just the way it’s always gonna be. So I’m excited for people to be able to witness what we have been working so hard at. I put a lot—a lot—of energy into these new songs,” he says.
This wouldn’t be the first time Newsted’s gone and done something like this. Back in the 2010s, he had a short-lived, yet pretty killer solo project aptly titled Newsted that kicked all kinds of ass. We’ll see if this new project is more in line with that, or something else entirely.
