Summary: Bruce particpated in a phone chat with me in April 2008 for almost an hour. You can hear it in two parts by clicking each audio player below. Part One: Bruce Phone Chat April 2008 - Part 1 Part Two: Bruce Phone Chat April 2008 - Part 2 Here's a transcript: “I got a great call about three weeks ago from Spike Lee”, Bruce says, in case anyone thought he’d been sitting on his hands lately. “He’s asked me to score the music for a new documentary about Kobe Bryant; it’s a day in the life of Kobe. Spike was with him from sun up to sun down. I’ll have a rough cut in early June, Spike and I will get together, figure out where the music goes, and I’ll go write it. And the band are going to play on it, so it’ll be a Noisemakers scenario – that’s what he wants. It’s the first score I’ve ever done, and it’s nice to be able to get my feet wet in this arena”. (Bruce ran over a story about negotiating with Spike “over the stall” (!!) and how John Shanks got his nickname…) “I’m working a lot at the moment – seven long weekends in a row - Wednesday through Sunday. It’s a Skaggs/Hornsby time. I think the Noisemakers are getting a little fed up as we’re booked until the middle of October! The Noisemakers are touring in August, and we have a joint date in September with Kentucky Thunder. But when we’re touring – maybe four or five days in between gigs – that’s probably when we’re going to record the music for this movie.” “We are hot on the trail of a new record – we’ve been working on sixteen songs, that are going hand-in-hand with the musical, SCKBSTD. (That’s a little more enigmatic than what it spells out!) We recorded for four days back in October, cut a bunch of tracks and then since then we’ve written several more songs, all for the musical. We’ve got eleven songs written for the musical now, and we’ve probably cut fifteen or sixteen songs total for the album." “It’ll end up being one record. It’s almost crazy to talk about ‘albums’ these days, it’s a dying form. I’m trying to keep it to twelve or thirteen songs for the ‘album’, in whatever form that will take. There are a couple of songs that everyone has liked so much that they’ve tried to shoehorn those into the musical, even though they weren’t written for that originally!" “The guys are coming here in May to record some more. A lot of the songs I’ve written with my old childhood friend Chip DeMatteo, with him writing all the lyrics on some songs. It’ll make you laugh, I think – we have such songs as “The Holy Trinity of Home Delivery” (quoted from it). “I’m just trying to write songs that interest me, and so consequently the subject matter over the years goes out of the mainstream. I’m trying to surprise people on a lyrical level. Our new song “The Black Rats of London” is about the unsung heroes of American history – the rodents and the bacterial strains that we brought over on the ships, and infected the Indians helping the English to prevail; also one and a half centuries later, infecting the red coats helping the colonists win. (Bruce quoted a couple of verses). “It’s comedic, but it’s got a point. It’s just a different take on American history. It’s so “live”; that’s going to be a big live song for us. It starts off with Sonny Emory just banging on the tom toms. To me it sounds like an old British pub-drinking song. Huey Lewis says that it sounds like an old Thin Lizzy tune!” “This record that we’re making really captures the sound of our band, more than ever. Most songs are performed by the band together playing in a room. I think the people who like our band will really hear that it feels like us playing a gig, and that’s hard to capture. I think that on at least half of these songs where we’re all just wanging away, I think it really has that sound. I think we’ll play several of them in our shows in August”. “We’ve no idea of a release date, it all depends on the development of the play,
