According to founding guitarist Vernon Reid, Living Colour's new album was officially born onstage at the Apollo Theater one night back in early 2012. Reid and his bandmates – vocalist Corey Glover, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun – had been invited to take part in a show celebrating the life and legacy of blues giant Robert Johnson, and they responded with a roof-raising performance of "Preachin' Blues," a brooding dark horse in Johnson's famously sparse catalog.
"It wasn't an over-rehearsed thing," Reid recalls. "We just hit it, and right then and there I felt we connected very strongly to a part of that blues flow, in our own way. And just in that spontaneous moment, that's when I thought, 'Man, this feeling, or these stories, or this sense of things is a thread we can work with.' But we didn't set out to do a blues omnibus or a blues travelogue. I mean, we're urban people. But I think the blues is overlooked in its complexity. We see it so much that we don't even see it anymore, because the familiarity breeds a kind of conceptual contempt, you know? You stop hearing 'hellhound on my trail ...,' and what that means. So we really wanted to try to reconnect with the existential aspect of what the blues is talking about." [Read More]
