MATT SORUM'S FIERCE JOY: More 'Stratosphere' Album Details Revealed
Rock And Roll Hall Of Famer and legendary drummer of GUNS N' ROSES, VELVET REVOLVER and THE CULT, Matt Sorum will release his new album, "Stratosphere", under the moniker MATT SORUM'S FIERCE JOY on March 11 on Rok Dok Recordings via Kobalt Label Services.
"Stratosphere" is major departure from the hard-hitting rock Sorum is best known for. His intense passion for animal and human rights, and need to give back heavily influenced the narrative and acoustic orchestration of the album.
"Over the years, I've been influenced by my surroundings and sometimes that hasn't always been for the better," says Sorum. "But after years of soul searching, I organically fell into a different state of mind.
"With many lessons learned along the way, it seemed like the perfect time to do a record in my own voice, if you will. It's as real and exposed as anything I've ever offered my in my career, and I hope you enjoy it."
Besides stepping behind the mic for lead vocals, Sorum wrote the entire album, and plays acoustic guitar and piano.
"I've always played acoustic, so I wanted to use that as the feel of the record," Matt says.
"I chose the musicians I wanted by records they had played on, and diverse instruments such as mellotron, slide guitar and ethnic percussion.
"I always wanted orchestration, so this album was the canvas for that as well."
Pre-order "Stratosphere" now on iTunes and get an instant download of "The Sea".
Check out the first webisode (in a series of 5) about of the making of "Stratosphere" below.
MATT SORUM'S FIERCE JOY - "Stratosphere" track listing:
01. Intro - Stratosphere Part 1
02. The Sea
03. What Ziggy Says
04. For the Wild Ones
05. Goodbye To You
06. Gone
07. Lady of the Stone
08. Ode to Nick Drake
09. Blue
10. Josephine
11. Land of the Pure
12. Killers N Lovers
13. The Lonely Teardrop
14. Outro - Stratosphere Part 2
Speaking to The Street, Sorum stated about his inspiration for the "Stratosphere" CD: "I'm known as a rock guy, but I've always loved so many diverse artists. I was a huge Joni Mitchell fan; I remember listening to a lot of her records back to back. Neil Young, Tom Petty, THE BEATLES, of course, and I was a huge Bowie fan. I was also into progressive stuff, like early GENESIS, Peter Gabriel era. You can hear that influence on the new album; there are a couple of songs that have some interesting time changes.
"I've always dabbled on the acoustic guitar, and I wrote a couple songs for VELVET REVOLVER. In GUNS N' ROSES, Axl [Rose] and Slash looked to me for arrangements. I wasn't the predominant songwriter, but I've always been involved in the process.
"When I put 'Stratosphere' together, I actually had a lot of it on cassette. I'd been writing the songs over the years, and I wanted to do an album that was just coming from me, regardless of anyone's expectations."
Asked if MATT SORUM'S FIERCE JOY will go out on tour, Sorum said: "We're going to tour, but it isn't going to be a typical rock show. If I'm going to front a band, I can't see myself, at my age, jumping up and playing rock and roll the way Dave Grohl does. Dave pulls it off, running around the stage with an electric guitar. But would that feel right for me? How can I make this feel natural, a natural progression, growing into the man that I finally feel that I am, and saying what I want to say now?"
Sorum played a brand new solo song entitled "The Sea" on November 18, 2013 at Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles. Fan-filmed video footage of performance — featuring Sorum on guitar and vocals — can be seen below.
Sorum told The Street about the track: "I wrote that song on acoustic, then piano.
"I always heard the desert was a cool place to write, so I headed out to Joshua Tree. Then in my hometown, we used to go to a little beach getaway called the Surf and Sand, and I wrote the lyric to 'The Sea' there. I was sitting on a balcony, overlooking the ocean, thinking about life. I started thinking about the sea as a metaphor for spiritual awakening."
"Lady of the Stone" Music Video
"For The Wild Ones" Music Video
"The Sea" Music Video
Making of "Stratosphere" webisode 1:
Making of "Stratosphere" webisode 2:
Making of "Stratosphere" webisode 3:
Making of "Stratosphere" webisode 4:
Making of "Stratosphere" webisode 5:
"The Sea" performance footage:
Read more at http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/matt-sorums-fierce-joy-more-stratosphere-album-details-revealed/#yxjFF6mARzTllHxg.99
Matt Sorum - "The Sea" - Live at the Avalon
Matt Sorum, performing his song "The Sea" at the Avalon in Hollywood, CA for the Ric O' Barry Dolphin Project Benefit Show.
Ready, Set, Slaughter: Dolphin Killings to Begin in Infamous Cove
Sunday, September 1 marks the start of Taiji, Japan’s annual dolphin slaughter, made famous by the Oscar-winning documentary ‘The Cove.’
Former Guns ’N Roses drummer Matt Sorum (L) and dolphin activist Ric O’Barry (R) protest Taiji, Japan’s annual dolphin slaughter by holding iPads that depict footage of the bloody killings during a flash-mob appearance on Friday, August 29, in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo: Lincoln O’Barry)
It’s that wretched time of year again.
The killing season opens Sunday, September 1 in Taiji, heralding a six-month orgy of mass terror, suffering, kidnapping, bloodshed and slaughter inflicted upon hapless pods of whales and dolphins unlucky enough to swim near the coast of Japan’s Kuman-nada Sea.
Herded by boats and terrifying banger poles into an inlet popularized by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, the stressed-out animals will be separated: younger, cuter ones will be sold to theme parks to spend a life in “show business.” The rest will be impaled, speared, sliced, and gutted in the crimson-red waters, destined for East-Asian dining tables.
For ten years, Ric O’Barry, star of The Cove, and his wife Helene have journeyed to Taiji every September 1 to kick off a long, often depressing and chilly season of volunteers witnessing, monitoring, protesting, and—something that gets more difficult each year—trying to attract media attention.
After the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, most Japanese and international media have focused on urgent issues far to the north. “One journalist at AP told us she’s not coming back until we find radiation in the cove,” O’Barry says, with sadness, before boarding a Tokyo flight. “It gets harder and harder when Fukushima is really the only issue over there right now.”
If The Cove pointed a world spotlight on the slaughter, Fukushima turned it away. Now activists around the world are coming up with new, attention-grabbing events the media simply cannot ignore, including simultaneous global demonstrations, Japanese flash mobs, and a healthy heaping of rock ’n’ roll.
“Anything we can do” will be done, O’Barry vows. “We have to keep coming up with creative ways to keep the issue alive.”
That’s why on this trip, “Ric will be accompanied by Matt Sorum, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a founding member and drummer of Guns N’ Roses and founder of the supergroup Kings of Chaos,” says Mark Palmer, Associate Director at Earth Island Institute.
“Matt is also the Musical Director for ‘Tokyo Celebrates the Dolphin,’ an upcoming event to generate much-needed positive international publicity regarding Japan’s relationship with dolphins,” Palmer continues. “The concert and celebration will be about the relationship the people of the Tokyo islands have with wild and free dolphins. The local people have adopted dolphins and given them names.” One island even made their dolphins official citizens.
“We’re trying to balance this publicity out, so it’s not all negative,” says O’Barry. Most people in Japan “are the opposite of Taiji,” he says, “We want to celebrate the relations they have with dolphins.” Meanwhile, the Kings of Chaos, “can fill stadiums around the world. A concert in Tokyo with 40,000-to-60 000 young people in the same building (in protest of killing dolphins) is hopefully going to get a lot of attention, and keep attention on the cove.”
A concert date has not been set, but September 1 will be a red-letter day in Taiji, and around the globe. “We have about 50 people who will show up at the cove, but we also have 100 cities around the world where people will be protesting at Japanese embassies and consular offices,” O’Barry says. “People can go to Save Japan Dolphins to get the information and show up at one of these demonstrations.”
Activists will also be showing up, spontaneously, at freshly planned “flash mob actions,” over the coming weekend,” says Palmer. “We’ve been invited by a Japanese activist group called Flippers Japan” to a flash mob in Tokyo on Friday and a similar Taiji event on Sunday.
Credit for much of the ongoing action belongs to The Cove, which “had an enormous influence on many issues,” says the film’s director Louie Psihoyos. “In Japan we’ve helped reduce demand for dolphin meat by about two-thirds, saving thousands of dolphins and porpoises each year. When our team arrived in Japan the government was force-feeding dolphin meat with toxic loads of mercury to thousands of schoolchildren, and had a plan to expand this scheme to unsuspecting communities all over the country. That’s not happening anymore.”
The company distributed thousands of pamphlets “to the primary dolphin hunting communities warning them of toxic dolphin meat,” he adds. “and sent suitcases of translated DVDs of The Cove all over the country.” Today, several countries “are banning the import of wild dolphins and many airlines (refuse) their planes for trafficking dolphins,” Psihoyos says. “Watching a good documentary can be more than $10 and some popcorn; it can be a weapon of mass construction.”
Greater awareness, about mercury and about what happens at the cove, has driven down demand, and thus the total number of animals killed annually. “In 2004, when our Save Japan Dolphins Campaign began, about 1,600 dolphins were killed that season. Last season about 900 were killed,” Palmer says. The government authorizes about 2,000 animals annually, “so the hunt itself is not doing well.”
But this silver lining has a very dark cloud: As demand for dead dolphins dropped, demand for live ones skyrocketed, with each fetching $150,000 or more. This, critics say, is the economic underpinning of the entire enterprise. Remove it, and the business collapses.
According to Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), although numbers killed each season fluctuate, last season saw the lowest number of animals killed in 10 years, but a record high number of animals, 247, captured for public display. In the prior season, only 68 were taken alive.
And there is more bad news. Whale-and-dolphin drives are still thriving in other countries, especially the Solomon Islands, in the south Pacific and the Faroe Islands, in the north Atlantic.
“I don’t think anyone has a handle on total numbers in the Solomon’s,” says WDC’s Courtney Vail. “The average take there is around 700 dolphins.” And though there was “a brief cessation” brokered by Earth Island officials, this year “nearly 1,700 dolphins were taken, many more than are killed in Taiji annually.”
“We’ve had some success funding (villages) for alternatives to killing dolphins,” Palmer explains. “One of the tribes got greedy and threw out our agreement and began killing dolphins again. But other villages are sticking by the agreement.” Unconfirmed reports claim the animals are suffocated with mud stuffed down their blowholes.
In the Faroes, meanwhile, people have survived for centuries through hunting whales. But in the 21st century, “the tradition persists, not only because some people there like to eat whales, but because they enjoy killing them,” Helene O’Barry recently wrote.
Here, “the hunts involve the larger community that participate in the round-up and killing in full view of observers, bystanders, and the Internet,” says Vail. “Whales are dispatched in large groups, as they are herded to shore en-masse, in a chaotic scramble to kill.” So far this year, more than 1,000 animals have perished.
Despite all the protests, media scrutiny, legal challenges, diplomatic force and simple attempts at friendly dissuasion, the killing goes on, in Japan and elsewhere. It seems as though no amount of outside pressure can stop it.
“It has yet to change the resolve of the hunters and the governments that support them. Diplomacy and friendship have not yet succeeded,” laments Vail, who then adds: “All cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition, should be exposed.”
O’Barry agrees. “We are trying to get the Japanese people to take ownership of this issue; they are the only ones who can stop this dolphin slaughter. Westerners can’t do it,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been looking for the past ten years for ways to work with them, not against them.”
Like any nationality, Japanese dislike foreigners telling them how to behave. “Many Japanese react with defiance,” says Palmer, “but many more secretly agree with us.” Still, standing up against this issue “is very hard for Japanese,” who risk their jobs, and get harassed and investigated “in a very heavy-handed way.” But, he adds, “word is getting around, slowly.”
O’Barry predicts the slaughter, though probably not live captures, will end soon. The killing is unsustainable, he says, morally and economically. After all, “The vast majority of people in Taiji are not involved in killing dolphins,” he notes, “less than 50 men are giving the entire country a bad name.”
Source: http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/08/30/cove-slaughter-2013-begins-ric-obarry-taiji-japan
Adopt the Arts Event Sunday September 15, 2013
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