Riot Fest 2017 - Saturday
Fishbone at Riot Fest 2017 (more by James Richards IV)

Fishbone's (mostly) original lineup working on first new album in decades; Fat Mike producing

In 2018, Fishbone reunited all of their original lineup except guitarist Kendall Jones (whose time with Fishbone came to a controversial end in 1993), and now that lineup is set to make a new album. It’ll be Fishbone’s first album in at least 14 years (their last was 2006’s Still Stuck in Your Throat) and their first with all five of the current original members together since 1993’s Give a Monkey a Brain and He’ll Swear He’s the Center of the Universe.

They’re in the process of working on the new album, which doesn’t have a title or expected release date yet, but keyboardist, trombonist, and songwriter Chris Dowd (who, having left Fishbone in 1994, had the longest hiatus from the band of all the current members) revealed details about it in a new interview with AltPress, including that NOFX’s Fat Mike is producing.

“[Fat Mike’s] definitely got strong opinions about what he is and isn’t feeling,” Chris says. “But we definitely have strong feelings about what we are and aren’t going to be bargained with, too. [Laughs.] I feel like Mike is doing this Fishbone album going, ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’ For real: It’s a six-headed monster.”

Speaking about the song and lyrical themes of the new songs, Chris added:

I’ll put it this way. You could wake up and wanna listen to Black Flag’s Slip It In. Then you turn on the TV and you see the orange dickhead, and you’ve got a new song. Is that “Ugly” Part II? I don’t know!

I will tell you this: It’s definitely going to be very political. But we’ve been singing about this shit for a very long time. We wrote songs like “Change.” And you sing about this shit, and you watch it fall on deaf ears. And at a certain point—and maybe this goes back to why I left the band—you just start to doubt your ability as a writer [and] as an artist. You know what I mean? Sometimes I look back, and I’ll be honest with you, I wonder if the shit we did was good enough. Maybe it wasn’t. Either a song is fucking transcendent or it isn’t. Maybe as good as I think I write, it wasn’t. I don’t fucking know.

As for Kendall Jones’ continued absence from the group, Chris said, “We wanted Kendall to be in the band. Tried really hard. But we’re just in different places.”

And as for when it will come out: “Trust me, as much as you would like to hear it, I would like to be done with it.”

Stay tuned for more. Also, assuming concerts will be happening by then, Fishbone are on board for Riot Fest 2021.

In other Fishbone news, frontman Angelo Moore recently took part in Mikey and His Uke’s guest-filled, quarantine Operation Ivy cover with members of Less Than Jake and more. Fishbone were also among the musicians to pay tribute to SNFU’s Chi Pig.

In other Fat Mike news, NOFX and Frank Turner’s split album where they cover each other comes out Friday (7/31) but is streaming in full now.

Watch a full concert video of the current Fishbone lineup in Philly in 2019:

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