Crazy Town Get on the “Horse”
Crazy Town will release their second album, Darkhorse, on
November 12th. The album is the band’s first since the
slow-yet-multiplatinum success of 1999’s The Gift of Game.
The album features a slightly retooled band, with singers Seth
“Shifty” Binzer and Brett “Epic” Mazur, guitarists Craig “Squirrel”
Tyler and Antonio “Trouble” Valli and bassist Doug “Faydoedeelay”
Miller joined by former Shuvel drummer Kyle Hollinger (who replaces
James Bradley J). Also departed is turntablist DJ A.M.
“Crazy Town has become a real band now,” Tyler says. “It’s
really become a solid entity.”
The group began writing songs while on the road last year, prior
to touring with Ozzfest. By the end of that tour, Crazy Town had
more than thirty songs to take into the studio with producer Howard
Benson (P.O.D., Motorhead). According to Tyler, the first order in
writing and recording was to move past the group’s breakout hit
single, “Butterfly.” “Over here in the States, it became all about
‘Butterfly,'” he says. “It became bigger than anybody could ever
imagine. We joked that we were gonna call this record ‘The Curse of
the Butterfly.'”
“But on the other hand,” he continues, “that record gave us the
opportunity to try some new things. It’s a totally live record. In
the end it sounds like the type records that we grew up listening
to that made us wanna be in bands. We weren’t trying to just write
a couple of dope singles. We wanted to make an album that you could
listen to from beginning to end. In ten years, I wanna be able to
listen to this record and be proud of it. And I think we pulled
that off.”
The album’s first single, “Drowning,” is due next week, and
finds the group moving in a more rock-for-rock’s sake direction,
than on Game. “So many records that come out today, you
don’t really get a sense of a band sitting there playing,”
Tyler says. “We’ve been trying to blur the lines forever; anybody
in a band will tell you they hate genres. But, I just got so tired
of hearing records on the radio with the same verse and the same
chorus. You get no sense of a band. We just came off the road for
two-and-a-half years and we play really well together. And I wanted
to capture that.”
After striking up a friendship with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo
at a shared bill gig in Fresno, California, Tyler and Crazy Town
enlisted him to add a guitar solo on the Darkhorse track
“Hurt You So Bad.” “Rivers was sitting there backstage, and I
walked up and said, ‘You probably hate my band, but I just want to
say I’m a huge fan of your band.’ And he said, ‘I don’t
hate your band.’ So we hung out, and two days later I was at a show
and Rivers was across the room and he goes, ‘Craig!’ “‘Hurt You So
Bad’ originally sounded almost like a Beatles song, and we heavied
it up a little bit and were almost done with it, and I was thinking
it could really use a guitar solo. So we asked, he said yes and
came to the studio, and I can’t explain how nice and gracious he
was. He said, ‘Do you mind if I take a picture with you guys for
the Web site?’ The thing is, if he’d fedback on the track for two
minutes, I would’ve used it, but he played this amazing guitar
solo. It’s fantastic.”
The band is now gearing up to push the record. In a week, Crazy
Town will leave for Europe for two weeks of promotion. Tyler says
the group will do some Christmas radio shows, and they are
considering playing the Big Day Out Festival in Australia in
January, before plotting a full U.S. tour. “We’re just trying to
impress each other,” Tyler says. “There are people who doubt us,
that’s why the record is called Darkhorse. It’s because
there’s people who think we’re the last band in the world that was
going to make this record. We just went away and said, ‘OK,
everybody who’s doubting us, we’re just gonna go away and show you
all that this is legit and we’re going to be around for
awhile,'”