As they prepare for their “Get Out and Vote” tour, the Beastie Boys are also busy working on their next album, a follow-up to 2007’s instrumental album The Mix-Up.
“We’re actually in the middle of recording it right now,” member Ad-Rock said to Billboard.com. “We hope to have it out
sometime next year. It’s a lot of vocals, a lot of words — very wordy.
And it’s political, depending on what you call political. You know, if
toilet talk and fart jokes are political, which they can be, in that
sense yeah, very.“
This upcoming album would be the first to feature vocals from the Beastie Boys since 2004’s To the 5 Boroughs. As for the possibility of the new material being played during the tour, “I don’t think so,” laughed Ad-Rock. “It’s always weird when you play
the new songs that people don’t know. Anytime we play new songs, it
always seems like a brick.“
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Ad-Rock also spoke on the need for the “Get Out and Vote” tour – because 70 million registered voters didn’t make it to the polls in 2004.
“70 million people is a lot of people to not vote. So this all happened really quick, like a month or so ago and within the past few weeks, literally. We were just stressing on what to do and then we were like, ‘We’re a band and we play shows, so let’s go to these swing states.’ We thought it would be a good idea to get people to vote.
“Basically, we just called a bunch of people and asked them if they wanted to play,” said Ad-Rock. “It’s literally like, whoever called us back (is on the tour).“
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The tour begins in October in Charlotte, N.C., and runs through Nov. 2 in Denver. Sheryl Crow, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Norah Jones, Crosby & Nash, Santogold and Tenacious D will join the Beastie Boys on various parts of the tour.
The Beastie Boys also reached out to De La Soul, Nas, Nine Inch Nails and Moby, but those acts could not participate due to scheduling reasons.
