Saudade have dropped their new track “Lions“, which finds Lamb Of God vocalist Randy Blythe and dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry guesting. Led by Chuck Doom of Crosses/Team Sleep fame, Saudade is a collective which boasts the following musicians as frequent participants:
- Chino Moreno (Deftones/Team Sleep)
- Gil Sharone (ex-Marilyn Manson/The Dillinger Escape Plan)
- John Medeski (Medeski, Martin & Wood)
- David Torn (Sun Of Goldfinger, David Bowie)
- Mackie Jayson (ex-Cro-Mags/Madball)
- Robert Thomas Jr. (Weather Report)
The collective debuted this latest track via Revolver, who are also running a new interview with Blythe and Doom. Speaking of how it feels to be on a track with Perry, Blythe offered:
“For me, it’s a super big honor to have Scratch on the track, to be on a track with him because that’s something that, coming from my world and being in this heavy-metal band on tour with Slayer, if someone had told me, “You’re going to be on a track with Lee Scratch Perry,” I would have said, “Get the fuck outta here!”
If you read interviews with me and people ask me, “What metal are you listening to?” I’m like, “I’m not!” I’m listening to a lot of Seventies dub reggae, you know? You’ll see that again and again and again in interviews, and of course Scratch is such a huge component of that. And in music in general, like, people outside the sort of reggae world don’t understand the range of his influence he pioneered in his Black Ark studio.
I’m a huge fan. Anything that is dubbed out, like, weird, tripped-out stuff, that’s all coming from him working with analog equipment in the Sixties and Seventies. He’s a genius. I have a biography of him called People Funny Boy my wife got me that’s one of my favorite books.
If you understand what he did and him being the first guy to do this kind of stuff, really at the forefront of it, and you start looking for that influence in all forms of music, it’s there. A lot of people don’t even know that. So, for me, having him on the track, getting to be with someone who has really, truly influenced music in general, not just like our genre or reggae or whatever, but music in general — it’s a big deal.”
As for the lyrical inspiration for the track, Blythe offered:
“…I wrote all the lyrics, and if you read the lyrics on face value — I’ll send them to you — it’s a bit abstract at times. I use a lot of really heavy poetic imagery, but then it reads almost like a psychosexual, Natural Born Killers kind of vibe. I sing from a male voice about being with my love, and I want her to “draw her knife,” and I say, “death from above,” then the chorus is “We kill with a kiss.”
So, it kind of comes off as this whole Natural Born Killers, kind of psychotic thing. But what the song is about is an invasive species of fish called Lionfish. They’re from Asia and they have been introduced into our ecosystem here in the Caribbean and on the East Coast. They first showed up in ’85, I think, down in Florida. These are one of the most aggressively dangerous, invasive species in all of the marine world. They’re venomous — they’ll fuck you up — and they kill everything. They don’t have any natural predators here on the East Coast.
They think that Lionfish are here as a result of some bored aquarium hobbyist who let them loose in our waters because they’ve done genetic research, and the first ones they found matched stuff that came from the Philippines where most of the aquarium hobbyists came from. So, they think some aquarium people had these lionfish in their tanks, [and] instead of killing them, they just let them loose.
It’s a really big problem down in our ecosystem on the East Coast, particularly down in Florida and the Caribbean. I was in the Caribbean on a photo gig, and I was doing a lot of snorkeling and spear-fishing on the coral reef for these lionfish when I wasn’t working because one adult lionfish can reduce the juvenile fish population of a coral reef by 79 percent — all the fish. They’re killing everything.
So my wife came down to Cayman and I said, “Honey, we’re going lionfish hunting.” I had a homemade spear and took her out with me in the water hunting these lionfish. It’s pretty scary because if one stings you — they move slow, but they move aggressively so if you miss, one might rush you — but if one stings you … you should look it up. It locks you up. It’s not like a bee sting, it’s like if you got stung on your throat, your throat would swell up and you’d die in the water.
This song is about me and my wife going in the water and trying to eradicate some of this lionfish population. That’s the only way to keep them under control now, because they don’t have any fear. It was a neat image to me. It’s an environmental song, but it’s also kind of this crazy, Natural Born Killers story.”
You can read more from the pair at revolvermag.com.
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