Battling The Blues With JOHN CORABI From THE DEAD DAISIES

Interview by Kris Peters
The Dead Daisies have always had an underlying stream of blues coursing through their music. It is an age-old style of music that has influenced pretty much every conceivable genre over the years, although rock music has benefited the most.
With vocalist John Corabi coming back on deck for last year's album Light 'em Up, The Dead Daisies embraced their blues side even more, culminating in late night jam sessions while recording that album at the legendary FAME studios progressing into recording sessions which led to their new album Nothin' But Trouble, which is due out on May 30.
The album pays homage to the work of blues legends such as BB King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howlin Wolf, with The Dead Daisies reworking their classic songs and sprinkling enough of their own DNA through the tracks to make them their own. It is an outstanding body of work from a band with an impressively high back catalogue, and showcases some of the influences that have seen the members hone their craft.
HEAVY caught up with Corabi to find out more.
"You know what I'm excited about so far is that the first two songs that we released have been getting great feedback from everybody," he began. "And as I was saying earlier, this was it was what we call a happy accident. This whole thing came about in such a weird, random way. We went to this legendary studio in America called Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and it was kind of a bucket list thing for all of us, including Marti Frederiksen (producer).
So we went down there with the thought in mind that we would just maybe write and maybe do a little bit of recording down in this legendary studio. It's a legendary place, but also it's a functioning studio, and they do museum tours through this place and each night around dinner time, they bring in 20, 30 people.
So we'd take a break. And then we kind of sat and thought about it. We're like, well, okay, the tour was over. We were done eating, and we'd crack open either a bottle of whiskey or some wine. And we thought we could go back to the hotel and sit and watch TV all night, or, we're here, let's just jam. Let's see. Let's just have some fun. So we kind of started jamming some blues that everybody was familiar with, obviously, like Crossroads, Going Down, and Born Under a Bad Sign. And then it was weird, we just kind of sat, and Marti kept the session rolling. We listened and thought, okay, this is really cool. This is really cool, so what we did is during the day we worked on what became the Light 'em Up record, and we just continued working at night and putting together 10 of our favourite blues songs and so far man, everybody's been raving about it."
In the full interview, John spoke more about the band's intention to honour their musical roots through a collection of blues tracks. He explained the challenges of reinterpreting classic songs, emphasizing the need to make them their own while maintaining their integrity, using When the Levee Breaks as a reference for transformation. He shared insights on the evolution of specific tracks, such as Terror Plane Blues into Take My Soul, and acknowledged the blues' influence across various genres.
We talked about the process behind reworking other people's music, which songs were the easiest to do and which ones more difficult and more.


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