What Do You Want To Hear?
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
I was checking out RollingStone.com today, and they had an interesting interview up with Phil Collen from Def Leppard. In it, Phil talks about how fans react to new music from the band when it’s performed in concert:
“You’d really like to go out there and play all your new sh-t off the new record, but you can’t do that, because they’d walk out,” he says. “It’s like when you go and see the Stones and Keith Richards starts doing a couple of songs, and everyone goes and buys a T-shirt.”
It’s unfortunate that for so many bands, that’s really the case. But not for everyone. Artists like U2 and Bruce Springsteen have the sort of fans that love hearing the new material. I remember seeing one gig on U2’s ”Vertigo” tour at Air Canada Centre where a woman behind me was singing along with “Yahweh” from “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” like it was an old classic and not the closer to the new album.
I figure fan reaction to a new song directly correlates to strength of the material. Will a new Def Leppard track from “Songs From The Sparkle Lounge” hold up beside a classic from “Pyromania” or “Hysteria”? If it does, than I’d think fans would want to hear it as much as a classic song.
How about you? When you see Def Leppard, or any established band for that matter, do you want to hear new material? Why or why not?
Take a listen to ”Nine Lives”, the first single from Def Leppard’s ”Song From The Sparkle Lounge” and then input the bonus code: LIVES