Fishbone will be a part of Less Than Jake’s Summer Circus tour for a June 14 show at Stage AE in Pittsburgh. PhotoCredit: Raymond Amico
Tracey Singleton’s return to punk-ska-funk pioneers Fishbone in 2024, after a 22-year absence, came about unexpectedly.
Singleton, also known as Spacey T, had watched some videos online and sent a message to guitarist Mark Phillips, saying that the lineup sounded great and needed to make a record. (Fishbone’s most recent full-length album, “Still Stuck in Your Throat,” had come out in 2006.)
“Two days later, (Phillips) put out an announcement that he was leaving the band. I was like, whoa, talk about bad timing,” Singleton said Monday. “So once he did that, I called Angelo (Moore, the band’s singer/saxophonist) and said, ‘Hey man, I don’t know what’s going on with Mark. I just saw the thing that he’s leaving the band and if you need me, I’m here for you.’ Angelo and I always had great times. He said, ‘Well let me call you back,’ took him a couple hours. I guess he called the rest of the guys in the band, and then he called me back and he said, ‘We need you, man.’”
About a week later, Singleton, who had been in Fishbone from 1997-2003, rejoined the band in Oakland, California, to help finish off the new album. Singleton said he served as a “funnel” to bring to life the album, “Stockholm Syndrome,” which comes out June 27.
“All the material was already done. They already had all the songs, and all they needed was guitar parts on all the songs,” Singleton said. “I wanted them to produce me and let whatever guitar parts they were hearing in their heads for the songs, that’s what I played for them. I wanted it to be a clear vision of what they were hearing in their heads before I even got there. I had freedom on the solos, but on all the parts of the songs, I wanted to play exactly what they wanted me to play, so that’s what I did and I loved the way it came out.”
Fishbone is on the bill for Less Than Jake’s Summer Circus tour, which includes a June 14 show at Stage AE in Pittsburgh. The band has been through many lineups, but the current group consists of Moore, original member Christopher Dowd (keyboards, trombones and vocals), Singleton, Hassan Hurd (drums), James Jones (bass) and JS Williams (trumpet).
“It’s almost like therapy for Angelo and Chris to move forward and bring Fishbone into the next area where we’re trying to be as a band and trying to build itself back to where it should be, because the band’s been through a lot of different iterations, a lot of turmoil here and there,” said Singleton, who’s spent much of the past 20-odd years in music education. “So we’re just trying to build the brand up to where it should be.”
In a recent call from the band’s tour bus somewhere in Arizona, Singleton discussed more about the album, the band’s political content and more:
What were your favorite parts to play? What do you feel are like your personal highlights on the album?
I really like it all because that’s the thing in Fishbone — you have to really know pretty much any style of music that they call up if they want to do. I come from rock and metal, like my band Sound Barrier, we were the first all-black heavy metal band signed to a major label in the ’80s. We were like five years before Living Colour. If you do some research on Sound Barrier, you’ll see that we were like, I don’t know, people say we were before our time. But we were just trying to forge through and come out with some great music. And we got a video on MTV, which was pretty cool, a song I wrote called “Rock Without the Roll.”
I’m pretty much from a metal situation, but at the same time I’m from the funk world too, because the guitarist Eddie Hazel from the band Funkadelic was my mentor. I moved to California from New Jersey to meet him and I met him, and we became best friends. So I’m known in a lot of different circles, mainly rock/metal circles. But I love all kinds of other music, reggae. I played in a lot of reggae bands in L.A. and all kinds of stuff.
Is that gratifying as a musician that you can have such a diversity of styles — ska, punk, funk, metal? That’s got to keep you on your toes?
Yes, because you never run out of ideas. I’ve never run out of any ideas for songs because I have so much to draw upon. It’s just fun to be able to put in different styles of music, especially in a band like Fishbone, because that’s what we do. We have a song on the new record called “Suckered By Sabotage.” That song has three different styles of music in it. It’s hardcore metal and then it goes into some reggae, and then it goes into some funk, all in the same song. And it sounds great live.
Which of the songs are you looking forward to playing live?
Well, to be honest with you, I can’t wait until we can debut the whole record in its entirety live. That would be great. A couple days ago, we just played at the Grammy Museum in L.A. and we debuted the song “Hellhounds on My Trail” for the first time, and that’s almost like an old style, kind of like blues song. It almost reminds me of Joe Tex or an old R&B blues vocalist, because Chris has all of that down. That’s the thing that blows me away about Chris and Angelo. When we do these different styles of music, they become the character for the style of music that we’re playing. When we’re doing reggae, you would think that we were with the Wailers. They turn into rastas. When we’re hardcore, they turn into punk rock/hardcore vocalists, knowing everything that you need to do to have that style down. And then on top of that, there’s horns. (laughs)
Are you playing an eight-string guitar on this?
Not particularly just yet, but I will be in the near future, because there’s songs that we have that I gotta play the eight-string. There’s a Fishbone song called “End the Reign” that Kendall Jones, the original guitarist, wrote and that song definitely is going to be played on the eight-string. So when we start doing that stuff, you’re going to see me playing the eight-string.
What does the eight-string open up for you musically?
It’s called an extended-range guitar because it has two more strings on it, and it’s like playing a bass and a guitar at the same time. It’s for more timbre and more sound. It’s really cool, and if you want to check out some interesting eight-string sounds, eight-string guitars, like the band Meshuggah or the band Animals as Leaders, this friend of mine, Tosin Abasi, is just destroying the eight-string. So I want to bring that into Fishbone’s music as well.
The first single is “Racist Piece of (Expletive).” Do you think that sets the tone for what people should expect from the album?
Well, that’s just one side of the record, really. It’s coming from all these dimensions, and that’s what Fishbone has always done, and the band’s always been political. So that aspect is always going to be there, but it’s just a very aware band, very conscious, and it’s just all of those elements are always in the music, no matter what style of music it is, like the reggae song, for example, is called “Why Do We Keep On Dying,” and it’s really some really great stuff. There’s a song on the record called “Gelato the Clown,” and it’s about being bullied. It starts off, it sounds like you’re in the 1920s and then as the song goes on, it just gets more progressive, and it blows my mind. It’s very diverse, right?
You mentioned the political content of some of these songs, so how important is activism through music to you personally? Do you feel like not enough artists and musicians are speaking out now?
Yeah I do because I feel like it’s our duty to be like that, especially being a Black band, a band of color, and seeing what’s going on around us. We would be almost crazy not to ever say anything about it, so we have to say something. It’s weird how I noticed this current administration wants to get rid of woke. We can’t help being awake. We all need to be sleeping constantly? We have to be awake. I just don’t understand that whole concept of getting rid of woke. I don’t understand it.
Is it hard to stay positive sometimes then in this environment?
Yeah, but we have to, as much as we can because we got to be cool-headed about the whole situation, and we don’t want to run amok or we don’t want to get too crazy. To me, it just seems like everything’s getting ready to lean toward martial law or something. So we just got to make sure that we’re where we need to be at the right place at the right time, because if that goes down, then music is gonna be more important than ever, and hopefully music won’t be banned.
