Warrant: New Interview And Live Footage

Jason Woodbury of the Phoenix New Times' "Up On The Sun" blog recently conducted an interview with Warrant/ex-Lynch Mob singer Robert Mason. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Up On The Sun: Have you guys (Warrant) been working on new material at all or have you been focusing mostly on going out and playing the hits?

Mason: Funny you should ask. There's a record that's just done now, (there's) a brand new Warrant record (called "Rockaholic") due out in May. We really took our time, and, through a couple years of doing "fly" dates, we kinda said, well, the band works, we're all doing it for the right reasons, we're all really happy on stage. It's great playing this legacy of music, and the fans love it, so why not [write some new songs] — but we were careful about it. We didn't just throw a record together. We test-marketed a couple of these songs live last summer, just springing them on the audiences. "Hey this is something you've never heard before," and by the end of the song, everyone is singing along, or buying into it. So we figured we should put the record out.

Up On The Sun: Did you feel a lot of pressure with the new material? To live up to the hit songs the band had scored?

Mason: We're just musicians. I'm just a songwriter/singer in a rock band. I was writing songs for this record, and personally, did I feel like they had to fit into an old-school Warrant mode? To a degree, but I don't really think you write songs like that. The fact that we are all from the same headspace, it kind of worked out that way. Some of these songs sound like a bit of a departure, but there are tracks on this new CD that we played live in the rehearsal room, and they came together through pre-production and shit, for the year prior or so to this record, and they sound like Warrant songs to us. It's just me singing. My voice is a little different than the original singer, but it's just a thing were you go on, and you write songs. I turned over things I had written, and say, do your thing, play it the Warrant way, and they could do nothing else, and I would ask nothing else. So, is that the long way of answering yes? (laughs) I didn't feel pressure, or intimidation, but there was a certain responsibility.

Fan-filmed video footage of Warrant performing a brand new song, "Sex Ain't Love", on June 17, 2010 at the "Market Block Party" in Syracuse, New York can be viewed below (courtesy of Rokken Randy).