Candlebox‘s story comes to a close on The Long Goodbye.
The final studio album from the “Far Behind” rockers arrives Friday, August 25. As frontman Kevin Martin tells ABC Audio, he wanted Candlebox to go out without any limitations.
“I wanna make an album that we wanna make, the record that we wanna make, how we wanna make it,” Martin shares. “And if it’s a last record, it should be a last record, which means anything goes.”
“There’s been a lot of musical changes over the years that we’ve been playing, and so we really just kinda used whatever those inspirations were to create the songs on the record that we wanted,” he continues. “There was no, ‘That’s too alternative’ or ‘that’s too rock ‘n’ roll’ or ‘that’s too hip-hop-influenced’ or whatever.”
That uninhibited approach to the sound of The Long Goodbye was matched in Martin’s lyrics, as well. Take the closing song “Hourglass,” in which Martin “found myself being very honest in a song that I wasn’t necessarily sure I wanted to be that honest in.”
“Even when we recorded it, I was like, ‘I think this is gonna be the closing track of the record,'” Martin shares.
The moment of recording “Hourglass” was straight out of biopic — or, rather, straight out of a parody of a biopic.
“It’s like the joke in [Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story]: ‘Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he goes onstage,'” Martin says. “That happens as an artist and as a musician.”
Candlebox is in the middle of a farewell tour, which includes dates with 3 Doors Down. The trek is currently scheduled into October.
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