TAPROOT's STEPHEN RICHARDS: New Material Is Very Different From First Album

TAPROOT frontman Stephen Richards recently spoke to Rolling Stone magazine about the progress of the group's sophomore CD, tentatively titled Welcome, which is currently being recorded with producer Toby Wright (i.e. ALICE IN CHAINS, SOULFLY) for a late August/early September release through Velvet Hammer/Atlantic Records. Here's what he had to say:

We've changed a lot since we wrote the last album, the singer told the magazine. It's funny, but if you asked me two years ago who my least favorite band in the world was, it would have been PINK FLOYD, but right now they're just about all I'm listening to, and BOWIE. All the songs are heavy on content and really take you on a journey. We're just more into melodic stuff. And that will be reflected in the record I mean, people will be able to tell it's TAPROOT, but this album's a lot more creative and probably a lot more enjoyable.

This time we've spent six months, eight hours a day every day working hard on the record and making sure everything's ready to go. And we've only been recording for two weeks, so we probably have four or six more ahead to make sure we get it right.

[We went into the sessions with thirty songs written and ready for pre-production, but Wright pared the thirty down to four]. And he had us write fifteen more. But it was actually really great. He saw a lot of similarities between songs that we had written a lot of one-dimensional writing and just suggested that we take the best parts of each and cut them down and combine them and make them better. So we took some of the good old stuff and reworked into better songs, and some of the newer stuff is actually the material we're most excited about.