BLIND MELON Guitarist Discusses Decision To Reform With New Singer

October 21, 2006

Greg Prato of Billboard.com reports that it's been exactly 11 years since the death of singer Shannon Hoon effectively put an end to BLIND MELON. But now, the group's surviving members — guitarists Christopher Thorn and Rogers Stevens, bassist Brad Smith and drummer Glen Graham — are back together again under the BLIND MELON banner, with a new singer, 25-year-old Amarillo, Texas, native Travis Warren.

Warren met Smith and Thorn through a mutual friend and was initially interested in having the pair help produce his own music. Then, a joke email from Smith to Stevens got the ball rolling towards getting back together last summer. "Brad wrote a fake press release and sent it to me — it was saying how we were back together and how Travis had brought us together," Stevens says. "It was the first I'd heard of it. I called Brad and I was like, 'What do you mean? You got the band back together without me?'"

Soon after, Warren and the four Melons congregated in the studio. "We decided to get into a room and play — we thought it would be fun," Stevens says. "I was really skeptical in the beginning about doing anything, and none of us are into doing any kind of 'nostalgia trip.' We started playing, and I knew within the first half of a song that [Warren] was nailing it. It was something about the way he did it that it immediately disarmed my skepticism."

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