Following a triumphant tour with BEAT – featuring Adrian Belew, Steve Vai, and Danny Carey performing the iconic 1980s music of King Crimson – renowned bassist Tony Levin is back with another video release from his latest solo album, Bringing It Down To The Bass. The video for his track “Road Dogs” arrives as a reflection on over three months spent living and traveling on a tour bus with his BEAT bandmates and crew.
Originally conceived as an instrumental, “Road Dogs” has evolved into a visual exploration of life on the road for musicians and their dedicated crew. “Tony’s initial idea for the video was to create a gritty nightclub vibe rather than a straightforward tour documentary,” says video producer A.J. Chippero. “I proposed a comic book-style approach, incorporating Tony’s personal photos and videos not only from BEAT, but from King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, and Stick Men tours, transformed into a black-and-white comic aesthetic. The result pays homage to Tony’s legendary online Road Diaries, one of the longest-running blogs in music.”
Tony says, “We road dogs who tour all the time aren’t just the players onstage – as the lyrics say, there’s trucking & rigging and loading and gigging… so, many of my photos of the crews in action seemed right for the video.”
For the album, Bringing It Down To The Bass, Tony enlisted an impressive roster of collaborators, including King Crimson and Peter Gabriel alumni Robert Fripp, Pat Mastelotto, Jerry Marotta, Steve Hunter, and Larry Fast. The album also showcases renowned talents such as Steve Gadd, David Torn, Earl Slick, Gary Husband, Shankar, Vinnie Colaiuta, and Mike Portnoy. Together, they deliver a rich blend of rock, jazz, classical, blues, and ambient influences.
Bringing It Down To The Bass, featuring the new video “Road Dogs,” is available now from Flatiron Records. Stream, download or purchase the album here. The release is available on double vinyl, CD, Blu-ray and digital streaming. The Blu-ray features Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD 7.1/5.1 mixes and hi-res stereo audio. The Apple Music stream is available in Immersive Audio / Dolby Atmos. Thiago Lima at Iguana Studios Toronto, Canada mixed the Atmos tracks.
Bringing It Down To The Bass has no shortage of wit and whimsy, and songs of power and profundity. Most are instrumental tracks, while a few feature vocals and spoken word. The sonic stew includes Prog, Jazz, Thrash, Classical, a whiff of barbershop quartet, and you won’t be sure what’s around the corner. And while it’s called Bringing It Down To The Bass – and that’s no lie – it’s not all about that bass. Levin’s seventh solo album, and his first since 2007, is an autobiography of sorts, with the themes drawn from Levin’s musical life. It features a myriad of collaborators from his half-century-plus on the road and in the studio with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson and many, many others.
“I had pieces very much in the prog-rock vein and I had pieces that were based on the bass,” Levin says, “and somewhere around the middle of the record I made the difficult decision to toss the prog stuff – well, not toss it exactly, save it for another album – and the more I focused, I chose the kind of pieces that had to me a sense of unity to it in that it’s about the bass. Not songs with singing about the bass, but each song is either based on a bass riff or a bass technique that I then invited some great rhythm sections to play on.
“My basses do each sound different. I wanted to write at least one piece with the funk fingers and I did that fingernail way of playing that I featured on one piece, and hammer-on technique on that first piece, ‘Bringing It Down To The Bass.’ I used to use that a long time ago and I hadn’t used lately since I got the Stick, which is designed to play with the hammer-on technique. That’s also a piece that has a rocking, really hot rhythm section with Manu Katche, from Peter’s band on drums. Also, maybe two or three times in the piece it breaks down and stops to just the bass playing different riffs and then Dominic Miller, from Sting’s band, comes in and solos and Alex Foster solos on sax.”
The recording of “Road Dogs” began as an instrumental piece. He revisited a sound he’s used throughout his career, playing the fretless bass through a vocoder. The results were not what he was after so Levin’s approach was to try to sound like the bass through this tool. There was a vocal take that captured the undertones of his voice and that became the appropriate path to take. Lyrically, the song shares a glimpse in to life on the road, with the artist singing, “lighting & rigging & soundcheck & gigging, packing & loading & driving & roading … Trucking & bussing & rigging & trussing, fixing & tuning & mixing & crooning.”
Tracklisting:
“Bringing It Down To The Bass”
“Me And My Axe”
“Road Dogs”
“Uncle Funkster”
“Boston Rocks”
“Espressoville”
“Give The Cello Some”
“Side B / Turn It Over”
“Beyond The Bass Clef”
“Bungie Bass”
“Fire Cross The Sky”
“Floating In Dark Waters”
“On The Drums”
“Coda”
