ALICE COOPER Talks About New Album: Audio Available

ALICE COOPER spoke to Australian radio Triple-J last Thursday morning (March 10) about his upcoming album, "Dirty Diamonds", and his forthcoming Australian tour. Asked about his new CD, Alice said, "I just keep writing these things. I have more fun now writing and recording these things than I ever did. Because I'm kind of back to doing early ALICE, '70s type of rock.

"To be honest with you, I was very inspired by a band like JET and the bands that were just really good garage-rock band. The thing I liked about it is that I listened to bands like JET and THE WHITE STRIPES and THE STROKES and I realized they were playing 1968 Detroit garage-rock. And I kind of said, I would like to go back and do what we did originally. And the last two albums — this album and the last album, 'The Eyes of Alice Cooper' — it's really just that."

"It's so much fun, because I would take the band, we'd go into the studio, we'd write the songs, we'd record it right there, and then I'd say, 'OK, no overdubs.' Because that's what a band should sound like. If the bass is a little bit rushing or the drums don't end quite in time, everybody wants to go in and fix that, and I go, 'Why? That's not what the band sounds like.'"

On the subject of his lyrics for the new album, Cooper said, "I always kind of use the world as my target. There's a lot of silliness in the world that I could write about. And some of it can be pretty horrific, and a lot of it can be very funny. It's just so easy, because it basically human nature. I don't necessarily have to attack an idealogy of anything like that, it's basically, we are the silliest people. So I kind of write about characters. There's a song on the new album called 'Saga of Jesse James' and it's about a cross-dressing truckdriver. It could be Johhny Cash, this song [laughs]."

Listen to Alice Cooper's entire interview with Triple-J in two parts at this location.