Slash revealed that while recording his upcoming album with Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators, they all contracted covid, according to Blabbermouth.
Slash featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators will release their latest album, titled 4, on February 11th. The album, which is the band’s first on the Gibson Records imprint, features the just-released first single, “The River Is Rising,” and marks the collective’s first studio set since 2018’s Living The Dream. In addition to Slash and Kennedy the band includes Brent Fitz on drums, Todd Kerns on bass, and Frank Sidoris on guitar.
While chatting with Germany’s Radio Regenbogen, Slash gave the backstory on the sessions: “The funniest story about this record was the covid story, because we took a tour bus to Nashville to keep ourselves safe — to get there and not travel commercially. And then we went and recorded the whole record, and then I got a phone call from Myles in the studio when I was about to do overdubs, and he goes, ‘Man, I tested positive.’ And subsequently, two of the other guys tested positive, so they all had to go into quarantine. And we still had to do percussion and background vocals, and so we sort of stalled.”
He went on to explain, “We mixed what we had, which was a lot. And then we recorded the background vocals in the guest house of the house that we were all quarantined in. And then those guys got better. I tested positive finally. And so I had to quarantine. But I just got vaccinated, so I only had to quarantine for a few days. And so I came out, and then we did the percussion and mixed (the rest of) the record and drove home. So that was the funny experience about this particular record, was everybody having to navigate the whole covid experience.”
Even though Myles Kennedy writes all the lyrics for their songs, Slash told us a while back that he sometimes influences what the singer comes up with: “A lot of the songs that end up on the record stem from random conversations that Myles and I have had. So it’s an interesting thing — I could very casually be talking to him about something that means something to me or vice versa, or both of us, and next thing you know, it becomes a lyric.”