INTERVIEW ~ JOHN CORABI TALKS THE DEAD DAISIES' NEW MUSIC + MORE

The Dead Daisies recently released their newest single, “Light ‘Em Up,” which is the first track off their upcoming album by the same name. It also sees the return of vocalist, John Corabi back to the band. We were stoked to get the chance recently to sit down with John and chat about the band, new music, tours, and more.

So I know you rejoined The Dead Daisies in 2023 and you went out on some tours. Was that always the plan for you though? To come back?

John Corabi: No, I mean. Here’s the thing, I think other than Motley, I’m not the kind of guy that likes to burn bridges. You know what I mean? When I left, I didn’t leave for any other reason than the fact that I was just burnt.

Right!

There were a huge amount of factors involved. When I first joined The Daisies, I was already out with my solo band just kind of doing shows on my own and they called to begin with in 2015. There was a couple of family matters. My son was the drummer in my solo band. He moved from California to here to play music with me, and we were doing pretty good.

And literally right around the time he moved, I’d gotten married. Which was August 2014. Initially from a family point of view, The Dead Daisies were just “oh yeah we’ll probably go out half the year and do some touring” and I was thinking I could do some touring with The Daisies and then come back and do some weekend stuff and whatever with my son and have time at home.

Then the first record with The Dead Daisies in 2015 Revolución was released and it just blew up. We were just constantly on tour. As soon as we stopped the tour, we’d start another record. Meanwhile my son’s on the other line saying “Dad, you suck” and my wife is like “Okay, well I guess I’ll see you next May!” You know what I mean?

Right! I get it.

I think I was home in 4 years time, maybe in total only 5 or 6 months.

Wow!

You know what I mean? And anybody else would be incredibly grateful to be that busy. I was just so burnt and tired and I just wanted to spend some time with my family. And maybe go do some shows but do them at my own pace. Unfortunately, 2019 was great. I went out and toured. I kind of did my own thing. But then 2020 hit. With Covid, I was home a lot.

Oh yeah. Actually, I saw you in March 2020, I think it was March 8th.It was one of the last shows I went to and within a week everything shut down.

Yeah. And I was actually on my way, I did a little run. Where are you at?

I’m in North Carolina.

Yeah, I was doing those shows and I was headed up north. All of a sudden I just got a call from my agent and he’s like “Go home. Everything is shut down.” In hindsight, I know this is a long answer, I remained friends with everybody in management with the Daisies. David Lowy and I were constantly sending jokes and memes back and forth to each other. I was talking to David, I was talking to Doug, with Dean. I was even talking via Instagram with Glenn Hughes, who took my place. I remained friends with the guys the whole time.

Even at one point, they were supposed to do a tour with Glenn Hughes but Glenn was sick. So they asked me if I would come up to New York and sing for the rehearsals and kind of run them through their paces. It was never any sort of bad blood or anything weird, you know what I mean?

Right. That’s good.

When Glenn left to do his Deep Purple shows and Black Country Communion. David came down to Nashville and we went to dinner together. And he was like “Hey dude, love to have you back. Let’s just go out and have some fun. Let’s write some killer music, go have some killer shows, but not kill ourselves.”

Right. Right. (laughing)

Sign me up, dude. Let’s go. (laughing) I went back last year. We rehearsed, it was like I’d never left. Immediately started kidding with each other, goofing off, and then we went out and just had a blast doing the shows that we did.

Here we are, we went back into the studio and did a bunch of stuff that I’m extremely proud of. Now we’re gearing up and getting ready to go out and do some more shows again.

Well that’s cool. I’m glad to have you back, but I completely understand. That’s hard. This is a band that tours a lot! And not just in the U.S.You guys are headed out again for a “World Tour”, right?

You know what’s funny. We kind of do the U.S. but it’s usually a minimal amount of dates. The U.S. is still such a hard nut to crack. So the majority of our business fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, is overseas. We do really well in Europe, The United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, South America, but the U.S, has been a little… It’s not bad. We do well, but it’s not like overseas.

That’s what I’ve noticed. You have a lot of overseas tours and you’ve done a lot of the major festivals as well.

Yeah. We’ve done all the big festivals. All through Europe and Japan. On the first tour, we did the Download Festival, played to 40 or 50,000 people. We’ll do like Hell Fest and you know, just all the huge festivals. We did one in Poland, it was unbelievable. For a few years, it’s called “Woodstock Live Music & Peace Festival.” It’s one of the largest free festivals in the world. We played with a 60 piece orchestra. We headline one of the nights. We played to like 400,000 people. It was insane, it was awesome.

Wow! That is crazy. I wanted to ask, which you prefer. The big festivals or just getting a good headline tour? That sounds just amazing though.

Honestly. I will say this and I think Covid made a lot of people really open their eyes. When we unfortunately had to sit home for about 3 years and do nothing. I think it made a lot of musicians, myself included, really kind of appreciate any place we play. The truth is, we try to make the best of it. Even if we’re playing clubs or small theaters, we love to see the audience singing back to us. So it doesn’t really matter to us. Festivals are great, there is a different type of energy at a festival because you’re dealing with a massive group of people. They’re sending their love and their energy back to you and you feed off of that. Unfortunate part of that is you don’t see much past the first 5-6 rows of people, then it just becomes a sea of heads and hands.

So they both have their pluses. So we just go out and uh the one thing David Lowy said. Who, if you’re not familiar with the band, David is the founder of the band. He’s a very successful business man, but he’s always loved playing music. In his spare time, he loved playing music, he loves writing music. He’s probably one of the most down to Earth people you will ever meet.

But when he got together with me he said “I honestly want you to come back. I loved your personality on stage, you were like the circus leader.” He said “I started this thing to have fun. To me, that’s what rock & roll music should be.”

Yeah. I agree.

“If I wanted to be serious, I’d stay at my office job and just do that all day. But I want to have fun. This is something I love, this is a passion of mine.” So that’s the thing, man. Regardless of whether it’s a small club, a huge festival, we just want to get out and have a blast. I think if we’re having fun, the audience feeds off of that. Which in turn allows them to forget about their.. I don’t want to put it this way, but we’re all being inundated with bad news all the time. I think our goal is to just make you forget about your day for an hour and a half. That’s it.

Yeah! I think so too. Everyone has their normal day to day routine and they go out for a concert to enjoy themselves. This is their break.

Yeah! And that’s what music is supposed to be. Alice Cooper just made a statement not that long ago he said “I find it a little difficult when bands get on stage and they kind of preach and tell you who they’re voting for.” It’s an outlet for you to have some fun, raise your fists, have a couple of beers, just have a good time. Be responsible. Don’t drive if you’ve been drinking, but just come and forget about your day for an hour and a half or two hours. That’s all The Daisies goal has been. We know how hard it is to buy tickets, how hard it is to pay for gas, and pay for parking, and pay for a t-shirt. David’s goal has been for fans to have fun and give them the most we can give them for their buck. That’s it. We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re not curing cancer. We’re just here, we’re having fun, we want you to have fun. We want you to go home and tell your friends. “I went and saw The Dead Daisies and I had a blast.” That’s it.

Yeah. I get that.

No reason anything other than that.

So your new single is “Light ‘Em Up” which I love. It’s just such a fully charged track. Is that what we can expect from the rest of the album when it’s released?

Yeah, you know. I will say one of the things we all kind of agreed on. We all thought the first album that I was on with the band Revolución was a little more eclectic than Make Some Noise and Burn It Down. So we wanted to have fun, we didn’t want to inundate anyone with lyrics that make you have to think. Everyone’s writing music nowadays it seems, they see the news all day long, then they write music in regards to everything that’s happening. We just wanted to make sure that the songs were fun, nothing political, not telling people the world is going to shit. We just want to make it fun and loud.

That’s definitely what the track “Light ‘Em Up” sounds like for sure.

Yeah, you know. Once again with The Daisies it’s been unbelievably easy, this team with Marti Frederikson. It’s been incredibly easy to write with. You put these 5 guys with Marti in a room and the songs just come out. So we probably did this record… in all total the time the band was in the studio working, we probably did this record in about 3 weeks.

Oh, wow.

But there were a few songs where we went a little left and we just had a little fun and tried to be creative and tried to tell stories. But still keep it light, keep it fun, keep it energetic. And like I said earlier, keep it loud.

So you all went into the studio together and wrote this album? You didn’t write anything separately?

Well, what we did and what we normally do. Management will say “Hey I booked you guys some studio time” and say what dates from here to here. Everyone goes home at that point, everyone has home studios and things like that. So everyone sits in their studio and they’ll put riffs down. Nothing finished because then we’ll all get together. Once we all get together the ideas start flowing anyway. So we just put riff ideas down and we either put them in a Dropbox folder or they’re on our phones. So we’ll all get into a room together and we just start playing riff ideas.

The band flew here to Nashville. We actually mapped out the songs, laid them down, and then everybody went home. Except for me & Marti.

Yeah. You live in Nashville, so you were already home, right? (laughing)

Yeah after we laid all the rhythm down and mapped the tracks out, the guys left. Then Marti and I just sat there and we knocked out the lyrics, the title, and then I sing it. Then we had backing vocals and all this stuff. Boom. Mix it, master it, put it to bed. So I think we did it all in 20 days.

Wow.

So we did some writing in Muscle Shoals as well, down in Alabama. We wanted to soak up a little of that mojo.

Oh yeah, that’s a lot of history down there. Definitely, that’s cool.

Yeah it is. And you know what, everyone is going to be pleasantly surprised. Between me, you, and the fence post we probably recorded about 2 albums worth of material.

Wow.

Yeah, so we did this record. And we were down there in Muscle Shoals and just sucking up some of the mojo from that room. We’d sit and write and record some stuff and then late at night we’d crack open a couple bottles of wine or whiskey or whatever we were doing. We would just start jamming and we kept the tapes rolling and we had a blast. We were writing stuff, we did some old blues stuff, and we recorded everything.

So I think there’s going to be some pleasantly surprised people with this record. And we may have some surprises in the future.

I’m definitely excited for that!

Yeah, it’s going to be really cool. The Muscle Shoals stuff, it was very good for the band and then we came back up here to Nashville and we finished the Light ‘Em Up record.

I can’t wait for it! I am bummed you won’t be hitting North Carolina on your upcoming tour, but one of our photographers (Kris) is planning to catch your show in Nashville. He saw you last year on a solo show you were doing.

I did a solo acoustic show with Tom Kiefer and Winger.

Yup. That’s the one.

It was so crazy. We ended that tour on August 18th at The Ryman, which was a bucket list place for me to play.

That would be a bucket list for me too. That’s awesome.

Yeah! Played The Ryman, it was sold out. I did a little acoustic set as a warm up for Winger and Tom Kiefer and it was amazing. Came home, did my laundry the next day. Then on the 20th I flew up to Philadelphia to play with The Dead Daisies. A bit of whirlwind, you know what I mean. It was crazy.

It looks like you have a pretty full year already, too. You’re starting the World Tour in June, will that tour be continuing through 2025?

I think so. I don’t know yet. I always tell management when they ask me what I think. I tell them “I’m just the singer, that’s above my pay grade. Just tell me where I’m supposed to be.” I have to say we do have our World Tour going through right before Christmas. But the way they’re doing it now, it’s not like it used to be. They’re being very cool about just doing it in spurts.

Great. So you’ll have some breaks at home with the family?

Yes. Go home, see our families, recharge our batteries, and then get back out. At our age, restock up on our diapers, get our Depends, and the wheels on our walkers replaced. You know. Hair dyed. Whatever.

Yeah. All the important stuff.

All the important stuff!!

I don’t want to take up too much of your time. So I’m gonna ask one more question that’s just specifically for you. What songs from your entire career are you the most proud of? Whether it’s from The Scream or Motley or Union or The Daisies or solo?

Obviously the Motley stuff is kind of the stuff that put me on the map.

Right. I personally loved The Scream though.

I was getting ready to say that. The one song for some reason that has resonated with a lot of people all around the world has been “Father, Mother, Son.” And for some reason, that’s the one song that some people go “My brother passed away” or “My father passed away” and it just seems to resonate for whatever reason with a lot of different people. So I think that’s probably the one song. It’s funny I just got an email. Some country artist my manager was talking to me about, they discovered the song and said they would love to cover that song.

It’s a really great song, that’s probably my favorite too. And I think I actually have every album you’ve ever put out.

I appreciate that, thank you.

It was great talking to you and I really appreciate the time you spent with me today. We hope to see you soon!

Interview by I’m Music Magazine Associate Editor Daphne McKinney