Darius Rucker to Tour and Record New Music with Hootie & The Blowfish
It appears Hootie & the Blowfish might have some music left in them. Frontman Darius Rucker tells Billboard that he and the band have plans to come together and make music again.
“There’s one more Hootie record and tour that we’re going to do,” he reveals. “I don’t know when, because country music is my day job — it’s what I want to do.”
He also says that he and the band will never part ways and that they actually have several shows scheduled. “We’ll probably always be a band. We’ve got two shows in August, we do about four or five dates a year. We’ll do another album and tour for a year, then I’ll be right back to this music.”
When asked about how he feels about his influence on other musicians and touring with some of them, Darius says he is thrilled about how the band’s lasting impact. “It’s amazing to me. When [Lady Antebellum’s] Charles Kelley and I first met, he sent me a video of him at thirteen with his brother Josh and one of their friends, and they’re playing ‘Hold My Hand.’ The first thing that Ketch Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show told me when we met was ‘I told my sister you were doing my song (“Wagon Wheel”), and she said ‘no way,’ because that record was so big in our house. She just didn’t believe it.”
Rucker, who is currently in the studio working on his forthcoming solo effort, believes that the new Hootie & the Blowfish music will actually have a country influence.
“I think if we came out today, we would have to change the instrumentation on a few songs and rewrite a few songs,” he explains.” We’d have to be a country band today. I thought we were as close to country music as you could be then. That’s why I thought when I started doing my country records that I wasn’t doing anything different.”
Rucker’s new solo single, “True Believers,” will be released in the coming weeks.
