BAD RELIGION Bassist Talks About Upcoming Album

September 1, 2008

Bill Adams of Ground Control recently conducted an interview with bassist Jay Bentley of the California punk rockers BAD RELIGION. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow.

Ground Control: Because of the way things are working, do you envision a new BAD RELIGION album surfacing early next year?

Jay Bentley: Not early for sure. If we were going to have it out early next year, we'd have to be working on it now and there isn't enough material yet for that. All we've talked about is Greg [Graffin, vocals] saying that while he's teaching there wouldn't be any 28-day stints at the House of Blues. We've made no commitments to doing anything and Greg said he wanted to take that time to write and Brett [Gurewitz, guitar] agreed so we could possibly get into the studio in April and the release would be later in the year under those circumstances.

Ground Control: So you're looking at fall.

Bentley: Right — but that's so one percent. [chuckling] And that's totally cool; we don't have any contractual obligations— it's not like we've got to have another record out — we do what we want, we're on our own label, we're fine.

Ground Control: Now, this might sound like a totally contrived question, but is that why BAD RELIGION returned to Epitaph?

Bentley: That's part of it. Part of it was, when we moved to Warner Brothers, Epitaph was small, OFFSPRING hadn't hit yet, and Brett and I were spending ninety-nine percent of our day shipping BAD RELIGION records. We considered that it might be hurting the band and hurting the label and stressing under our own weight. Strangely, when we left, THE OFFSPRING took off and sold seventeen million records. [laughing]

Ground Control: Just in time for you to leave!

Bentley: [laughing] That seemed to work out really well, but Warner was cool and in the beginning it was great. The people that were there knew who we were and respected us and it seemed like it was the right place for us to be but, because we were our own label, we thought that people were attached to their seats with chains and the truth is that the turnover rate in the industry is ridiculous, so all of the people that were there when we signed on were gone and we were stuck with a bunch of people that thought MATCHBOX 20 and HOOTIE AND THE BLOWFISH were more important than us.

Read the entire interview at Ground Control.

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