Van Zandt has his own solo band called Little Steven and The Disciples of Soul, intermittently active since the 1980s. He has appeared in several television drama series, including as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos (1999–2007) and as Frank Tagliano in Lilyhammer (2012–2014). He is a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, in which he plays guitar and mandolin. It’s been great to have those pairs of hands and realise the album live in a deeper way than we were able to as a smaller unit.Steven Van Zandt (né Lento born November 22, 1950), also known as Little Steven or Miami Steve, is an American musician and actor. We’ve got a lot of good session friends who play with us, so we’ve spent time re-imagining the first record, and also the second album is bigger and needs more hands. “We’re a six-piece now for standard shows, and we love getting horns sections in. With festival shows at Glastonbury and Latitude ticked off, attention turns to a UK tour that will see the band play the 4,900-capacity Brixton Academy for the first time, eclipsing that Shepherd’s Bush ambition, and Jones is confident the band’s sound will be big enough to do the legendary south London venue justice. I learnt drums because we felt like we needed a certain kind of drummer, but we realised for the second record we needed a completely different set of skills.” I’ve been the drummer up until this album, out of necessity. “One of the things we initially set out to do was create a band that was full of multi-instrumentalists,” says Jones, “so it’s about who has the best idea on an instrument at the time. Live, they’re a six-piece, augmented by a group of talented instrument-swapping friends. The build-up to the second album also saw Bear’s Den become a duo as guitarist Joey Haynes departed and Jones left his drummer’s stool to return to his roots as a guitarist and bassist. We went for a very authentic approach, everything’s analogue, all the synths are originals and the guitars are vintage. We had lots of vintage gear in the studio and Ian was very well educated in recording techniques from the 60s, 70s and 80s. “The first record is a culmination of songs written over a period of years and the second record is a culmination of songs written in one month and recorded in six weeks. We were doing 15- or 16-hour days and had about two evenings off the entire time. All the analogue gear suited what we were going for sonically. “We did the main body of the tracking in six weeks. “Rockfield was pretty wonderful and pretty intense,” says Jones. That creative ambition is certainly in evidence on Red Earth & Pouring Rain. We’re not the sort of band who think `we must headline Glastonbury’, but creatively we want to make sure we’re constantly challenging each other and being dynamic and not sitting in a particular channel. “When we started, headlining Shepherd’s Bush Empire was our dream, and we did that a year ago. For the first album, we’d done quite a lot of groundwork, and we’ve got a strong work ethic. Everything’s felt very gradual rather than an overnight thing. We spent a lot of time talking about what we were going to try to achieve before we picked up an instrument. That went okay, but we were still learning, so we took a year out, went for a coffee and said `let’s do this again’. “Me and Davie had been working on and off for 10 years together and started a band called Cherbourg maybe eight years ago. We wanted to make it quite cinematic.” The pair had been musical partners for a decade prior to forming Bear’s Den, when Jones says they set out with a carefully formed plan of attack. “We wanted to have a certain nostalgia around the record, that’s lyrical as well as sonic.
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