Legendary Rock Interviews' John Parks has issued a new interview, conducted with CLUTCH's Neil Fallon, in which he talks about the new Earth Rocker album, non-musical influences, crazy fans and burning, flying viking ships. An excerpt follows:

Q: Earth Rocker is currently kicking my ass and I want to ask you... Do you think that this album is a good introduction to Clutch for those of us just realizing the band’s awesomeness?

A: "I certainly hope so! One of the things Machine did in pre-production is ask us to write the kind of set list that we might play at a festival. A greatest hits, if you will. We did just that and hopefully that comes through in the final product."

Q: Clutch is always one of those bands I have heard about but maybe didn’t appreciate some of the categories or labels people used to describe them. Sometimes those types of notions or associations can poison someone before the songs even sink in. Is it fair to describe Clutch in my caveman terms like “Clutch Rocks” and leave it at that?

A: "Won’t argue with that! Monikers are a necessity in writing abut music, I suppose. But the fact that we’ve had so many, most very misleading, has on one hand, made it difficult for labels to market the band. On the other hand, we’re pleased with the idea that the band is difficult to describe. When in doubt, we just call it like it is, Rock and Roll."

Read the full interview at this location.

Earth Rocker, out now via Weathermaker Music, continues to hit the charts around the globe, the latest being Norway, Sweden and Finland. The list is now as follows:

US - #12

Norway - #13

Sweden - #14

Finland - #50

UK - #50

Germany - #71

BraveWords' Earth Rocker review can be found here, while BraveWords scribe Martin Popoff's new Clutch feature can be found at this location.

An excerpt reads:

Like the fine catalogue reaching back into the past, Earth Rocker finds singer Neil Fallon studding the album with storytelling and characters, always characters, which, quite deliberately, come to life through his vocal choices. "I think they have to. It’s easy to write in the first person, an assumed character, but when you actually have to verbalize it, that’s a different monster altogether, and I kind of play head games with myself, like yeah, at least for these three to four minutes, I’m that person, and I’m the world’s foremost expert on whatever subject I’m singing about. When those three or four minutes are over, then that ends. And you know, it is self-indulgent, but that’s half the fun.

As for his famous "bellow," amusingly present in the chorus to the record's title track, "I just kind of gravitated towards that, ended up doing it, and you know... let me back up a little. When we first started out, we were a hardcore band, and I think back then I had the kind of adolescent naivety that melody was a bad thing, that if you had melody, then you are obviously commercial. And I’ve since learned that that’s just not the case. And I early on gravitated towards people like TOM WAITS, and maybe more recently, a voice like LEONARD COHEN’s, where these guys, they may not have the most beautiful singing voices in the world, but there’s a quality in it; and the sincerity--that is its own kind of beauty. And at least I hope I can get an ounce of that into what I do. Another example not in the world of hard rock was Chuck D from PUBLIC ENEMY, which I listened to religiously in high school in the early ‘90s, and he had that same kind of core quality. And people sometimes say, you look like a preacher up on stage there, or you sound like preacher up on stage, and I guess I can understand where they’re coming from. But I think that’s because the blues guys that I listened to and I liked are emulating a gospel sound, if you want to talk historically. I’m certainly not trying to be that, but that’s what I listened to, and that’s what leaks into my delivery."

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