Eighteen months after the initial date of March 27, 2020, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Original Sin will celebrate a decade plus of their debut album with a not to be missed concert at Count’s Vamp’d in Las Vegas, Nevada on September 4, 2021. What was originally billed as a tenth anniversary show, is now the 11 and a ½ year anniversary of Exile On Fremont Street. Original Sin is vocalist / guitarist Todd “Dammit” Kerns (Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy And The Conspirators, Toque), guitarist Brent Muscat (Faster Pussycat), bassist Michael Ellis (The Hellenbacks, Blotzer’s Ratt), and drummer Rob “Boom Boom” Cournoyer.

“It’s surreal,” says Todd Kerns, speaking exclusively to BraveWords scribe Aaron Small. “I remember at the time saying, ‘There’s no way we’re cancelling this show, it’s going forward.’ Then sure enough it was like, ‘Ah, that sucks.’ The thing that really sucks is the fact that we have so many people who come from Europe, The UK, and Canada. We probably could have booked this show this month, but we wanted to hold on as long as possible to see if anything opens up. But then it felt like, eighteen months later, we don’t feel like going any further than that; it starts to get kind of ridiculous – the 12-year anniversary, or whatever. The other thing about Vegas is it’s open, people are excited, people are happy to get out. I know we’ll do well locally, and we will get travelers from around the country. I’m hoping that by early September, maybe people will be able to come down from Canada. I’m not sure if anybody will actually take that kind of chance. But that was the intention, to push it back as far as possible to see if we could get any visitors.”

A reissue of the Exile On Fremont Street CD had been planned to coincide with the tenth anniversary show. However, as the concert was delayed, so was the physical product. That CD, complete with three bonus tracks, will be released on September 4th. One of those bonus tracks is the song “High”, which fans may be familiar with as a lyric video was released in March 2020.

“That’s absolutely still happening,” confirms Kerns. “The whole time we thought, ‘Should we put it out and make it available?’ We sort of went back and forth on it, but decided to sit on it and make it a big deal still on the day of the show. You get there and here’s the CD – compact disc. It’s sort of become a conversation of, ‘Is that even a thing anymore?’ I’m still going to do it until I’m told otherwise. We wanted it to be special, to make it an event. So, on the day of the show, CDs will be available, as opposed to just having it online and snuffing that little flame out.”

The other two bonus tracks on the reissue of Exile On Fremont Street are “Broken Record” and “Hey, Hey Rock N Roll”. “We’ve got a version of ‘Broken Record,’” begins Todd. “‘Broken Record’ was an acoustic release; we did a full electric version of it. Oddly enough, ‘Broken Record’ was actually a demo for the Static In Stereo record (released in 2001). We did a version of that song way back then. Then it kind of made its rounds as an acoustic song that I knocked around; it’s on the Near Life Experience EP, which accompanies Borrowing Trouble. Now we’ve got a full band version, which actually turned out really great. I’m really happy with it. The Static In Stereo version, oddly enough, was a full band version, but this one has a little bit more… there’s some really interesting things about the way Ellis and Rob work together as a rhythm section. They always do something a little different that I never would have thought of, which is always kind of nice when you come up with songs and people could just very easily play along, or go along with what you say. They have a very defined idea of what they want to do, which can take it somewhere else. For a knock down, drag ‘em out, dive bar rock band – there’s some very clever stuff in there. The other song, ‘Hey, Hey Rock N Roll’ is a Dr. Ellis song, that he wrote, also for the acoustic record. But it was being played live as a full band version, so we decided to just knock it out. So, it’s a 14-song release.”

Will this September 4th show spur some songwriting? Can we expect any new material from Original Sin? “It’s always sort of there… it’s such a weird time, isn’t it? I was talking to Jeff Pilson from Dokken about it. He plays in Foreigner as his gig, but then he’s got Black Swan, and The End Machine he did with Robert Mason, George Lynch, and Mick Brown. Very rarely is anybody in one band; everybody seems to have multiple things floating around. And I kind of like that. I like the Neil Young-isms of, I can play acoustic music, I can play loud music, or whatever. With Original Sin, it’s one of those things where, even though that door closes every once in a while, we try to do this at least a couple times a year. It’s always based on scheduling. For me, it’s weird when you go on the road, then you come home, it feels like when you were gone, everything was just on pause. You forget that everybody’s been doing other things for the entire time you were away. And they have schedules and lives and families too. The possibility of doing some new music is always there. I love those guys and there’s something very special about the chemistry with those people, and it’s been going since 2007. That puts it into perspective how long we’ve been doing this.”