Sam Wall sat down with Tora Tora singer Anthony Corder, who discussed their plans to release a new record, future touring, recording their 2019 record Bastards Of Beale, and their desire to tour Europe. Watch below. An excerpt follows...

Sam Wall: “So you’ve been doing writing recently too, we’ve had a couple of singles released over the past couple years like 'Neptune Society' and 'Go Where the Love Is'. Is this leading to a follow up album to Bastards of Beale? Is this leading to something bigger?”

Anthony Corder: “Yeah! We are… we got a new collection of songs going, we started recording right out of Covid. It was maybe middle of ‘21, it was when people could start getting back together, and we went in and we cut like 12 tracks.

“And we were talking about the process when we went in before, we cut Bastards of Beale almost live. We cut it at a place called Sam Phillips Recording Service. If you or your listeners aren’t familiar with him he’s the guy that found like Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, a guy named Elvis, he started Sun Records. When he sold Sun Records to RCA he moved right down the street, the same street in Memphis”... “He went right down the street and he bought an auto garage, and he stripped it all the way to the studs, and he built his studio, this recording place, and he designed the echo chamber.

“When we went in we were thinking about it, and it was our first new music in like 20 years, and we just said ‘man, lets just go in and cut this thing and see what happens.’ And so the band was out in the room, and they put me in the iso booth, and said ‘go for it, if you get it awesome, but if you don’t we can come back and grab you.’ And it was so exciting man, it was so cool. We really went through that in a fast process, I think we cut the whole record in about 8 days. So they did a couple of days of basic tracks, a couple days of overdubs, then I sang for a couple days and then we mixed it. We were on a really limited budget, we were limited in time because I was traveling back and forth between Nashville and Memphis.

“And so we thought about that when we went in the studio, that record came out in 2019, we cut it in 2018. And then everybody was on pause through 2020 and then in to 2021, and then we decided in the middle of ‘21, we said ‘lets get together.’ It had been about 14 months since the band had seen eachother in person, so the very first thing we did was just hug each other, then plug up and start jamming. We played old songs, new songs, we didn’t care we were just like ‘let’s just play.

“But as we were getting ready for that process, and having that, we said ‘man instead of rushing through this session, let’s just give it to John (Patterson, drummer), and let him have the room, let him mess around with the snare sounds, and different miking techniques and all that stuff. And then we’ll cut the guitars and vocals outside of this session.

“And we also started thinking about Bastards of Beale where we said, ‘We’re not sure if everybody heard the whole record.’ We had two sneak peak songs Rose of Jericho and Silence The Sirens, and then we did a video that dropped as a single for Son of a Prodigal Son. And then we said ‘did anybody listen to the rest of the record?’

“So we said ‘hey on this next round maybe we’ll just let out singles,’ let ‘em out one at a time, and just kinda let them lay there and breathe a little bit.”... “If they like it cool, if they ignore it, no problem man, we’ll just work on the next one and then we’ll just take it from there.

“So I think we’re headed towards a collection, we’re getting close. I know that I have new recording sessions lined up with Keith (Douglas, Guitar), I’m gonna be in Memphis doing that this year.

“I’m really focusing on being creative this year. I’m in a reflective kind of place, my children, I have three boys, have all grown up and they went to college.

“2019 we were busier than we’ve been in 20 years, we went from Maine all the way to California. And I don’t know, it’s just something’s sparked in me and I just said ‘man I just feel like I still have things that I wanna work on, and be creative, and think about, talk about.’ And so this year I’m really gonna try to work on that.

“I’m gonna get out on the road, do these acoustic shows, we’re gonna be doing Tora shows for sure. We’re gonna do a new project while we’re wrapping up these last songs.

“So I think it’ll be a new collection. The last couple that we did, were pressed on vinyl, and we’ll probably do some vinyl for this at some point. We’re interested… some people want you to do CDs and have booklets and all that kind of stuff. We’re kinda interested, we’re kinda doing this a little bit as a focus group with our audience to see just what they’re interested in and what they’d like.

“Eventually I think it’ll get to that point, I think we’re about 5 songs in right now and I know I’m recording two new ones. I mean we’re only a couple of songs away from having a full project, so we’ll probably end up putting a collection together.”