HoustonPress.com reports the first bit of music from ZZ Top's long-awaited, long-delayed, semi-mythical forthcoming album has leaked...but not anywhere on Earth.
Astronaut and friend of ZZ Michael Fossum, currently headed to the International Space Station on a Russian spacecraft, is carrying a copy of "Flyin' High," which the band evidently plans to put on this album, according to a release from longtime publicist Bob Merlis Tuesday afternoon:
Fossum has maintained friendships with Billy F Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, the members of ZZ Top, for some time, dating back to even before the missions he flew aboard the US Space Shuttle in 2006 and 2008.
He caught wind that one of the tracks on the new album, the band's first studio recording since 2005, is entitled "Flyin' High."
No further information was given in the news release about when ZZ Top fans back here on Earth might be able to listen to either "Flyin' High" or the album.
However, Gibbons told Billboard.com back in March that the album “will be out by the end of the year,” and that the Texas trio has been working on the new record in both Houston and Los Angeles. "I've got a little studio at my house out in L.A.," he says, "and it kind of takes the load off to be able to leave Texas, go to California, stay there for awhile and then you get to leave California and come back to Texas."
As for the sound, Gibbons notes that he, Hill and Beard are "still just making a lot of loud noise. We still pose as interpreters of the blues. We can't invent it; It's already been invented. But we can do it our way." Gibbons adds that the album will be comprised primarily of originals but that the group "might cover a couple of things."
ZZ Top ZZ Top – Stages (1985)
See also:
ZZ Top: Billy Gibbons named Texas State Musician
ZZ Top: new album due in 2011
ZZ Top to receive Texas Medal Of Arts
ZZ Top, Extreme guitarists help launch new Pushking album
Steven Tyler to appear on new ZZ Top tribute album
ZZ Top to record with Rick Rubin
