ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons has revealed that he is the studio recording a solo album inspired by Cuban music.
"The engineers were rolling their eyes, going, 'Yeah, Gibbons is going to go Havana on us,’" Gibbons tells Rolling Stone. “But when I was 13, I got a guitar and my dad — being the consummate entertainer — sent me up to New York to study Latin percussion with Tito Puente. I learned maracas, timbales, clavas, bongos…you name it…and having lived in Mexico a couple years, I know just enough Spanish to get me in trouble."
Encouraged by the results, Gibbons is eyeing the project as a proper solo album.
"I put together a little side band," he says. "I'm going back to wrap up the project and, believe it or not, it's turning out to be such an obtuse, oddball, unexpected left turn from ZZ Top's blues background. But there is something to it."
ZZ Top recently returned to the road following a hip injury to bassist Dusty Hill last August that resulted in several shows being suspended and rescheduled.
The band’s latest album is 2012’s “La Futura.”
See also:
ZZ Top to perform Mash-Up Mondays debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live
VIDEO: ZZ Top perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live
ZZ Top to resume tour with Jeff Beck next year
AUDIO: ZZ Top guitarist joins Johnny Winter on new album
Search ZZ Top at hennemusic
