LOS ANGELES (Tommy Lee Official) -
Tommy Lee considered holding on to the name
Methods of Mayhem for his new album, out Tuesday (May 21), even after his sidekick rapper TiLo left the fold in 2000. But rock's famous bad boy finally broke down and released
Never a Dull Moment under his own name.
Lee tells, "My producer, Scott Humphrey, goes, 'Here you are basically trying to start over from the ground up with Methods of Mayhem, when you've put in all this time creating a name for yourself and now you're not gonna use it. I think you're being stupid.'"
Just about everybody with a TV set knows the name Tommy Lee, thanks to circumstances that have nothing to do with why the former Motley Crue drummer entered show business 20 years ago. In addition to his current child custody battle with ex-wife Pamela Anderson, and the $160 million lawsuit filed by the parents of a 4-year-old boy who drowned in the pool at Lee's Malibu home last June, Lee's name is also - thanks to that infamous sex tape - rather synonomous with male endowment.
"That's really strange," he says. "Oh god, it's so fucking weird."
Recorded at Lee's Malibu home, and again featuring Lee at the mike,
Never A Dull Moment ranges from the
Rob Zombie-like "People So Strange" to the power ballad "Blue." "When we got back from the road in 2000, I started writing and I started hearing the music and said, 'Man, this doesn't sound like Methods anyway,'" Lee says. "So I was sitting there pondering over what Scott said and I was like, 'He's right.'"
The album also revamps the David Bowie hit "Fame." "I love Bowie and I'd heard a few people do remakes of the song, and I knew I could do a better version," Lee says. "So I started fucking with it and I was like, 'Wow this is coming out awesome.'" Lee adds that "Fame" "sort of very appropriately fits my life, don't you think?"
Lee says he doesn't know what kind of response to expect to Dull Moment, though the current issue of Entertainment Weekly gives the album a D rating. "The Methods of Mayhem album went gold and didn't even have a hit single, where with this record, my single 'Hold Me Down' is in the top 10 in all three rock charts, and I'm like, 'Holy shit!'" Lee says.
Lee says he'd consider doing another Methods album at some point. "But it'd have to be a creative free-for-all," he says, "pretty much like the first one, but with a different set of guest stars."
Lee's tour, which was originally kicking off on Friday (May 24) in Denver, is being rerouted with a possible launch date of June 21 in Anaheim, Calif. More details to come shortly.
