Frank Black Won't Quit

In the last two years, Frank Black has given James Brown serious competition for the title of hardest working man in show business. 2004 saw his much-beloved rock band the Pixies reuniting on tour, followed by the 2005 release of Honeycomb, a critically lauded country album recorded in Nashville with old-school session heavyweights Steve Cropper, Buddy Miller, Reggie Young and Chester Thompson. Earlier this summer he released Honeycomb's follow-up, the ambitious double-disc Fast Man Raider Man, for which he returned to Nashville to re-team with his Honeycomb players and a few impressive additions: Levon Helm, Al Kooper, Cheap Trick's Tom Petersson, honky-tonk player Marty Brown, Los Angeles songwriter P.F. Sloan, and Simon Kirke from Bad Company and Free.

"You know what they have in Nashville?" asks current Portland resident Black of his decision to record in Music City. "A really high standard of musicianship. That's what I discovered as an insider -- you can just call up three or four guys and they're going to kick your butt with any instrument in their hands. You can get all uptight as an indie rocker like myself, like 'Wait a minute, these guys aren't involved in college rock!' But they all know about rock and roll music -- hell, half of them used to be in Little Richard's band!"

As on Honeycomb, Raider Man finds the self-described "quirky alternative guy" once again plumbing the depths of his early musical influences.

"The first time I sang music in public as a kid, I sang a Woody Guthrie song," he says. "I grew up listening to gospel and Leon Russell and blues. This is who I am."