‘Hootie’ to rock again

Band back with new album

TBy Kristin M. Hall

wenty-five years after “Cracked Rear View” launched their careers, Grammy-winning rock band Hootie & the Blowfish will release a new album and launch an official tour next year after a decade-long break.

The Southern pop-rockers, featuring lead singer Darius Rucker, Mark Bryan, Jim Sonefeld and Dean Felber, broke out with their major label debut in 1994, which has been certified 21-times platinum and made the Recording Industry Association of America’s list of the top-10 most popular albums of all-time.

With Top 10 hits like “Hold My Hand”, “Let Her Cry” and “Only Wanna Be With You”, the South Carolina-based band went from playing college bars to selling out arenas and winning best new artist at the Grammy Awards in 1996. The band put out five studio albums and other live albums, never coming close to the popularity of the first, with the last one in 2006. Their last official tour was in 2007.

But with a big anniversary approaching in 2019, the four musicians who still play together a couple times a year for annual charity events decided it was time to go out on the road and bring with them some new music.

Rucker said they hope to have a single out in the spring with a full album next summer. The Group Therapy Tour starts May 30, 2019, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and will hit 44 cities, including the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Madison Square Garden in New York and Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee. The tour ends in Columbia, South Carolina on Sept 13.

The band talked to The Associated Press from Columbia, where they all met as students at the University of South Carolina, to discuss why their

and its song “God’s Plan” also were the most streamed album and song of 2018, respectively; Drake was also the platform’s most-streamed artist in 2015 and 2016.

Following Drake, Post Malone, XXXTentacion, J Balvin and 2017’s most-streamed artist Ed Sheeran rounded out the Top 5 list of

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album was so successful, deciding to go dormant as Rucker explored his solo career and returning to their hometown on tour. The answers have been edited for brevity.

AP: How different does the campus look now from when you went there?

Felber: The university has changed a lot. The dorm where we actually met is now in the dump (the university demolished the dorm several years ago). It’s improved and grown massively.

Bryan: One interesting fact is we’re going to be doing our first Columbia, South Carolina, show in probably 20 years. The town that we came out of, that we played a million shows in when we were young, we haven’t played here in 20 years or almost.

AP: Are you expecting a lot of old college friends to start texting you again?

Rucker: We’re changing phone numbers.

AP: Looking back at “Cracked Rear View”, the crazy amount of success and attention must have been a big change for you?

Rucker: We probably toured seven years before we got a record deal.

Felber: We did two cassettes and a CD before we got signed and did “Cracked Rear View”, and had been on the road for four years pretty solid. By the time we got there, we were pretty ready and pretty busy.

Bryan: But we also jumped to the big stages really quick, which we weren’t used to. So, it was kind of interesting trying to take our set from like a club show to these big arenas and that sort of thing. So, there was definitely a period of transition there.

AP: That album came out when the dominant sound in rock was grunge. Did that set you apart?

Sonefeld: Our music was going against the grain of what was popular on radio at the time.

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LOS ANGELES:

Eddie Murphy and his fiancee Paige Butcher have a new baby boy.

The couple released a statement through Murphy’s publicist Monday saying Max Charles Murphy was born Friday and weighed 6 pounds, 11 ounces. The boy’s middle name is a tribute to Murphy’s older brother and fellow comedian Charlie Murphy, who died of leukemia last year.

It’s the 10th child for the 57-year-old Eddie Murphy, the second child for the 39-year-old Butcher. The couple has a 2-year-old daughter, Izzy. (AP)