HOOKED ON SKA PUNK
Reel Big Fish go with the flow of touring, writing new music
Aaron Barrett can’t wait to get back to the Duke City for a show. It’s been a little over a year, in fact. “The Albuquerque shows are always so much fun,” he says. “The people are so loud an energetic.”
Barrett is a member of the ska punk outfit Reel Big Fish.
The band is best-known for its 1997 hit “Sell Out.” The single helped the band gain mainstream recognition during the third wave of ska in the late 1990s.
Since 2006, the band has released its music independently, and Barrett is the only founding member of the band.
The band’s most recent album, “Happy Skalidays,” was released digitally in 2014. The album was mainly a Christmas album and featured two original songs.
“I’ve always loved Christmas music since I was a kid, and we had always talked about doing a holiday album since way back, but it just took us that long to finally get around to doing it,” he says. “Maybe we should have put the holiday album out sooner and not re-recorded all our old songs five times.”
As the band remains on tour, Barrett says music is on its way in the near future. Though he doesn’t know when it will be released.
“I’m always toying with new song ideas that will ultimately wind up being a new album. Not sure if 2016 will or won’t be a new album year, but we’ll see,” he says. “We have been doing a few fun, unlikely, unexpected covers lately that I think people will get a kick out of.”
Over the past two decades, Barrett says, the writing process hasn’t changed too much.
“I’ve always been the main songwriter since Day One, so I’ll come up with the main idea for the song and then show it to the guys and let them put their own spin on it,” he says. “I like seeing how the song changes and develops from an idea in my head that gets filtered through these awesome musicians and then usually turns out better than I thought it would. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of talented musicians over the years who have helped my songs be as awesome as they can be.”