Faith No More

Astonishingly, it has been 17 years since Faith No More broke up, almost immediately after 1997’s Album of the Year record. In 2009, the band started to play shows again here and there, and this year they put out the excellent Sol Invictus album. They play Red Rocks in September, so we spoke with founding member and keyboardist Roddy Bottum about it all…A

Yellow Scene: Sol Invictus is immense – are you happy that you created a huge and relevant album rather than going the nostalgia band route?

Roddy Bottum: “Hugely relevant” is very flattering. I don’t mean this in a pompous way, but I feel like it was all we were capable of doing. I don’t think we would have been capable of replicating our songs or our legacy. All we could do was go from the heart. That’s just what came out.

YS: You seem to be enjoying yourselves on stage again – did you need a break to get back to that point?

RB: Yes, absolutely. Initially, it was more scary than anything. But I don’t think we could have done this without the break that we took. It was just too long of a haul. It was a really, really long time together, and a very intense time together, and I think that we had to take steps away from each other.

YS: Do you like playing Colorado?

RB: I can’t really recall playing Colorado. I don’t remember. I played there with Imperial Teen a couple of times but I don’t remember Faith No More shows. I drove to Red Rocks from Los Angeles with my boyfriend to see Bjork. It was amazing. It’s a special place – I’m excited to play there.

YS: Were you celebrating the recent Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage?

RB: We were in Denmark at the time, but there was celebrating going on. Some rainbow flags were waving and stuff.

YS: What can we expect from the set?

RB: Kind of what you would expect – something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. From there, we’re playing a festival in Chicago, and after that we go to South America. That’s all we really have planned at this point.