Beastie Boys recording "political" album

CLEVELAND (Billboard) - As the Beastie Boys prepare to begin their Get Out and Vote tour, the group is also at work on the follow-up to the 2007 instrumental album "The Mix-Up."

"We're actually in the middle of recording it right now," group member Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz tells Billboard. "We hope to have it out sometime next year. It's a lot of vocals, a lot of words -- very wordy. And it's political, depending on what you call political. You know, if toilet talk and fart jokes are political, which they can be, in that sense yeah, very."

Any chance of new material getting played on the "Get Out and Vote 08" tour? "I don't think so," Horovitz laughs. "It's always weird when you play the new songs that people don't know. Anytime we play new songs, it always seems like a brick."

Horovitz says the decision to stage Get Out and Vote came down to the simple fact that in the last presidential election, 70 million registered voters didn't make to the polls.

"70 million people is a lot of people to not vote," Horovitz says. "So this all happened really quick, like a month or so ago and within the past few weeks, literally. We were just stressing on what to do and then we were like, 'We're a band and we play shows, so let's go to these swing states.' We thought it would be a good idea to get people to vote.

"Basically, we just called a bunch of people and asked them if they wanted to play," he says. "It's literally like, whoever called us back (is on the tour)."

The seven-date trek begins October 27 in Charlotte, N.C., and runs through November 2 in Denver. Sheryl Crow, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Norah Jones, Crosby & Nash, Santogold and Tenacious D will play in different incarnations throughout. Horovitz says the Beasties also reached out to De La Soul, Nas, Nine Inch Nails and Moby, but those acts were unable to participate for scheduling reasons.

Reuters/Billboard