The Beastie Boys talked to Billboard Magazine about their new recording, "We're actually in the middle of recording it right now," says Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz . "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."
The group is currently getting ready for their "Get Out and Vote '08" tour and, as of now, do not plan on playing any of the new material, "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."
The Beastie Boys decided to do the tour because of the lackluster turnout at the last presidential election where 70 million registered voters did not vote, "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 mini-tour will consist of seven dates beginning October at Charlotte North Carolina and will run through November 3rd ending in Denver, Colorado. The lineup will be Sheryl Crow, Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Norah Jones, Crosby & Nash, Santogold and Tenacious D and of course, the Beastie Boys.