Blue Öyster Cult just released the new album Ghost Stories, featuring a collection of “lost gems” recorded between 1978 and 1983, and guitarist/vocalist Eric Bloom is explaining why these tunes never made it to an album in the first place.
“You know, when you’re writing songs for a record, sometimes you work at it, you work at it, you work at it, never quite gets to where you want it to be recorded,” he tells ABC Audio. “That happens a lot on records.”
To get these tunes to where they needed to be for this album they were transferred from reel-to-reel analog tape to digital audio by the band’s original audio engineer, George Geranios, with producers Steve Schenck and Richie Castellano using artificial intelligence to complete the songs.
Despite the tunes being recorded so long ago, Bloom says he didn’t really forget about them — but at least one, “Don’t Come Running To Me,” gave him what he called an “oh yeah moment.”
“I’m listening to that, and I’m going, you know, I remember that. I said, ‘How did I ever sing that high?’ Which kind of blew me away cause I could never sing that now,” he says.
When Ghost Stories was announced, the label described it as “a fitting finale” to BOC’s recording legacy, but Bloom doesn’t believe that necessarily means it’s their last album ever.
“I can’t say we’ll never record again,” he says. “I mean, look at the example of KISS. You know, they’ve been saying final tour for about 20 years. So, I’ll, I’ll put it on the same level as that.”
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