One thing that is undeniable is Howard Jones' voice is massive. He is one of the only people to pull off a proper Dio cover and now he's using his chops to cover another classic, "Eye of the Tiger," the theme from the Rocky movies. As always, HoJo (does anybody call him that?) delivers:
I'm totally into it. As for how the band decided to do the cover, drummer John Sankey explains:
“One day when we were in the studio working on our new album, They Bleed Red, Howard Jones (vocals) turned up in a shower robe and started shadow boxing in the vocal booth while doing his best Rocky Balboa impersonation. It was so impressive that we immediately knew we had to do a cover of the infamous Rocky soundtrack theme. ‘Eye Of The Tiger‘. We had already been discussing the possibility of recording a cover, but had no idea what song we would do. In that moment when Hojo literally transformed himself into the Italian Stallion right in front of our very eyes we knew it was the perfect choice!
Our biggest challenge would be adapting the original song into our own style, so we decided each of us must take on the persona of a different cast member to best capture the performance necessary to do such an iconic song justice. Howard lived and breathed the role of Rocky for a full week, Francesco Artusato[guitars] became as a slightly shorter Ivan Drago, Ryan Wombacher [bass] was the perfect fit for a modern day Mickey and I of course was a ‘way too Australian’ not quite as ripped version of Apollo Creed.
We entered the studio swinging wildly in all directions with our respective instruments and there was blood, sweat and many many tears, mainly of uncontrollable laughter. Hours later we emerged victorious and super slow motion high-fived each other in classicRocky fashion as we listened back to the sweet metal sounds of a reformed Survivor classic. We hope you all enjoy it as much as we do.”
The track is only available on certain special editions of the band's new album, They Bleed Red, which comes out this Friday, November 6th.
Of course, you can hear the band's first proper single, "The Way We Die," right here.
