The Melvins' Dale Crover On The New Solo LP "Glossolalia," Tom Waits & More - "Paltrocast" Exclusive

Photo byDale Crover

As he began plotting his new solo album, Dale Crover realized he was starting from scratch. The Melvins, Nirvana and Redd Kross drummer and Altamont singer-guitarist was already more than 30 years into a world-renowned musical career when he started work on what became his full-length solo debut, 2017’s The Fickle Finger Of Fate. So Crover fortunately had a backlog of songs and ideas to draw on from The Fickle Finger Of Fate and its 2021 followup Rat-A-Tat-Tat. But this time around it was different, just Crover and a Tascam 8-track gifted to him by Joyful Noise founder Karl Hofstetter -- and the end result is Glossolalia, Crover’s third LP under his own name and arguably his most focused statement yet as a solo artist.

Glossolalia features 11 catchy yet eccentric tracks, as demoed at Dale Crover's home and later re-recorded with longtime Melvins engineer Toshi Kasai. Besides that interesting mix of Nuggets-y garage rock, crafty proto-metal riffage and gorgeously hazy psych-pop, Glossolalia includes appearances by Ty Segall, Tom Waits, Soundgarden's Kim Thayil, Pinback's Rob Crow, Mindee Jorgensen, and Crover’s longtime friend and Altamont bandmate Dan Southwick. Prior to the release of Glossolalia, Crover kicked off a cross-country Dale Crover Band U.S. tour last month August 23rd in San Diego, which followed dates opening up for Redd Kross with an acoustic set.

In August 2024, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dale Crover again via Zoom, as embedded above and set to air via the Long Beach, New York-based Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz television series. Our prior conversation from 2021 is embedded below, as also taped via Zoom.