Reel Big Fish 'Fame Fortune and Fornication' album

Aaron Barrett and his ska-rock band Reel Big Fish are about to release their first covers album, "Fame, Fortune and Fornication," on January 20th on the band's own imprint, Rock Ridge Music. Though in between are remakes of classics from Tom Petty, Van Morrison and the Eagles, the 10-track disc opens with Poison's "Nothing but a Good Time" and closes with "Talk Dirty to Me."

"Originally I wanted it to be a Poison tribute album," Barrett admits, "and I wanted to call it 'Open Up and Say Ska.' But I guess that only sounded good to me."

When the group started brainstorming choices for the album, Barrett says there were a few titles that sounded fun but didn't make the cut. "We tried 'Fight for Your Right' by the Beastie Boys and 'Baby's Got Back' by Sir-Mix-A-Lot. It was a bad idea. They're fun to play but they sounded terrible on record. We still might do them live, though."

Free from label obligations, left the group, according to Barrett, "finally happy." Currently without a label, the band nonetheless has a distribution deal that Barrett says allows RBF to do pretty much whatever it wants. So far, that has amounted to a live album, 2006's appropriately called "Our Live Album Is Better Than Your Live Album," and last year's sixth studio effort, "Monkeys for Nothin' and the Chimps for Free," the title punning off Dire Straits.

Last summer the group was one of the headlining acts on the annual summer-long Warped Tour, rocking out in front of a new generation of fans. Barrett credits social networking sites like MySpace for bringing out younger fans to the shows.

"It's good for business," he says. "It's nice to see that new people get into it every year and that older fans have stuck around."

Even though the band won't be part of the next Warped outing, it is working on setting up gigs during the summer. The coming tour, is the longest trek the group has planned in more than six years. But Barrett says the band is up to the challenge; touring is more pleasant than it has been in the past.

"Everyone in the band gets along well now," he says. "There have been times in this band when people hated each other's guts and it was miserable, but we're lucky now that we can tour on a bus. That helps everyone's morale, and you have your own bunk, lounges and places to go to get away from each other if you need to."

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Reel Big Fish - Fame Fortune and Fornication