Defiance Part 2

When we checked in with Ian Hunter back in 2023, the Mott the Hoople legend was riding high with the release of "Defiance Part 1", a star studded new studio album featuring collaborations with a number of high profile colleagues.

April 19th, 2024, the companion record, "Defiance Part 2 : Fiction" will arrive via Sun Records, and as expected, it’s another who’s who of icons. Johnny Depp painted the album artwork, as well.

Having long used his voice to explore and examine contemporary issues, Hunter is once more pointing his passionate pen at a society seemingly more out of control with each passing day.

“I was trying to avoid all that on 'Part 1'”, Hunter says, “but on 'Part 2', it caught up with me. Most of those were written 2 or 3 years back, so I wanted to get it all out before whatever takes hold in November. It would be dated after the fact”.

Songs like the legalization anthem “Weed”, featuring Stone Temple Pilots’ Dean DeLeo (guitar), Robert De Leo (bass), and Eric Kretz (drums) and the epic “Fiction”, with keyboards from Mott the Hoople’s Morgan Fisher and a stirring string arrangement from David Mansfield (Bob Dylan, T Bone Burnett), are full of righteous fury and vibrant spirit, Hunter’s perspective and gift for protest music as clear eyed and independent as ever.

“I’m neither left nor particularly right”, Hunter adds. “I’m just straight down the middle. And so I tried to write from that point of view. An eagle has 2 wings and if one falls off it perishes. That’s what I’m trying to get at. A bit of common sense, you know, Thomas Paine stuff”.