KX XV

The other night on 'The Late Show' I heard Paul Shaffer and his band cover the song "We Were Born to Be Loved" by beloved grunge pioneers King's X. It's not the first time Shaffer's performed KX songs during commercials, he seems to be a fan, especially of that song as legendary KX bassist Doug Pinnick said last year:

PINNICK: Paul Shaffer got on our bus one time after a show. He and a couple of his band members came down to see us play at a club in NY. I was changing, and one of my techs comes onto the bus and says, "Paul Shaffer and a bunch of people, his band I guess want to come on the bus and say hello!" My immediate reaction was, "Bring em on!" And they marched straight to the back of the bus and we hung out back there. Paul says to Ty, "So who does your samples?" Ty replied, "Samples? What samples?" Paul said, "Vocal samples." Ty said, "Nobody. We sing!" Paul said, "Hmmm?" Then he said, "So that last song you did that had all the starts and stops in it, what's the name of that song?" We said, "Born to be loved." He said, "We're gonna do that song!" Ty chuckled at him and he said, "No seriously, we're going to do that song on the CBS Late Show!" (Now) Paul Shaffer plays "Born to be Loved" on Letterman all the time and we get paid for it! Dude, every 6 months we get a royalty check from them playing that. It's paid bills. It's like awesome!

King's X, who happen to be my favorite band in the world, are set to release their 15th album--appropriately entitled 'XV'--on May 20. Do yourself a favor and get a copy of it... and their other 14 albums too while you're at it, each is a hard rock gem. In the meantime, check out one of the tracks from 'XV' at Doug's MySpace site.