311 appreciates it's SL Fanbase (Deseret)

S.A. Martinez, vocalist for the funk, hip-hop, reggae, rock band 311 says he has a soft spot in his heart for Salt Lake City.

"We've been coming there since the early days of the band," Martinez said by phone from his Los Angeles home. "We've always had a great fan base there. I think in the West, Salt Lake is our largest market, or at least one of our largest markets."

Martinez and his bandmates — guitarist/vocalist Nick Hexum, guitarist Tim Mahoney, bassist P-Nut and drummer Chad Sexton — will return to Salt Lake City to perform and promote the new album "Don't Tread on Me," to be released on Tuesday.

The album, the band's eighth, contains 11 new songs, most of which were written and recorded over the past year. "We had a couple of songs that were left over from the 'Transistor' album sessions," said Martinez. "And one, 'Long for the Flowers,' which was originally called 'Grifters,' was redone and found its way to the new album. We also had one song, 'Waiting,' that we had played on tour last year that was recorded for the album."

"Don't Tread on Me" was a fairly easy album to make, said Martinez. "The only real problem we had was working with the deadline. There came a time when we had so many demo songs we were working on that we had to say, 'No more demos!' And then we started arranging and working on what we had."

Choosing 11 songs from the 17 the band had set aside was also not a huge problem, he said. "We worked on a bunch of songs, and we stopped paying attention to some because they weren't working out. And most of those were discarded.

"But there were some that we were working on in the beginning that I thought for sure would become the album's singles. And for some reason, they didn't work out for the album. We still have them for use on the next album."

For 15 years, 311 has been a professional recording group. And throughout that time, it has seen music trends come and go. "When we started out, the stuff we played wasn't big on the radio. But then there were times when we were in demand. The good thing is we didn't change our style to fit the trend. The music business will always work in cycles. And some years we're it and others we're not. But we don't change to fit."

Still, the guys in 311 never thought the band would be together for more than a decade. "We had some hard times when we were starting out," said Martinez. "But we were young and green. And that's a good thing because we had no idea what we were getting into. I think if we knew how hard it would be back then, we wouldn't have done it. We got into it and as things developed, we took things in stride.

"And since we were so young we had the strength, energy and stamina to do what we needed to do to keep the band alive."