Korn frontman prepares a new crop of songs

If you’re hanging out in truck stops around the country in the next couple of months, keep an eye out for who’s sitting in the next booth. It could well be Korn frontman Jonathan Davis. But give the dude some space -- he’ll be working.

With pre-production and music writing underway for Korn’s next album, Davis is hitting the road with a couple of compadres to look for inspiration for lyrics.

“I’m going to take off on a tour bus and start writing,” he says. “I never know what I’ll write about until I’m doing it. I like the fact that I’ll be on my bus and can go anywhere I want -- just going to take off and hopefully write great stuff.”

In the past, Davis would hole himself up in one location and power through the writing. This time, though, he wanted to take a different approach to get in touch with what’s happening out in the world, to reflect changes in music and pop culture and simply because he’s feeling pretty good overall.

“Personally, I’m in a great place,” he says. “My medicine,” he jokes, “is working.”

That would indicate a new tone could be in the offing, rather than the internal anguish and torment that have been Davis’ stock in trade since before the Bakersfield-originated band emerged as a pioneer of both rap-influenced hard rock and the so-called nu metal of the last few years. The dark edge this time, he says, could well come not from inside, but from the uncertainties of war prospects and global developments.

“We could be running around with gas masks on this trip,” he says. “It’s a scary time, and that will come through” in the lyrics.

The biggest changes, though, will be in the music and its place in pop culture, he says. Although last year’s “Untouchables” album showed the band moving away from its origins, this, he believes, will take the band into a new phase of its art.

“It’s still taking shape, but it’s different this time,” he says. “We’re producing ourselves, which is really cool. Don’t have someone outside coming over to tell us what we need to do. It’s the fastest we’ve ever worked -- three weeks and 10 songs. And it’s the tightest the band’s ever been. We’re getting along so great.

“We’re at different places in our lives, and the scene we started has started to die off. We’re not trying to prove anything. We proved ourselves. This is just about making a good album. It’s cool what’s happening. We opened up a door that all kinds of bands came through and were accepted. But what happened is the record companies over-saturated the market. So it’s really exciting to see new stuff going on.”

Plans are still being set for the album’s release by Epic, which could be as early as June to coincide with Korn’s stint on the Ozzfest tour. In the meantime, Davis is also working on other projects, including having recorded the new TV theme for UPN’s “The Twilight Zone,” and composing and recording music with composer Richard Gibbs for a DVD “coffee table book” featuring the work of writer-director Clive Barker.

Jesse Harris knows why he signed

Jesse Harris couldn’t ask for a better platform from which to launch himself. He’ll be on stage at Madison Square Garden during the Grammy Awards ceremony tonight in his role as Norah Jones’ guitarist. And he could well end up on stage again accepting the award for song of the year, since he wrote Jones’ hit “Don’t Know Why.” Not surprisingly, being in that prime position has made a lot of major-label record executives think big about Harris’ own potential.

But when Harris recently signed a record deal, he did it with a company that was not thinking quite so big.

“I don’t think many major-label presidents would sit across the table from you and say, ‘I don’t care how many records you sell,’ ” Harris says. “But that’s what Ron Goldstein said.”

Goldstein is president of Verve Records, a division of gigantic Universal Music Group, but a label known mostly for moderate-selling jazz, not mega-selling pop or rock. Harris recently signed with Verve subsidiary Blue Thumb, headed by longtime jazz producer and executive Tommy LiPuma. The singer-songwriter is not a jazz artist, but he just didn’t feel he belonged in the regular pop world. His feelings are partly shaped by having been in a mid-’90s band that was signed to EMI but dropped before an album ever came out. And it’s hard not to notice that Jones’ phenomenal ride has come through Blue Note, a Capitol Records label that, like Verve, is best known for its jazz releases.

“I’ve been meeting with a lot of major labels, and they are at once very alluring and very scary, because they’ll spend tons of money and you need to sell 500,000 to a million to make them happy. And once they’re not happy with you, they want to get involved with your music and change it,” Harris says.

“This is my fourth album,” adds Harris, who has released three indie records, “and I don’t really want that kind of interference, and I don’t want to be stuck on a label where no one is happy because I didn’t sell enough records.”

New Yorker Harris, 33, is just completing what will be his Verve debut, titled “The Secret Sun” and featuring his regular band, the Ferdinandos. The album is scheduled for release in July.

Small faces

* Michelle Shocked will give a “Campfire Series” of freewheeling shows at Molly Malone’s in L.A. each Tuesday from March 4 through April 1. They’ll feature a solo performance threading episodes from her life in story and song, but will also involve guest performers, art displays and audience-involvement elements on a different topical theme each week. The first will be titled “Political Weenie Roast,” with the similarly food-related “Civil Liberties Are Like Marshmallows” and “Make S’mores Not Wars” among the following. She’s also preparing expanded reissues of her four earliest albums, starting with the first complete release of an informal recording made at the 1986 Kerrville Folk Festival that was put out without her knowledge and edited as “The Texas Campfire Tapes.”

* Garage a Trois, the funky jam trio of guitarist Charlie Hunter, Galactic drummer Stanton Moore and Critters Buggin’ saxophonist Skerik, is following its 1999 indie debut with “Emphasizer,” due April 22 from Boston blues label Tone-Cool Records. Coinciding with the release, the band will play several shows around New Orleans, including a New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival appearance April 25, with a June tour around the U.S.

* Texas band the Sir Douglas Quintet tried to pretend it was English back in the swingin’ ‘60s even though it featured Tex-Mex sounds in its repertoire, so why shouldn’t a band of English musicians today play Tex-Mex music? That’s the deal with the London-based Los Pacaminos, which is fronted by Paul Young, whose string of ‘80s hits made him one of the most popular British neo-soul singers of that era. Burbank-based independent Tornado Records is releasing the band’s debut album in the U.S.