Tommyland Rides Again | Tommy Lee rebuilds his solo album
Tommy Lee has reimagined his 2005 solo record Tommyland: The Ride as Tommyland Rides Again, released 22 May 2026 with guests including Butch Walker.
Plenty of musicians reissue an old album with a couple of demos bolted on the end. Fewer go back and rebuild the thing.
Tommy Lee has done the second one. Tommyland Rides Again, out on 22 May 2026, is a full reimagining of his 2005 solo record Tommyland: The Ride.
What it is
Not a remaster, and not a straight re-recording. The songs have been reworked, with new guests brought in across the record — the single “Good Times” features Butch Walker.
Tommyland: The Ride was always the odd one out in his catalogue: a loose, genre-hopping solo album from a drummer better known for enormous arena backbeats. Twenty years on, it turns out he still had opinions about it.
Why a drummer should care
Because it is Tommy actually playing, in a context that is not Mötley Crüe.
The Crüe catalogue asks for a very particular thing — huge, immovable, four-to-the-floor. His solo work is where the electronic side of his taste shows up, and where the drum programming and live playing sit next to each other. If you have only heard him inside the Crüe, it is a genuinely different picture.
There is a caveat worth stating: reworking a twenty-year-old record is a risky move, and not every song here needed it. But when it lands, the extra weight in the drums is very obvious.
Final thoughts
A solo album rebuild is not the sort of thing that troubles the charts, and it does not need to. This is a drummer with nothing left to prove going back to fix something that nagged at him.
Meanwhile the day job is busy: Mötley Crüe are out on The Return of the Carnival of Sins, where he is selling the snare off the stage each night.
Read our full Tommy Lee feature or see his full rig, era by era, in the Rig Vault.