By Carl Begai
When Trans-Siberian Orchestra / Savatage guitarist Chris Caffery refers to Tears Of The Sun, he’s not talking about a new sadboy love song he’s just written, or taking a shot at launching a Broadway play. Nope. Tears Of The Sun is, in fact, a Caffery-created hot sauce that has gone from his kitchen to the stores through a series of fortunate coincidences. And unlike a lot of “celebrity” marketed products – which usually feature little or no actual input from the star in question even though his/her name is slapped on the label – Caffery can lay claim to having created Tears Of The Sun hot sauce from scratch.
“All of it is my recipe, actually, because I’ve been cooking my entire life,” says Caffery. “Steve Seabury at High River Sauces is responsible for getting it out there. The whole idea of making the hot sauce company that he has came about while he was managing some of my solo stuff and dipping his feet into the food business at the same time. I gave him some of the hot sauce I’d made at a business meeting, and he really liked it. From there Steve eventually got into doing it as a business, but this recipe is 100% mine. I measured the ingredients and sent it to the guy that was making it; they cooked it off of that. I had them tweak it a little bit because I wasn’t completely happy with the way it came out, and we ended up with the hot sauce we have now.”
“It’s not like I’m just stamping my name on a bottle,” he continues. “In fact, I didn’t put my name on it at all because I didn’t want it to be presented as ‘Here, a musician put his name on some salsa.’ I wanted to make something that would actually get taken seriously, and it won two really big national hot sauce awards since it hit the market; Best New Hot Sauce Of The Year and Best Fruit-Based Habanero Sauce. I think that if we would have said it’s Chris Caffery’s Hot Sauce, that wouldn’t have happened.” Continue reading CHRIS CAFFERY – Tears Of The Sun: “You Can’t Download Hot Sauce”