![]() ![]() It was as important as '60s music in that it signaled a change in direction. The bands said important things and stood for change. "See, I came of age in the '60s, when music was a real cultural and political force. Even when I played a lot of notes, I tried to make them mean something - at least, that was my goal. Playing a lot of notes and saying nothing is totally ridiculous. They were superficial, had dumb lyrics, they looked silly, and they were just a vehicle for a lot of terrible guitar solos. It was painful for me at the time, but a lot of the bands of my ilk were pretty stupid and terrible. You have to destroy things to create things. Were you a fan of grunge? After all, grunge killed off a lot of hair metal bands in the early '90s. Yeah, the Alice In Chains reference is fairly intentional. You just bend the string up a half step and you're there. It's a very simple bend it's not tape manipulation or anything. "Well, that's because I wrote the song with Jerry! No accident there. The bends you're doing on the main riff are very similar to what Jerry Cantrell plays on that track. The song Voices In My Head sounds a bit like Alice In Chains' Check My Brain. It could be the on first take, it could be on the hundredth. I like sitting in the control room and hearing the track played back. The rest of the time, I'm a total shoot-from-the-hip guy. The song Tooth And Nail was pre-conceived, and maybe a few more. I think there were only two times I ever pre-planned solos. How extensively do you work them out in demoing? There's some pretty great solos on the new record. They couldn't believe I could hold my own playing music that wasn't considered heavy metal." I mean, these guys are amazing! We did all of these prog-rock and jazz-type stuff. You know, the other day I jammed with Marco Mendoza and Allan Holdsworth's drummer. "I sure hope that people today don't consider me a shred guitarist. I studied that for five minutes and then said, 'OK, I'm ready!'" So I looked at a guitar magazine and there was this lesson by Yngwie Malmsteen. I remember being in the studio with Dokken, and there was a guitar part that needed some heat. I wore the clothes and did the hair and all that, but my heart wasn't into it. "As far as being a shred guitarist, I was never one of the pack. There were a couple of cool players around at the time, but I didn't have their level of enthusiasm for the genre and the sport of speed guitar. It became a race of technique, and I had to play along to get noticed. In the '80s, I got caught up in the shred world, yes. Then I was raised on 'The Four Horsemen' - Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Page. I grew up playing blues music, jazz and classical. So, were you ever comfortable being called a 'shredder'? First, let's talk about the whole shred guitar scene, which you mentioned earlier. My whole life seems to be ruled by lead singer problems." I would've liked a little band cohesion, though. But the record's still great, so that's all that matters. It was a pain shuffling around all these different tracks, rewriting things, getting in multiple singers. I have Will Marten, Marq Torien and Keith St. This whole record was supposed to be fast, and it wound up taking two years. And then I became unhappy with the writing. My regular vocalist, London LeGrand had some trouble, and he had to bow out for a while. We wrote everything in ten days, recorded the tracks and then we ran into singer problems. Originally, it was supposed to be the second record with my group Souls Of We. ![]() "What's a drag is, I spent very little time writing this new album. I'm not going to sell a million records out of the box or have a hit single, so I might as well make the kind of record I can really be proud of. "One thing the downsizing of sales and the music business has done is, it's shifted my focus to making music purely for making music. ![]()
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