KIM MITCHELL - Max'ed Out On Amazement Page 4
by Martin Popoff

"Well, Craig Baxter I met through Max Webster keyboardist Terry Watkinson, eons ago," says Kim. "He spent a brief stint as road manager for about a month with Max Webster. And we sort of lost touch and then all of a sudden I saw Craig Baxter posting on my web site. And everything he was writing on the web site was killing me. It was great. It was, well, this guy has a great writing style. He is so entertaining, he's humorous, he's smart, he has a way with the English language. And I thought, I'm going to ask him if he's ever written lyrics. That's how it all started. And he really hadn't done it before, but I believe he rose to the occasion huge, because - and I don't mean this in a pretentious way - but if you're writing lyrics for my music, I'm used to Pye Dubois, who was just f**king incredible. You're not going to get away with just shit with me. There's going to have to be something going on there. And he really did deliver."

Asked to point out a highlight on the literary end, Kim thinks for a minute, and then says, "You know, f**k it, I'm going to do the clich‚ line - they all speak to me. But I really do like 'Dreamthieves', I really like 'Rock That Ride', and I like 'Ain't Life Amazing', because you know, dark clouds do happen for everyone. But yet life is worth living and life can be amazing too."

And back to the fat strings, again, there's this Joe Hardy, who unsurprisingly, picks a prickly, slightly edgy sound to slot into the rest of the chromium steel mix of his Mitchell machine. For anyone who has seen Kim Mitchell live, it may comes as a bit of a surprise that Kim's consummate sidekick Peter Fredette isn't playing the bass on the album. After all, Peter's a monster whacker of the plank, not to mention a soulful singer extraordinaire - big part of the band equation in other words (watch him spin on 'All We Are' someday - ranked by the same governing body we mentioned above as the greatest rock ballad ever penned).

So why not Peter?

"Because Peter is more... Peter is not as much a composer on the bass. You know, Peter is great at taking something that somebody else basically composed, wrote, put down, and running with it. Peter is a great presence. He's been a serious asset to my career as far as singing, and he's a great bass player. I just found that he lacks... I don't even want to put it in a negative light, because I found Joe to be more melodic, being able to compose great parts around the song. He just moves around on the bass a bit more. And Peter's the first one to say that too. Peter's going, 'Jesus Christ, I just love what Joe played on this. It's so melodic. I wouldn't have even come close to thinking that! I'm just loving learning the parts.'"

KIM MITCHELL - Max'ed Out On Amazement Page 5