Moxy - Ridin' High in 2001 Page 2
by Martin Popoff

"I actually came into the project a little bit after it got going," explains Earl, providing a bit of background on this most unlikely of reunions. "Bill and Bud were writing tunes together and got two or three songs together and said, 'hey, this should be the next Moxy album.' And I guess it was about five years ago that I had last ever talked to them about doing anything with Moxy. And I just wanted to leave it alone because at that point there was no recording possibility, just the idea of getting together and playing some dates in Texas. But that never happened. So this time when asked, the truth of the matter is I have a little boy who is 2 1/2 and he's a diehard rock and roller. Like if I was just sitting around playing the guitar, some ZZ Top riff, he would be right over there right away. So he kind of inspired me and they phoned right around the same time and I said 'yeah, I'd love to play some guitar'. Basically Bud did most of the rhythm on his tunes, I did most of the rhythm on mine. He did some harp, some of the guitar solos on his and overall I did about 85% of the solos. I'm not going to pull any punches. A lot of what I like comes out. There's some bluesy stuff in there. There's one tune that Bill had which is kind of like a Page-ish solo, Fire Down Below, a Zeppelin-ish tune. And there's one like AC/DC where I'm playing more of a Billy Gibbons type thing against it. I lean more towards the blues."

Bill adds that "there are no guest appearances or anything. It's just been a really great writing experience and performing experience for everybody, and everybody's just going at it really gung ho. There are some songs that are your regular 3:30 bangers, and we have a couple that go into a little over five minutes, long ballads perhaps, but mainly it's pretty high energy stuff. We're pretty happy with it. We think it is probably the best thing we've ever done, I believe, because we had control of it ourselves, not to say we didn't have the control before. But back then, it was a little bit different because you are younger of course. You're with a label and they don't tell you a lot of things, you just go and do it, and after the fact you have this record that you either are or aren't happy with. So this one we had control over the writing and the production, and we're basically just doing it because we had the material and we think we could do, and did do a good job."

Moxy - Ridin' High in 2001 Page 3