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STEVE STEVENS - The New Wave Of Classic Rock Page 2
by Martin Popoff

Did Nick do anything outside of the box, something that you'd never seen before?

Providing a bit of background, Steve says that, "Although I've been making records since 1981, I've never done an electric guitar solo record. And after the last Billy Idol record, which was Devil's Playground, we went out on the road for about seven to eight months, and played a lot of countries we've never played before - Russia Serbia, Finland - and it really seemed that the climate had changed, in terms of a new generation of kids really being into guitars. So yeah, we spent seven to eight months on the road, and we were on the Warped tour, and those kids... it was a real revelation to be seeing guitar solos, which was totally uncool in the '90s when Nirvana hit and all that. Everybody played three chords and the climate wasn't right for it. So I really thought that I could bring something to the table as far as an instrumental record goes that would be different from what other instrumental guitarists were doing."

"My interest isn't really in the whole shred thing. I'm more of a composer, and I wanted to maybe invoke the same feelings in people that I had when I was a 14-year-old kid and I heard the first Queen record, or when Yes came out with Close To The Edge; I'm a big prog rock guy. So I had a real burning desire to do this kind of record, and Billy had said, 'Well, I'm going to take a majority of 2007 off.' So I thought this was a good time to do this record. So it was a real labour of love. It was done at my home studio, and I kind of learned as I went along. I'm not an engineer, but I think I did a pretty decent job on it (laughs)."

That's definitely the case. Damn, after this, Steve should be getting calls to produce. Seriously, the sounds and tones (and tenacity, to quote ZZ) are gorgeous. Steve figures it worked out well because he stayed away from anything too tricky on the tech end of things.

STEVE STEVENS - The New Wave Of Classic Rock Page 3