Y&T - In Earthshaking Rock We Trust! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

I asked Dave if any of the Earthshaker songs posed any threat vocally or axe-wise, given the passing of so many years, as well as the rabid histrionics enclosed on that white hot chunk of the band's catalogue.

"Earthshaker record, let's see, I would say vocally, no. I've got that all covered as far as any of these tunes go. But it's just really more about memory (laughs). That's the kind of thing. Like I haven't played 'Shake It Loose' since 1978, or '81 or something like that. 'Young And Tough', I don't think we've played more than a dozen times in our entire career. 'Let Me Go' we haven't played since the '70s. But overall, we definitely played a lot of the songs when that record first came out. 'Knock You Out' was a favourite even before we got signed. Like I say, we were hitting them and playing them anyway. But that's another good song. I always think that are three sides to Y&T. There's the straight-ahead, 100%, balls to the wall really fast stuffed that we've got, such as 'Squeeze' and 'Knock You Out' and 'Hurricane', and the other side, completely opposite, has always been our ballad thing. And then of course everything else falls in the middle, mid-tempo rockers and stuff. But I think that's kind of the biggest fabric of why people like Y&T, is that we are actually able to be a band that makes sense doing both of those styles - the really fast heavy stuff and the melodic ballads - and it doesn't seem odd somehow."

Perennially known as a great live band, folks worldwide who might have missed Y&T in their heyday are going to get to judge for themselves. "Yes, well, right now, we're actually finished just looking through stuff for a DVD that is coming out. We have a DVD that we recorded in Holland in October of last year, and it should be coming out in the summertime, so that's all in the works right now, being mixed. And then after that, after we go through lots of rehearsals over the next two and a half weeks to make sure we know all these songs for this upcoming show, we will have some time in-between shows, after that, and we're hoping that we're going to actually get in the recording studio and start writing brand new material for the first time in a long time. That's the thought right now. And of course, we're always going to keep on the idea of releasing product that hasn't been out in the marketplace before on CD, or for a long time. There are few were old records from Universal... well, Universal owns everything that we did, basically up until the '90s. Because everything on A&M and everything that was Yesterday & Today records on London, and all the stuff that we did on Geffen, all three of those record companies were absorbed by Universal. So at least it's a one-stop shopping center for us. We just go to Universal for all the old releases, to get the licensing back to release them."

Y&T - In Earthshaking Rock We Trust! Page 3