WARRIOR SOUL frontman Kory Clarke spoke to Dawn Osborne of TotalRock about the inspiration for the title of the band’s upcoming album, “Out On Bail”. The LP will arrive on March 4 via Livewire/Cargo Records UK. Regarding the album’s title track, which was made available earlier in the month, Kory said: “It’s a song about a former bandmember, in another band, that was upset about something I said at his wedding which I didn’t wanna go to. But anyway, I said it to his mom. And I’d had a few. [Laughs] Anyway, he didn’t like it so much that he called me — he left a message on my machine saying, ‘You’re fired. I’m taking all your publishing. We’re gonna re-record the whole album with somebody else.’ And I got the message. I called him back and I said, ‘Yeah, well, guess what. You’re gonna find me out in front of your house with a baseball bat and it’s going right over your head.’ So I hung up the phone. And one day I came back to my apartment and there’s a note on the door. And it says, ‘Call detective’ this guy. And I go, ‘Yeah. As if.’ Another week goes by, another note: ‘Hey, give me a call…’ I’m, like, ‘Fuck off.’ So I just hung out at different bars; I didn’t stay in the neighborhood. [I figured I’d] let it go to a bench warrant, if it goes to that. Whatever; who cares. Then [the detective] called me on the phone and I actually picked up. I didn’t know it was him. And he goes, ‘Kory, listen. If I have to find you, I’m gonna put you on Rikers for three or four days so you get in to trial.’ And I don’t know if you know about Rikers Island, but it’s not really a great place. [Laughs] You can look that up. And I didn’t wanna spend any time at Rikers or down in The Tombs, which is another nice little dungeon they keep you in. But he said, ‘Just come down.’ He goes, ‘I know you weren’t gonna do anything, I’m pretty sure.’ He goes, ‘You just come down. I’ll print ya, take your pictures, stick you in a cage for a little while and then we’ll let you go.’ So, that’s what happened. I went down there to my girlfriend and that’s what happened. They locked me in for a couple of hours and then they let me go. That was it… I still don’t think I should have gone in in the first place. But whatever.”

“Out On Bail” is described in a press release as “a statement of considerable intent” from Clarke, who is “one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most prolific, prophetic and controversial songwriters.” The LP was produced by Clarke, with additional production by Dennis Post. It was mixed and mastered by Rune Buck.
WARRIOR SOUL released a trio of albums on the Geffen major label during the ’90s, beginning with its classic 1990 debut, “Last Decade Dead Century”.

Having initially split in 1995 following the release of “The Space Age Playboys”, WARRIOR SOUL was resurrected in 2007 by Clarke, who has issued several albums since: “Destroy The War Machine” (2008), “Stiff Middle Finger” (2012), “Back On The Lash” (2017), “Rock ‘N’ Roll Disease” (2019), “Cocaine And Other Good Stuff” (2020) and “Out On Bail”.

Inspired by the The Great Guitar Build Off, an experienced builder challenged himself to turn a live-edge piece of cherry wood into a masterfully unique, grizzled beauty.Kent MeloyFor the past five or six years, I’ve been slowly building my guitar-building chops starting with a couple kits and then moving into my own scratch-built designs under the name Tunguska Guitars. Lately I’ve been intrigued by some of the builds I’ve seen featured on The Great Guitar Build Off run by Britain’s Crimson Guitars, and I’ve tried to start thinking outside of the norm.My brother-in-law has a bunch of 2″ slabs of cherry wood that have been drying in a shed behind his house for a couple years. When we were down for a visit, he took me up to collect a few. This particular live-edge piece wormed its way into my heart, and I grabbed it, knowing it was probably useless for a guitar.But once I got home, I kept thinking about how to solve the problems. The entire bridge/tailpiece area was completely unsuitable, and one thing I knew I did not want to do is fill it with resin. This thing needed to stay as raw, beat-up, and un-shiny as possible. There was barely enough wood to get a body and neck out of it, but I managed to get both.I decided the only way to solve the bridge issue was to fabricate something myself (if you can call it that), so I picked up a 3/8″ steel rod and used a blowtorch to heat it up and make the necessary bends in the bridge, far enough apart that it literally “bridged” the canyon of disintegrating wood. I put threads on the mounting ends so I could install nuts on the top and bottom as a basic height adjustment. The 2-piece tailpiece was less drastic, but also did the trick by boring deep into the good wood for support.I decided the pickup mount would emulate an acoustic, boring all the way through the body and countersinking a steel ring for decoration with pickup mounting holes on the backside instead of the top, and I wanted a single volume control to hover in the upper horn’s decorative hole. This took a while and involved a short, threaded rod, three nuts, and a little bit of J-B Weld to get one of the nuts on the mini-pot.Once I got far enough into the process, I was calling it “The Nameless One,” but my friends started calling it “Keith Richards”­–a grizzled, beat-up, true rock ’n’ roll survivor. I came to be completely okay with that assessment: It just feels perfect!The pickup is a hand-distressed StewMac Golden Age Parsons Street humbucker. The fretboard is ziricote and the relic’d tuning machines and control knob came from GFS. The thing sounds amazing—it’s very open and organic. Cranking up the distortion just a bit gives it a lovely swamp-’70s vibe. It completely surpassed my expectations, and I’m sure it’s Keith’s fault. Send your guitar story to submissions@premierguitar.com.

SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS frontman Myles Kennedy spoke to Danny Stoakes about the lyrical inspiration for the track “Fill My World” from the band’s latest album, “4”. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Though it’s not a big rock song, it has a lot of meaning to me… It was inspired by my dog Mozart. He’s a Shih Tzu. He’s a little brat, but he’s essentially our kid [laughs], of my wife and I. And we were… I don’t know where we were, but we couldn’t get home one night. So we had those little camera things. And we were supposed to get home — or maybe she was supposed to get home, and something happened. So he was stuck in the house by himself. And there was a massive storm; we get these crazy storms where I live in Spokane now, where trees fall down. The wind’s just gotten nuts. And he hates it; he freaks out. So we kept watching him throughout the night, And he was just panicking; he was freaking out — he was freaking terrified. And so the song is basically written from his perspective, like, ‘When are you coming home to save me?’ And I’ll be honest — when I was tracking it, you can kind of hear my voice break a little bit at one point. [Laughs] I’m a softie; I’ll admit that. I’m a guy, if I’m in a chick flick, I will cry during the movie. [Laughs] But, yeah, he inspired that track lyrically.”

“4” was released on February 11 via Gibson Records in partnership with BMG, “4” is Slash’s fifth solo album and fourth overall with his band featuring Kennedy (vocals), Brent Fitz (drums), Todd Kerns (bass, vocals) and Frank Sidoris (guitar, vocals).

“4” has the history-making distinction of being the first-ever album to be released on the new Gibson Records label, which is headquartered in the iconic American instrument brand Gibson’s hometown of Music City, Nashville. In light of the 30-year partnership between Gibson and the Grammy Award-winning Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductee Slash, it made sense for the new SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS’ album to be made available via Gibson Records.

For “4”, Slash and the band traveled across the country together to Nashville, Tennessee and recorded the new album at the historic RCA Studio A with producer Dave Cobb (Chris Stapleton, John Prine, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile), revealing a stunning new sound and style all captured live in the studio. Cobb shared the band’s desire to lay down the tracks live, in the studio including guitar solos and vocals — a first for the group.

SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS kicked off a North American headlining tour on February 8, in Portland, Oregon. The trek will hit 28 major cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and more, before wrapping up March 26 in Orlando, Florida.

The list of rock bands that have managed to release a brand-new album fifty years after their debut record is not exactly overflowing with names. The list of bands that have released a new album fifty years later and managed to not sound like tired retreads of past glories or sad attempts at modernizing their music is even shorter. SCORPIONS have avoided both pitfalls with “Rock Believer”, their first new album in seven years. The rock icons revisit many of the sounds that fueled their superstardom’s peak. The level of energy and songcraft present though keep those tracks from feeling tired, and perhaps for the first time in several records, there are even a few anthems that hold up next to the classics we’ve been re-purchasing on multiple formats over the decades.

“Gas In The Tank”, the album’s opening salvo, immediately re-positions the band as masters of the energetic rock anthem. The song has an inherent catchiness that fits in snugly within the horde of crowd pleasers that have been longtime staples of the band’s live set. The beloved hallmarks of the band’s sound are omnipresent, with Klaus Meine’s vocals continuing to hit that perfect mix of triumph and wistfulness, and Rudolf Schenker and Matthias Jab’s guitar work once again delivering tastefully blistering shred with their solos. Thankfully, while the list of legacy bands that put together an impressive opening track and then coasted throughout the remainder of their latest record is lengthy, SCORPIONS have enough gas to fuel them through “Rock Believer”‘s long haul.

The high-energy rock anthems continue to come throughout the record. The opening track is matched by subsequent rockers such as “Roots In My Boots”, “Hot And Cold”, and “Peacemaker”, which has Meine deliver a snarling vocal performance on the chorus of the album’s most overtly metallic track. “Rock Believer”‘s title track is the most perfect slice of ’80s-style glam metal that has been released in the 2000’s. It puts everyone paying tribute to the Sunset Strip’s glory days to shame with its sublime mix of earnest rock balladry, sleazy guitar solos, and cowbell from drummer Mikkey Dee (MOTÖRHEAD), making his studio debut with the band after several years of live performances.

“Shining Of Your Soul” sees the band settling into a midtempo groove, but even that is fueled by some great rock guitar riffs. The band proves capable of stomping heaviness that is evocative of “The Zoo” with “Seventh Sun”‘s thumping bass lines and pounding drums, and “When I Lay My Bones To Rest” comes off as a dirty MOTÖRHEAD-style rocker. The band does deliver one of their trademark ballads with “When You Know (Where You Come From)” , though they save that for the album’s closing track. Otherwise, the driving force that motivates SCORPIONS here seems to be a pure mission of expertly crafted slabs of well-done hard rock, delivering that in droves.

It’s a testament to the band’s self-confidence that on the fiftieth anniversary of their 1972 debut album, “Lonesome Crow”, the band’s course of action was to simply do the things that they have always done best throughout their existence. “Rock Believer” serves as a comforting reminder that SCORPIONS are still capable of generating catchy rock anthems in their later years.

In a new interview with the “(Don’t) Quit Your Day Job” podcast, Jeff Scott Soto, the acclaimed American hard rock singer of Puerto Rican descent, was asked if he ever felt like he didn’t get a fair shake or people treated him “shitty” just because of the slightly darker hue of his complexion. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Absolutely. Of course I went through it, especially in the ’80s when this style of the hair bands, or whatever you wanna call them, and even the genre was flooded with so many bands that were… a lot of their frontmen were of Caucasian descent and had green eyes or blue eyes and they had blond hair. I didn’t fit in that mold… Of course, there were exceptions. Stephen Pearcy [RATT] is Spanish. I believe Vince Neil [MÖTLEY CRÜE] is half Spanish, but they didn’t come across with that look as much as I did. And [I thought], ‘I need to shift how people see me first because my talent isn’t gonna do it enough; it’s not gonna do it alone. I have to make sure that I kind of fit and look the image as well as singing it,’ because the way I looked when I was with Yngwie, it would not have worked for me in terms of trying to get and gain that side of notoriety had I not done something about it. So I was doing things like adding the bleached hair on portion of my hair, I grew it out longer, I was wearing different clothing. I tried to remold myself to kind of fit musically what I was trying to rebrand myself.”

Soto is a man that needs virtually no introduction to any discerning melodic rock fan. Jeff launched his career at the young age of 18 years old in tremendous fashion as the lead vocalist for Yngwie Malmsteen’s debut album, “Rising Force”, and the sophomore effort, “Marching Out”. That first step into the spotlight has led to a career that has seen Jeff play and work with an outstanding number of artists and genres from the AOR of EYES and TAKARA, to the hard rock and metal of TALISMAN, AXEL RUDI PELL, SOUL SIRKUS, and, of course, his time with the legendary JOURNEY. Jeff has also maintained a solo career over the past decades, while also recently joining up with the progressive metal supergroup SONS OF APOLLO.

Last October, Soto released his latest solo project, “The Duets Collection, Vol. 1”. For this album, Soto wanted to do a career retrospective and re-record some of his favorite songs from his storied career, but with the twist that he invited friends to join him on duets of said songs. So, not only did he re-record these songs with his musical friends Jorge Salan, Howie Simon (guitars), Leo Mancini (guitars), Tony Dickinson (bass) and Edu Cominato (drums), but he called in some of his fellow rock friends/vocalists — including Erik Mårtensson (ECLIPSE, W.E.T.), Eric Martin (MR. BIG), Johnny Gioeli (HARDLINE), Deen Castronovo (REVOLUTION SAINTS, JOURNEY), Nathan James (INGLORIOUS), Russell Allen (SYMPHONY X), Renan Zonta (ELECTRIC MOB), Dino Jelusick (TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA), Mats Levén (CANDLEMASS, TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA), BJ (SPEKTRA, SOTO) and Aliro Netto (SHAMAN, QUEEN EXTRAVAGANZA) — to create a unique duets album.