2019.05.01 - Loudwire - Slash on New Guns N’ Roses Album: ‘Ideas Are Coming In’

Slash on New Guns N’ Roses Album: ‘Ideas Are Coming In’

Chad Childers
May 1, 2019

Slash is truly in his element on the concert stage, and he'll be spending a lot of time there with his cohorts, Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, in the coming months. In advance of the tour, the guitarist and his bandmates have issued a new live video for "Boulevard of Broken Hearts," one of the songs from his recent Living the Dream album.

The clip features intimate backstage footage and live footage from their Eventim Apollo performance, and can be viewed at the bottom of this post along with all his tour dates.

We recently had a chance to chat with Slash on a number of subjects, including his touring life. Slash also weighed in on some of his favorite guitarists, discussed his love of horror films and offered an update on Guns N' Roses writing for their proposed album.

You've got a big summer ahead of you — South America, Europe, hitting another U.S. leg. Do you kind of get the same thrill touring now that you did when you first started? And are you still finding new things while you're out on the road that kind of make it interesting?

I love touring. I love the 45 minutes to two hours, or even three hours that you spend onstage. That's always been really the main motivation for it. But that said, I feel much more comfortable traveling than I do staying in any one place for too long. So I guess that has to do with just being in a new place all the time. I guess there is always something interesting and new about places that you've been to or you've frequented—different countries and what not. It's hard to say, but yeah I would imagine there's a lot of those new experiences that you get are a part of the overall appeal of the tour.

Looking at your social media and some of the videos that have been posted for this tour, there was a cool one centered on the journey of your European fans coming to your shows. How cool is that from your perspective? Obviously you make that connection onstage, but to see a little of the back story on who is coming to see you.

I think it's great. The opportunity to be able to allow people to shoot their own videos and send them in and compile those into one video is really cool. That's something that I think is a nice step forward for trying to share the experience with the people that you play for. It makes it that much more interactive, because fans are such a major component of everything that it is. Touring and recording and writing music, at the end of the day it's all performed in front of a room full of people, and those are the people that make this whole thing happen. So it's great when you can get them really involved, and get that little bit closer to them.

It's been great to see you play with Myles and the Conspirators over the last few years, and see that grow. You have such great chemistry and camaraderie. What do you most admire about the guys that you put in this band and what makes this such a great group of guys to play with on a regular basis?

I don't even know where to start. They're just an easygoing, very laid back bunch of guys to begin with. They're just very easygoing, that's the best way I can put it. But they're really great musicians. They're very well rooted. They know exactly what they like, and their influences, and what makes them them, are a huge part of their personality. So they are what they play.

It's just fun, because all anybody wants to do is just to play. There's no other agenda with these guys. We get together. We write some stuff. We have a good time just hanging out, playing, working on music. We get it all together and then we go out and record it and tour. It's really very, very simple—interactive. And everybody seems to be on the same page. All things considered, bands can be complicated. But this is definitely not a complicated band.

Myles has his own stuff going, but I know he kept awareness of what you were doing with Guns N Roses. When you're off cycle do you keep up with what Alter Bridge is doing? Do you pay much attention to what Myles is up to at that time?

Yeah, all things considered there's so much, there's such an online presence that I  know where Myles is at with Alter Bridge, or when he was doing his acoustic solo thing, and other stuff that's posted. So I sort of can keep in touch that way, as far as being in the loop. Then I text him from time to time, see where he's at, how he's doing. It's the same with the other guys, everybody's very busy, so I can sort of keep up with whatever they're doing on Twitter or Instagram, and then I text them all, and stay in touch. I did that through the whole Guns N Roses tour. I was out there, but I kept in touch via email and text, and what not.

Having worked with GN'R for a couple of years, when you come back to Myles and the Conspirators, do either of the projects inform each other. In other words, do you maybe carry over something or are you more energized coming into the other project or do you purposely try to keep it separate?

Doing the two things, it's a relatively new thing at this point. When the World on Fire tour ended and I went to go do the Guns thing—you shut down one and fully focus on the other. So in August when Living the Dream tour ends, I go into the Guns world and start focusing on that. It'll be 100 percent focused on that. I don't know if one energizes the other, as much as you just you really sort of focus on the one that you're doing at the time.

So I'll write stuff for the next Conspirators record while we're on the road, so that when I'm working on Guns, all my focus is on Guns material, and Guns, the tour and whatever else it is that we're doing. I don't really think about Conspirators at that time.

Looking at your socials, I noticed a mix of things and you do a great job of giving nods to your fellow peers, especially guitarists, whether it be a birthday or a tribute of some sort. So I wanted to know, who were the guys you were paying attention to when you first started as a guitarist and also is there somebody in the younger generation that you're really excited about what they're doing, and putting out there?

Well let's go with the younger generation first. It's hard to say. There's a lot of guitar players in the younger generation. I mean there's tons of them, and there's some really good ones. I like to see these people online, or on YouTube, or somebody might turn me on to something, or send me a link, and say check this out. I don't know any of these people's names, but there's some fucking brilliant guitar players out there, and they're all pretty young.

That said, there's guitar players like Gary Clark Jr. who's no spring chicken, but he's to me, a newer guitar player on the scene compared to some of the other people I listen to. I think he's phenomenal. You can never give enough props to Jack White. I love Jack. John 5, who is technical ... he's somebody who is probably one of the most brilliant technical guitar players I've seen or heard, and he's also a friend. So those are the guys that I think, that come to mind, that I'm very familiar with, that are sort of the newer guard.

Then you got guys like Jerry Cantrell that came up a lot around the same time that I did. James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine, oh fuck, a lot of amazing guys. Dimebag sadly is not around anymore, but we came up around relatively close to the same time. Zakk Wylde as well.

As for the guys that I was into, and that I still listen to when I came up were definitely Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and [Jimi] Hendrix. Then there's Jimmy Page, and I got into Albert King and B.B. King and Freddie King. I think we all call them the three Kings, but I love those guys. Buddy Guy, and then guys like Billy Gibbons and Rick Nielsen and Joe Walsh.

As I've been playing for awhile, then you get more and more exposed to those guys. Joe Perry, and Brad Whitford, and Angus and Malcolm Young. I mean, I could go on, and on, and on. There's so many guitar players that were an influence on me. Michael Schenker, Gary Moore, there was a period in the '80s when those two guys were there, and Uli Jon Roth is another one. So there's a lot of different types of guitar players that had a big influence. I still listen to all those guitar players still.

Knowing you've taken an interest in films, particularly doing horror films with Slash Fiction, what are your thoughts on what's coming up this summer. We got another Child's Play remake. We've got The Boy adding a sequel. It seems like there's a lot of sequels, a lot of remakes in the horror genre, and just wondering what your thoughts are on where that is going movie wise?

Well I'm not super excited about any of the remakes. Every so often one will come along that I think actually transcends the original, but I am looking forward to the sequel to It. I thought it was a really good, fun, well made horror film that came out. That was, I thought, an improvement on the original.

I was going to say, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark kind of looks like ...

Yeah, Scary Stories I'm interested to see. Yeah, I'm scared of that one. Oh yeah, I'm scared of that one. I'm interested in that one for sure.

And just a fun one in The Dead Don't Die looks like a kind of kitschy zombie film.

Now, I know that line. Is that actually a movie?

Yeah, it's Bill Murray, Adam Driver, there's like half of Hollywood seems to be in this thing.

Yeah, I think I saw something on that. But that line, "the dead don't die" comes from something else. I can't think what it is. But anyway, yeah that'll be interesting. You know all in all, I think it's been a pretty good time. Like when I got into producing horror movies, and it's something that I'm very active in right now, and I got all these different projects in different states of development, and I got two deals I just closed, but what inspired me to get into it was there was this period of just really, really a few and far between good horror movies. Most of them were really dumbed down to the point where I was just really disappointed in the whole genre.

So, I wanted to get into something where it was more story- and character-driven horror movies that were a little bit more of dramas that just happened to lead into a place that was a little bit of a thriller and that kind of thing. As I've been doing that, the actual horror genre has changed a lot in the last seven years and gotten to be pretty interesting. You still have your sort of predictable run of the mill movies that come out every, I guess every month or so, but then, you also have some really good ones, and some great stories. I mean Get Out was great. Quiet Place was great.

Hereditary was great. So there's been some really inspiring movies that have come out over the last few years, that have marked a big change in the horror genre as a whole.

GNR writing is probably held off until after your touring is done. But have you ...

No, we're actually into it now, but at the same time everybody's still busy with a million other things. We haven't been able to sit down and completely focus on just the one thing, but we have been toying around with stuff.

Do you have material that you've already written and intend to present to the band, or does it kind of work more where everyone gets in a room and works it up from scratch?

I think there's no set rule for this. I don't think anything has been worked up to the point of ... well, let's put it this way. Ideas are coming in.

Got it. And such a great tour that you guys put on. From your own perspective, what was maybe the biggest surprise of having the GN'R tour do what it did?

The biggest surprise was the tour itself. I mean, everything else, it was a surprise and the icing on the cake. The biggest fucking thing about the "Not in This Lifetime" tour, was the fact that it even existed at all. You know? That was just the big shocker.

Anything else on the horizon we should be looking for?

Slash Fiction, yeah there's a couple things that I, well, with films, until there's a release date, you don't want to get too ahead of yourself, but things are moving in a positive direction, so that's all good. So we'll see what happened in 2020, if I can get a release done.

https://loudwire.com/slash-boulevard-of-broken-hearts-live-video-guns-n-roses-interview/

They are definitely working on new music.