2023.12.20 - The Moment with Brian Koppelman - Interview with Duff

22:00 minute mark:

Brian Koppelman: When you write these songs, I mean when you get an idea or you get a groove, do you ever… how do you know “Okay man, I’m gonna save this bit for a band that I’m working with.” Because you’ve done so much band stuff, not just with Guns N’ Roses, but so much of that stuff.

Duff: Yeah.

Brian Koppelman: How do you know, “Okay, this little melody and riff, an idea, feels right for me,” “I should play this one for Slash,” “I should not,” “I should play this one for…” How do you… Or is that not in you head at all and you address it like, “All right, I’m doing a Duff project now”. How does that work for you?

Duff: Man, okay, so if you could see my screen, if I could share you my screen on my iPad – which I’m talking to you on right now – I got a thing called Garage Band and I just hit the microphone and I have my acoustic guitar with me at all times on the road everywhere. It’s my punk guitar killer, it’s my everything. But I just love to play having the guitar in my lap. And I’ll write songs – there’s all this I call my crappy demos, they’re all on my iPad. I’ve shared my crappy demos only with a couple of people, Slash being one, because he knows what I’m trying to get. Or Mark, my producer. My crappy demos. So I will label them, you know, with a question mark: “GN’R?” or “Iggy?” Or, you know, “Ozzy?” But most of them for me… I wrote a song called “Amen”. It just all came to me when that - you know, everything that went down in Gaza and Israel, like that day. I was on the road watching TV and just heartbroken. You know, I’ve read so much history about that area dating back pre-Christ and all that. But like, they have just been under siege forever, you know, and this isn’t… I guess you don’t get surprised anymore. That’s happened a million times. But heartbroken you can be. You can be heartbroken.

Brian Koppelman: And in fact if you’re not heartbroken a little bit by this stuff - when you see kids in these situations… there’s something broken. But it’s so interesting like you just casually said that-

Duff: So I wrote a song called “Amen” and I sent it to Slash, and I said, “This is a Guns song. This is a Civil War, this is a new Civil War type of song.” Civil War is a Guns N’ Roses song-

Brian Koppelman: Of course, I know.

Duff: Those out there listening might not know.

Brian Koppelman: Yeah.

Duff: And I’d say there’s a new civil war.

Brian Koppelman: Oh I see, yes. Of course. So that’s how you wrote that now, because it feels like that vibe.

Intriguing.... I mean, just the fact that he considers it a GN'R song indicates that he isn't ruling out the possibility of making new GN'R music. If the internal discussions had concluded that they would not make new music, then he probably wouldn't have had that thought process. Of course, from him making a demo and thinking of it as a natural GN'R song, and even sending it to Slash for more work, is still far away from it ending up on a GN'R release, but we wouldn't get anywhere if Duff didn't think it was a possibility.