Monday, 1st February 2016
Screenshot by dltourhistory
Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott was recently interviewed by Joe Benson for Off The Record and mentioned the new album.
Joe talked about recording the new album in three sections, the tracklisting, the songs - Man Enough/Let's Go, Dangerous/Battle Of My Own, famous fans/influences, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, the 2016 tour, being away from home and playing with Styx.
Joe mentioned new songs Dangerous and Battle Of My Own which were also played during the 50 minute special.
Visit the Album News section. For more news on new music (based on band member quotes) dating back to January 2011.
Off The Record - Joe Elliott Interview Quotes
Dangerous
"It was called Dangerous Drug. For a long time me and Phil had had this thing percolating and he had no verse lyrics, no melody. He just had the guitar riff and he this idea of the chorus Dangerous Drug. As in you are a dangerous drug. Just usual Leppard metaphor stuff. It didn't sit right. For me it didn't have the kind of bounciness or a frenetic kind of lyric. It didn't have that whop bop a lop bam boom ness to it you know. So I said do you have any objections to me trying to do this a different way?. And he's like no man I'm not precious to this at all."
"So I said I just wanna get rid of the word drug and just use Dangerous and kind of have it work the way Photograph and Promises did and various other songs like that. It worked so much better for the backing vocals. For me to sing around them in classic Leppard style. It's one of the two very obvious Leppard songs. And we wanted to do some stuff that was joyous and related to our past catalogue. What we wanted to do with this album was have a bit of both. So we had like Let's Go and dangerous sounding like what you might wanna call classic Leppard. And then the other stuff like Battle Of My Own or Man Enough or Energized. That sound somewhat like us because you can tell we're playing and singing it but song wise they didn't relate to any track on any previous album. And that for us is growth. So to have a bit of both. That's why we feel it's such a well balanced record."
Battle Of My Own/Jimmy Page
"Very much so. In fact it kind of got the thumbs up from Mr. Zeppelin himself. I heard a great story just before Christmas from Ross Halfin our photographer. He was driving Jimmy up to a record fair somewhere. And of course he's in Ross's car so he can't get out. And Ross was playing our new album and Battle Of My Own came on and Jimmy kept saying put that one on again. Put that one on again. And he was really, really into this song and I got an email back later. A few days later going Jimmy just adores this track. He says he totally hears the Zeppelin thing in it. But he also hears - there's Crosby, Stills And Nash sort of harmony vocals in the bridge part. And it was you know. Again we were referencing these songs before the lyrics were written. We were just calling it Zep III. And this song was leaning that way and again for us we haven't really done anything like that. If ever but if we have it was a very, very long time ago."
"So when Sav came in with that guitar riff. He played it in the control room on an acoustic guitar because you just pick up the nearest thing to it. But as he did it. It just became natural as we were sitting around that this is how it should be done. Not on an electric. It should actually be played on acoustics. The way that Bowie used to do that a lot in the Ziggy period and Zeppelin obviously did it too."
- Interview Source - unclejoe.com
- Def Leppard - Off The Record 2016 Show Page
- Def Leppard - Radio 2016
- Def Leppard - Def Leppard Album Section
- Previous News - 1st February 2016