2015.06.22 - Billboard - Slash Talks New Material, Touring With Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators

Slash Talks New Material, Touring With Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators

By Gary Graff

Even though Slash and his band — Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators — plan to tour up until Christmas in support of their 2014 album World On Fire, recording its follow-up is most definitely on the horizon.

“We’re working on new material for the next record,” Slash tells Billboard. “When this tour’s over we’ll start going in and doing some pre-production and probably go into the studio some time in mid to late spring and record.” Kennedy, of course, will also be spending time with his band Alter Bridge around then, but Slash promises that, “We just have a way of doing it. It all works out.”

Song ideas have already started popping up and Slash reports they’re sounding good. “They sound very rhythmic and that’s definitely something that, for me personally, I’m going for,” he says. “We’ll see what that turns into. It changes. It sort of evolves; you start out with one idea and that sort of morphs into another idea. At this point it sounds like it’s going to be really awesome, so I’m excited about it.”

Before that, Slash and Co. will be releasing an undisclosed cover song recorded to accompany a friend’s upcoming jump across the Snake River Canyon in Idaho, made famous by Evel Knievel’s failed attempt in 1974. “I’m not at liberty to talk about it, but it’s something that’s different than anything we’ve done so far,” Slash says. “When he does this big landmark jump, the song goes with it, so I’m excited for it to come out.”

Meanwhile, Slash has another new project to be enthusiastic about — the newly released CD and video set, Live at the Roxy 9.25.14, recorded in Los Angeles during one of four special shows geared around World On Fire‘s release and released in partnership with BitTorrent.

Recording and filming one of the concerts was a last minute decision, according to Slash, and even then it was not certain it would be a commercial release. “One thing was that we had a bunch of new songs that we’d never played before,” he says, “so thinking back on it and after playing a lot of those songs every day since then, it’s interesting to think how cool those songs must have sounded when we were first getting in the groove in front of an audience. That was literally the first time we ever played them, so that’s sort of cool. And they’ve changed a lot; they’ve evolved a lot over the last however many months it’s been.”

In fact, Slash and the band recently played the 17th and final selection from the album — “Iris of the Storm” — in concert, completing a full sweep of World On Fire. “We played the obvious single first and then we’d go, ‘Let’s try this one, let’s try that one, on this leg let’s try two more’ and that’s just sort of the way it works out,” Slash says. “You sort of put a little bit of time into rehearsal before every tour leg, but we’re talking about a couple of days, so you’re going to incorporate the easy songs first. The ones that are hardest to perform live always end up being towards the end.”

Slash is in Europe until early July with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, then will be touring North America during the fall and early winter, including a slot on the Voodoo Experience festival Halloween night in New Orleans. He will be spending the interim in the film world, preparing for his second film project, the horror movie “The Hell Within,” which is currently casting and is slated to start production in January.

https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/slash-talks-new-material-touring-myles-kennedy-6605643/