TINA PEEK: Hi George how are you? I was happy to hear I‘d be interviewing you today, even though I was supposed to be speaking with London, [LeGrand] and funny enough it seems we know some of the same people.

GEORGE LYNCH: Well, you’d get a whole different perspective with London, more flowery, more colorful. I would definitely suggest talking to London.

TP: [laughing] Well I know you were out in Vegas recently playing with the Sin City Sinners so I happened to mentioned to Todd [Kerns] that I would be interviewing you today and he told me you were a great guy and to say “Hi”.

GL: Those guys are so great. Yeah, we have a blast. What it ends up being, it’s like a little vacation for me and my wife. We go out there and they put us up at the Hard Rock for three or four days. And I’ve found out it’s a bad way to go, because you just end up spending all your money at the Hard Rock when you’re there for four days. What else is there to do, you know? So actually, I think on the third day we just went like, “Okay, we can’t handle another day of gambling here.” So we just went out into the desert and went hiking and it didn’t cost anything.

TP: Yeah there’s a lot of other things to do there besides gambling anyway. I’ve never been yet, but I’m making it my mission to get out to Las Vegas one of these days, and I really want catch the Sin City Sinners playing live.

GL: Yeah it’s a great time. We did like seven songs I think, Dokken and Lynch Mob stuff and some covers. It was a lot of fun, and it’s real easy and they’re great guys, great band. I love the drummer. I think the guy lives in his van and sells pot or something. [I’m laughing-he’s referring to Rob Cournoyer, initially from Raging Slab] He’s like Big Band, Buddy Rich-style trained and everything, but when you see him he’s just like Cookie Monster when he plays, and all his drums are just flying everywhere and moving all over the floor and he’s got his hair in his face and he’s great. They’re just a great bunch of guys and a lot of fun.

TP: They are nice. Okay, so we’re talking about your new band today, a band called Souls Of We and I know you’ve been doing some tours with your band Lynch Mob, so I was wondering if this is simply a side-project for you and where you see this band going?

GL: Well no I don’t see this as a side project because it’s something I’ve been working on off and on for about five years, and five years as a side project is a pretty long time… But it really came together in the last year and half when London and I re-joined forces, because we used to play together in a band called Microdot and he also auditioned for Lynch Mob very early on, so we have a little history. And he’s been cutting my hair for about seven years, so…

TP: Has he really? [I’m laughing]

GL: [laughs] Yeah and we became friends. And I’m like “Damn, dude, you look so fuckin’ amazing, you’ve gotta’ be a bass player or a singer or something.” And he was like, “Yeah, I am.” So it was kind of after the fact that I discovered he was a musician. Usually guys that look like that aren’t very good, so I didn’t have high hopes or high expectations for his ability. But then we got together to do this Microdot project and I realized that the guy definitely has skills and chops, and then he left and went to do Brides Of Destruction and did some albums with them. Then when that fell apart, we got back together and finished up Souls together and you know, it is what it is.

TP: I was curious as to what prompted you to form the band Souls Of We? Is this just a new chapter in the George Lynch career that spans thirty years?

GL: No no, because I don’t think like that. I don’t compartmentalize anything I do, and I don’t look back, very often, so it’s just pretty much live in the moment and the creative process in writing these songs. Putting this band together was a day by day process, climbing a lot of mountains and down a lot of valleys and you know [laughs] very tumultuous and very challenging and out of that fire the crucible of this record emerged. And it wasn’t something I could let go of, it wasn’t just something of an afterthought, I probably worked harder on this record, than any record as long as I’ve been alive and so I hold it really close to my heart and my hopes for it. But regardless of how well it does commercially it was gratifying to have done, and I think to create something unique as far as the sound and the style, the writing style and the chemistry of all the band members, this whole thing, it’s something you can’t buy and sometimes you can’t even create even with all the best intentions. So I think that we have to take care of that and continue to work on evolving as a group.

TP: Tell me about Johny Chow, the bands bassist and drummer Yael and how they were brought into the fold?

GL: Well the band got put together in the eleventh hour, because these songs were all a kind of culmination of many other writing efforts I’d had in other projects, from Stonehouse, to Microdot, to Band Of Flakes and a couple of other projects that were unnamed. The last thing we did was put the actual band together. After London and I had joined forces and we finished writing the lyrics and recording the vocals, we thought, “Okay, now we need a band!” But Yael played on one track and Johny played on one track and that’s the band, the way it’s established right now. The other people that were guesting on the record like Mike Wengren from Disturbed and Morgan [Rose] from Sevendust and Fred [Leclercq] from DragonForce, they’re on the record as guests, but obviously they’re not going to be in the band. So, we had to establish the foundation of what the group really is, a band that would go out live and continue on with selling records, which would be Johny, Yael, myself, and London. And it’s a really, really interesting, fun, cool mix of people that I think transcends musical eras and generations and influences. All these people are in pretty deep and I think this band is capable of great things. As far as steering it towards any specific direction, that’s where I’ve got to sort of let go, and obviously I have my hands in all aspects of everything I do, but I don’t pretend to be very good at that part of the business, unfortunately. And as much as I try, I think it’d be better if I kept my hands out of it, because when I get involved I usually steer it into a ditch. [laughs] So we hope to flush the band out live and get out on the road. It’s a challenging and daunting prospect for us because we’re an unknown entity. We’re all seasoned players and have families and this is our livelihood. We had an offer to go out with Black Label [Society] and Sevendust but it just didn’t work for us. We couldn’t find a way to make that happen. Like if we were twenty-something year olds in a van and didn’t care if we made a dollar, that’s fine, but those days are long gone for us, unfortunately. I would love for that to happen, but it’s kind of ridiculous if you’re fifty-three or [fifty] four years old driving around in a van trying to play to kids that could be your grandkids. [breaks out laughing] I don’t know if that would work, but we’ll find a way, opportunities always come along.

TP: You and London had originally written most of the songs for the new album almost four years earlier as you mentioned, but because both of you had commitments with other projects it was put on hold. So when it came time to refocus your energies on the new album, did you find it was easy to do? Were you still happy with the work you had done four years prior?

GL: The only thing that was that old that London and I had written together was “Nork 13” which is a bonus track on there. It’s very primitive sounding. It’s kind of an appendage on the record. It’s a strange little song, [laughs] but it’s cool, and that was a Microdot song. There are songs that pre-date that, but they weren’t songs that London was involved in until we joined forces after Brides Of Destruction. I had already written the music and then he wrote the lyrics and so on. But “Nork 13” is an old song that we worked on many years ago, and I think half of the record is older stuff from older projects that was morphed into the new sound and the other half of the record is stuff that I wrote more recently, very recently, specifically for this record.

TP: How many songs were originally written for the album?

GL: Well you know, the writing process was ever evolving and never ending, so if I were to go back and look at my hard-drive and said, “Where are all the songs that lead to this song?” You could take for instance, “January”, you could follow that back to a timeline, to so many permutations of that song, that you would lose track of it because…it’s funny, because I even have cassette tapes of jams with like, bands from the ‘70s that I digitized, but I still listen to in mind for ideas because I’m meticulous about that, as I’m driving around and I’ve got my little micro-cassette recorder or I’m saying something into my phone and even when I’m in Souls Of We, we’re right in the middle of tracking and I’ll say, “Wait a minute, I just got a riff idea” and I’ll make the engineer--I always pull an idea out of my desktop because I’m always stashing, even if it’s just one riff, I’ll just stash it in there for future reference and I go back and mine through this stuff, because I don’t want to waste anything. [laughs] I’m like the kid who was taught you don’t waste any food on the table because there are starving kids in Africa. Well, there are lots of people in Africa that don’t have songs, so I use up all those parts. [laughs] So there’s no clear cut fine line as to where Souls Of We songs were actually written. It was really just a long, evolved process, for the most part. Now some songs like “Skeleton Key” were written a couple of years ago for the specific purpose of this record and it did come together pretty neatly, but that’s not the case for a lot of the songs.

TP: Interesting. How did you come up with the name Souls Of We and was there a reason behind choosing that name in particular?

GL: I think it’s an ode to the fact that we’re not really trying to name the band because really, we try to destroy distinctions between ourselves being people that are part of the creative process and people that are part of the listening process, or appreciation process and everybody in between, some of which are musicians, creative themselves, and we’re all creative to a lesser or greater extent. So having said that, that name says it best. It’s kind of the greater community versus “Hey look at us, look what we did.” Which we don’t feel. I mean, if we did anything, we were sort of vessels, conduits, for the love of music. Everything I produce, it starts with sort of an epiphany, an idea that just comes to you just writing or riding my motorcycle or I’ll be asleep and I’ll wake up and I’ll run down and jot it down. I’ll be in a hotel room and that’s where everything starts, it all starts there. I wonder, “What’s behind that and where did that come from? Where’s that initial spark generated from?” You know, the creative process and I don’t know that mystery and so that’s what I love about it. Music to me is very mysterious and an adventure, so you never know what’s gonna happen from day to day or from moment to moment. Every time I step into the studio or have to go on stage, I don’t know what’s gonna happen and that’s why I love it. If I was going out there playing the same thing every day, I’d probably get bored out of my mind, you know? And I think Souls Of We reflects that, the greater community. We don’t look at this record as something that we’re trying to sell or pawn off on people and convince people that it’s valid. With Dokken we did that and I felt that Dokken wasn’t that amazing of a group and maybe it didn’t deserve the recognition it got. I appreciate the fact that we did, but I don’t know that we deserved it and that we would’ve obtained the kind of status we obtained, just on our own merit.

TP: Why do you say that George?

GL: We had incredibly powerful management, Q Prime Management, who managed Metallica and Queensryche and many, many, many other bands, probably the most powerful rock management company in the world, lots and lots of juice and lots of promotion there. We had a very big label, Warner/Elektra, probably the biggest label at the time. We had a huge talent agency. We had the biggest publicists, and we had the biggest radio promotion people and the means for distribution and so forth, and the video machine and so forth. So we had the full machine working for us. We couldn’t have failed in spite of ourselves. And Souls Of We is the opposite of that. Souls Of We does not have a machine behind it, but the machine is the people, so it’s sort of the democratization of the music that you see occurring everywhere, hopefully, and we want to be a part of that. Of course we want to achieve commercial success, because that allows us to continue to make music. It’s not like we want the shining mansion on the hill overlooking Malibu with our limo driver. We don’t want that, [laughs] but we want to be able to continue to write and produce music and bring it out in front of an audience. And also, when you work so hard on something like this, you really want people to have a chance to hear it, and that’s the only thing. It’s just frustrating. And I’ve done records. I’ve done all kinds of records. And I’ve had some great success with some albums and zero success with others, and the frustration isn’t having zero success or commercial success, it isn’t the money as much as it is the recognition and appreciation factor. You just really bury your soul on these records. It’s like a movie or a great novel, and it is work, reaching down deep and to create this thing and to put out a CD with no response. It’s um, very, very frustrating. But you know, “Boohoo.” [laughs] It could be a lot worse, so… I’m not complaining about it, but I’m just saying from a personal standpoint what the frustration and exasperation is from that standpoint.

TP: The bands debut album, titled Let The Truth Be Known was completed with no funding and no label and it is was also self-produced. Was that a conscious decision that you made, so you would have more freedom to write an album that you wanted, as opposed to how a label would tell you to write it?

GL: Well, Souls Of We wasn’t Lynch Mob or Dokken. If it had’ve been Lynch Mob or Dokken we could’ve done it the other way, you know. We’d go out and get management, get some interest, get us a label, get funded, grab an agent and go out and do a tour. But Souls Of We is not that kind of animal. It’s something that is different, obviously, so I really wasn’t interested in putting the cart before the horse. I really just wanted to do what I felt compelled to do, which is create the record. Once I started doing that I couldn’t stop. I didn’t stop at one point in the middle of the process and go, “I need to get a record deal.” [laughs] I’m going to make a record, it’s a body of work and this record is an experience that should be creative and listened to as an experience, as a whole. and I thought, “Well I just feel compelled to finish this and then we’ll worry about everything else afterwards.” And that’s basically what we did. And we got signed after the fact. We put the band together at the eleventh hour and then we’ll tour after the fact. Hopefully we’ll have some commercial success and the band will go out and you know, I assume that it’s gonna be a slow, somewhat of a slow process and I’m fine with that, um, just as long as it isn’t too slow. [we laugh] I’m not getting any younger.

TP: [laughing] I hear ya! So how was the writing for this album different from past work you’ve done with Lynch Mob or even Dokken, aside from what you mentioned earlier about the time factor, but how was the collaboration with London different from collaborations you’ve done in the past?

GL: Well I always rely on that counterpoint part to myself, as far as a writer, to basically finish the other side of the coin, because I’m not a very good lyricist, so I rely on that significant other in the writing process. In Dokken it was Jeff Pilson and in Lynch Mob it was Oni [Logan] and so now London and they all work pretty much the same. I mean, the way that I work is, I just kind of work alone and come up with the foundation, which is usually just an arrangement of, I conceive of a few parts, come up with a simple arrangement for those parts and then start filling in the gaps. Then I try different things and try to think of different things until it comes together. And sometimes it does come together and sometimes it doesn’t. Then I bring the band in and then we flush it out, or if I’ve worked with an engineer is another way of doing it, with programming, or we hire a drummer or something and we can do it in the studio like that. Then the thing is…that’s a whole other thing, you know, then I finish that and then I hand it to Tony [Anthony Esposito] or to London and they do their work. Now on the Souls record, before London came aboard, I was working with Andrew Freeman. He’s a vocalist that I’ve worked with quite a bit. He’s in Offspring now, actually, and we were working on the lyrics ourselves and some melodies and vocals, but when London got involved, it just stepped up to another level and I let him take over. See the wonderful thing about a guy like London is that he’s so self-contained, he knows what he wants to say, he doesn’t need help, you know? So he took those first three songs, went home and came back the next morning with three finished songs.

TP: Wow.

GL: And that’s how Andrew works as well. They both take a lot of pride in their work and they really have a vision and have something to say and it’s a gift. I mean, they’re poets. It’s one thing to have an idea or an idea that you’re trying to express, it’s another thing to be able to express in a really cool, lyrical way. It’s tough, it’s probably easier for them obviously because just, say when people look at me as a guitar player and think, “Well it looks really hard,” and I go, “Well it is, but it isn’t.” You know what I mean? What happens, happens. I hear it in my head and it happens, and I pick up a guitar, things happen, but then you have them and the work starts.

TP: “January” is the debut single and I’m not sure how you feel about videos and the advent of bands making videos, but do you think you’ll make a video for the song at some point?

GL: I think it would be important that we do, because the visualization, the picture that the words paint and the force of the music and all the textures and all the complexities involved, really lend themselves to being a visual product. London and I speak about these things. He has tremendous ideas for these things, and he will and has just written story boards for the production and the ideas and conceptualizations and the visual landscape of what these things should look like and all the components of it. So I think that this band would translate very, very well to video. I think it’s important to have a video to use as a promotional tool. And the idea, which is a pretty grand idea and I don’t know if we’ll be able to achieve it, is to actually video almost every song on the record, so there would be a video counterpart to the whole album. That’s what we’re hoping to do. And if we have the time and the money, and the means to do it, we’re going to try. Obviously we’re going to start with one or two songs, [laughs] or it would be too big of a chunk of work to accomplish, but London and I will talk about that.

TP: Interesting. So how would you describe the album?

GL: I think Souls Of We is a unique voice in rock, I think that it’s hard to draw any parallels with other bands but I think that’s a good thing. I heard somebody say that it was a cross between Korn and Buckcherry and something else. [laughs] I can’t remember what they said, which I thought that was pretty accurate. People feel compelled to compartmentalize everything.

TP: That’s very true. People are always putting labels on artists and bands. But I find that a lot of bands are starting to look and sound the same. They’re blending into one another, just very generic sounding. So if you guys have come up with something that’s a little bit different, that sets you apart, I think that’s a great thing!

GL: Well I would hope that once people get to hear it, that it is that. It’s definitely not like anything else.

TP: I like the song “Skeleton Key”, it’s a great song.

GL: That’s a horror flick. That’s the idea behind that one, and that’s one of those songs I was suggesting would make a great video, just with the words—“Hollywood Street, children of the street, rock, vampire”, ya’ know? It could be very dark and very savage, how you do that on a budget I don’t know, but…

TP: George do you have a personal favorite off the new album, and if so, which one and why?

GL: I don’t have a personal favorite. It’s not that kind of record. I mean, like the first Lynch Mob record it was very obvious because “Wicked Sensation” was the first track, the title track. But this record’s not like that, you know? There is no stand out track. I mean, subjectively, maybe for you and for me there might be, but personally I don’t have any specific favorite. There’s actually a couple of songs that I don’t think we hit the mark on, that I was frustrated with, “Under The Dead Tree” being the most notable stand out for that. I was really frustrated with that song.

TP: Why is that?

GL: Well, it was one of the songs that we did with Mike Rengren and Fred at Henson Studios. The sounds on it are great, very aggressive and heavy and so forth, and it was a difficult, difficult song to finalize, just could never find the right lyrics, the right melody—it was a vocal song at first and then became an instrumental song because we were so frustrated with the process of trying to get it right and it just never happened. And I was never happy with the instrumental version of it either, and so far people have listened to it and think it’s great, but I have big problems with that song and the potential that it had. I thought it should’ve been much more than what it ended up as. So I’ve had frustrations with a couple of songs on there and a couple of moments on some songs like “St. Jude”, with the breakdown section, which I think just kind of got lost in the end and we never got it back. You know, sometimes you get so involved in these things that it’s sometimes hard to undo, it’s hard to back out of it. But having said that, I think the record as an experience and a whole is very gratifying from beginning to end. I think probably my three favorite songs are “Crawling”, “Skeleton Key” and “Let The Truth Be Known”.

TP: You touched on it earlier and I just wanted to go back to that--plans for the band to go out on the road and promote the new record. Is that something that will happen in the new year or will it be difficult given the other projects that some of you are involved in, when will you be going out on tour?

GL: We had an offer to go out in support of Black Label Society.

TP: Right, you mentioned that earlier and that didn’t work out, so...

GL: Yeah, we talked about that, so we really couldn’t make it work, but we have a couple of ideas and we’re dedicated to getting the band out there on the road because I think when you close your eyes and you listen to the record, you do visualize the band, I mean, that potential. And we meant for it to be a live experience. How we actually make that happen is gonna be challenging, so I can’t… I mean, I can tell you what I hope we’re able to pull off—we got a couple of things in the works. There’s a possible Japanese visit in there next year and there’s a possible opening slot on a tour as I just mentioned and I can’t say the name of the band because it hasn’t happened. It’s something we’ll be plugging away at.

TP: What are the band’s plans for the future then? I know everyone’s involved in different projects, but will it get to the point where you’re all going to say, “Let’s focus all our attention on Souls Of We and just do that.” Or do you think you’re always going to have your hands in other things?

GL: I’m fairly certain we will continue on and do another record, but it will be done exactly the opposite of the way that this record was done.

TP: Meaning?

GL: It will be the four of us, Yael, Johnny, London and myself getting into a room and creating the record and going right in and recording it, without a lot of pain, because I will not go through a process like that again. [laughs] I just won’t. And it’s just too hard on us and it’s unnecessary. So we’re trying to be really smart about it and capture a moment. We’ll have to be economical with our time, but I’m dedicated to the idea of doing another record, definitely and I’m looking forward to it actually. Finding the time really depends on other things that we’re all doing, obviously, I’m writing a Lynch Mob record right now. We’ve recorded eight songs already and we’re releasing our new record called Smoke And Mirrors in early summer of ’09 and we’ll probably be touring extensively throughout the spring and there’s always a possibility that Dokken may reform at some point. I don’t know. I have no idea if that will ever happen.

TP: Really…

GL: I don’t know. I’m saying that that is always a possibility, one that I hope happens, just create some closure and go forth and end that whole experience on a positive note rather than a negative one… So there’s all these kinds of things going on that we don’t know where they’re going to end. If there is no Dokken reunion and Lynch Mob has some success, there’ll be some downtime between the next Dokken record and then I would take that opportunity to do a Souls Of We record. Another thing is, that two other projects that I’ve had sort of in the pipeline that I will finish someday and one is an instrumental record, which is gonna to take me a long time to finish. It’s going to be a very complex, involved process because I want to go to different locations around the world and record it, remotely and so forth, different recording studios and playing with different people, in different genres. When I was in India I met up with some musicians over there that I would like to have involved and European players that I’ve met in my travels and I’m going to have some Native Americans involved in there and country players and blues players and all that kind of stuff. So that’s going to be a big undertaking. Another record I plan on doing at some point, probably further towards the horizon, is I wanna do a blues record. The undercurrent of my playing has always been blues. I love doing it, and it can bring atrophy to life and be a hard and easy record for me to do. So I want to knock that out at some point. But those are further down the line. But mostly, Souls Of We is having this record achieve something successful, with recognition and build on that for some years and do a second record, and I would think with the second record, the first record would become re-appreciated. [laughs] re-recognized at some point.

TP: Which often happens.

GL: Hm-mm, and it can redirect attention to the first record. I remember getting the second Queen album and it made me wanna buy the first one, and I didn’t hear about the first one until I got the second one. “Where did this band come from?” It happens a lot.

TP: Well I think that’s it, do you have anything you’d like to add that I haven’t asked, or any messages for your fans?

GL: Check out the DOJO online guitar academy at georgelynch.com; watch out for new line of Randal Lynch boxes coming out in January, as well as the new Washburn acoustic guitar, the G2G Mr. Scary pedal and on and on. [laughs]

TP: Well thanks so much George, I really appreciated your time today.

GL: Well thank you, Tina. Talk to you soon!