According to Slash, Guns N’ Roses has blues roots.
The guitarist recently spoke to Arizona’s KLPX radio station and talked about how he chose the songs for his upcoming blues record, ‘Orgy of the Damned’:
“The key catalyst for this was I had a blues cover band back in the late ’90s. I used to sit in with bar bands all the time because that was the only vehicle where I could play just flat-out blues because Guns N’ Roses isn’t really blues-based… I mean it’s a blues-based band but it’s not a blues band.”
Slash picked songs from his earlier blues cover band:
“Anyway, so I had this blues cover band and a lot of these songs we used to do back then, I just picked them off the top of my head because they meant something to me. I always wanted to record that but I never got around to it. So all these years later, I finally decided to do it and I went back and got those old setlists from back then.”
It Is Not A Serious Blues Album
‘Orgy of the Damned’ will arrive on May 17. The collaborative project will include names like Billy Gibbons, Chris Stapleton, Iggy Pop, and Paul Rodgers. In a chat with Rock Antenne last month, the musician discussed his blues album. He said everyone took it seriously, but it wasn’t meant to be that serious:
“Everybody’s calling it a blues record and it is got a lot of blues on it. It’s got some R&B on it, it’s got some old school rock and roll on it. It’s really just a record of songs that I grew up listening to that I really dig and I just wanted to be able to record a covers record and be able to play that kind of guitar and whatever. So it’s not supposed to be taken seriously as a blues record.”
In his album, Slash added a cover of Fleetwood Mac, ‘Oh Well.’ He previously said he wanted to collaborate with Stapleton on this song because he thought his singing style was perfect for the track.
You can watch the rest of his chat below.