antiMusic: Hello Kip?

Kip: Yeah man.

antiMusic: Hi it's Morley Seaver from antiMUSIC. How you doing?

Kip: Good. How are you?

antiMusic: I'm doing great thanks. I've got to say it's a real pleasure to speak with you. Your new record is probably my favorite record in I don't know how long. I think it's exceptional.

Kip: Oh, well thank you very much. I appreciate that.

antiMusic: I couldn't believe it. It goes down every single cut. There isn't a single bad cut and it just gets better as it goes along. I'm totally blown away. I just think it's terrific.
Before we get into the new record, can you take us back to 1993 and why you decided to shelve the band temporarily…and actually was it temporarily or permanent?

Kip: God I mean, you know, there just weren't any gigs out there. It was kind of like when the grunge thing hit and the 80s thing. The bands…the commercial rock bands just became like kind of a joke of the business. There were no gigs. So it was just kind of like, we didn't really break up. I just thought, you know what? I'm going to go do my solo s*** for a while and you know, kind of re-invent my ability on how to write music and stuff because it was just trying to push water up hill, really, you know? There was no…it was really just because the gigs weren't there. I mean we went out on the Pull tour. We did the club thing after having done arenas on the second record. That was a pretty vast drop. And so, I just felt like my time could be spent better, kind of like reshaping the way I think about music and stuff. And you know, I toured a lot solo. You know, it was kind of like we never really broke up. We just figured we'd come back at some point. It took quite a bit longer than I figured it would but we've all been really busy doing other stuff. We did the Poison thing in 2002 when we reformed the band and everything. We did a best of the new songs and that was cool. And we had planned on getting together earlier than but it just didn't work out. This record deal came up for us and it was quite a big deal. And so, Reb was available from Whitesnake and stuff and everybody just kind of kept their outside gig, you know. So we had a window of opportunity last February 2006. And you know, knock this thing out. We wrote the music in about 22 days which is pretty fresh. And spent about two months on the words. A couple months mixing it. It was a big project. I mean I really worked on this album, you know 24/7. I didn't take any time off in between. It was a solid six months of work since I was kind of doing everything myself.

antiMusic: After you shelved the band in '93 or so, you took some time and I hear you got your studio together, how long did that take you and did you start writing the solo record right off the bat?

Kip: I did, yeah. I mean, I've been in the never ending process of picking studio gear that I like and buying and selling so I bought a place in Santa Fe and I put a decent studio together where I did this conversation Seems Like a Dream album. I spent about a year on that because I was kind of experimenting because I was back to the drawing board and I wanted to Pull out all the heavy guitars and kind of go more euro, Gabriel-esque but I've got Americana. I don't know really what to call it. But it was an important record for me to kind of break out of the box and experiment more with sound. And you know, I've always kept studying music so I'm always interested in trying new things and writing string arrangements and doing all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, I kept plugging away, but the gigs were lean and there was nowhere to put the record because no one was interested in the name because the name was so associated with all the fallout with the '80s thing. I put it out on a small record and actually it did not too bad. I mean I put it out and toured all over the world acoustic and you know, kept writing, and did my second and third solo record in there, in the same place in Santa Fe and then I moved to Nashville 5 years ago. Don't ask me what the f*** I've been doing since then. (laughs) I've been touring a lot man, but I've got a solo record in the can with 15 songs on it and a bunch of other projects. I produced a band and a couple film things I did.

antiMusic: Was recording and performing strange for you after 6 or 7 years as a band, even though you've always been the central point of Winger, the band?

Kip: I grew up in a band with my brother and I always was like the primary writer and the kind of studio geek. So it was pretty natural just hanging. It was a big jump because we were so big at the time and all of a sudden, you know, once you carve yourself in as a certain type of artist, once you've had a big hit, it's one thing, you know. The public doesn't really want you to change much so, I complete threw out everything and pretty much started at the very bottom because I didn't see a reason in making another Winger record. There was no point in it, you know. I felt like, a lot of the bands were changing their sound with the times and stuff, and that to me looked like they were trying too hard and the point of that was oh, they're trying to sell records. And so I was thinking, I didn't want to be that contrived, you know. I really had to throw out everything I knew and start over, in terms of music. And so musically it was pretty difficult but being in the studio alone, I mean I've been in the studio alone since I was 15 years old so that wasn't a problem.

antiMusic: Was it tough to get Reb and Rod back on board?

Kip: No, no. they had been asking me to do it for a long time. And I just hadn't felt like the reception would really be there. And so when we finally did this, it was amazing. We went out on club tour in Europe in October and basically sold everything out. We did a six week run here in venues that were 500 to 1000 and sold out half of it. Which was strange. I mean that's hard ticket sales for a band like us. You know, we haven't rubbed the brand name into the ground. We probably were too absent, but on the other hand we haven't really played every dive bar in the country just to keep going, you know---as a lot of my contemporaries have done. And hey, if you have to do it, no problem. I'm not putting anybody down cause gigging, I mean, if you're a musician you've got to take the gig, you know.

antiMusic: Were you trying to get a certain vibe with this record or where was your head at when recording----writing actually?

Kip: Part of the reason why I didn't make another Winger record was Pull was a really strong album. And I thought, you know what, until I have something, enough to say, I don't think there's any reason, because I'm not an artist that can keep making the same album over and over again, like the Scorpions or something. God bless them. They're great. But I just can't do that.

I made a major breakthrough in my composition when I wrote this string…it's like a chamber piece, string quartet, piano and harp and it's about seven minutes and I really dug in to it so it took me about a year to write it, studying with this guy Vanderbilt and was really getting into it, you know. And after I wrote a piece, I said, oh I see clearly what to do with the band, you know. I just wrote a bunch of heavy metal songs in different modes and stuff and tried to make it really interesting because the normal s*** is to just play songs and you know, in pentatonic scales and it all sounds the f***ing same no matter how, or you come up with a riff and no matter how you cut it the same notes are in the riff as every other band that's trying to write a rock song. So I just kind of tried to blow it out a little bit and basically what I did was pick a lot of scales that are out of the ordinary, kept modulating all over the place and just kept doing it the way I felt like once your ear, as the listeners listening to it, like it doesn't take more than three times on a pattern before you get it, and then you're bored. I just kept trying to, you know, fill it with surprises, and you know, but keep it rock and keep the brand name happening like the way we sound. Reb's guitar riffs are key to the way the band sounds. It's how his riffs and kind of my voice and you know, kind of, intricate drumming and stuff like that, so I was just trying to pick more interesting musical ideas and interject them in this kind of sound that was already established.

antiMusic: What were some of the songs that came out first on this record and how did it all come together?

Kip: The first song we kept was "Living Just to Die", which in my opinion is the weakest song on the record so we went from there and once we hit our stride we wrote like "Generica". Which is kind of like, well I hear that as a kind of King Crimson, Genesis, with an Alice Cooper vocal in it.

antiMusic: That's exactly what I was going to say…sounds like Alice Cooper to me.

Kip: Yeah, I don't' know where that came from. That's what I heard so I just went with. And then "Disappeared", those were some of the highlights when we really kind of broke our stride on that. The other ones were "Easy To Follow", "Right Up Ahead". And a couple of the best accidents on the record were "Four Leaf Clover" and "Blue Suede Shoes". They were complete accidents and I always say to people when I talk about writing, the accidents are always the best songs. You can't just try to write stuff that's good. You have to kind of try to carve it out with whatever skills you have and then hope that you get struck with a bolt of lightening.

antiMusic: Those two cuts are probably my favorite cuts on the record, so you're probably right.

Kip: Yeah, I mean, "Four Leaf Clover" is so unusual musically, I was like, and wow this is like The Police. But it sounds like us. So we were lucky. Reb and I also…we've got this good chemistry and we're such good friends, it's just fun to do it. I mean I gained about 30 pounds just doing the record because we were just drinking beer the whole time. A case of beer a day, dude, I kid you not. We were just slamming coolers all day.

antiMusic: Can you tell us about a couple of the cuts? Maybe starting with "Blue Suede Shoes", "M16", "Generica" (Alice Cooper-ish vocal on the verses).

Kip: Well you know I got this idea for making the record when I was out touring and did the military gig and I got to talking to some of the personnel there and I was thinking, yeah, man I want to write a record, basically, I set out to write a whole record from a soldier's perspective of what they're feeling instead of what people are thinking about the war and this and that, democrat, republican, and conservative, liberal, not of that s***, just kind of like; here's this dude who's 18 years old or 20 years old or however old, is in the f***ing military down there, dug in a hole getting shot at. I wanted to get into the psychological aspect of what that might actually be like. So I set out on, "Right Up Ahead" was the first song on the record. I just put myself into the mentality of some of the people I talked to. And "Blue Suede Shoes" was like the ultimate song about that perspective of why you might in one instant kind of stand up for things. You know the guys that are kind of defending the country, a lot of them are taking a lot much s*** right now because the war is so unpopular yet they are the ones, without that we wouldn't even have the ability to say it because there would be a dictator in power and you know, kind of all this psychological irony of what's going. So really I just want to say in a dignified way, why I might, enlist in the service and defend the country. So I work on those ideas. "Four Leaf Clover" is kind of about this guy whose wife is cheating on him back in the states and "M16" is about a story a guy told me that was a green beret guy who got kind of caught in a trap. And after that I felt like I had said it. So I didn't really want to keep on going with in, because it was starting to become like an overkill so I just finished the record, and you know, took the songs the way I heard them. Because it was starting to sound forced. So the second it started to sound forced lyrically I just abandoned the idea and started writing you know, kind of the first things that really struck me about the songs and how I felt like they should be written. With Winger songs, I write the lyric last after we write the track and then I try to write the lyrics that'll give the ambience of what's going on in the music. It's different, in Nashville, you'll sit down in a writing session and they'll knock out the lyrics first and the chords don't really matter. But with rock bands, especially rock bands like us, where we have a very signature sound, the players aren't interchangeable. With a lot of rock bands the players are really interchangeable. Not many people can do Reb Beach and not many people can Ron Morgenstein. So you know, I'm very protective of that sound.

antiMusic: How did "Generica" come out"

Kip: That was another one of those accidents where I was playing the keyboards cause we were doing, you know, I was thinking, well, okay if I'm going to make another record, I don't want to try and do Bon Jovi, you know, because we're more riff oriented than that. We write way more sophisticated music. I mean, I admire Bon Jovi. I'm a fan so I'm not putting it in a mean way. I just mean that you know, it's more technical and kind of more oriented towards muso. And I thought of some of my favorite bands and I often times, you'll imitate things to try to get yourself out of a hole so I grab the keyboards and grab a sound. Phil Collins I used to love. All Phil Collins and Genesis when Genesis really became pop and used those really hard-hitting keyboard sounds like (dah dah dah), which basically wrote the riff right there, you know. The thing that I'm very proud of about "Generica" is there's no key to that song. You couldn't like sit down and say ooh it's in this key. It's just all over the place and we managed to make it work. It's very unusual. I like it though.

antiMusic: So, looking at the record now, do you think you hit the mark that you were hoping for when the songs first started coming to you?

Kip: Yeah, I do. I think I really do. I mean I'm really happy with it. I think it's fresh. We got a few of the reviews like you know, in Germany it was like: worse comeback of the year. I'm thinking: what the f*** are these people listening to, you know. How can you put that record on and go: worse piece of s*** I've ever heard. I mean, maybe it's not your taste but I don't get it. But for the most part we got great reviews and everybody really dug it. And I was happy with that. And it actually sold pretty well too, which is really kind of odd. I mean, I'm just totally not used to my record selling. And you know, we've done pretty well with it. It did great in Japan. Europe did OK. Over here we did a lot more than we thought.

antiMusic: How are the new songs going down live?

Kip: Great. Except that they're too f***ing high. It's so hard to sing that s***. Like I wrote "Right Up Ahead" and it's like at the very top of my range the whole song. It was so stupid when I did that but that's how I hear it and my voice doesn't really kick into rock and roll mode unless I'm really up there at the height of my range. So I suffered through it.

antiMusic: You've got to put it right at the start of the set.

Kip: No. No and I could never do that. I'd be completely toast. Yeah, "Right Up Ahead" is kind of midway of the set. We're doing a live DVD, so you'll be able to hear what the whole thing is about live.

antiMusic: What's up for the band for the rest of the year?

Kip: We set gigs through the summer and we're continuing to book. I'm trying to finish my solo record so I can come out with that in…soon hopefully soon. We're going to continue to do gigs and then I've got a three piece power band--- I grew up in bands I told you I grew up in bands-- my brother's the drummer and this guitar player …ever hear of a band in L.A. called the Pygmy Love Circus?

antiMusic: Never heard of it. Sounds interesting.

Kip: Dan Carey plays drums. He was my original songwriting partner when we were kids so that's a band called Blackwood Creek and we're almost finished with that and so we're going, I'm working on that. And also I'm working on classical music. I've got an opportunity to write for this choreographer, a pretty well known choreographer that's what I'm doing like orchestra music for that. And I'm just writing a lot.

antiMusic: So no down time for you.

Kip: No, man. I'm full on. It's good. I'm happy to be working.

antiMusic: Won't take any more of your time. I'm not s***ting you. This is the best record I've heard since I can't remember when. I play it every day.