INTERVIEW: Richie Kotzen – I Heart Guitar

Richie Kotzen is one of the most prolific musicians in rock. This is a guy who recorded an album of 50 songs to celebrate his 50th birthday, an artist whose material has evolved from hard rock and shred to blues, R&B and fusion, a band member who breathed new life into Poison and Mr. Big, and who made up one third of The Winery Dogs, a classic rock-influenced supergroup with Billy Sheehan and Mike Portnoy that gave us three killer records. Now Kotzen is back with Nomad, his latest solo album. Released on major label BMG and mostly played by Kotzen himself, there are parts that are familiar to those of us who love the ‘Mother Head’s Family Reunion’ albums and stuff like Peace Sign, and then there’s some of the most out-there, unique, unencumbered expression we’ve ever heard from Kotzen. We caught up over Zoom, our first chat since 2017, to hear a little about it.

I Heart Guitar: Dude, I’ve been listening to the new record, and you sound like you’re having fun on this. It kind of reminds me of Peace Sign, which is one of my favorites of yours. There’s a kind of you feel excited on this one, like you’re exploring things and hitting things that I haven’t really heard you do very often or at all. Was there a concept for this one? Like, this is what this album’s gonna be like? Or did it just happen organically?

Richie Kotzen: No, it wasn’t really a concept. I you know, I just started looking at some of the ideas I had for songs because I was on the road. So I just wrote, went back and looked at what I had that was finished and what I had that was in development. And then I had a few other ideas come to me. I just kind of put this record together the same way I always do: typically what happens is I get into a mode where I am getting ideas and I start documenting them. And then something will happen, usually where something new will get written and recorded, and then that kind of prompts me to go back and look at what I have that I never finished. And ’cause then what happens, I get the feeling after I write the new song, like, ‘Oh, I wanna keep going,’ but if I don’t have any new ideas, I can’t keep going. So then I’ll go back and see, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’ve got this idea for this song ‘On The Table’.’ So I worked that up, and ‘Nihilist’ actually was written a few years ago. That’s been finished for a long time and I just never was sure where to put it. So it kind of came together that way. But I don’t ever really sit down and say ‘I’m writing an album.’ I kind of let it come to me.

I Heart Guitar: It sounds to me like BMG really gets it.

Richie Kotzen: Yeah. I’m lucky. I am lucky because when I say lucky, I mean in reference to the fact that a major label is trusting in the music and allowing me to put out the record as I envisioned it. The truth is that the record was done and I was planning on putting it out on my own, and then all of a sudden they said ‘Oh no, we’ll do it for you. We’ll put it out.’ And so here we are. A lot of times when you work with a big company they get a lot more involved, which sometimes is okay. But other times if they’re not of the right mind, they can kind of mess things up for you creatively. So this time around I got the perfect situation.

I Heart Guitar: Yeah. Well, I mean, you’re someone who’s released albums yourself. You’re someone who’s released albums with a label, and you know what you want by now, you know how to do it, and you can probably spot when you’re being ripped off! Let’s talk about some of the tracks on the record. ‘Insomnia’ has these really greasy, low guitar sounds. What do we hear in there?

Richie Kotzen: So it’s kind of two things going on in the, in the verse. You’ve got this basically very simple, you know, ‘da da da da da da’. And even though the song’s in F#, to play that I might have done the Drop D tuning bit just to get the, the lower note. I’d have to go listen to it. ’cause What happens is I record this stuff, and unless I’m actively performing it, I forget what I did. But it’s a pretty simple thing that’s happening. The bass is a bit more active in the verse and it’s playing this sort of pattern, and then the drum beat is something very specific, this kind of thing where it’s like I’m doing something on the hi hat and the snare drum where it’s like… I’d have to play it to actually describe it but it kind of does that over and over again. But then where it flips is when the chorus comes in, and it’s kind of a big riff that the band plays together. And of course, there’s that little interlude where we have a little unison line to kind of set up the chorus which the guitar and bass play together. But what I like about that structure is that you have that verse that’s kind of dark and a little creepy, you know? And then the chorus kicks in and it’s bright and it’s hopeful. And it’s just the way it was written. I mean, it just came that way. You know, as, as a songwriter, I don’t think about these things. They kind of happen. I follow the instinct and I allow it to kind of develop and open up on its own, you know? And so that’s just where it went.

I Heart Guitar: It’s funny ’cause I interviewed so many musicians of different types, and people either fall into one of two general categories. I find one is ‘the music just falls outta me, and I’ve gotta figure out what it wants to say and where to go with it.’ And the other is people who agonize over every detail and are absolutely miserable.

Richie Kotzen: Oh, yeah. Well, I’ll tell you something. You know, I’ve done a bit of both. And it’s an interesting situation for me because I’ve got such a large body of work behind me so it kind of puts me in a position where my only motivation for doing it is because it’s because it’s something that comes natural, and it’s something that I can do for myself to sort of exercise, you know, these thoughts and, and these emotions and put it into the form of a song. And I’m able to do it without expectation. And what I mean by that is, in the early days, as a young recording artist you do have expectations. You’re expecting – you want – people to listen to your work. You want people to acknowledge your point of view and this and that. And then as you get older your perspective changes. And in a very interesting way, I’m in a much better place, I think, not just now but over the last 15 years probably, where I’ve got enough work out there where I really feel well represented for who I am and what I am as it relates to making music. And I feel very fulfilled with it. So in that, coming from that kind of place, it’s almost like an insurance policy against your work, that if you finish something and you decide to release it, that you can fully stand behind it, as opposed to in the old days, maybe you had a recording contract and you had some pressure, and you knew that, well, if this doesn’t do something, I might lose my deal and this or that; I have to live up to what I did on the previous album. With all that, with all those expectations gone it’s, it’s a really good feeling, you know?

I Heart Guitar: Yeah! I feel like that translates as some of the excitement that I hear in this record. ‘Nomad ‘feels like a really interesting song. I can’t really compare it to anything you’ve done before. It’s so progressive, but it does kind of remind me in a way of the spirit of the Vertu stuff you did.It must be fun to kind of dip into those more out there kind of aspects of your musical personality and know that it’s gonna be accepted.

Richie Kotzen: It’s in my DNA. In my early years I did a record, it was kind of a fusion record that Greg Bisonnette played drums on, and Jeff Berlin appeared on bass on a few songs. And when I was quite young, I was probably 25 when I did that. And my first record had some pretty wacky stuff on there. You know, I remember Steve Smith the drummer, telling me, ‘I don’t know how to chart this. What …what is this? What time signature is that?’ I have these kinda weird little phrases that I wanted everybody to play together, and that sort of stuff, that abstract stuff is in my DNA. But over the years when I started taking singing more seriously, a lot of that kind of quirkiness in the music kind of went out the window a little bit. So I brought a little bit of it back in on the 50 For 50 record. And then I think with, with the song ‘Nihilist,’ I really kind of went full throttle on it and I think that’s why it’s such a special, unique track. When I wrote that, I just wanted to do something that was totally free of any sort of constraint or anything that I may put on myself.

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I Heart Guitar: Yeah. So you have been playing drums on your records for decades. You’re a great drummer. What does playing in a band with Mike Portnoy do to your drumming?

Richie Kotzen: It doesn’t really affect it. I mean, it affects my guitar playing more than my drumming, obviously, and I love playing with Mike. He’s an amazing drummer, but he’s a stylist too. He’s like guitar player in that respect. Like if you hear a guitar player, you’ll know, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so playing,’ and obviously Mike is like that with the drums, which in a strange way it might be more difficult to get to that place on that instrument just because of the role that it plays in rock music. Obviously if you play progressive music, which he does, that’s a little more common. But in the world of rock and roll it’s a little different for drummers to have their own voice the way a guitar player can, so I think what’s great about playing with Mike is that he has that, And he is a lot of fun to improvise with too. I love to improvise when I’m playing live. And you know, it was a great experience, the whole Winery Dogs thing.

I Heart Guitar: Yeah! We got three great albums and the way I see it, sometimes these things come back, sometimes they don’t, they’re great while they last, and it’s great if it comes back but onward and upward, y’know?

Richie Kotzen: Yeah. That’s the best healthy attitude. I mean you only ever are where you are. You know, it’s like, here I am in a hotel room talking to you. I’m on tour with my trio with my own new record coming out and everybody [from The Winery Dogs] is off doing other things and now it’s a great memory. And you never know what the future holds, you know? Not to get into a Winery Dogs talk but the fact of the matter is that when we played our last show it was smiles and high fives and it was a healthy, nice vibe coming out of that. So yeah, you never know.

I Heart Guitar: Yeah. So let’s talk nerdy gear stuff! Did you use anything on the record that would probably surprise us or anything unusual that has a cool story or..?

Richie Kotzen: Well the surprise would maybe be the guitar. You know, obviously most of the record is my signature Tele, and if it’s not that, it’s the Stratocaster signature model from Fender. I do have this old Yamaha Hollow Body. It looks like a Gretsch guitar. I don’t know the model but I’ve had it for a long time and I used that for the rhythm guitar on ‘Cheap Shots.’ When you hear that opening guitar it’s this Yamaha hollow body plugged right into my Marshall direct with no pedal. Plug into the upper normal channel – ’cause there’s four inputs – upper right, and just get the amp turned to a certain point where it breaks up nice, and a [Shure] 57 in front of it and that’s it. That might be a surprise ’cause I think everybody thinks that I always have a Telecaster in my hands.

I Heart Guitar: I know you’re a man who enjoys his Yamahas. We’ve talked about your your old SG models and stuff in the past.

Richie Kotzen: Yeah. I haven’t played those in a while. They’re, they’re locked away in cage. I haven’t played those in a long time, but that was my first real guitar.In America it was called the SBG 2000. But I have two of ’em. I have a 2000 and a 3000.

I Heart Guitar: So the last thing I wanted to ask you about is a record that I come back to a couple of times a year. It just kind of lures me in: The Road by Wilson Hawk. It’s so musical, it’s so memorable, and it’s just classic R&B. Tell me about that one.

Richie Kotzen: Well, that was a record I made with a very good friend of mine named Richie Zito. He’s a very successful record producer. You can Google him, you’ll be blown away with the work he’s done. I met him when I did the Poison album. He was the producer and we became instant friends. And then he produced a solo record of mine. And we actually ended up somehow becoming neighbors and lived on the same street. We were, and are, very good friends and wanted to make a record together, and, and he’s like ‘You’re from the Philadelphia area, let’s do a really authentic soul album, really focused on that side of your writing.’ And so we got together and wrote a bunch of songs. I wrote a few on my own. He brought in some things and we made that record together and initially, you know, at that time we were thinking maybe we could get a major recording contract for it, get a major label to put it out. Do some live stuff and have like a big band with horns and backing singers.

And, and then, you know, the industry being what it was, it didn’t really get the kind of response… We were not met with the same enthusiasm that we had! So we said ‘We still believe it’s, it’s special and we love it, so let’s just put it up.’ We put it up on iTunes and it’s been there ever since. And it’s a really fun album. And a funny thing how we got the name I have to say, was we took a famous soul artist, one word from their name, and then a sports team. ‘Wilson’ for Wilson Pickett, and Hawk from the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. And so, check this out. Kim Bullard was playing organ – and you should Google him too. And we were at Kim’s house and we were sitting there and I said ‘We need an album cover.’ And I look and he had sitting there these two letters. It was an H and a W and they were initials for something. And I was sitting there and I’m looking at it and I go ‘Whoa, check this out.’ And I just switched the letters around and I laid like some kind of cloth and I just dolled it up a little bit, took my iPhone, took a few photographs of it and said look at this. There’s the album cover. And that’s the final image. So the cover was so weird. I mean, you know, weird stuff like that happens. It’s one of those moments where it was like somebody just shone a light there and put that in front of me. I love when stuff like that happens.

Nomad is out now. Visit richiekotzen.com for more info.