TROUBLE Guitarist Discusses New Album, 'Simple Mind Condition'

Andy Bach of Metal Domain magazine recently conducted an interview with TROUBLE guitarist Rick Wartell. A couple of excerpts follow:

Metal Domain: "Simple Mind Condition" will be TROUBLE's first release in over a decade. What was the motive to do a new record?

Rick: Wow, interesting question. You know Leif Edling from CANDLEMASS was working for Escapi, and he kept calling us and bugging us and bugging us to do a new record and we really weren't in the state to do a new record at that time. I guess after all the phone calls and persuading and this and that, we finally broke down and decided, why not do another one? Once we started working on it, we realized that this is not such a bad thing after all!

Metal Domain: What inspired the cover art for "Simple Mind Condition"? It's kind of different from what we're used to.

Rick: Chuck and Eric were actually working on the cover and I think they were looking at a lot of ancient photos and trying to come up with ideas that fit the title, "Simple Mind Condition". Through their research, they came across a photo at the library and it just kinda fit. One of the things is that this is our seventh album and if you notice on the album cover, the sheet around the guy's head, to the left of his head, there's the shape of a "7." And that was kind of eerie for everyone. And we thought that you know, maybe it was a sign that we should use that.

Metal Domain: That's pretty cool! Now I also wanted to mention that over the past few months, TROUBLE has kind of given a second-life to its classics, who decided to reissue the old albums?

Rick: Escapi did that also. When we decided to do a live DVD with them, the also wanted to know the availability of our old material. We researched it and found that we actually owned everything. So we decided to do a deal with Escapi and get them the whole catalog. They're big TROUBLE fans so we're pretty happy to have a label that's into what we're doing.

Metal Domain: I know you've been nearly cursed when it comes to this unplugged project; its release was pushed back so many times. So when can we finally hear it?

Rick: Actually, we started to record the unplugged project before we even started recording the new album. It was one of those things like, why don't we just go in the studio and start recording some stuff acoustically and see where we're at with that. We really liked where it was going, but decided that maybe it would be better if we just put out a full-blown album before we did something like that. So we put that on hold again and went on to do the album first. It is still going to be completed, probably by this summer and hopefully released by the end of 2007.

Read the entire interview at this location.