ANVIL Frontman Says 'All The Songs Are Done' For Next Album

Vue Weekly recently conducted an interview with frontman Steve "Lips" Kudlow of the Canadian metal legends ANVIL. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Vue Weekly: You've been doing this for a lot of years now. With any band, there are always people involved whose priorities change and they stop given everything they have to music. What makes the struggle worth it for you?

Lips: From my perspective it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter whether people think I'm crazy or not. I've got to live with myself. I'm the only one who has to, and in a certain sense with the results, if they're good or bad. And the job will always remain the same no matter whether you've sold a million records or whether you've sold 10 records: you've still got to write another song. That's the way I look at it. To me it's been one long album and that's the way I look at it. Honestly, it's been completely and utterly non-stop. As soon as I'm finished writing one song I'm beginning to write another one, and it's been like that for 30 years. Ultimately, for Robb (Reiner, drums) and I, what it really is, how many songs can we write, how many albums and how many gigs. That's what it is. It's not how much money. It never has been and it probably never will be. Our measurement of success is simply how many songs and how many gigs we can play. No matter how big the gig or how little, it's still a gig, it's still a song.

Vue Weekly: Are you happy with the finished film "Anvil! The Story Of Anvil"?

Lips: Some things I'm still bewildered with, because there are parts of my personality, just like everybody, that I don't particularly care for. But I can live with it. I have to — it's me. It's a depiction of myself, and when you see a depiction of yourself you see things that you sometimes don't like seeing. There's a certain part of me that's aggressive, no doubt about it: the emotional part. I'll snap if I get pushed the wrong way. I have a temper, but it's not that I always have a bad temper — they just happened to capture it a couple of times. They got lucky.

Vue Weekly: At the end of the film, there's a mention of a 14th album. Is that in the works now?

Lips: All the songs are done, so that's not really the problem. The problem is catch up. We've got a serious backlog, especially with the United States — it's out of control. I mean, the people in the States, they don't know, they've never heard the song "Metal On Metal" before. They've never heard of us. The only way that you could find our albums — and still to this day, if you can find them — would be in independent mom-and-pop shops. Record stores that carry obscure records, which are hard record stores to find, and on top of it where are you going to find the album? There's no distribution there, so the only way those records ended up down there were on import, and that's fractional sales. In its day, I think "Metal on Metal", there might have been maybe 20,000 copies in the United States.

Read the entire interview from Vue Weekly.