BRUCE KULICK Discusses New Solo Album

Troy Culpan of May The Rock Be With You recently conducted an interview with former KISS guitarist Bruce Kulick. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

May The Rock Be With You: Your new album, "BK3", is due out very soon and for those of us here in Australia we will be able to pick it up from [Kulick's upcoming] shows [in Australia in December]. How would you describe the range of songs on the new album?

Kulick: I'm working on it! It's really stressful, because I'm trying to do a worldwide release, and what's interesting about this record,...with the first two solo records, I actually only wanted to sell them myself and not have any real distribution, and this record I really want it to be distributed because I have such amazing guest performers on there and I'm trying to work with it. I'm almost going backwards; instead of doing it myself, I want the help of a label and I guess you can imagine that the record industry is not any easier these days. But the record is finished and all the artwork's done. You can [see] a lot of the photos on my website and everything, but I'm just trying to figure out the positioning for the whole worldwide release right now. It's a little stressful right now but this is the record that's worth being careful with. Not only do I feel responsible for Gene [Simmons] to be on there and his son, Nick, who did such great performances, but that's real important to me that it's the best of me and I have some great players on there and I just want to get the best exposure I can.

May The Rock Be With You: From a songwriting point of view, does "BK3" feature songs you have written just recently, or are they from the archives over a number of years?

Kulick: You know, one of the song's called "I'll Survive", which had to do with me getting shot back in 2003 on Sunset Blvd. [in West Hollywood], which made CNN and everything. Fortunately, of course, nothing really horrible happened, but still it inspired me writing this song, I probably wrote that in November/December of 2003. So the songwriting process started as far back as then. There are a couple of things that are a little bit more recent, like the first song, "Fate" — it was actually finished early summer when I recorded a couple of tracks for the record, but it did really span over the course of a number of years from 2003 to now. It's pretty remarkable, but it all makes sense in the big picture.

May The Rock Be With You: And the instrumental stuff, do you ever go in and just play and whatever you play is what you record or do you have something in mind?

Kulick: There is one instrumental on my [new solo] record. The other two had at least threee or four on each one of the first two solo records. It was kind of unusual. Jeremy Rubolino is the guy that produced the record for me. When we discussed the recipe of the record, shall I say, at one point it came up that there was no instrumental on the record and I did think that was a little odd. And I was like, "Wow, we never even thought about it." I remember at one point we tried writing something that could be an instrumental and I kind of just thought it was a little dark and weird, and after that discussion, that weekend I remember just sitting down and jamming on something and turning it into the instrumental. When it comes to the melodies on the instrumental, that is almost something that is slightly planned out and slightly improvised. By the time we got [Steve] Lukather there to jam along, I left out a lot of what wasn't completely formulated. I wanted to see, "Well, alright, what would you play over these verses? Let's jam!" It was its own animal in the way it was created and I'm real proud of that track because it's really unique in the way that we trade off and it's not always obvious. It's obvious to me when he's playing and I'm not playing, but I think a lot of the fans just get off on the energy of it, the ones that have heard the song.

Read the entire interview from May The Rock Be With You.