Lita Ford recently completed recording her long-awaited new solo album. The follow-up to 2012’s “Living Like A Runaway” is once again being helmed by guitarist/producer Gary Hoey, who contributes some guitar playing to the disc, alongside the rest of Ford‘s backing band, which continues to consist of guitarist Patrick Kennison, drummer Bobby Rock and bassist Marty O’Brien.
In a new interview with Full In Bloom, Rock stated about the recording process for Lita‘s new LP: “She wound up kind of doing it backwards. Gary Hoey, the guitarist, is producing this record, like he did her last record. And what they would do is she would fly out to his studio in New England there, and they would build some tracks, work on some tracks. And they would put a drum machine track, but they would lay keeper guitar and bass and vocals and all that on top of these drum machine parts. And then, two or three months later, they may get together for another song, or who knows when, with their schedules. But long story short, they had a full album’s worth of material, everything finished, except that it had these programmed drums. And the drums sounded fine, but it wasn’t like real live drums. I said, ‘Listen, Lita, we’ve played together seven, eight years now. You’ve gotta let me come in there and put some real shit on here.’ And she agreed. It was challenging [last] year because she was ready to track drums in early 2020, and then studios were shut down and all that [due to the coronavirus pandemic]. So we would up finding a good room in Minneapolis where our booking agent has a really cool studio — private studio, but really high-tech and really cool. So we went there in September. So the drums were the last thing on it. And so the record’s done, and they’ve got Max Norman on board, and he’s starting to mix now. I haven’t heard the latest update, but it’s at the mixing stage now.”
Asked about the musical direction of the new Lita material, Rock said: “It’s arena rock. She’s got some ballad kind of things on there — different shit — but it’s big guitars and great melodies. It’s cool. I think people will dig it.”
This past January, Lita told SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” that her new album contains “some of the best guitar playing” she has heard “in decades.” She added: “And I’m not blowing smoke up my own ass, but Gary and I just nailed it with the guitar playing on this record.
“I’m a huge fan of people like Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter from Alice Cooper‘s ‘Welcome To My Nightmare’. I mean, there’s some really great duo guitar players — [JUDAS PRIEST‘s] Glenn Tipton, K.K. Downing… Those guitar players don’t exist anymore — they just don’t exist. If you wanna hear them, you have to go back in time a little bit and dig them up into your favorite library, favorite music catalog. But I think Gary and I really nailed it on this next record. It’s, like, oh my God. I’m crying — I’m just, like, crying listening to this stuff. It’s so badass.”
In 2019, Lita told The Metal Voice that her new album will include a song called “Monsters”, which was inspired by infamous cult leaders like Charles Manson and David Koresh. “It’s just really dark and nasty stuff — brainwashing people and all the stuff [Koresh] did, and got all those people to drink Kool-Aid,” she said. “But then again, it could be someone like your attorney, or it could be someone like your mom who is the monster in your life. It could be your manager. You never know who the monster in your life is gonna turn out to be.”
Ford‘s last release was 2016’s “Time Capsule”, a collection of songs that were recorded by Lita in the past, but never before made available.
Five years ago, Lita released an autobiography, “Living Like A Runaway: A Memoir”, via Dey Street Books (formerly It Books), an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
