Sorry, Thinny, I didn't see your post with the RS link before I replied to Capt. I started the post, then got distracted by a car inspection and didn't catch that you had posted in the meantime.
I also found a couple other things online. There's a great interview Richie did with The Hollywood Reporter that covers a lot of this. I'm just quoting pieces of it that have to do specifically with the writing; but the whole article is interesting.
(BTW, I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I noticed that these particular responses also have examples of what I mean when I say that Richie hasn't said much in interviews since he left the band that he hasn't said before. In these, specifically, he does say "co-written" and "co-produce" but he was just as likely to say "I wrote" and "I produced" even then. The only reason it people take exception
now, and why they see it as dissing the band or trying to take all the credit
now, is because that's the way
they perceive it since he left. To my recollection, nobody posted any complaints when this article was first published in 2012 or even before, when he did other interviews.)
If you want to read the whole article, here's the link:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ea...lowdown-370991
Quote:
THR: Aftermath of the Lowdown deals with a lot of your personal demons. Talk about the theme.
Sambora: I tried to capture freedom, because on this record I am away from the band. Looking back on it, I was getting off the road after this mammoth 18½-month, 52-country tour. When it stopped, I was able to look at what was happening over the last seven years of my life. A lot of stuff went down. I was looking at my stuff. I think everybody has stuff, and I wanted to write authentically about things that had happened to me or observations that I had over the past 10 years. So I started to write the music, and I had no idea if I was going to have an album or not -- but then, when I was about five or six songs into the writing process, I started to get turned on and said, "Wait a minute, I think this is a record." So I think the songs were encompassing everything that happened to me. What I found is, my stuff essentially is everybody’s stuff. So many things that happened to me that everybody goes through, whether it be divorce or losing a parent or becoming a single dad, all of that -- a lot of people, almost everybody goes through that. But there is so much energy and so many different things happening on this record, especially when you listen to the lyrics.
...
THR: You seem really at home at Dangerbird. How is the process different working with a smaller label, and what are your goals?
Sambora: We get in a room and we make decisions very quickly. One of the things I wanted to do was showcase my singing, because people put me into this box where I am a guitar player. There are a lot of people that have a preconceived notion of who I am as a person and a musician, and I think this record tried to break that mold. Even from a guitar-playing standpoint, what I don’t see in a lot of bands and a lot of records right now is a lot of guitar playing for self-expression -- playing solos. ... When you are working with a label like Dangerbird and I was the boss, the sole driver of the train, I could do all those things. ...
THR: How was it different writing for your record than a Bon Jovi record?
Sambora: When I write songs with Jon, it’s an awesome experience, but basically there is a lot of commonality in our relationship. We grew up five miles away from each other, a couple years apart, in the same social bracket, but our styles are very different. When I write for the band, he is the megaphone for that band. So I write words that he is going to be able to sing, and I look at that as very important. With my solo stuff, I’m the guy with the mic. I’m the megaphone. … In the band, we all sit down and talk about things. Jon is the leader of this band, and I have had a lot to do with everything. I have been a guy that has co-written 90 percent of the hits, as well as many songs on every record. I also co-produced a lot of the records with Jon. We were essentially the songwriting team that moved that team forward, and on the business level, I have been his right-hand man. We were label presidents on our own label on Atlantic Records and produced Skid Row out of that, so Jon and I had done a lot of work in this organization for a lot of years, and that’s the way it’s rolling. Jon’s the leader, and there are no bones about that -- and no hard feelings. Everyone has a specific role in the caste system of what this band is, and that’s why it has lasted for 30 years...
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According to this bit from songfacts.com, SYG was one of the first songs he wrote for AOTL, so that would probably place it somewhere around fall of 2011, which takes it back even further - to 2004, which is about the time that Bobby and Shanks came into the picture, isn't it?
http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=36297
Quote:
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This was inspired by a low point in Sambora's life, including his divorce from actress Heather Locklear and the death of his father. "About seven years ago is when things started to kind of come apart for me," Sambora told Fuse TV in 2012. "I was getting divorced, which is never pleasant, and having to be a guy that lives on the road and becoming a single father and the conflict of wanting to be there. And also, my dad dying of cancer, all that stuff. I'm not whining about it at any point in time; that's what happened. Then at the end of this tour last August, I just said, 'That was like seven years ago now,' and that's where the title came from. It was one of the first songs I wrote for the record. The thunder and the rain or the noise that happens in people's lives, and the noise that happened in my life, and digging through my own personal life experience, I think I've always been a guy on a songwriting level that has been able to utilize my own personal experience, my own personal observation so to speak, and then it becomes a universal thing. That's what I found with this record. Even though I was trudging through my own personal experiences, ups and downs, and there's been a lot of them, it felt like it was ... it becomes everybody's. There's more commonality to humanity than there isn't. I think that this is a very relatable record."
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12-21-2017, 10:24 PM
