I don't think Jon will dismiss Phil X so easily :3

He won't because he fulfills the role of a showman as lead guitarist on stage much more than Shanks who seems rather introverted to me.
Furthermore I'm pretty certain that he needs to keep two guitar players around because of the way the albums are produced nowadays with tons of guitar layers for every track. Remember that ever since Shanks had come onboard as a producer (2005) we've had two guitarists on tour.

I think Bounce was the nail in the coffin for the band as it's probably the most overproduced album up to this date. If I remember it right David didn't feel comfortable to be handling all the backing tracks/layers on Undivided, Bounce, Everyday, Hook Me Up etc. and as HAND continued the trend to use layers of guitars it made sense to bring in another guitarist and backing vocalist.

I picked out Born Again Tomorrow and All Hail the King first time I heard them, Knockout and Our House I'll concede but the guitar's not the main player in them, my initial reading was I could only hear Phil in BAT and AHTK. The BAT solo is VERY Phil. And I think it does make a difference - listen to the rest of the solo's on that album - even THINFS is very constructed. I do like Shanks as a composer in some ways but his execution lacks a bit of... finesse.

As for Shanks replacing Phil - if that happens that's the end of the band as a touring force. While Shanks has no stage presence, casuals can't tell the difference between Phil and Richie and my previous point - he's a solid guitar player but not an exciting one. But anyway I don't see it, I'm not even convinced to leave my initial reading that this is all a time thing and Phil is lead guitar - it won't mean every track but certainly most if we ever get a new record but it's well established that Richie didn't play on every track so... can't whine about that really.

I think Phil is here to stay. That inner circle is hard to get into. I've always thought that he didn't play much on THINFS because he has his own band and commitments. I never saw a reason to overanalyze it. Maybe as an official member now, he will be more involved next time.

I agree... Even if Richie does come back, I could see Phil sticking around...Which would kinda be cool...

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Pardon me sir, but I guess what you meant to say was "Huge wrote the bass line for KTF and in live concerts Alec played it "in his own style"". =)

No... I meant it to read the exact way I wrote it...

If you read the sentence prior, I'm specific about Huge being in the Studio and Alec being the live player... So when you couple that with the next sentence (the one you included), it comes across pretty clear and obvious..

As far as Alec playing it in his own style, I have no idea... They sound identical to me but I'm not a bass player or a musician...

I know a lot of people were shocked when Huge made the statement about him being in the studio during Faith and writing that bass line. I guess if people were shocked, Alec must have done a very good job at fooling everyone and it couldn't have been too far off...

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He most certainly did. It was done much sloppier than on the studio version whereas since 1995 it was done spot on.

The biggest example of the difference between to the two is Evening With. Al's playing of the riff is way sloppier, a much different feel.