Todd Kerns is a rock & roll lifer. You know his playing from his nearly 13 years with Slash Ft, Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators but he has now joined forces with former Alice Cooper guitarist Stef Burns and current Evanescence drummer Will Hunt in the new project Heroes & Monsters. Their debut record is out on January 20, and Todd recently took some time to talk about it.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Todd Kerns –
On how Heroes & Monsters formed – Well it’s one of those weird things. I mean a lot of it has to do with the lockdown. everybody just being not operative, just sort of like sidelined completely. Will (Hunt, drums) was a friend, and he just sort of reached out one day and said, “Hey, me and my friend Stef are doing this thing. What do you think about knocking some ideas around?” It was like literally, “Yeah absolutely”. None of us knew if we had another month of sitting around or literally another year. So we just started kind of knocking ideas around and the first thing that came together was “Locked and Loaded”, and that came together great. Another one comes together great. Another one is okay but we should do this. The process starts to kind of present itself as far as writing and making a record. And the next thing you know you’ve got a record on your hands. and you’re like, “Wow this is crazy how this happens”. I mean I’m making it sound too simplistic but it was just enjoyable and fun and came together so painlessly that it was kind of a no-brainer to just go for it. :58
On the band’s creative process – They definitely had worked up a few things before I came along. A lot of it was sort of me playing catch up and then me bringing the potatoes to the potluck. It was such an interesting process. I think that’s the most fun when it comes to being collaborative is to collaborate. If I make a solo record that’s really satisfying getting to do my own thing because that’s what you do in a solo project, when you’re just performing on somebody else’s record that’s fun because it’s you just playing on their record. With this, it was sort of like there are three big personalities with ideas, and you just sort of knock them around, and the ones that work you keep and the ones that don’t fall by the wayside and that’s just sort of the way it goes. 2:23
On the production of the record – Well technically it’s like a co-produced, a group co-produced kind of thing but Will had a big part of it. Alessandro (Del Vecchio) had a big part of it. It’s one of those things, they did such a great job of that. It’s honestly not my forte. My production ideas are more from an arranging and how things kind of come together way. But the actual sonic aspect, don’t look to me. I benefited from being surrounded by talented people. 3:29
On creating a concise, 10-song, 40-minute record – I think it’s interesting that you say that because I really do feel like it’s quite diverse in its own way. I feel like if we had sort of carved it down to be 10 songs that kind of sound in a similar vein, where you basically have a record of 10 songs that are just 10 different versions of the same kind of song. I don’t think that’s quite as interesting as having it sort of bob and weave in and out of a couple of different areas. But I think that that’s part of the fun of sort of arranging a record. The idea of a shorter record has become sort of an ongoing conversation even with the last Slash record we did was 10 songs. We started to kind of think about the records that we came up on. Back in the vinyl days was the idea, some of the Van Halen records had eight songs, 10 songs. How can you have filler on a record that’s just that brief? I just felt like less was more. I think that we kind of have leaned into that. We’d written a bunch of other songs and not so much didn’t make the cut but we just kind of felt like, “Let’s just make a more succinct record”. As you mentioned it’s kind of like, I don’t know if you remember, but I remember in the 90s and early 2000s when people really liked to lean into the amount of music you could put on a compact disc became kind of like, “We’re going to do 17 songs”, and most people kind of were familiar with the first half of the album and then kind of went they just gave up or whatever. To me, it’s kind of more like the records I grew up on Destroyer or,r Led Zeppelin 2, it’s like those were brief records and every single song is as important as the one before and the one after it. I think that that’s kind of what we tried to attempt to do with this record. So hopefully it kind of comes across. 4:40
On how to balance showing your influences but still sounding fresh – There was a period there, post-hair metal where everybody was terrified to even flirt with the idea when it became a dirty word you know. I think that we’ve come so far the other way now where I kind of feel like there’s nothing wrong with flirting with showing that there’s elements of that and classic rock and elements of sort of what you would call sort of more modern rock. In a lot of ways, I feel like there’s no rules anymore. I think that we should be allowed to kind of just make music and kind of feel like it’s sort of all from the same pot of gold chocolate box. You kind of go, “What’s this one going to be?” You don’t know. There’s even like tiny sprinklings of sort of proggy ideas here and there that is more those guys than me because I wouldn’t have the foggiest clue how to do that. That’s kind of important to me to, like I said, to not have 10 songs that are 10 different versions of the same kind of song and it’s a bit more of a journey a bit more of a ride that way. 7:11
On what he learned from Slash & Myles Kennedy – That’s actually really interesting you say that. I don’t even know if I’d be able to say what I’ve learned because I’ve been living with it for going on 13 years so I don’t know that it’s really something that I could actually probably put into words but it’s clearly in there. It’s also a big part of the music that I love in Cheap Trick and Queen and the Sweet and all the bands that are so song-oriented and hook oriented but still aggressive and you can crank it up in the old Chevy Nova on a back road somewhere. That’s kind of where you know it all comes from to me and I think that there’s really sort of no reinventing of any wheel per se because it’s sort of like we all love rock and roll and rock and roll is sort of a reinterpretation of something over and over and over again from 1950-whatever till now. But at the same time, I think that there’s still something, a new way to say it, I think that that’s sort of the way we’ve tried to do that. I think that that’s I think we’ve been relatively successful at it if I must say so. When I’m working with these guys or working with these guys it’s sort of like there’s a way that that guy works but when I go over here that guy’s doing something I would never have thought of or would never expect it because these people think completely different than one another and think completely different than I do so that’s part of the collaborative effort as well a\is that sort of like, “Wow”. You just never know what’s coming at you for better or worse sometimes. Sometimes it’s like, “Yeah, that didn’t grab me”, but nine times out of ten when you’re working with people who are talented and people you respect and admire good things are going to happen. 9:07
On being signed to Frontiers Records – It didn’t seem to be too weird. I can’t speak for them but I think that they do what they do so well and they don’t need any help from me to do that, they do it so well. But I think that having something like a slightly different color in their palette just kind of makes it an interesting new take on things. Everybody’s a rock and roll fan and everybody’s a song fan and everybody’s a music fan in that whole collective including us that it’s sort of like a respect for that kind of music and that band and that artist and this band and then Heroes & Monsters. So it’s kind of like I think that you can tap your toe to that and bang your head to that and pound your fist to this so it’s kind of like one of those things where I think that we fit in there maybe in a slightly different category but it’s still rock and hard rock and that kind of thing. It’s funny that you bring that up, I’m so oblivious, I never really thought about it. Are we the redheaded stepchildren of this entire label? I don’t know. 11:46
On Heroes & Monsters playing live – We’re doing an Italian run in February. It’s another one of these classic examples of Will’s extremely busy Stef’s extremely busy, I’m extremely busy, can we find a moment to do this? Can we go to February and do this? There’s a couple of things that come up wait now it’s three things now it’s four now, it starts ballooning and you go, “Let’s do it”. We’re gonna go out and try and run it up the flagpole and see how it goes and then when the next window of opportunity comes up maybe we can do something there and something at another point you never know. We can make these things kind of work. A lot of the time with some of these projects, I have quite a few friends that do projects like these sort of get-together, different guys in different bands or recording songs, and they never have any intention of playing live. They make records and they’re like it was just a fun recording project but they’re never going to take it on the road. So the fact that we’re actually kind of taking that next step to see if that’s if we (continue). The first step was seeing if we could even write songs together, the next step was kind of seeing if we could put a record together, the next step was sort of compiling that into a thing and releasing it and now getting together and playing music live that’ll be the next sort of adventure. 13:00
Bruce Springsteen Streaming ContentOn how he became known as Todd “Dammit” Kerns – Well Todd “Dammit” rhymes with God Damnit, that’s basically where that that came from. It’s just a silly old nickname that kind of grabbed on. Vinnie Paul from Pantera used to use it all the time and then Slash started just introducing me as that and that just became the thing I was like okay, “Well, now I’m this”. It’s sort of a funny thing and then there was a t-shirt and that became an entire enterprise unto itself now so it’s one of those weird things, to me I’m just Todd Kerns but that thing gets wedged in there and you’re like, “Okay here we go”. 14:45
On any Canadian bands he recommends – as far as modern groups go I would be a little bit lost because I haven’t lived there in 15-16 years so a lot of the newer music that’s coming out of there I am so (unfamiliar with). People say, “What about this? What about this?” I’m like, “I don’t know”. There’s a lot of great old bands people should look out for, Streetheart. Streetheart is a band that came together and then broke off to become Loverboy, certain members went off to be Loverboy, but Streetheart was a great just a great rock band that I love to this day. There’s a lot of bands that you should check out but there’s so much music cranking out of there all the time. My kid has a band called Pack Rat check them out. 15:44
On his 2023 plans – Toque has a bunch of stuff going on. It’s such an interesting year that way in that when I’m home I play in a show here in Vegas called Raiding the Rock Vault with guys from Heart and Dio and Whitesnake and we have fun doing that. Toque is always doing stuff we have new music on the horizon. The Bruce Kulick band always has things going on, the non-makeup Kiss years that we celebrate. The Slash thing will eventually fire up, it’s such a funny old ship that has to kind of get the barnacles off the hull and get back in the water. We all got really crazy busy with our obligations from 2020 that all kind of got stuck in the mud so that when the doors opened in 2022 we all got kind of sidelined. We put out a new record in 2021, just about a year ago. That didn’t get quite the amount of love it should have gotten only because we could only do so much before everybody got sidetracked and everything else, That will eventually find its way back to one another as well. It’s a very interesting year it’s incredibly busy. Last year was a year where I was supposed to never work again a lot of people were like, “We’re never working again, we’re never touring again”, and all of a sudden it was the busiest year of my life so so I’m kind of treating this year as just like more of the same. 17:00
