Joel Hoekstra is one of the hardest-working people in the business. Aside from his time with Trans-Siberian Orchestra he is also in Whitesnake and has toured with Cher and the Rock of Ages band. He is back now with a new record from his project Joel Hoekstra’s 13 called Crash of Life and took some time to talk about it.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Joel Hoekstra –
On how he hooked up with vocalist Girish Pradhan – Basically, Frontiers, we were talking about who was gonna sing on the album, and they suggested him. I listened to his band and I thought, “Well, he sounds amazing, but maybe a little bit more of like a young Sebastian Bach kind of vibe”, a lot of the high screams etcetera. So I thought that he’s amazing. I don’t know how that fits with the Ronnie James Dio through Lou Gramm, Paul Rodgers vibe that my stuff usually has. So we started just by me rapping with him, talking, and then giving them the stuff to sing, and as I got the tracks back from him, I realized he’s a real chameleon, he can really do it all. I’m delighted to have him on board, he’s a really talented guy. 1:05

On if he wrote with Girish’s voice in mind – I definitely wrote the melody lines going a little bit higher this time than (former singer) Russell (Allen) would have been. So in terms of where the range sat, it was a little bit on the higher end on some of the parts. I lay down a guide vocal for the whole record, for the singers when I do these, it’s a real pain in the butt. I basically sing the entire album as I hear it, and then they just sing it a whole lot better than I do. So yeah, it was definitely geared more toward his range, but I wasn’t necessarily looking for the same kind of vibe as his band. It was just whether or not he was gonna fit the vibe and he does. He’s really, really versatile. I think that this will be a good album for that for him in terms of people actually understanding that he’s not just a screamer. 2:26
On if having such a talented band gives him confidence when writing – Pretty much, I think some of the tracks that I’ve done are probably the mellowest tracks Vinnie Appice’s ever played on in his life, which I always got kinda get a kick out of. He’s able to do it and play it with taste. What I love about Vinny is that he always plays the unexpected, he’s not like a stereotypical or prototypical session drummer where he plays exactly the same parts that most session drummers would think of. So I love that sometimes he’s the guy that takes these songs in different directions than I would have expected and I usually kinda roll with it. It’s funny with this stuff, I’m kind of a dictator with the writing because I wanna write everything, but then when it comes to the production style I’m the total opposite. I’m very much like, “Okay, whenever they play, I’m gonna just go with” because that’s gonna take the song to some different places than I’m gonna expect, and I like that too. 3:54
On if he feels that he’s grown as a writer over the 3 records – It’s always up to people to judge what they think is a good song or not. I just kinda do what I do. I think, yeah, the more you do things, the better you get at them in life. That’s just the way it is, right? So however, I like a lot of the stuff on Dying to Live, I think that this is a little bit of a return to that album in a way, as far as the content being a little more varied. On Dying to Live, that album was really varied in terms of content, and I love that personally. That for me is what I really like. The label asked for Running Games to be a little bit more compact stylistically. Then this one, they didn’t really ask me anything so I just went back to, “Alright, I’ve got this idea and this idea”, and I like writing all the different styles and having all the different sounds on there to represent a lot of my influences that got me into this style of music. Then I think the bond and the glue for the whole thing is obviously having the same musicians on everything. I basically use a Les Paul for the entire record, maybe occasionally grab a different guitar for a little overdub or something. Just having that same Les Paul tone throughout the record, everybody’s got the same sounds, you get the same mix engineer, and by the time it’s done, it’s like, “Well, this stuff obviously all belongs together”, so even if the writing is a bit varied, it sounds like it’s cohesive. 5:41
On if his solo work allows him to show different sides of his personality – Well, yeah, I don’t do that deliberately, I just write whatever it is I’m feeling. I love to leave it vague enough that people kinda hear their own stories in it. That’s one of the things I enjoy about this whole thing is a lot of times people think it’s about a certain thing and it’s not, and that’s always fun for me to just kinda leave it in that area where the people are hearing their own things in it. Gosh, regarding the whole smile thing, and that’s part of what I feel when I perform, a lot of times, I can be very smiley. But I also think it’s a bit ridiculous when an artist caters every song to one emotion, every single sawing they write. What human being blocks around feeling one single emotion? None of us, absolutely, none of us. I’ve never really understood that. The ability for somebody to be like, “Alright, all the music I make is gonna be angry”, it’s like, “Okay, well, yeah, but aren’t you ever happy?” Because realistically, you are. Likewise, with me, it’s annoying sometimes online when people are like, “You should smile when there’s a picture of me not smiling”, so I have to smile every single picture because you like my smile? Nobody walks around with a smile on their face 24/7. I do smile a lot, I think when I play, if I’m happy or whatever, but that’s kind of natural. It’s not forced. I guess my point is, no person walks around feeling one emotion their entire life, so why would an album be that way? 8:24
On addressing a range of emotions in his music – Well, at the end of the day, these albums are made for the artistic statement. As far as the financial end of things with these, they’re a bit of a disaster for me, to be honest. By the time I’m done paying everybody else because I’m the boss, I basically have spent a lot of time and energy to break even at best to get them out. So they’re more or less artistic statements and just hopefully part of my legacy, and that will hopefully be more than a guy who just had some good gigs. 10:44
On what he learned from Paul O’Neill – Paul was somebody that I really respected because he was as passionate about Trans-Siberian Orchestra as I’ve been about just being a professional guitarist. He was just 100% dedicated to it. That was on his mind, 24/7. I wake up pretty much every day thinking about, “Okay, what’s the task at hand, what are we doing, how do we move us all forward?” And that’s every day. So I think just Paul’s passion for it. The big thing with Paul, he saw a lot of times in us, more positive than we even saw in ourselves. He’d be the guy who gave you the pep talk and tell you how good you were and all that stuff. By the time he was done, I’d be like, “Really? Okay.” But he definitely believes in all of us in TSO, all the people that he hired. I guess he was just really supportive and it’s super eccentric, obviously, the mad scientist, I don’t know if you ever have the chance to meet Paul, but there was only one Paul O’Neill, there’s never gonna be another Paul O’Neill. It’s like certain people you meet that are so totally unique and eccentric, and so I thought that was beautiful, just the fact that Paul is so just totally, totally unique. I love that, I love people like that. You meet people you’re like, “Well, you’re never gonna meet another one of these”, and so Paul definitely had that going. 11:56
On what he took away from performing with Cher – I would say the professionalism. I was working with her, I believe, from the time she was 71 through 73 years old, so to see her go about it and realized like, “Wow, she’s been at this for a very, very long time”, over 50 years really at that point in time. So I think just to watch her go about her business and what it takes to have a career like that. 13:54
On what he learned from David Coverdale – A lot with David. He’s been a really amazing boss and I think probably the best boss I’ve had in terms of championing his players. When he hires people in his band, you don’t often the band leaders tweeting their band member pictures and talking about them as much as David does about us. He’s really, really good in that regard. If you look, go across the board, and would be like, who else is doing that? So he’s really, really great with that in terms of positive support and building us up, and he’s a great hang in terms of humor, lots of laughs. For me, he’s been the perfect boss man, we’ve gotten along from day one, and I think it’s just been a really easy natural fit. I’ve always been grateful to be there, and I think at the stage of the career that David was at, when I joined he’s just looking for people that, obviously, have the ability or the talent to be in the band, but also are just positive and glad to be there. I guess he’s probably had, over the course of his career, he dealt with a lot of different personalities, and I think the further on they get, they’re just looking for, “Look, I just want somebody who’s going to be easy to work with and happy to be here”. So I guess we’re a natural fit in that regard because I have been happy to be there the whole time, so anyway, he’s great at staying positive, he’s always up, always a positive energy all the time. 14:41
On the future of Whitesnake – I don’t know. People tend to pick up anything I say in this situation as clickbait. I really don’t know anything that you guys don’t know. I’m gonna go hang with them actually in about six days, I head out and hang with them for a while. Not recording new music or anything like that, but just doing some recording and hanging out. We’ll see what he has to say. What I had said that they’re grabbing and putting in the click-bait headlines is that I actually read in an interview online that he was talking about doing dates, but that’s not a direct mention to us, that’s not anything that we’re in the know about and we’re holding out on people. I’ve said in other interviews that he’s in constant contact with us, but it’s always kind of like social humor, we have a band thread that pretty much we hear from close to a daily basis. But we know if David wants to get out and play, we’ll hear that from him. It’s not up to us to be prodding him to be like, “Hey, what’s up, man?” It’s just like, “Hey, he knows we wanna play. So hopefully we will”. In the words of the late, great Paul O’Neill, “Fingers crossed”. That was a big Paul O’Neill thing he would say to us a lot of times. 16:47
On if he will tour with Joel Hoekstra’s 13 – Well, number one, having a seriously big window for me, with enough notice for me to be like, “Okay, I’m gonna dedicate that time to that, and having everybody else’s schedules line up”, or a line up that would reflect the out well enough to take out. But it would inevitably be a total financial disaster for me. It would be like the money that we would get as Joel Hoekstra’s13 to go out and play places, and what I would probably spend to do that wouldn’t even remotely line up. These guys are veterans, you can’t have them in the Motel 6 and flying on Spirit Airlines in the middle seat. Anyway, yeah, it would just logistically be very difficult, but we have done a show we did on the Monsters of r=Rock Cruise after Dying to Live was out. I think that if it were to happen, it probably a run. Usually, if people are gonna get a set together, it’s better to play multiple shows while everybody knows the material. In our line of work, the pain in the ass is when you shed a said you memorize it all, work really hard to get it all down, you play it once. That was weeks of work. 18:35
On the new Revolution Saints – That was something that, I guess, just having a good relationship with everybody involved, I think it’s something Deen wanted me to do and Frontiers asked me to do, and I was just hearing Doug’s not gonna do it. But I wanted to make sure that was the case, you gotta be careful in situations like that and make sure you’re not replacing somebody without their knowledge or something like that. So I texted him, I was like, “What’s up? Are you not doing this anymore?” And he said, “Yeah, I just wanna do the Dead Daisies thing”, and he said, “I actually recommended that they get you to do it”, and I said, “Okay, well, it takes that weirdness away”, and so at that point in time, you’re a guitarist and you’re being offered a chance to work with Deen Castronovo and Jeff Pillson for a bit, those are two really super talented guys and also guys that I’ve known for a while and had a friendship with. So I think it’s all that stuff just kind of lining up, the fact that I’ve been working with Frontiers for so long, I’ve been working with, or known, Deen and Jeff, I worked with Jeff even for a minute in Foreigner, filling in for Mick (Jones). All three of us toured together in 2011 for a really long tour, we were out at Night Ranger, Foreigner, Journey on that tour. So I think just almost all those factors combined that probably in the fact that Doug said, “Get Joel to do it”, all that stuff fitting together, just made it the logical choice, and like I said, for me, that’s the main excitement surrounding that is to work with those two guys. 20:04