Few musicians can boast of the resume Bumblefoot possesses. He has been in legendary bands (Guns N’ Roses), supergroups (Sons of Apollo), and a successful solo career. He just released his first solo record in 10 years, an instrumental album called “…Returns” and took some time to talk about it and his upcoming plans and projects!
Please press the PLAY icon for the MisplacedStraws Bumblefoot interview –
On if he worked on these songs while playing in his other bands – Yes and no. I didn’t have any intention of making another instrumental record. It was one of those things where it was on the someday list. “Someday, yeah, maybe someday. Sure, someday”. But I did do a few instrumental songs that I just kind of tossed out digitally, on to Spotify and Bandcamp and that kind of stuff. So it really was just the pandemic where although some days, there was suddenly time, and they could happen. So I thought of all the things people had asked, “Would you ever do another acoustic EP?” I did one in 2008. So I did two of them and stuck them on Bandcamp. “Would you ever do another instrumental album?”
Now, what I would do is on all my own albums, I would have a few instrumental songs. Peppered, if I could use that word, lightly peppered amongst the vocal songs. I always think of Van Halen albums, like the way you would have “Spanish Fly” what was that before, “D. O. A”., and then “Little Guitars”, and then “Eruption”, they’d be peppered. So that’s what I would do. I would have instrumental songs here and there, but my main thing was to be a rock band with vocals and rock music. But suddenly I’m in this chair for two years. It’s like, alright, the gift of time. So, there was a song, there was a riff that I had written for Sons of Apollo’s second album that we didn’t use. I said, “Let me take that riff and just turn that into a song”. So, I did that and, and appropriately named it, oh my God, I just had a brain fart. I forgot the name of my song. This is what happens when you turn 55, “Planetary Lockdown”.
So I put that out and before that in 2019, I had put out another song, just a one-off instrumental song. The first thing I did is when I decided, “Okay, I’m going to make an album”, I know I at least had those two songs to put on there. They were just digital, and I wanted to have them on physical stuff as well. So, I started writing and the first thing I took was a song idea I had from 1989. It was this riff that I never did anything with, and it’s just been collecting dust on a mental shelf for decades. (plays the riff) All right, I’m going to take that and I’m going to turn that into a song, so I just took that and just started building round it. It starts with that and then drums kick in and the bass kicks in just doing whatever, just one take of just whatever came to mind for the bassline. Then threw a melody on top, almost felt almost Satriani-ish. (continues to play) So, two times of that, and that’s like, where to go from there. Okay, let’s have the whole band kick in, and heavy guitars, and, and change the chords around. Keep the idea of the melody, almost like theme and variations. So that’s the theme, and now we’re creating a variation. Where to go from there? Break it up with something else.
The song just kind of just built and built and built. Then in the middle of it, it had this, I just pictured a big, long space to just jam, just an open field to do whatever. I thought, “It’d be good to jam with someone and like trade back and forth. There’s room for that.” Because I wasn’t really looking to have guests, or if I did, certainly not a lot of them. I didn’t want this to be the Variety Hour. But, also during the time of that riff, 1989, I had just gotten my first legit write up in a real guitar magazine. This teenager, a kid my age, wrote to me and he was from England, and he said, “Hi, my name is Guthrie Govan I would love to hear your demo if you could send me a cassette copy, and here’s mine.” We became pen pals, and for years we would write each other handwritten letters, and sent each other cassettes of just all our little demos and handwritten transcriptions and everything for years. I was on his song “Rhode Island Shred”, I played the solo to that, and the harmonies to the end, and so it just seemed fitting to ask him to take this song from that time period that I’m finishing up, where I first met him and had that riff, and my legitimacy began and asked him if he would trade back and forth with me, and he’s like, “Yeah, sure”. So, we did a little back and forth, he took a solo, I did one, he took one, I took one, and there was that. That was the first song I did with the intent of making an album. Then from there I just kept writing, writing fresh songs.
There was one other song that I had from a video game I did. In 2010, and that was the “Chopin Waltz”. (plays the song) This is the real version. It’s a lot prettier. This was (plays his version). The video game was like a Rock Band, Guitar Hero kind of game, and they were making one. This Polish company was making this video game of just Chopin in different styles to celebrate his 200th birthday. So, they asked me if I would do a guitar metal version of it, so (continues to play), to build and just go like it, and just do this whole crazy version of it. So, I took that song and had my drummer, Kyle, Kyle Hughes, the phenomenal drummer that played on every single track, except for one, we’ll talk about that. So, he laid these crazy drums on it, and then I added some orchestration to the middle, and put that on the album as well. And everything else was written freshly.

On if he knows from the start if a song will be vocal or instrumental – Usually when I’m writing a song, as soon as there’s a nice melody, it goes straight to the voice, and I write words to it and I sing it. This time I just put a big piece of tape over my mouth and anytime there was a melody, and this is something that I always kind of kicked myself for, which is I never, or just not often enough, I guess. I feel like I always gave the melodies to the mouth and not to the hands. Because of that, it’s very easy to be labeled as unmelodic player, even though if you listen as a whole to like the whole catalog of decades of music, there are melodies in there, but usually the guitar solo is the place where you do the flashier stuff and a little bit, it’s a very strong spice, a little bit goes a very long way.
You can have a completely melodic solo, but if for two seconds you do something crazy. It’ll be like, “Oh yeah”, that’s what people are going to point at. If you do three seconds, it’s not melodic anymore. Now it’s a shred solo. So, with this album and with just writing songs where I was permitting the guitar to be the voice and to do the singing. I think it finally, for once, I’m hearing people say, “singable solos”. Singable songs, and that’s something that I always wished I could do. I guess I finally am doing it, but I guess it takes an entire song to pull that off and not just a guitar solo. Maybe that’s just my immaturity of feeling like I have to just always get crazy during a guitar solo. So yeah, yeah, it’s singable. It is a song that I would have sang. But instead, I just keep the tape on the mouth and just let the guitar do the talking, do the singing. I do feel like there’s a lot of it on here and I feel happy about that, that at some point before I’m six feet under, I made something someone could sing.
On if it’s refreshing to have the freedom of a solo record over a band – It is. It’s good to have both. When you play in a band, you have people that are adding things that you’re incapable of coming up with. Becomes more than just what you could do. With this album though, you get to fully express 100 percent in every aspect, the artwork, the song writing, the playing, every single thing, the order of songs. You get to really give 100 percent of yourself. That’s what you want to do as a musician. You want to really pull out as much blood and guts and sweat and tears and anything you have that you can put into it. There’s a real thrill in getting that out of you and sharing that. So, yes, it’s, it feels damn good to be able to do that. For me, I like the unexpected.
I like to shock people in ways like even just the way the album starts. It doesn’t come in gently. It’s, you know, it’s like an angry five-year-old swinging. I wanted the feeling to be like you just woke up in a tornado. And you’re like, “What the, what’s going on?” It should take that amount of time it takes when you’re woken up out of sleep and your brain isn’t quite back yet for like a good 10 seconds. It should feel like that when the album kicks in.
For all of these songs, I was picturing a lot of things. There was a lot of visuals in my head as I was writing, and I was almost writing towards those stories and pictures in my weird brain. Yeah, which is what I always do with writing for TV shows and video games and horror movies and all that stuff. There’s a scene that you’re scoring. So, in this case the goal was for people to imagine the same scene I was imagining while listening to the music. So, with the first song “Simon in Space”, as I was writing the song and as it was coming together and making all the sounds, it really did feel dynamically by the end, like you were just on a little ride, a rollercoaster, a space adventure.
Some of the sounds are kind of spacey. It’s very easy to plot out the music video to that. It’s like it just opens up, boom, you’re in an asteroid belt and a million things and all this chaos and everything flying around. You get out of it and you’re just exploring space and then the chorus, that melody, and you see beautiful things and nebula and colorful stuff. Then it’s like, “Oh. More chaos”. I wanted it to feel like you were taking a good space ride. Hopefully that’s what people picture when they listen to the song and by the end of it, that they feel like they were just on a little mini mental adventure. All the songs have some sort of visual. Like that, that I didn’t tell you about. If we have time, I talk way too much all the time.
On whether Whom Gods Destroy will continue – I don’t know. I mean, I would hope so. It was the intention. It’s just, everyone needs to write some music. So, if that happens, we’ll have a second album. At this point, I think everyone is very busy with everything else. You can make an album during the pandemic, but once the pandemic is over and you go back to everything you were doing, whatever momentum you had during that time period when you had all that time, that time isn’t there anymore. So, it’s really hard to keep that same momentum you had for those things. Everyone is back to doing their touring. Everyone’s back on the hamster wheel of just touring, touring, touring,and doing their own things. So hopefully, time could be made to do another another Whom Gods Destroy album.
I think the band would have been incredible live if we did shows and the goal was to do a second album and then do shows so that we don’t have to pad a show with covers or other things, and that we would have enough music to fill a good hour and a half or two hours. So yeah. But even while writing that, the mind frame I was in musically of all of that, dark, chromatic, weird, heavy riffs That bled a lot into the things on the solo album, because it’s what I was living, so it would show itself. So suddenly in the middle of “Moonshine Hootenanny”, where it feels like this kind of bluegrassy thing going on, it takes this weird detour and it’s all this dark sounding stuff with this kind of, where’s the one, rhythms and “Monstruoso” has a lot of that as well and shows itself pretty much.
This album is like a scrapbook of, “All right, here’s what I did. Here’s where I visited. Here’s what I felt in the past couple of years” and every song is a different picture. They’re not all the same place, the same time, the same state of mind. When the pandemic is wearing you down from all the death this orchestrated song with this crying violin because that is what I was feeling. That was a picture of that. It was a picture of loss. Just everything was just a different photo in the photo album of here’s what I did during the pandemic. They’re not all the same by far, they’re definitely, I guess you could say maybe stylistically. I mean, there’s a common thread that could be heard throughout, but definitely different experiences being shared.
On the future of Art of Anarchy – The Jersey show we did well. I think we pretty much filled that one. Yeah, it’s always fun. Time will tell. We’ll see what happens. Again, everyone’s back to doing their things. Once everyone’s on that, on their hamster wheels, can they all get off again to, to go back and do this?
On if he plans on touring for …Returns – I don’t plan on touring, driving around in a van for a month. I won’t even say tour bus, because this is instrumental guitar music. I’m saying that now. Maybe not even, driving around in my car. The plan is doing one-off events and things like that, and a lot of teaching things. I want to get back to what I love most, which is producing, and I’m producing a ton of bands right now.
There’s this doom metal band called Evoken. They are just the doomiest of doom. I recorded all their old albums 20, 25 years ago, and they’re doing a new one, and we are in the final mixing of that, and it sounds amazing. There’s a band from Baltimore called Shavrock. It’s these two brothers, and they just write these beautiful songs, almost like rabbinical lyrics of hoping and goodness and they harmonize almost they sound like Simon and Garfunkel only they get a little louder at times So imagine and the guitar player has this real bluesy rock Slash type feel to his playing so picture I can describe it as music as if you had Daughtry with Simon and Garfunkel singing and Slash playing guitar. Really interesting stuff. Great songs. Great songs. So. We’re finishing up their album. The Dodies, I think I’ve told you about that. They’re putting out their third album, Dreamism, very soon. It’s gonna be any month now. So, yeah, great album, such good stuff. It’s been a lot of good producing stuff and I’m so happy with that.
I love doing that. I love just helping bands get exactly what they’re looking for and getting out there and doing it and helping them make their dreams happen. I feel like I’ve done my own. I’ve, I finished my dreams and now I’m just having fun. So now I’m just using everything I learned, all the stupid mistakes I made and helping other people make their things happen.
So, I’m doing a lot of rock and roll fantasy camps as well. Got one coming up in LA. Just pretty soon mid-February, another one in Fort Lauderdale in mid-March, and I am playing with Derek Sherinian, keyboards from Sons of Apollo, and with Tony Franklin, fretless bass monster, and Vinnie Appice on drums, and we’re gonna play the Kennedy Center in D.C. April 1st. it’s part of this event that Derek has been playing and brought me in on it, and I’ve been doing them for a few years now, and it’s a festival called Starmus. Astrophysics and music. Which is right up my alley. My two biggest loves. Space and music coming together. So, yeah. There’s going to be some good playing happening in April. I have some more, there’s gonna be a lot of nice little one-offs and events happening and a lot of teaching stuff. So, I’ll be getting out there. I’ll be playing.
On the packaging of …Returns – There is so much to talk about with this album, and even just the release of it. That was a bigger job than making the thing. I didn’t want to just throw it on Spotify. So, finally redid the website since 2008, and have a nice new web store and everything, and I just thought about 30 years since putting out the first instrumental album that I did. I haven’t done a fully instrumental one since 1995, that first album that debuted on Shrapnel Records. It’s been 10 years since I even just put out a full album. So, what I love and what we all love about physical products, physical, I hate calling them products. That’s so cold. What we love about vinyl and even CDs and cassettes is the artwork. So, I made sure that this thing was just filled with artwork. So, front cover, back cover. I want to talk about this spaceship too. We’re going to talk about that. Here you see it. Here you see it again leaving. You see it inside, flying, more artwork. This is a double LP, and both of these are filled with colorful artwork. That’s so cool. And the second disc is a UV pressing. Not a special edition or anything like every album is like this. So, it’s three sides of music, fourth side has the artwork on it, and you can see it through on the third side, you can see the spaceships going, and so there’s that.
The CD, of course, it opens up, you have the CD, and then in the other pocket is a foldout. Booklet that folds out into like four panel size square of art on both sides and cassette, even the cassette it folds all the way out into a bunch of artwork. It’s all about that. So, you have the crazy music video that’s all 8 minutes of wacky animation that I got the help of a wonderful, talented guy named Radek Grabinski out in Poland. Good friend of mine that has a video game company. He helped me make that video good. He also made a Simon in Space game. It’s like a retro space shooter. It’s a fun game, the music is on there. You can hear the song playing. So, just coming up with all different ways to experience. this music and enjoy the release of the album. It’s not like a cash grab thing. It’s a free video game. It’s free. Just go play it and have fun and all of that. So that’s it. I just want this to be a fun thing. That’s all I give a shit about at this point.