Getting some props from Ringo Starr is a pretty big deal. The purveyor of peace and love may not have been the best drummer in rock & roll but he was, after all, in the greatest band in musical history. So when he pops up the other day and says Matt Sorum was “the best drummer for Guns N Roses,” that’s pretty darn cool.
Not long ago, Sorum felt he needed to get some music out of his soul. It was almost calling to him. So he went to the desert and he went to the ocean and he wrote – about things that had been swirling around his psyche for quite some time, about what he saw happening in the world, about his beloved Earth and the creatures that we share it with. He was not a newbie to producing his own music but it had been a while since he had taken the time to actually record. He was just too busy. Bands like the Cult, Guns N Roses, Velvet Revolver and most recently the supergroup Kings Of Chaos have kept creativity humming in his life. But he was also giving freely of his time to charitable organizations such as the Dolphin Project and his own Adopt The Arts. “Over the last three years I’ve started to get more involved in more charitable work,” Sorum explained to me during our interview this past December. “Organically I started to change as a human being. I’m getting a little bit older, I’ve had a really blessed life, I’ve been given a lot of gifts. I started just kind of turning around naturally.”
With all of these things coming to a pinnacle, the music was ready to come out and next week, on March 11, Sorum presents Stratosphere by Matt Sorum’s Fierce Joy. With an almost hypnotic, surreal vibe floating throughout the actual music, the lyrics are the first things that actually catch and hold your attention. Matt Sorum has taken some beautiful, spiritual, touching melodies and hammered home some tough love. Granted, he’s not all completely zen and harmonic conversions. There’s a Beatles psychedelia spritzing over “What Ziggy Says,” a middle-eastern enchantment in “Land Of The Pure” and “For The Wild Ones” there’re hints of what Lou Reed may have sounded like if he was a bit more, shall we say, peppy. What Sorum has created is something for the brain, the soul and the flesh. If you’re looking for traces of GNR and the Cult, it’s more ingrained into the woodwork of the words than the harder rock he is known for. Sorum has chosen the guitar and his voice over what his wrists can do. And he has sculpted a garden of hope. “
I’m known as a rock guy, but I’ve always loved so many diverse artists,” Sorum posted to his Facebook on Sunday. “You can hear that influence on the new album.”
After spending time in December with Sorum in Los Angeles for his Kings Of Chaos concert to help raise money and awareness for the Dolphin Project, I have personally seen how the transformation of a rock & roll boy-child has grown into a man with a heart for giving. He is passionate about his philanthropy work with animals and children, and he has this wonderful crocus breaking through the snow freshness that allows him to enjoy every day with new eyes and a hopefulness that is contagious. It is why so many come running when he asks for their participation in his projects.
Your new album is coming out soon and there are a lot of serious lyrics going on in these songs. Not exactly what some fans may be expecting from the former drummer of Guns N Roses.
(laughs) Well, I guess the easiest way to explain it is when I started writing the album, I really set aside a period of time where I actually went out to the desert near Palm Springs and hung out there for about a week. I went with my writing partner that I worked on some of the songs with and basically just sat there and worked on music without any distractions. We really didn’t do anything but write, which was great, because it’s so hard sometimes to sort of write when there’s things going on around you and distractions and cell phones and all kinds of stuff. So I took the time to go there. After that I went down to Laguna Beach for a while, where I kind of grew up. I grew up down near the ocean so I went down there for another week and did the same thing.
I’ve heard the desert had a really great vortex for like energy and feeling creativity and that kind of stuff. And I really did feel it. I had sort of a stream of consciousness out there that really helped me find my path on the album. I had concepts and ideas for songs and most of the ideas for the music were already happening; but when it came time to write the lyrics, it just started flowing. I can’t even explain it. I had ideas of things I wanted to talk about, of course, but once I grabbed onto a title, or an idea where I was going, I started to kind of form the lyrics. We used a lot of different techniques to doing that but I really felt like I fell into my own lyrically on this album. I haven’t really taken on lyrics this heavy in my career ever. When I started writing them, I just felt like I was just going to write from my heart and not really worried about whether if some were too deep or too heavy. And I didn’t think outside of myself. I didn’t go, “Well, what are people going to think of this?”
So that was the easiest way to get it done. For instance, the song “The Sea.” I wrote that lyric down by the ocean, obviously, but I sort of thought about my life and where I’d been. I struggled with drugs and alcohol for a long time and I finally got clean about six years ago. That was really sort of a metaphor for a new take on life, water being a metaphor for spirituality and cleansing and all kinds of things like that. So that lyric kind of came through that idea. If you hear the lyric in the second verse, “Find a raft where it teaches me to be at one with the sea, can’t wait to meet you there when I dive into the sea.” Basically, meet who there? Who are you talking about? Basically, I’m talking about spirituality, a higher power, that kind of thing.
When I wrote “What Ziggy Says,” I thought that was sort of a way to connect with my family, so most of the lyrics in that song are based on family members. My wife’s name is Ace, my dog’s name is Lola and Bowie, and my grandfather’s name is Dr Bob. I talk about pretty much every family member, my mom and dad, in that song and how really they are the circle of life for you. When everything else fails, you got family, you know what I mean. That’s the story of life.
And then I got into songs like “Lady Of The Stone,” which is a song about global warming and sort of questions the weather and drones and different stuff. I’m a little bit of a conspiracy theorist. I’ve got ideas that the government is just messing with us (laughs). Then I get into “For The Wild Ones,” which is basically my song on animal rights, how I feel wildlife should be left alone. Wildlife should be protected, in general, and it’s really a song about how wildlife should be left in the wild. We shouldn’t be allowed to capture it for entertainment.
I’m kind of jumping around with my thoughts, basically. Songs like “Josephine” is about my grandmother. She is a hundred years old, a hundred and one now. That’s a love story between her and my grandfather. “Killers N Lovers” is a dark, sinister story of the underbelly of the city.
Do you think you could have written songs like this ten or fifteen years ago or do you think you had to grow into them?
Oh, I had to grow to be able to be this brave. I think in Guns N Roses especially, I think Axl was a great lyricist. I think he always pushed the envelope and I used to really respect that about him because he wasn’t your typical rock lyricist in those days. If you remember listening to those songs from hair metal bands, I mean, we weren’t really in that pack. And I think that’s the reason why a lot of people in America, especially in the mid-West, gravitated towards him, because he’s really speaking to them.
But that was then and this is now. I think times have changed, especially for me. No, I couldn’t have. I was in a different mindset. I was younger, I was just really discovering the world. I was running around having fun, playing rock & roll and entertaining people and not really thinking much about the impact of what I was doing. It was a whole different energy, being in a rock band and touring. And we were rebelling in a major way and showing the world that you could be who you want to be, celebrating life and not letting anyone tell us what to do. In that time, we were the kings of rebellion. We were. We really stood for it. And moralistically, do what you want to do to your body, it’s your body. If you want to get drunk, if you want to do drugs, but then obviously the effects of that took it’s toll on all of us in the end. But now I’m just in a different head-space. I’m an older guy, I’ve done everything there is to do in rock & roll, and I really just want to kind of be honest about where I’m at now. And I think this record is really honest for me. I’m not trying to be the rock guy or being forced into being what maybe my fans might want me to be. It was very freeing and cathartic when I did this album, to be able to just do some music for the sake of doing the music I wanted to put down on a recording.
When I recorded it, I did it all in my backyard, believe it or not. I have a pretty nice recording studio and obviously it’s an independent record so I had to make it with all my own money. I have a buddy in Texas that is like one of my closest friends and he’s a doctor and he said, “Matt, I want to back you up on doing this record.” That’s why we called the label Rok Dok Recordings. He basically came in and took the whole thing and said, “Look, I want to do this. It’s exciting for me.” Here’s a guy that’s got a good business in medicine and his name is Dr Garry Craighead and he gets a lot of excitement out of being around the music business, because it’s good for him and it makes him feel good to be involved. So we both did this together and then I brought in all the musicians and we recorded it and then I got a friend of mine, Alain Johannes to mix it. He’s done Mark Lanegan, Queens Of The Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures and Arcade Fire. So when I went to mix it, I really wanted to make sure that I had a great mixer. I actually tried three guys out and then after I got them hired I told them that I couldn’t pay them that much (laughs) I said this is an independent record, which is a whole different ballgame. When I used to be in the big machine with these records like Guns N Roses, Velvet Revolver and The Cult working on Atlantic Records or Geffen, I don’t even want to tell you what we spent on those records. In the millions, you know. I made this record for a catering budget for a week.
But that was probably a great feeling, getting to do this without anybody else’s influence coming in there and trying to tell you what to do.
This has been the best experience of my life. I put a team together of people that are incredible. I’ve got Kymm Britton, who is an amazing publicist and works with some of the biggest bands in the world. She’s come on board and done a great job. Then I got a guy that used to actually work for Velvet Revolver at RCA Records handling all my label services, basically my A&R man. I’ve got a team of music licensing people, about five of them. I’ve got two publishers. I’ve already got “The Sea” on CSI in December. We’re going to start licensing out the music all over the place and you’ll hopefully be hearing it on TV, film, video games. That’s the only way to really monetize music for musicians anymore. I mean, I hope I sell a chunk of records but to be able to go and do this again, I’ve got to work really hard to try to see if I can get a little bit of funding back by going out and licensing this music. And to explain what that is, is basically I loan it out to television shows, film, different things.
Are you going to play some shows?
Well, that’s another very difficult thing and it’s very hard when you’re on the independent level. No one’s getting paid and you get in the van and roll down the highway and play shows for no money. The reality of people offering Matt Sorum enough money to be able to get him a hotel room is tough. But I’ve devised a scheme of how I can maybe raise some money to go out and do it. I think that’s a little bit of the difference between a major and an independent. You’ve got to find the capital to be able to go out and tour. Obviously, you’ve got to feed people, get hotel rooms. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. Then people got to come see you. Let’s see how the album starts to roll out and hopefully I’ll get some movement on that and try to get out next summer is my plan.
What was the “surprise” song on this album – the one that almost didn’t make it on or the one that was completely changed from it’s original version?
I added “Lonely Teardrop” at the very end. I recorded that by myself. That was sort of the song that I wrote at the very end of the session. It’s the second to last song on the album and I felt that it was good enough to add and it fit into the story. And I did “Stratosphere,” a spoken word thing at the end too. Initially that was going to start the album. My friend and I had started working on the orchestration on a mellotron but we were going to attach that to the beginning of “Gone.” It was going to be a segue piece but it became too long and we started really getting into it. We were like out there one night and we had just gotten this crazy mellotron instrument. I don’t know if you know what that is but it’s basically a machine that has horns, strings, like live tapes of real voices, and samples on the machine. So we started orchestrating that whole piece that was going to be “Stratosphere.”
I had written this poem called “Stratosphere,” which is the title of the album, and I said, “I want to go out and speak that over the music” and I did this spoken word thing cause I’ve always been into spoken word. I went out and did that and it just worked and I go, “Oh my God, that’s the beginning of the album.” Then I started working on where I was going to place that on the album and I opted for the end after my publicist was like, “Maybe we’d better put it at the end because we don’t want to completely freak people out.” (laughs) Gil Scott-Heron, I was really into, and Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs; those guys, kind of like a Beat Poet spoken word kind of trip. That’s kind of what I was going for when I did it. There’s a whole scene out there for that, that spoken word kind of trip. Who knows, someone might dig it (laughs)
We all know Matt Sorum the drummer but not so much Matt Sorum the guitar player. Was that always a part of your childhood and not just drums?
Yeah, I’ve been playing guitar since high school. I’ve got a massive collection here of guitars. I’ve got more guitars than most guitar players. In the last week alone I bought six guitars. I’ve got three Les Pauls, I’ve got three Gretsch guitars, I’ve got two Telecasters, two Stratocasters, I’ve got probably about eight acoustic guitars. I mean, they’re everywhere. It drives my wife crazy (laughs). Right now there’s a plethora of them in the bedroom. And I have a mass collection of guitar amps. I’m obsessed with guitars. I think they’re beautiful. I just love them and that’s very much what went on this record too. I mean, every guitar on that album, those are all retro classic guitars: Old 1960’s Gretsch Country Gentleman used by guys like George Harrison to Rickenbackers used by bands like the Byrds and The Beatles. I was very adamant about the guitars that were on this record. It had to be classic, 335 Gibson Les Paul, Les Paul guitar from like 1959. All the amps are old. I used all vintage amps. There’s just something very soulful about that to me. An older instrument, a vintage instrument, it just feels like the soul of the instrument really speaks because it’s had a life, it’s been played, it’s been around; it’s basically told a lot of stories. You can actually feel that in the music, I think. I used a 1963 drum set, very old drums. They’re almost fifty years old, you know.
How big of a difference was it going from being behind the drums to being up front with just your voice and guitar?
Well, I’ve always been a singing drummer so I’ve always sort of based a lot of what I play off the vocals, believe it or not. If you ask a guy like Ringo or people like that that are more song drummers, that weren’t virtuoso or more about themselves, “Look how flashy I am, look at my drum solo.” I don’t really consider myself that kind of drummer. I’ve got some chops if I want to BUT the mainstay of why I’ve been in bands for as long as I’ve been in bands is that when I get ready to go and record a song, it’s more about the song. It’s not about me. I’m a team player. So when I stepped up front, it’s the same thing. Even being the drummer in bands like the Cult, Velvet Revolver, Guns N Roses, I was very instrumental in the arrangement of the song. And you can ask Slash or Duff, even when we did these Illusion albums, we all sat in a room and put those songs together. Even though I didn’t get publishing on a lot of that music per se, I was very instrumental in the arrangement of that music. Meaning, “I think we should go here and try this.” We all had a very open forum for working on stuff. I think that’s what really sort of makes great bands. I think that if people are open enough to be able to work like that in an environment, being willing to try things like that, experimenting, is the reason we came up with great product. And we never really argued about it. We all kind of knew, we all had a sense that we respected each other enough to be able to try each guy’s idea. And out of that came great music.
With this, same thing. When I went into the room with the guys to start doing pre-production, I told them initially, “I want you guys to tell me anything you want to tell me and do whatever it is you want to do to the music and we’ll all talk openly.” And to be honest with you, everything went down so easy I can’t even believe it. And the way I arranged the music was sort of by instinct of all the things I’d learned over the years. So I think a lot of drummers make great producers and make great arrangers and sometimes makes great frontmen, like Phil Collins, Don Henley, Dave Grohl, a lot of guys. So when I stepped into that position, it was very natural because I had already been kind of doing it, except from behind the drums.
But some people are more comfortable being back there and not front and center.
Oh don’t get me wrong, it took me a minute to get my heebie-jeebies off (laughs). It’s a different feeling to be able to stand up front and lead the band. You got to have some sort of presence that people are even going to want to watch, and obviously I’m not like up there doing calisthenics with my voice. I’m doing more of a, I don’t know, doing more of a Tom Petty meets Mark Lanagen kind of thing. And you got to find the right audience for that, especially if you’re going to step in front of a bunch of rockers. But once you get past that, once you do it a few times, it’s like, oh, this feels pretty cool. I like this, I like being able to be up on the mic and talking and have the audience [attention]. You could see why lead singers could get a little cuckoo (laughs), because it becomes a very sort of powerful place to be standing. It’s like you’re talking to the audience and they’re listening and it’s cool. I can’t wait to go out on the road and be able to have that forum to express myself. I like it.
Who was the first real rock star you ever met?
The first real one I ever met was Chris Squire from Yes and I was about sixteen and I snuck in backstage at the Long Beach Arena. I was a kid. But somehow I got a backstage pass and I snuck in and I met him and he was very nice to me. I went up to him and I said, “Mr Squire, how are you?” (laughs) And now we’re friends. Years later I know him and I still consider him a legend like in that progressive rock world. It’s pretty cool to be able to say, “Hey Chris, how you doing?” And he says, “Hey Matt.”
Since February was a big Beatles anniversary month, as a drummer, what do you think was Ringo’s greatest moment on drums?
Oh God, his greatest moment on drums, I mean, there’s so many, you know. I don’t think they looked to him as an amazing drummer but what a character and the reason I play drums is Ringo. There’s something about him, he just had so much charisma. His persona jumped off the stage. Everybody knows Ringo. Everyone knows his name. But I love songs like “Come Together” and the tom-tom work on that and the hi-hat work. There are so many musical moments of what he did on the drums. “Come Together” is probably one of my favorites because of the simplicity of the tom-tom rolls. But it’s such a big part of the song. It’s so musical but it’s like he’s playing notes on the drums. It’s like I said before, it’s all musical, it’s all part of it. And that was the clever sort of songwriting ability that he was a big part of. And I love him when he sings too. I love that whole “Octopus’s Garden” thing. What a beautiful idea for a song. And that’s another guy I know personally and I see him quite a bit and it’s such a dream for me. I feel like I’m living in some sort of a dreamscape around him.
What still excites you about playing music?
I love making it and seeing the end result, like as hard as I worked on this album and it’s finally coming out and it’s been almost a year’s process. I mean, I finished the record last summer. I’ve been kind of setting it up and I want to make sure the world can hear it. But it’s been my life. I don’t know what else I’d do if I didn’t make music. And I’ve gotten to this point so there’s no stopping now, you know what I mean. I love being able to get out on the road and play for people and I love when people gravitate towards it. And that’s going to be the most interesting part about this record is seeing the reaction and see what people are going to be saying about the album. And so far so good. I think the first word out of their mouth is they’re very surprised, and it’s heavy in a different way. It’s not heavy rock but it’s heavy in a different way.
Are you doing anything with the Dolphin Project?
I am working on something, yeah. I’m trying to get something going on with that again and I’m in contact with them a couple times a week and I’m constantly tweeting on it. I’m going to be constantly working on the Dolphin Project [http://dolphinproject.org/] and my charity for kids, Adopt The Arts [http://www.adoptthearts.org/], so I’m very much in that world. It keeps me going.
Anything else you have coming up?
I’m going to be working on getting this album out. We’re setting up a couple different Facebook pages, one in Portuguese and one in Spanish, and just getting people to come over to the Matt Sorum world. I’ve got the Kings Of Chaos I’m working on too, going to be touring, making a DVD, we’re doing lots of stuff so I got my hands full for sure (laughs)
Link to earlier interview with Sorum about the Dolphin Project
Live photographs by Leslie Michele Derrough
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