Each one of us loves turning on the radio and being hit in the face with a balls-out rocking tune. It just makes the day worth living, the place you’re headed to a little bit better. Unfortunately, in today’s overgrowth of bland indistinguishable pop, that experience happens less and less. But because of the simple act of Scott Ian of Anthrax turning fifty, there is a new bombast of music coming out this week that hits the right spot: Motor Sister, the birthday gift that gave more than a one night stand.
Mother Superior, a hard rock band that produced eight albums and was beloved by many, was one of Ian’s favorite bands and he wanted to hear them play again and what a blast it would be for his birthday. So his wife Pearl Aday did what any loving wife would do: she made it happen. By the next day, word had spread and before you could blink an eye, they were in the studio with Armored Saint’s Joey Vera, The Cult’s John Tempesta and Mother Superior vocalist and guitar player Jim Wilson recording twelve hand-picked tunes from the MS catalog. And this week, Ride officially drops with both Scott Ian and Pearl Aday adding their talents on the disc as well. “This Thing Reminds Me Of You,” “A-Hole,” “Little Motor Sister” and “Doghouse” are among the rocking tunes that rush you down the highway in a blaze of glory. This is pure rock & roll.
The gem amongst the testosterone is Pearl Aday’s vocals, buttering Wilson’s lead singing with a crisp bbq sauce that enhances the songs with a savory explosion. They compliment each other so scrumptiously that you put the CD on loop and let it keep playing; not just to revel in the music but to hear more of her voice. If you haven’t discovered her 2010 solo album, Little Immaculate White Fox, and her expressive emotations of songs such as “Nobody,” “Mama” and “Broken White,” do yourself a favor and buy it today as you’re grabbing a copy of Motor Sister’s Ride.
Aday’s backstory is well-known: she’s the daughter of Meatloaf and sang back-up for him for a number of years, as well as doing a tour with Motley Crue where she met future husband Scott Ian. She’s a wife and mother, singer, songwriter, performer and genuine all-around nice person in a crazy music world. As Ian wrote in his 2014 autobiography I’m The Man, “You make me feel like a superhero every day … and my love for you is unequaled.” Now it’s time for even more people to discover the wonderfully talented Aday.
I had the pleasure of talking with the woman who was named after the legendary Janis Joplin and the album that bore her nick-name about her involvement with Motor Sister, being the daughter of a superstar, working on a new solo album of her own and discovering we had more in common than both us being named after iconic rock ladies (I was named after The Beatles “Michelle”). “I love the name Leslie. It’s my mama’s name,” Aday said with a laugh before happily talking about the birthday gift that will keep on giving. “Isn’t it great! I could talk about it till I turn blue. I love it.”
I understand that Motor Sister came about because Scott wanted Mother Superior to play at his birthday party. Does Scott always get what he wants for his birthday?
(laughs) Well, that year he did cause it was his 50th so it was a big deal. I actually threw him four parties, you know, cause he’s Scott Ian and he was turning fifty and it was a big deal and I’m his wife so I have to do a good job, right.
And it turned into something more.
Yeah, we were just looking to make that music come alive again, just for the night for a party to celebrate, and we invited twenty of our friends that we know love the music as well and one of them happened to work for Metal Blade Records and I guess it obviously made an impact because we got a call the next day that said, “We heard about the party, this is amazing, let’s do an album.” And it was like, whoa, okay, cause we were not expecting that. We were just looking to have a party and celebrate and get really drunk and have our friends there and hear the music live again. Apparently it made a big impression on the universe because we are on a fast track. I think it was two months later we went into the studio and in two days we recorded the album that you’re listening to.
That is insane, two days.
Yeah, we made it in two days. We played it live, everybody got into the studio, all in the same room, we played it live and then Jim and I took one day maybe a week later, and in one day we re-sang our vocals together in the same vocal booth. Every single song in one day, just bammed it out like that.
You’ve been working with Jim for quite a while now.
I’ve been working with Jim for a long time, maybe thirteen years, making music, writing together and it’s just a really harmonious relationship. We are both on the same wavelength and we speak the same language musically and it’s just something that really works. Jim is kind of a magic guy when it comes to music. It runs in his blood. He loves it so much. You can tell, obviously. His music that he wrote with Mother Superior that Scott chose, it’s music that we love so much and it was just too good for nobody to hear played live again. At that point is when we decided to put the party together. Mother Superior was defunct, they were not happening for years at that point, and it was kind of heartbreaking for me and Scott so for us it was a given to, “It’s your 50th, let’s whoop it up. We have to do this. Let’s call Jim.” So it was just kind of a nice piece of magic that has kind of proved to us that the music wasn’t over and shouldn’t have been.
Mother Superior released eight albums. How did you pick from all those songs?
It was hard but that task was mainly left up to Scott. Scott’s the one who cherry-picked the twelve that he liked best, which I don’t think was an easy job, and there are definitely some others that moving forward could possibly be done on a next album, if that’s an option for us. But yeah, it was hard. But the ones you are hearing are Scott’s favorites, I guess.
You didn’t get to pick one that you wanted to make sure was on there?
Well I agree with him. I would have probably picked the same list. You can’t go wrong, really, with Mother Superior.
You’ve got Jim on the vocals but then you brought in John Tempesta and Joey Vera. Why those two particular guys to fill out the lineup?
Because we love them. They’re like family to us and they are unbelievable musicians. Joey had been working with Mother Superior in the past in some capacity and Johnny is just an amazing drummer. His talent and style fits this kind of music perfectly and we just knew that he would be great. Scott’s known Johnny for, I don’t know, thirty billion years, so it just like a given, like, oh yeah, let’s call Joey and Johnny. It presented itself, it was already there, you know.
You guys performed in New York not long ago and everyone seemed to be having such a good time.
Yeah. Before we did the party, we rehearsed one day and then the day after the party we got the call about let’s make an album, and then we went into the studio – we didn’t rehearse before we went into the studio – and we recorded it in two days. So it’s something special with this group of friends together and this music that we’re playing. It’s something really special and it just happens and happens in a great way.
What is conceivable for you to do as a group?
We have two more shows definitely booked now, cause the album is out on March 10 and then March 11 we’re playing here in Los Angeles at the Whisky A Go Go. Then on March 12, we’re playing up in San Francisco at a club called the DNA Lounge. Then beyond that, we’re looking to play more. Every single one of us wants to play with Motor Sister because it’s so much fun and it’s just a matter of everybody’s schedules meshing, because everybody’s got their day jobs. But that’s something that we’re striving for – more live shows and let’s see if we can piece together the puzzle to make it work, you know.
Do you think it’s a possibility for you guys to write some original material and continue Motor Sister?
Sure, definitely. When you love doing something so much you find the time. That’s what I believe and that’s something we’ve already been talking about and there have been ideas being tossed back and forth already. It’s definitely something we all want to do as well, to carry it forward.
Are you going to get a chance to do another solo record anytime soon?
Actually yeah, we’re almost finished with a new one. We’ve been working on it for a long time, cause you know Scott and I had a baby three years ago, so my music and everything kind of fell to the wayside. Well, it was placed there because something much more important came into our lives and I was fortunate enough to have all of the time to be a full-time mom and to just devote all of my time and energy to just doing that. Our son is three and a half now. So for years we’ve had these songs kicking around and then over the past year or so, we started to record them with Jay Ruston and this album is very cool.
It’s a bit different from the last one. The last one was more hard rock. This one is still rock but we’re calling it more like a California country thing. It’s more like the Eagles than AC/DC, and not to toot our own horns but it’s pretty awesome we think. We have Jay Dee Maness, a pedal steel player who played with the Buckaroos and Gram Parsons and played on “Tears In Heaven.” We’ve also got Philip Sayce, who is an amazing blues guitarist. We’re almost finished. We have nine songs, I think, done and we just decided to redo two from the last album with this energy as well. We’ll be done soon so that’s something for us also to look forward to: working with Motor Sister and working with Jim and now I have a side thing, well, it’s a side thing now, but that will be finished soon as well. We’re excited about it.
The sound on your upcoming album, was that just a mood you were in or just a natural progression for you?
Maybe both but I think that kind of music is always in us too. There were little touches of it on the last album as well with songs like “My Heart Isn’t In It.” It’s always there. To me, it’s all rock & roll and if you really like hard rock or if you like metal, it doesn’t mean you can’t like the Eagles or the Stones, you know what I mean. I think it all comes from the same spirit, pretty much, but I think these songs were just the songs that came out. The way that Jim and I write, usually what happens is he’ll give me a call or text, and he’ll say, “I have this new idea for a melody.” And he’ll play it and we’ll record the music, he’ll play it on his guitar, and then I’ll take it back and plug words in. That’s how we work and these were the songs that were coming out at the time when we were writing new music. And we just went with it. Go with what you feel cause that’s when it sounds the best.
Why did it take you so long to do a solo album in the first place?
People always say, “Why did you wait so long?” I don’t know if I was waiting. I think I did it when I was ready to do it. I don’t think I could have done it if I tried to do it before. It wasn’t like I had a plan like, “I’ll wait till this point and then I’ll do it.” It’s like I needed to live my life and have the experiences that I was having in order to be able to do it. I did it when I was ready to do it.
Little Immaculate White Fox had such great tunes on it and I wanted to ask you about a couple of them: “Nobody” and “Broken White.”
I really like both those songs and they are both really fun to sing. “Broken White” is really hard to sing (laughs) and it takes a lot out of you. But you write about what you know and your experiences. Everything I write about is really personal cause that’s where you feel the most passion. “Nobody,” when I wrote that song I had stopped singing with my dad. I had sang with him for nine years and that transition that we both had to make together, for me ending singing with him, was a bit bumpy so my words in that song were about that, about this sort of tumultuous patch that we went through.
And “Broken White” was actually about, I was reading the New Yorker one day and there was a big article about the artist named Marlene Dumas. I don’t know if you know of her but she’s a painter and a really interesting person to read about whether you like her paintings or not. Anyway, there is a painting of hers that is called Broken White and in the painting it’s sort of like a close-up of a woman’s face and it looks like her head is a bit thrown back and you can’t tell if she’s in ecstasy or if she’s in pain and it was just really striking to me. So I basically wrote a story around it from how that piece of art struck me, where it made my brain go. It’s about what I saw in that painting.
When did you first feel the desire or the pull to write songs?
Since I was a child. I think I’d always been singing around the house since I could speak. I’ve been around music my entire life. Music is just in my blood and I think with the help of a friend of the family, I was about fifteen when I wrote my first song. It was called, “We Were So Young.” (laughs) But I think at that point I had tried to do a little bit here and there. I was always in musicals in school. I played the cello from fourth grade to eleventh grade. But I think maybe at fifteen was when I grasped the songwriting format. I just started writing poetry. I have notebooks and notebooks full of lines and poems and phrases and things like that. Then I finally, I guess, figured out how to put it to music. I’ve been doing that forever.
When a song is forming in your head, is it words that come first or melodies?
Both. It’s more and more, I find, with me getting comfortable with it, which sounds funny cause I’ve been doing it for so long. But I’ve started hearing melodies more readily than I ever had in the past. There’s a song on the new album, the one I just told you about that we’re still finishing up right now, and it’s called “Revel Young,” and it’s about our son, our son’s name is Revel Young, and I don’t know if it was the epiphany of becoming a mother or giving birth or being pregnant for all that long. I don’t know what it was but I think it had something to do with that. But I remember markedly there was this moment when I had my brand new son and I was breastfeeding him and I started singing to him, singing his name, and I heard this melody. So I actually have written a melody for the chorus of this new song that is on this new album. So that’s very exciting for me. Writing the lyrics is very exciting for me as well but being able to also be a part of the music is exciting for me because it just shows me that it was something that was always inside of me and I just couldn’t find it. And now I have found it.
You went to college and majored in Creative Writing. Did you ever have any aspirations early on to go in a different direction than music?
I love to write, I love creative writing as well, but I really did want to go to school for music. I would have loved to go to Berklee. I went to Emerson College, which was fine for me and great and I did get that first degree in Creative Writing, which I am very proud of, which I am applying to what I do today. I still do creative writing but music was always there. Even though I was in college, I was majoring in Creative Writing, I was still going and being in the musicals and singing in bands. I never got away from music. So I guess the answer to that question is no, I didn’t ever really want to do anything else but music. I was willing to try other things but it always comes back to music.
When did you realize that your family was a little bit different than the family down the street?
I don’t know. It’s normal to me cause it’s all that I know. I don’t know what it’s like having a policeman for a father, what it’s like having a doctor for a father. It’s all relative. It’s the only thing I know so it’s normal to me. And I grew up with friends who also had parents who were entertainers. But I also grew up with friends who had doctors for fathers or mailmen for fathers and that was normal to them. It’s just the way that it is. It wasn’t strange to me cause it was what I knew so it was normal to me.
Of your two parents, who has kept you grounded the most in this business? Is it your father because he is in the business or your mother because she was on the outskirts or the sidelines of the business?
Both of them in all aspects, I think. My dad was in the business and I was witness to a lot of stuff whether it was the troubles that my dad was going through with managers and/or record companies and you learned to keep one eye open at all times. You learn how to spot, what do you call them, assholes from a billion miles away (laughs). When you’re in the entertainment business you tend to be surrounded by assholes, you just have to be able to recognize them. And also be able to know how to surround yourself with good people and people who actually support you and what you do.
And there’s always a woman behind the man, right. My mom actually used to tour manage for an amount of time. She got her travel agent’s license to become a travel agent so that she could book the band and stuff because, if you know anything about my dad’s career, it was really, really high and then it got really, really low, and then it got really, really high again. So it’s been a big rollercoaster for all of us and along that way everybody learned a lot. So I watched my parents deal with the way, way highs and the way, way lows, and we all got out of it okay (laughs). I have to attribute what I know about this business to them.
Who was the first real rock star you ever met?
We lived in Woodstock and my mother worked at Bearsville Studios, so Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman; Diana Ross has been in my life since I was five years old. She’s like my second mother and her youngest daughter is my best friend since we were five years old. I’ve been meeting celebrities since I was an infant.
Were you ever starstruck by any of them?
I don’t get starstruck easily but recently I got starstruck and I’ll tell you two times that just popped into my brain. Once was a few years ago. As a gift from my husband for my birthday, he took me to see Bonnie Raitt. She was playing in Honolulu, so we went to see Bonnie Raitt and we got to meet Bonnie and I was like drooling. I couldn’t speak, it was ridiculous (laughs). We took a picture and my face in the picture is like the dumbest face in the world. I don’t even know what I was doing. So I freaked out meeting her.
Then just recently I had the chance to meet Gregg Allman. Oh my God, I was like, “Gregg Allman, I love you, I’ve been wearing your t-shirt,” cause I knew he was going to be at this event so I wore my Allman Brothers t-shirt, and organically I got to meet him in a hallway, just ran into him. I just fell at him and he gave me a hug and he was so charming. Then I think I went out into the alleyway and cried or something (laughs). I was so happy. So I don’t get starstruck too easily but with Gregg Allman and Bonnie Raitt, I kind of freaked out.
And one time I went to see Aretha Franklin in concert and I got to sit in the front row and she came forward and she reached down and I got to grab her hand. She touched my hand (laughs) so I got really excited about that. I didn’t get to really officially meet her or speak with her but I got to touch her from the stage.
Has it always been natural for you to be on a stage with thousands of people looking at you?
You know, for me, thousands of people is less scary than a tiny room of twenty-five or thirty. I think because a giant audience is more anonymous in a way, if that makes sense. You can’t actually see everybody and if you’re in front of an audience of thousands of people, you’ve got really big bright lights on you, blinding you, and you can’t see them so you just go for it. But in a small intimate setting, it’s a little bit more nerve-wracking. I think the most nerve-wracking experience I have had onstage is probably where I had to do some public speaking or something. Singing is not really a problem for me but public speaking is scary. Like, we’ve got a lot of stand-up comedian friends and I don’t know how the fuck they do that. That is so bizarre to me, so scary.
When you need a boost of inspiration, who do you put on the headphones?
You know what, there are so many answers to that question, but in past years I find myself putting on my friend Leona Naess, who is actually the step-daughter of Diana Ross, and she’s an artist as well, a singer and a songwriter, and I get really inspired by her songwriting and her lyrics. Her style is very different from mine, she’s quite pop-y, but her writing I have always been really impressed with. So I put her on a lot. For some reason that kind of gets my creative juices flowing. Maybe it’s because I really see her as a peer and she does it very well so maybe that inspires me. You know, her energy inspires me to have energy in that direction.
What was the most unique thing that inspired you to write a song?
Maybe it was that Broken White painting, because I think most of the other songs that I wrote, not to belittle those songs or what they are about or where the stories are coming from. But those are very personal, maybe things that happened to me or things that happened to my friends. There is a song on the new album that’s coming. You know when you have a friend you love so much and they have a broken heart and you don’t know exactly what to say? I didn’t know what to say. This happened in real life and it was a really horribly sad heartbreak for her and I didn’t know what to say so instead I wrote a song from the viewpoint of the man that broke her heart and what he should have said and how she should have acted. That was sort of the only thing I could give to her in that time, do you know what I mean, because I couldn’t say anything to make it better. So instead, I wrote a song from the viewpoint of her man, but I made him say the things he should have said. And that song is called “Nothing Like Romance.”
Any idea when that is going to come out?
I don’t actually. We’ll be finishing it soon and then we just need to find a home for it in terms of how we get it out to people’s ears, however that is done these days. But soon. We’re doing everything we can and we’ve got a good little fanbase going since the last album so those people are kind of chomping at the bit to hear new stuff as well. So I’m back baby! (laughs)
