ALICE COOPER On Forthcoming Album: 'It Will Definitely Have A Lot Of Different Flavors In It That We Don't Normally Go To'

Rock legend Alice Cooper recently spoke with Kyle Meredith of Consequence Of Sound. The full conversation can be streamed below. A few excerpts follow (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On the recently released "Breadcrumbs" EP:

Alice: "It's about Detroit. It's all Detroit players. All the songs are from Detroit players or about Detroit. It's hometown for me, so we just figured that we would do a tip of the hat to my hometown and came out with some interesting things... There's a certain amount of R&B that's built into these players. Even if they're playing hard rock, there's just a taste of R&B in there, and I can hear it on these tracks, which makes it different from anything else I've done."

On the "Detroit sound":

Alice: "I think if you really want to take it back, it goes back to the fact that most of these kids' parents worked in the auto business. They worked in the factories, and everybody was sort of middle-class or lower-middle-class and kind of had the same upbringing. They don't want to hear soft rock. They want to hear something that gets them going. They want to hear the horsepower. It's like having a muscle car. That's the kind of mentality it is. If you're Seals & Croft, when we lived in Detroit, you're just going to die out there, but if you're a hard rock band with attitude and energy like MC5 or Iggy [Pop] or ALICE or any of those bands, then you're home free there. It's always been like that — it's just always been the hard rock capital of the United States... I still feel that when I go Detroit, it still has the same feel. Rock bands are rock bands there. Jack White has got this certain attitude in his music that's purely Detroit, and that's what makes it so cool. I just did a thing with him, and I said, 'It's really hard not to sound like Detroit if you're from Detroit.' He said, 'You're right.' It's really, really true."

On "Go Man Go", the new original song on "Breadcrumbs":

Alice: "When [producer] Bob [Ezrin] and I write together, we go right back to the source of everything. That's just what we are. If you take rock n' roll back to very essence of it, we're all Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry was what we all learned first, and that includes THE BEATLES and THE ROLLING STONES and everybody else. He was really the guy that put guitar rock on the map, and we just took it from there and turned it into something else."

On the status of his forthcoming record:

Alice: "We've done all the [musical] bed tracks already. The bed tracks are done. We did them all in Detroit, and now we're going to be doing the vocals in Phoenix, just because I'm between tours at the time and I've got some days off in Phoenix. I said, 'I really have to be home for a few days, so let's do the vocals in Phoenix instead of going back to Detroit for the vocals.' The essence of the songs are all done, ready to go."

On whether "Breadcrumbs" should be taken as a preview of what's to come:

Alice: "That was the whole idea — 'Breadcrumbs' was sort of, like, leading you into the next album. It's all original stuff. The new album is all original stuff. The original [ALICE COOPER] BAND is going to be playing on it — the O.G.'s, we call them. The original guys. There's two or three songs that we wrote with the original guys, and they're pure Detroit... We're probably more Detroit than we are L.A. or Phoenix or anyplace else. We go to a lot of places that we wouldn't normally go, because we're working with writers that we normally don't work with, and I kind of like that. I like breaking out of the mode where an ALICE COOPER album sounds like an ALICE COOPER album. This will sound like an ALICE COOPER album, but it will definitely have a lot of different flavors in it that we don't normally go to. It was like that with the [HOLLYWOOD] VAMPIRES album. When 'Rise' came out, Johnny [Depp] did most of the writing on it — Johnny and Tommy [Henriksen], my other guitar player. Instead of me going into these songs – like, they sent the songs to me and sent them to Joe [Perry]. Joe and I decided, 'If we get real involved with this, it's going to sound like ALICE COOPER or AEROSMITH, so let's not do what we would normally do to our songs. Let's let it be what it is. That's what made that album original-sounding — the fact that we didn't go in and do surgery on those songs. We let it be what it was when Johnny wrote them. I did a few vocal things, lyric things and everything like that, but I said, 'If I start getting involved in arranging on this album, it's going to end up sounding like me, and I don't want the VAMPIRES to sound like ALICE."

"Breadcrumbs" was released in September via earMUSIC.