CROWBAR's KIRK WINDSTEIN: 'I've Always Had That MOTÖRHEAD Mentality: We're Not Going To Change'

Australia's Triple T recently conducted an interview with frontman Kirk Windstein of veteran New Orleans sludge metallers CROWBAR. You can listen to the entire chat below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On his recent activities:

Kirk: "I recorded a solo album which is coming out — it's like 'mellow CROWBAR,' I call it. There's a lot more clean guitars, more vocal melodies and shit, but it's still my style. That's coming out late January. We're set up in the studio with everything, demoed to click tracks, we're ready to roll when we get home. We'll take off a week or something, then boom, let's go. We'll be doing the twelfth CROWBAR record."

On his life as a professional musician:

Kirk: "It's not as easy as you think, obviously with traveling and whatnot. It's gotten so much easier for me since I've gotten with my wife [Robin]. She travels with me so that makes it really good. It's a lot of hard work but we're blessed to do it. I mean, how many people pick up a guitar or play drums, sing, and get to travel around the world? I've been to Europe 47 times since 1992. Literally. That's 27 years ago. I went once this year, but we went four times a year before. Been to Australia. This is my fourth time. I've been to Japan once, but I'd like to go more often. We played with DOWN, CROWBAR, Russia five times, Istanbul, Turkey, Tel-Aviv, Israel, Estonia, Bulgaria, Latvia, places bands are starting to go, but people never played there before because of socialist-communist stuff in the past, but those people get so pumped and excited to have bands come play for them. The shows are crazy. They don't have money for merchandise and stuff like that, but that's okay — we just want them to be there. You have kids crying, going crazy. It's amazing. It's a lot of work, most definitely. For me, this is our life. But, at the same time, I'm a husband and a father, stepfather, grandfather and all of these things as well. All of that comes first, but we're busy like we are now, obviously, on tour. Even when we get home, we'll have a tour in the States which we can't announce, which will be great. And with the studio stuff, it's a full days' work every day, just doing business with e-mails and phones and text. We do as much as we can ourselves where it's really a family thing for Robin and I. It's a lot of work, but no complaining."

On where he thinks metal music is headed:

Kirk: "For me, I've been doing it for so long. I see so many young bands like INCITE. There's a lot of bands that we tour with that I think are great bands, but it's so difficult. What it is, everything is so oversaturated. The technology — when we got signed to our first little record deal, you needed to have a proper record company. I did ten CDs a night for a guy's band and they sound production-wise, amazing. You can make this record at home on your computer or whatever. We don't do that — we try to do shit old-school, we're trying to make our records sound more old-school, like fresh and new and not squashed. Everybody listens to their music on those little earbuds, nah. I need big speakers. I can't hear anyway. I see so many good bands the last 10 or 15 years, they put out three or four records and I love the bands, but they don't seem to get to the next level. I really think it's oversaturation. For a band like CROWBAR, any of us, our group of people, HATEBREED, anybody, we've all been around that we have a name, even though it's not a household name, we have a name and it's an established band, with a lot of material already out. Unfortunately, there's not many new bands that break through and climb. We always do what we do. I've always had the MOTÖRHEAD mentality. We're not going to change, we're not going to stop wearing the shit we wear, we're not getting a haircut anyway, we're not going to do anything that's hot for the moment, we're CROWBAR. Here are three or four chords and my voice. Love it or hate it. We're CROWBAR, we sound like CROWBAR. You treat your fans great, you kick ass every night, you appreciate what you're doing, you do it well, even though there's peaks and valleys throughout your career and bands jump way above you, a lot of them are gone, unfortunately. I'm not happy about that, but I watch it happen a lot over the last 30 years. We just work hard, jam our asses off, give the best show we can every night, shake every hand, take every photo, give the people what they want. It worked for MOTÖRHEAD, not that we're MOTÖRHEAD. [Laughs]"

CROWBAR's latest studio album, "The Serpent Only Lies", was released in 2016 via eOne.

Windstein will release his first solo album, "Dream In Motion", on January 24 via eOne.