DOKKEN Guitarist Talks About Upcoming Album

A brand-new interview with DOKKEN guitarist John Levin has been posted on the band's official web site. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Q: That is awesome. Now tell me, how is the new DOKKEN album coming along? When are you going into the studio to finish it?

John Levin: "Well, it is coming along well. We are working on two albums right now. The studio album is going to be called 'Lightning Strikes Again', and I would say we have nine tracks done as demos for it. We are gonna do things diffrently this time. We are going to get all the music down on demo form, and then when we go into the studio, we are not going to spend a lot of time messing with parts, we are going to blast it out. The demo sounds so sophisticated if I played it for you, you would think it sounds like the record already."

Q: What kind of sound are you aiming for on "Lightning Strikes Again"? Don says it is going to be heavy like "Tooth and Nail".

John Levin: "It is so hard to compare. I thought 'Hell to Pay' was a step closer to the older stuff, some of the fans agreed. To me, each piece of music is its own child. I think it sounds like DOKKEN, but who knows? There is an old saying, 'You try and please everyone and you please no one, so you are best just pleasing yourself.' The only thing I can guarantee the fans that all the songs are heartfelt, and not a bunch of stuff where someone is trying to re-create a past feeling."

Q: How do you feel about the new DOKKEN? I think you are going to bring in new fans, and you have a long career ahead of you.

John Levin: "Thank you very much. I think this is the best we ever played, like I said earlier. The last tour, night after night, we were just playing unbelievably well. I don't know what came over us. We all felt that way. We were all like getting off stage, and looking at eachother ya know really psyched, and playing at a whole new level than we never have done as a band before. We are all really, really excited about it. The reason I respect Don so much, is because what Don does and what Don writes is very genuine. He doesn't jump on any trend. He only writes from his heart, and things that are real. There is nothing contrived about it. For the same reason, it is perhaps why each record doesn’t sound a like. You can't have true creativity and try and do it the same way every time. The music that you wrote is just a moment in time. That is really what it is, it is a moment in time, it is something we wrote about at the time, and I played a solo on it which came out at that moment for whatever reason why it came out. To keep re-creating that, you really can't do it. What am I suppose to do, go back and rip, myself off or are we suppose to go back and listen to an old record, and say let's do something like this. That would not be genuine. To me that wouldn't be what it is really all about."

Read the entire interview at Dokken.net.