JOE ELLIOTT On DEF LEPPARD's Five-Decade Career: 'It's Just A Blessing, Really'

In a new interview with Indianapolis, Indiana's TV station WTHR, DEF LEPPARD's Joe Elliott and GOO GOO DOLLS' John Rzeznik spoke about the two bands' upcoming 45-date North American tour, which will take place next year. The trek, with special guests THE STRUTS, will kick off March 2 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and wrap up July 2 in Indianapolis. Along the way, the bands will visit major U.S. cities, including New York, Boston, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco, among dozens of others.

Speaking about DEF LEPPARD's longevity, Elliott said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Well, it's just a blessing, really. It's not anything I think about until somebody like yourself asks me that question, and then I have to come up with some kind of fancy answer, because, to me, I just live my day, and I wake up, and I do whatever I do, and then we, if we're in tour mode, it's down the rehearsal room for a few hours, and we talk and we laugh and we joke, and then eventually we actually play some songs together. It's just part of the package. And the fact that we've been doing it for — it'll be 50 years that I met [DEF LEPPARD bassist] Rick Savage in August of next year. It just seems like — I don't know — maybe 10. Because it's never stopped, it doesn't feel that long."

He continued: "Sometimes I watch movies and there's a scene in it where somebody comes home and it's, like, 'Oh, I haven't seen you for six years,' and I'm thinking in reality it's, like, well, that's not even a thing. That's not even time away. It's, like, you saw him yesterday. If I didn't see these guys for six years, it'd feel like six months because we've never not seen each other for that long. But we just do what we do, and we make records, and some of them sell like crazy and other ones just don't. But it never really stopped us thinking that we were doing the right thing. Everything we did, whether it be 'Hysteria' or whatever our worst-selling record is, we put the exact same amount of effort into both. It's just that some of them resonate and some of them don't. But the fact is that if you have hits like what the GOO GOO DOLLS have got and what we have, and they hang around, you've always got a career. And we are both artists that wanna keep furthering that. I don't see them wanting to end it anytime soon, and we certainly don't."

Joe also talked about how grateful he is that DEF LEPPARD has written so many songs that people still want to hear decades after they were first recorded.

"People sometimes think about any artist, when they have a hit, that you're gonna get sick of it," Elliott said. "I mean, obviously some people do, and I find that kind of weird. But when you have a [hit] song, it's a blessing because at the end of the day, we're all songwriters first; otherwise we have nothing to record. And that is the seed of it all. I can't speak for Johnny, and he may agree or not, but the two most important parts of my life, when we're doing stuff, is when I walk into a room and I say to the other guys in the band, 'I've got this idea.' It's bursting out of you. It's like you've got news that you can't wait to tell. And if that translates to maybe 20, 30, 40 years later, you start that song on stage in front of 20,000 people and they go completely nuts, you kind of go into rewind. They always say your life flashes before you when you die. What happens to me is it flashes all the way back to the day I walked in and said, 'Got this idea,' and it might have been the beginning of 'Pour Some Sugar On Me'. And I'm sure it was the same with [GOO GOO DOLLS'] 'Iris' — with any of their songs. It a moment that's hard to describe to anybody other than a fellow songwriter."

DEF LEPPARD's story will be told in the upcoming feature-length documentary "Long Live Def Leppard", slated for release in theaters in early 2027. The film from director Jeff Feuerzeig chronicles the legendary rockers from their humble beginnings in Sheffield, England to global chart domination in the 1980s and 1990s.DEF LEPPARD is working on the follow-up to the "Diamond Star Halos" album, which came out in 2022. DEF LEPPARD's new LP will include the song "Rejoice", which was released in late January ahead of the band's return to Las Vegas for their "Def Leppard: Live at Caesars Palace The Las Vegas Residency".

"Def Leppard: Live at Caesars Palace The Las Vegas Residency" ran through February 28, 2026 at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. These new shows followed the band's sold-out residency successes in 2019 and 2013.

In January 2025, DEF LEPPARD released a cover of Ben E. King's 1961 classic "Stand By Me". All proceeds from the song went to FireAid, which raises money for those impacted by the fires that swept through Los Angeles in January 2025.

DEF LEPPARD's version of the song is featured in the Netflix film "Bank Of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger", which was released in January 2025. The band can be seen performing the track before the credits.

DEF LEPPARD's "Just Like 73" single, featuring a guest guitar solo from RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE guitarist Tom Morello, was made available in June 2024.

DEF LEPPARD's 12th studio album, "Diamond Star Halos", came out in 2022. A year later, the band followed it up with "Drastic Symphonies", a collection of reimagining of some of DEF LEPPARD's greatest hits with London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road. The album spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Current Classical chart.

DEF LEPPARD was finally inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in March 2019 — 14 years after the British rockers first became eligible.