LITA FORD: 'A Lot Of The Great Musicians Are Really Nonjudgmental People'

During an appearance on The Hook Rocks! podcast, Lita Ford spoke about what it was like for her in the 1980s when she was the exception on the testosterone-fueled, male-dominated hair metal scene, where women were relegated to eye candy. She said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "It was a lot of games. And men are just men. And they're not anything indestructible. It doesn't mean anything. And a lot of the situations were they couldn't put two and two together. And it wasn't just men. It was a lot of people. But then, on the other hand, they couldn't put together the fact that, 'Oh, she's a female and she's playing guitar. Huh? How does that work?' Well, to me, it never really registered. I just thought, 'Well, I just wanna play guitar.' And it never dawned on me, really, that 'you're a female.' 'Oh.' Well, nobody told me. I mean, I knew, but I never really put two and two together and thought, 'Well, I can't do this because I'm a female.' It never really made sense to me.

"A lot of the best musicians, a lot of them were men, and I have to say that a lot of them helped me to achieve certain rock celebrity status and just hanging out with the best of the best musicians… They didn't look at it, like, 'Oh, she's a girl. No, she can't do this.' They didn't look at it like that. They were different," she explained. "Like Dee Snider, for instance. Dee was such a huge support for Lita. And we opened for TWISTED SISTER many times, and Dee would always go out and rile the audience and get them pumped for our show coming on. If we were doing a festival or if we performed before them, he would always come out and rile them, even in the early '80s. He was just all about it. And people like Ritchie Blackmore —he never judged me because I was a female. And a lot of these great musicians are really nonjudgmental people. It's all about the performance. And so that's what you've gotta separate — the losers from the leaders, so to speak."

In a late 2023 interview with Robert Miguel of Uvalde Radio Rocks, Lita spoke about the delay in releasing her long-awaited new studio album. She said: "Well, I just did an interview a little while ago and I was just saying that there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle in moving forward with things, especially now in the music industry, there's so many moving parts and stuff. So I just need to have all my ducks in a row before I try to release this record. And I think just recently, I wanna say just over the last couple of weeks, the missing link and the biggest pieces of the puzzle, besides me, have been found. And we're gonna be moving forward real soon with this record."

Ford's upcoming follow-up to 2012's "Living Like A Runaway" was once again helmed by guitarist/producer Gary Hoey, who contributes some guitar playing to the disc, alongside the rest of Lita's longtime backing band, consisting of guitarist Patrick Kennison, drummer Bobby Rock and bassist Marty O'Brien.

In May 2022, bassist Marten Andersson (STEELHEART, LIZZY BORDEN, LYNCH MOB) officially joined Lita's touring band. Andersson replaced O'Brien who became the touring bassist for DAUGHTRY.

In a separate interview with "THAT Rocks!", the weekly YouTube series hosted by Eddie Trunk, Jim Florentine and Don Jamieson, Lita stated about her next LP: "The problem is we've had so many things happen over the last few years. Our manager died; George Marshall died a year ago, [in] '22. And then my songwriting partner died. And it's just been devastation. But we take all that pain and everything and we just put it right back into the album. And then we recorded the drum tracks in Minneapolis during Black Lives Matter and COVID. Everything was locked down and the place was boarded up and the guys had shotguns and Rottweilers. And then we went in and did drum tracks. And it was awesome."

In January 2021, Lita told SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk" that her new album contains "some of the best guitar playing" she has heard "in decades." She added: "And I'm not blowing smoke up my own ass, but Gary and I just nailed it with the guitar playing on this record.

"I'm a huge fan of people like Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter from Alice Cooper's 'Welcome To My Nightmare'. I mean, there's some really great duo guitar players — [JUDAS PRIEST's] Glenn Tipton, K.K. Downing… Those guitar players don't exist anymore — they just don't exist. If you wanna hear them, you have to go back in time a little bit and dig them up into your favorite library, favorite music catalog. But I think Gary and I really nailed it on this next record. It's, like, oh my God. I'm crying — I'm just, like, crying listening to this stuff. It's so badass."

Ford's last release was 2016's "Time Capsule", a collection of songs that were recorded by Lita in the past, but never before made available.

Eight years ago, Lita released an autobiography, "Living Like A Runaway: A Memoir", via Dey Street Books (formerly It Books),an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.