MARK KENDALL: Why GREAT WHITE Needs To Keep Making New Music

Don de Leaumont of The Great Southern Brainfart recently conducted an interview with GREAT WHITE guitarist Mark Kendall. A couple of exerpts from the chat follow below.

The Great Southern Brainfart: Michael Wagener produced your latest album, "Full Circle", and he really managed to capture a more classic sound from the band. Did this come natural and how much of a role did he play into this?

Mark: "It wasn't intentional at all because we just wrote like we always do. We didn't change a thing. Obviously, the production is top-shelf stuff. When you walk into Wagener's studio, you're just blinded by platinum records. He's worked with everybody. One thing he did do was made me feel at ease. When he's recording with you, he makes you feel so good. We got really good performances. He just made us feel really comfortable.

The Great Southern Brainfart: I'm sure his old-school way of doing things probably gelled with you guys a lot more than say the new way of a younger producer.

Mark: "Exactly. He doesn't use Auto-Tune or anything. He just tells you to play it again until you get it right. He'll say, 'Don't sing flat!' [Laughs] I like to believe and trust my ears enough that when I listen to something, if it sounds good than it is good. If the computer says it's not good, then so what? We're not computers. We're human beings and we like the way music sounds. If it sounds good, it's good. If you start judging things by what it says on the computer, you're going to wind up sounding like a machine. What works best for us is when we all play together and everything usually works out. It has nothing to do with computers."

The Great Southern Brainfart: Do you like recording digitally vs. analog or vice versa?

Mark: "I have no problem with recording on computers. I actually like it. It's just a quicker way to record for me. When we were working with two-inch tape, it took so long to do the simplest edit. Now, with the click of a mouse, it's done. You can make records so much quicker now. It keeps things moving along and you're not stopping and starting so much. I hate taking these huge breaks for something to happen. I like to keep the momentum and the energy up."

The Great Southern Brainfart: As a veteran of the scene, you've seen the music business change, digress, come back to life, and all in between. What is your take on the current state of the industry?

Mark: "Well, you really need a lot of people on your team that know the Internet really well. It's a lot more difficult to get your music to the people, because we don't have all the mediums we used to. We're not on the radio and we're not on MTV every five seconds all over country. When you take all of that away, we still have the fans and they still come to the shows but a lot of them might not know that we have a new record out. I'm just totally into making new music because we're always challenging ourselves to get better. That's our whole momentum and the whole reason we're still here. We just want to keep writing and keep doing something good and maybe even a little better than we did the last time. There's not a lot of forums for new music, but when people hear the latest album, we're getting great feedback from it. We're just doing the best we can to get our new music heard. We still have our history that we're proud of and grateful for but to keep our energy where it needs to be, we need to keep making new music."

Read the entire interview at The Great Southern Brainfart.

Photo credit: Neil Zlozower