MARTY FRIEDMAN: My Music 'Is Definitely Not The Most Commercial Thing In The World'

Matt Wardlaw of PopDose.com recently conducted an interview with former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

PopDose.com: Moving to Japan like you did, that's a very interesting transition. I don't know that you could have seen it playing out the way it has and being as massive as it has been with all of the stuff that you're wrapped up with.

Friedman: Yeah, there's no possible way. I didn't expect to do as much as I've done at all. I just hoped to be in some kind of domestic Japanese music situation. Things have just blown my mind as far as what I expected and what I wound up doing, with things that have opened themselves up to me. But at the same time, there's a give and take, because it's been at the cost of cultivating the rest of the world. You know, I work so hard in Japan. My career is doing fantastic here in Japan, but a big majority of the rest of the world just knows me from the last time I released a platinum album and that would be with MEGADETH, a long, long time ago. Which I don't blame them, I mean, you'd have to learn three or four different languages to find out everything I've done in between. [Laughs]. Only my hardest core fans really know what I've been up to in Japan, but I think people deserve to get something. I've been very lucky to have fans around the world who have supported me way back in the beginning and even now and a lot of people who've probably forgotten about me because I'm out of their radar now that I'm in Japan and I hold nothing against anybody. I just really want them to have access to what I'm doing, because I think people will enjoy it, if for no other reason than that. I think people outside of Japan would enjoy even the things I'm doing in Japan, but it's really hard to get all of those things available to everybody. So now that I'm on an American project and it's a worldwide project, this is my one chance in a long time to allow people to hear what I'm about now and possibly compare it to what they know me from and hopefully hear the insanely vast improvement and the depth that has changed so much since they last heard my playing.

PopDose.com: With all of the stuff that you've been doing, have you been able to see as a player how that's all fed back into the kind of record you made with this record as opposed to if you would have made this new record 10 years ago?

Friedman: Oh God, yes. You hit it right on the button. I've been in Japan for 10 years and I've done a billion projects — lots of solo albums here. I listen to the output that I've done in the last 10 years and you can not even compare it to the 10 years that I did before as far as depth and intensity and density and growth. It boggles even my mind, first of all, how friggin' hard I've wound up working. The 10 years prior to that, of course I was doing fantastic things. I was making history with a great band that I loved. It was great. But as far as musical growth and depth and stuff that really turned me on musically, I was moving at a snail's pace. Ever since I came here, it's made my mind blow up from stimulation and the result is an album like Inferno, which just came out naturally.

PopDose.com: You've done so many things since moving to Japan, and part of that has been a ton of TV work. You've said that "TV facilitated the ability for me to do exactly what I wanted to do musically without having to compromise." How did it open the door for you to really do that?

Friedman: Well, first of all, my music is not exactly Justin Bieber. It's not super-commercial and super-mainstream, although I've done a lot of songwriting, recording and producing and guitar playing for Top 10 acts here in Japan all of the time, which I love doing because I love popular music, especially in Japan. But Marty Friedman, the solo artist, is definitely not the most commercial thing in the world. It's a bit eclectic and it's very intense. There's a lot to listen to and it can be quite hard to listen to at points, but it is what it is. So I think that had I not been so visible on television, it would be harder for me to get a major label anywhere to release my stuff, especially with all creative freedom in my corner. I mean, nobody really tells me what to do. I can only attest that to the face familiarity [I have]. They know me from being on TV or being in the media and stuff like that, so it's kind of almost like a free pass to do what I want, despite the fact that it's not going to necessarily be the biggest mainstream commercial hit that they're going to make billions of dollars off of. But I've consistently released album after album after album, all on major labels here, and they've all done respectably well and gotten me to the next step. I can only say that I've been allowed to do that because of doing all kinds of other activities in Japan as well.

Read the entire interview at PopDose.com.