Places like Portland and Seattle were known for rain. There was this period where there was this drought… It just never rained. She’s the one that convinced me to make the move. My wife never liked it there for whatever reason. for about 10 years in the ’80s and another 10 years in the 2000s. I wanted somewhere peaceful with nice trees and laid back people.
Paul Gilbert : I moved to Portland five-six years ago. Sleaze Roxx: You moved to Portland in recent years. I had spent something like two days trying to figure out a good bass part on that and I got it done in an hour, due to his guidance. He saved me a lot of time with some great ideas on that. Professorship At The Leningrad Conservatory is one where Kevin was helpful because I can play funk guitar, but I don’t play funk bass. Kevin was really helpful when it came time to do the bass parts. Where I really needed some help was with the bass parts, that was a little more challenging. Since, I was the songwriter, I really knew what I wanted in terms of the drums and guitar.
He went in with protools and fixed a mistake here and there. So he pressed record, I did it and it was alright. If it’s not, we’ll have to find someone that can come in here that can do it.” We just needed to start somewhere. Just hit record and we’ll see what happens. I said to Kevin, “I don’t know how my drumming is going to go, because I haven’t played drums in ages. I met Kevin through Kelly Lemieux who is a bass player who I play with sometimes. We still kept our distance of course and other precautions. We did have contact with many other people. I showed up at his studio and we were both wearing masks. So, I knew that I wanted to work with an engineer. I was writing, recording, performing and engineering an album… You need to have another human being in the room to look at that can give you a grin every now and again to let you know that you’re on the right track. I loved that, I really like playing with other people, the thought of doing it all alone was weird. I thought that was pretty fun, especially playing the drums. I decided to play all of the instruments myself. After about six months, I said, “I think I have to change my plan !” I originally wanted to cut it “live.” Well, that wasn’t going to work with everything going on. No one, as you know, had any idea how long that was going to last. I had done one rehearsal and then Covid caused me to quarantine for a while. My plan was to record it about a year ago. Was this an album that was written over the pandemic? How did these times influence the album? Sleaze Roxx: You have a new album coming on June 4th titled, Werewolves Of Portland. The majority of the interview appears below.
Ruben Mosqueda of Sleaze Roxx spoke with guitarist Paul Gilbert (Mr.