Guns N’ Roses’ 2008 album Chinese Democracy was 14 years in the making at a reported cost of $13m – and a small part of that gigantic budget was spent on hiring drummer Josh Freese.
In stark contrast, Freese’s new solo album Just A Minute Vol.2 was recorded as cheaply as possible, and partly created while he was touring as a member of Foo Fighters, a role he has since vacated.
Speaking to MusicRadar, Freese says of his low-cost recording process: “It’s always in a bit of a DIY fashion. I’m never spending too long getting drum sounds or worrying what microphone I’m singing into.
“I’ll give you a perfect example. There’s a song called Electric Saxophone Is Fun (We Want Drugs), and it was done all on GarageBand.
“It had this funk drum loop, which sounded kind of goofy, but I liked the drum machine aspect of it for some reason. But the samples were bad, so I tried to replicate the loop with a different drum machine, and it didn't sound good.
“Then I decided to play drums on it and see how that goes. And in the end, it’s live drums, but over the GarageBand recording that I’d done on my laptop out on tour.”
He says of another track, Skeletons In The Wall: “I'm singing into the laptop, using the microphone on my Mac AirBook or whatever. It’s not even a real microphone on my voice.”
Just A Minute Vol.2 is Freese’s second collection of one-minute songs.
“It’s become this nutty, wacky little project,” he says, “and my joke’s always been that the song is so short, if you don't like it, by the time you go to push skip, it's done anyway, so just let it roll. This record is for the short attention span, ADHD population out there, which encompasses almost everybody at this point.”
Across the 25 tracks on Just A Minute Vol.2 there are echoes of other bands Freese has played in, notably punk rock group The Vandals and new wave icons Devo.
He explains: “One thing I heard Rick Rubin say that I really liked is, ’No matter what art you’re doing, whether you're doing a painting or writing a song – you be the audience. Make the things you like. Make it the way you want to hear it.
“Some of my stuff sounds like Devo, and some of it sounds like The Vandals, and some of it sounds like Ween. That's the stuff I like – punk rock stuff, quirky stuff, pop stuff, and pretty stuff.”
In addition, there are two tracks influenced by other famous drummers.
The first is If You Know, You Know, which has a similar sound and energy to a 1980 song called Don’t Care by The Police’s drummer Stewart Copeland, which Copeland released under the alias Klark Kent.
“I’m a huge Stewart Copeland fan,” Freese says. “When I heard Klark Kent as a teenager I was already a big Police fan, so I was already drinking the Kool-Aid.
“My friend Scott Thunes, who later played bass in Frank Zappa's band for years, he told me about the Klark Kent thing. He was like, ‘That’s Stewart Copeland's solo record he made on an 8-track, and he’s playing all the instruments!’ And I was like, ‘Holy Shit!’
“At that point, I was probably 16 or 17, and I had started kind of writing music and recording my own weird stuff at home, so it was such an inspiration. It was another guy doing what I wanted to do, or what I was starting to do. And not only a guy doing it, but a drummer that I already was a big fan of.”
Freese also admits that his song Cybertruck LOL is influenced by a heavy-hitting Queen track written by drummer Roger Taylor and released in 1977.
“I didn't realise it when I was doing it,” Freese says, “but when I added that third harmony – there’s the main vocal, then the second harmony, and the third harmony on top of that – I remember going, ‘God, what does this remind me of?’
“I said, ‘This stacked harmony is making me think of something.’ And then a friend of mine said, ‘That’s Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack!’
“It's just the same vibe. It was kind of an accident. And oddly enough, that's a Roger Taylor song – a drummer song.”
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