ANAHEIM, Calif. — As Duff McKagan put the finishing touches on his 2023 solo album “Lighthouse,” he was happy with its sound, a kind of laidback punk rock that featured acoustic guitars and keyboards more than the hard rock of his day job playing bass in Guns N’ Roses.
But then his wife Susan got into yacht rock, McKagan said on a video call, and he started to worry.
“Do you know what yacht rock is?” McKagan said of the ’70s soft rock with vibes most mellow. “I have no idea what yacht rock is. But I hear it. I think, ‘(Shoot), this is the same instrumentation as what I do almost.’”
So he asked Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist Slash for a second opinion.
“I’m talking to Slash, I say, ‘I think I do yacht rock!’” McKagan said. “He goes, ‘It’s not yacht rock!’ I’m like, ‘But it’s the same instruments, kind of, so maybe.’”
“Lighthouse,” and “Tenderness,” the 2019 solo album that preceded it, most definitely aren’t part of the yacht rock world.
But it is different than the punk rock of the ’70s McKagan loved as a teen in Seattle, where he still lives, and the hard rock scene on the Sunset Strip where he found fame with Slash, singer Axl Rose and the rest of Guns N’ Rose in the mid-’80s.
“It’s my punk, you know,” said McKagan, who has described his solo work as “simple punk songs, laid bare without me screaming.” “If I’m trying to do anything, I want to do something completely different. Everybody knows I can do the big rock stuff, and I love doing that.
“I’m closer to Lemmy and Iggy than Killing Joke,” he said of such punk influences as Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. “This is another side, like, OK, let’s explore this and see.
“And I’m having a wonderful time doing it.”
McKagan is currently on a solo tour behind the “Lighthouse” album that was delayed until now due to Guns N’ Roses’ touring commitments.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, McKagan talked about making his new non-yacht-rock music, playing with Iggy Pop in 2023, stealing from Sex Pistol Steve Jones, and what it felt like when Bob Dylan singled out one of McKagan’s solo songs for high praise.
So after the pandemic, after Guns N’ Roses made up its canceled tour, you finally got a chance to finish ‘Lighthouse’?
We start putting the songs together for ‘Lighthouse,’ I have like 60. Like, how do we make the first record out of this? What is it? I knew ‘Lighthouse,’ the song, would be the first song of the record. And I knew ‘Just Don’t Know,’ the song with (Alice In Chains’ Jerry) Cantrell would be the last. That’s a great bookend. So what’s the idea between? I think of it like a novel.
I did some shows with Iggy and played on his record. And then Iggy goes, ‘Ah, man, I’ll do something on your record. Man, I really like the lyrics to ‘Lighthouse.’ So he gave us the spoken word thing (on ‘Lighthouse – Reprise’) It was like you have the voice of God in your studio. I mean, really, it’s like, ‘Whoa!’ Everything was really cool about making this record.
The album came out Oct. 20, 2023, but you weren’t able to really enjoy it right away.
We were supposed to be done touring, Guns was. But we extended our tour. By the time Oct. 20 came, Guns, we were in Boise. I’m in my hotel room and my wife sends me a little cake, you know, ‘Happy Record Release Day.’ And, well, it’s out — what happens now?
These days I try for a real work-home balance. So I got home, it was our 25th anniversary. We went to Hawaii, just rested my feet in the sand. We play long shows in Guns, and we go out for like two years, you know.
So we finally put this (tour) together for Europe and for America, and there we are, 11 months after the record comes out, in Dublin four or five weeks ago. I’d done a ‘Tenderness’ tour of Europe and the U.K. (in 2019). It’s either they’re not going to show up this time, or maybe more people will show up. And luckily for me it was more people showed up.
You play a lot of acoustic guitar on ‘Lighthouse’ – tell me how that came to be your sound there.
I was really good friends with Mark Lanegan (singer of Screaming Trees), and I’m good friends with Greg Dulli (of Afghan Whigs). And I watched them, like, ‘Oh man, one day — I can never sing like Mark Lanegan, of course — but God, I want to do that type of music at some point in my life.
You can’t, as an honest musician, you can’t sit down and try to write a certain kind of song. At least I can’t go, ‘I’m going to write a pop song today. It’s going to be a pop smash.’ I can’t do it. So whatever song comes out.
It was around 2015 that I sat down with my acoustic guitar and it was like an a-ha moment. Where it sits on your chest, it’s kind of right where you sing from, and it’ll tell you want to sing. Like you start playing chords and you have a melody and maybe a phrase. It’s kind of right here, the reverberation on my chest is.
So that’s when I started writing songs that became ‘Tenderness’ and the ‘Lighthouse’ stuff. I wasn’t screaming and it was acoustic. I could envision my keys, and I could envision the kind of whole song and the backing vocals and all this stuff.
The song ‘Hope’ has Slash on it, but I read it’s something you dug up from years ago.
During the shutdown thing, I got the masters back of this record I made for Geffen in 1996. Then Geffen got bought and my record got shelved, and they wouldn’t give me my record back. So it’s 25 years and I got them back during the time I’m recording ‘Lighthouse.’ It seemed to me that ‘Hope,’ the message, would fit really nice in the middle of this ‘Lighthouse’ story. The subject matter stands the test of time and the riff Slash played on that is just, it’s so him. He’s so genius.
