Dan Chesnet from The Belgrade News spoke with GREAT WHITE guitarist Michael Lardie recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

The Belgrade News: Your lead vocalist (Jack Russell) is out right now. How is he doing and when do you guys expect him to be back with the band?

Lardie: "He is recovering. Any time you have your midsection cut into — they had to reach a section of his large intestine — any time you open up your body that far, it takes quite a while to rehab the body to reanimate the nerves and all the muscles and stuff. As far as a projected date, it’s really more often than not up to Jack. I hear, and I’ve talked to him a couple or three times a week, he’s working, very, very hard to get back. He misses it terribly. He misses all of us. And we’d like him to come back when he’s 150 percent ready if you follow my line of thinking. Because I’d hate for him to come back too soon and realize, ‘Oh wow I really should have done rehab for another month before I tried to come back. Now I gotta take more time off.’ I want him to be just so ready to go that he just blows people’s minds. So we’re all being very supportive of him. And the great thing is he’s being very supportive of our scenario by endorsing us to go out and do what we’re doing. And giving Terry Ilous (XYZ), who’s filling in for Jack, encouragement. He calls him a couple a times a month, and says ‘I’m hearing great things about you, thanks for singing my songs so well.’ We’re having a great time with Terry, so it’s a win-win situation. By like I said, I will reiterate, I don’t want him coming back to soon. I want it to be right, so when he’s back he’s back all the way.”

The Belgrade News: So with Jack not there right now, I assume the band’s not working on anything new.

Lardie: "We always write songs because that’s what we do. And we always think in terms of how it would sound with Jack singing them. Mark and I have created music and melody for these songs over the years. Kind of like in your mind when you’re at home working on a song going ‘where would Jack go with this. How would he approach this.’ We keep doing it no matter if we have a project specifically in mind or not. So when we do get to that point where we’re doing another record we have a wealth of catalog to be able to draw from. And hopefully have 10 or 11 really good songs on it out of 100 ideas."

The Belgrade News: How does the band go about making a new song or a new album? Is everybody involved in the writing? Does it start with a riff?

Lardie: "It’s varied, it’s not just styles that we do. There’s no steadfast rule. Back in the early days when Mark and Jack just started working together in ‘79-80, they would set with a guitar and they would just riff over each other and they’d figure out the songs. With the advent of computers now what we do is come up with an idea - we can like make an empty pre of it - and bust it off to Kendall and say ‘what to you think of this?’ He goes ‘oh I got a great beat section that would go right there.’ Sometimes we’ll fill entire songs that way via internet. And when we get together everybody pretty much knows the arrangement. That’s one way to do go. Sometimes we all just sit in a room and jam, and songs like Mista Bone come up. So it’s varied. I wish I could say there’s a specific formula, but I kind of like it that there’s not."

Read the entire interview here.