Metal Shrine recently conducted an interview with DEEP PURPLE bassist ROGER GLOVER. In the interview Glover talks about his new solo album If Life Was Easy, his work as producer, the live DVD with Deep Purple, Deep Purple writing sessions and more. Excerpts from the interview are below:

Metal Shrine: For how long have these songs been around? Are they songs that have been around for a couple of years or are they newly written?

Roger Glover: “Well, it´s been about nine years in the making and in those nine years, which it says on the album cover, I´ve been through a lot. Moving and …in fact, I´m moving right now. I´m surrounded by boxes and it doesn´t end! Anyway, I think, probably one of the first songs was ‘If life was easy’. That was a little guitar thing that I was picking for months and probably actually a year or so, before I realized “Yeah, maybe there´s a song in there?” Another one that was early was a song called ‘When Life Gets To The Bone’, which eerily predicts the future I was gonna have with my problems like divorce, separation, countries and babies… especially divorce. In fact it´s not about the baby, it´s all about the divorce and all about lawyers and the crap you have to go through. A lot of my life of the last few years wound up as lyrics and hopefully somewhat poetic and deep enough so that other people going through the same emotions, can identify with it.”

Metal Shrine: During all these years, were any of these songs stuff that you brought to Deep Purple or were they just made for a solo record?

Roger Glover: “The thing about Deep Purple is that you don´t bring a song to a writing session, because they don´t like that. I mean, we don´t like that! If anyone brought in a song that was completely finished and all we had to do was copy it, neeehh, that´s not what Deep Purple is. Deep Purple starts its songs… I mean, we don´t write songs for start, they kind of evolve from a series of jams and really what you want to bring into a Deep Purple session, is just a riff or a chord sequence or a rhythm or a line or two and that´s all and then everyone else just kind of join in. There are a couple of ideas that I might have considered for Purple, but we had a writing session and a lot of my ideas went into the writing session anyway, and that was in March. There´s a Purple album bubbling under and we´ll get to it next year.”

Metal Shrine: Was it recorded in New York?

Roger Glover: “If I used a studio it was in New York, but a lot of it I did at home. When I say at home (laughs), home is where the suitcase is these days. A lot of the stuff was done on the computer and a lot of it is actually demos! I´ve got a computer and Pro Tools set up, the whole business, and I write songs that way. Usually you write songs where there´s a little drum machine thing and a couple of keyboards and you program it all and bing bang, you have a song! It´s really a kind of demo, but the weird thing is, I don´t have to write for anyone except myself! That´s what I´m indebted to Deep Purple for and so I tend to write whatever comes into my head and that´s pretty dangerous. (laughs) Lots of things come into my head. I mean, I listen to a lot of internet radio and that´s probably my main source of music these days. Switching around and there´s a couple of radio stations that I really like and I thought of doing an album like a radio station really, where you get a lot of variety, so that´s the idea for the fact that there are so many different… I hate the word style, but you know what I mean!”

Read the entire interview here.

Bravewords.com scribe Martin Popoff recently conducted an interview with Glover. Read the interview at this location.

If Life Was Easy was released in the US on September 6th.

The tracklisting is as follows:

'Don’t Look Now (Everything Has Changed)'

'Box Of Tricks'

'Moonlight'

'The Car Won‘t Start'

'The Dream I Had'

'Stand Together'

'If Life Was Easy'

'Welcome To The Moon'

'Set Your Imagination Free'

'When Life Gets To The Bone'

'When The Day Is Done'

'Staring Into Space'

'Get Away (Can’t Let You)'

'The Ghost Of Your Smile'

'Cruel World'

'Feel Like A King'