By Carl Begai

Over the last few months vocalist / guitarist LITA FORD has devoted her time to promoting her new album, Living Like A Runaway, which has doubled as an exercise in damage control. She isn’t shy about calling her failed 2009 psycho-industrial nu-metal comeback album Wicked Wonderland a disaster, and she makes no secret of her feelings towards ex-husband and former NITRO singer Jim Gillette, whom she credits for making her life a living hell. After filing for divorce in early 2011, Ford dealt with the ugly aftermath of her broken marriage and channelled that energy into making a new album, Living Like A Runaway. It’s a true comeback, loaded to the gills with emotion and attitude, ultimately giving the fans what they wanted last time out.

“The new album cover should have one big middle finger on it,” she laughs. “I came back with a record that wasn’t a Lita Ford record, and I’m happy to say Living Like A Runaway is the real deal. It’s got a lot of emotion in it. It’s not ‘I think I’ll write a record now,’ it’s pure heart and soul. The music came to me at one of the darkest times in my life, and the only release for me to dump my emotions out was my music.”

It might be accurate to say that Living Like A Runaway turned out the way it did as a result of Wicked Wonderland and the emotional baggage that went with it. The recorded version of the aforementioned middle finger, so to say…

“Well… actually, I don’t know… maybe you’re right,” Ford concedes. “My ex had complete control over everything. He wanted to make Wicked Wonderland, he wanted to write the songs, and I couldn’t function with him around. So, in a way I guess you could in fact say I had to go through the divorce to make this record.”
“I just needed the divorce. He was blocking me from being creative and he was blocking me from being Lita. I couldn’t function. Sometimes it happens when you’re with somebody and they sort of take over your life. It was like ‘Okay, the first thing I’ve gotta do is get you outta my way…’ (laughs). Once that happened I was able to be me again. I sat down, started writing, and I felt all this creativity flowing. It was non-stop. We couldn’t put a cap on it and it was great. As a matter of fact, the day my divorce was final was the very day the record was delivered to the record company. That was a good day (laughs).”

The operative “we” is Ford and guitarist / producer Gary Hoey, who boasts a solo career spanning 20 years and 18 albums. Ford calls him “a godsend,” as he collaborated with her on Living Like A Runaway from top to bottom. It was a partnership that, according to Ford, started with a leap of faith.

“Gary was a friend, and he called and offered me his studio up in New Hampshire. He said if I wanted to take a break and come up and record, just to let him know. I thought about it and decided to take him up on the offer. I had a really good feeling about Gary because I had talked to him about my concept for the record and what I was going through. Not a lot of people wanted to get involved and I got a lot of cold shoulders from the record producers I talked to, but Gary understood and he dove in head first. He was so into this project, he really brought it to life right from the very first song we wrote together.”

From a fan’s point of view it’s hard to imagine Ford being stifled so completely on a creative level for Wicked Wonderland, only to return with an album that fans and press agree ranks as some of her strongest work to date.

“I had to bury Wicked Wonderland, I had to pretend like it didn’t exist,” Ford explains. “I was constantly being shot down when it was being made so I said ‘You know what? You do the fucking record.’ That wasn’t my record. It has my name on it and my voice on it but that’s about it. You can’t compare the new record to the last one because they’re completely different.”

Fans that have been around since the Out For Blood album (‘83), or go back as far as The Runaways (’75 – ’79), remember Ford as much for her guitar as her voice. When the Lita album broke big in ‘88 with ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ and ‘Close My Eyes Forever’, however, the focus tightened on Ford’s voice and her looks, shoving the guitars into the background. She continued to play on the albums that followed, but it seems that a conscious effort was made for Living Like A Runaway to put Lita Ford the guitarist back in the spotlight.

“I really have, and we really brought out the guitars on this record. There are beautiful guitar harmonies, there are actual licks that are worked into the songs. They weren’t just rattled off. We wrote these beautiful flowing guitar parts, like on ‘Asylum’ and ‘Living Like A Runaway’, and that was something we really wanted to make predominant. Guitars like that have kind of gotten lost in today’s music industry and we wanted to bring it back.”

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