antiMusic’s Morley Seaver spoke to BLUE COUPE guitarist Joe Bouchard (ex-BLUE ÖYSTER CULT) about a number of topics.

Bouchard’s 2009 solo record, Jukebox In My Head, will be re-released in September by Spectra Records. In the second part of this three-part series, Morley Seaver talks to Joe about how the record all came together. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: One of the surprises for me was variety of material here. On records by some other artists it can sound like just one big messy soup, but with your record, there’s some rockers, a country-ish song, some vintage rock ‘n roll and a couple of instrumental yet everything hangs together wonderfully. Did you intentionally set out to mix the record up or do these song structures just use you as a conduit and find their way to you without your planning?

A: "I think I was as intentional as you could be. I did want to show some versatility. A lot of people know me only as the bass player in Blue Öyster Cult and I’ve been doing a lot of different things for a lot of years and I just wanted to put that out there. I think you put up your own website and work on your own little cottage industry and this would be the centerpiece of where I want to go with it. I think it really helped a lot in a different ways. It’s really hard to measure how a solo album does that well.

So, why a solo album now? Well, why not? If not now, when? (laughs). No I’m just feeling good about being creative. I think I’m just getting a little more comfortable with producing myself. I tried to be a record producer after I left Blue Öyster Cult and I was very unsuccessful so it’s been a very slow process of learning how to produce well. And most of it is just listening critically and not being too affected by outside things.

I guess, to be accurate it all started when METALLICA covered 'Astronomy' on their Garage Inc. album. In 1998 when I heard Metallica was covering a BOC song, and I found out it was my song 'Astronomy', I was floored. It was like a giant pat on the back. One of my co-written songs finally got some major recognition.

The first thing I did was quit my day job. Honestly the money wasn't that amazing, but it was the principle of the thing.

The second thing I did was call Ian Hunter (MOTT THE HOOPLE), who lives nearby in Connecticut. I asked him to co-write some songs with Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith. Ian hates a schedule but after being prodded by a couple of six-packs of beer, he was co-writing with the band known as BDS. We wrote four songs together.

Not much came of those songs, but it was a start. Then I started thinking about moving in a more acoustic direction and a flood of songs started appearing."

You can read the whole interview here.