In a new interview with All That Shreds, Shrapnel Records CEO, Mike Varney, discusses current projects, Yngwie Malmsteen, Vinnie Moore, Paul Gilbert, and much more. An excerpt follows:

All That Shreds: Look at Yngwie, he releases all his records to Japan the minute he brought them in here, he just you know, got his own divisive force I don’t know what distribution forces he’s got, but Young Guitar did a huge spread on him.

Mike Varney: “Yngwie is in a class of his own pretty much. I don’t know any artists that consistently released music that didn’t change much and that’s by design. Yngwie wanted to make sure that when people bought an album they got everything they wanted on the album. It wasn’t like he was going to listen to EDM or something and try to incorporate or whatever, he really wanted to give the fans that experience and I think that’s why he has kept the fan base because they always know what to expect from him. A lot of times artists lose that fan base because when the fad take a turn they take a turn with the fad. Then they lose that focus, but Yngwie never did that. Would you say Yngwie stands in a class of his own?”

All That Shreds: Yngwie is in a class of his own!

Varney: “Yeah Yeah, he is in a class of his own, I’m happy that I happen to luckily be the guy that found him, I don’t think anything would have kept that guy down, so I just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

“Here’s the thing, Yngwie from what I know is that, unless he’s been drinking too much or something, a lot of that stuff that he would say was deliberately said to get people going mad. I mean he called me up one day laughing, oh man I need a guitar player, are you in Guitar World. I told him I’d never heard of Jeff Spike, but he asked if I liked him, I told him never really heard his music. Stuff like that, he would say stuff just to get people ‘Yow what the F’ to get them upset. That was his humor. One time I think he said ‘have you ever listen to Willy Raw?’ or something like that, I said nope, that was just him being of character. I think he like the idea of creating that persona. I think Black (Fork) kind of had that persona, kind of a dark persona, but Yngwie is actually a lot of humor. I mean he’s a very funny guy, he loved Monty Python and can sit there and run down Monty Python skits, reenact them, but I don’t believe that most of the stuff that was said about him, when people go ‘what a jerk’, I think he knew exactly what he was saying and I think that’s why he said it. As far as him being, the stories of people who met him and he was mean or whatever, I never saw that side, he was always nice and kind of that wise ass streak. People had to know how to take him.”

Read the full interview at allthatshreds.com