Stryper frontman and solo artist Michael Sweet recently guested on the Focus On Metal podcast (found here), and one topic of discussion was the future of his Sweet & Lynch side project with guitarist George Lynch (Lynch Mob, Dokken). They have released two albums - Only To Rise (2015) and Unified (2017) - but have never toured.

Sweet: "George didn't do a lot of promoting and a lot of pushing with those albums. It gets to be exhausting for me when I feel like I'm the only guy really pushing it. And that's not to take anything away from George; it's just a fact. I'm one of those guys where I want everybody in the band pushing and promoting equally as much, as they should be, or why are you doing it? I'm at that stage right now where I'm feeling like the fire is kind of dwindling. I don't want it to; I want to pour some gasoline on the fire and ignite it again. Maybe that'll happen but it's quite possible that it won't."

Sweet recently spoke with Rock Confidential about the band's new album, God Damn Evil, and the effects of social media on the relationship between bands and the fans, and plans for new recordings. An excerpt is available beloww.

RC: Are you still humming riff ideas and melodies into your phone and recording them for writing purposes?

Sweet: "I still do. Usually what happens, about three or four months out from recording an album I’ll start doing that. I’ll hum ideas into my phone and then go back and listen to it and pull from that and create chords around that idea and create a song. I haven’t done that since we turned in God Damn Evil, but I’ll probably start doing it once we get out on the road in May or June. I’ll start getting my ideas going. Then the next album will be a solo album or one with Joel Hoekstra. I’ll start writing a couple of weeks before we start recording. I like working under pressure. It helps me to focus more and it helps me deliver more."

RC: So the album with Joel will be a group project?

Sweet: "Yes. Joel and I are going to write everything together. He’s going to be the guitar player and I’m going to be the singer. It will be like Sweet & Lynch. We’re going to come up with a band name, get some killer players. We’ve already talked to a few guys. It’s going to be awesome, man."

RC: Is it in the plans to re-record more songs from the Stryper catalog?

Sweet: "It is. We’ve always wanted to do that with five or six songs from In God We Trust, five or six from Against The Law. People might wonder why we’d do that. I really believe, and we’ll have to prove it, that we can outdo the production on those two albums to make it more modern, more in-your-face, and today. Same thing we did with Second Coming. We’ll add a couple of more songs from Yellow And Black Attack. We only did two from that album on Second Coming, so maybe we’ll do “From Wrong To Right” and “Co’mon Rock” or something and then add a couple of new songs."

Read the complete interview here.

The eighth annual Monsters Of Rock Cruise set sail February 11th - 16th aboard Royal Caribbean's Navigator Of The Seas visiting two new ports: Falmouth, Jamaica and the private isle of Labadee. During Stryper frontman Michael Sweet's live acoustic set, he invited Symphony X singer Russell Allen and Whitesnake guitarist Joel Hoekstra on stage for a killer rendition of Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer".