Ultimate-Guitar.com recently caught up with VOLBEAT frontman Michael Poulsen to discuss the band's new album, Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

UG: On the new record, Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies, did you go into the writing process with any specific goals for this record and at what point did the western theme enter the picture?

MP: "We did all of the writing for this album before we went into the studio. For me, the toughest part of writing an album is trying to figure out where to start. The first 4 or 5 songs are always the hardest because that is what sets the mood of the album. All of the songs are written straight from the heart but at the same time, we knew that we were going into a new studio and we wanted to leave our comfort zone. We've used the same studio for all four records so far with Jacob Hansen as our producer. So we wanted to bring Jacob into a new environment because it was getting to the point where you'd just call up the pizza man and have the same pizza you've been ordering the last five years. We wanted something new. Jacob was working on building a new studio that was not totally finished yet so we just decided to all move to a different studio and we chose the Puk Studio, which is in Denmark and has been used by a lot of international musicians (Elton John, The Kinks, Gary Moore, ect.). It was quite interesting because in these modern days, not many bands go into studios like that anymore; they produce them at their home office. There's nothing wrong with that but I still like to capture the sound of those studio rooms. There are reasons why great recording studios have rooms look like they do. You can catch a certain acoustic sound. Going into that studio, you could see and feel that it hasn't been used in years. We were dusting everything off. It was like finding the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and trying to find out how it works. We were always pushing buttons and finding out how to work things. That was very interesting and inspiring to be there and see Jacob Hansen work with that stuff and see what he can do. We also hired in Rob Caggiano because he had become a fan of the band and he wanted to produce a couple of our songs just to see how they worked. We thought there might be an interesting angle to that, having Jacob Hansen who knows the band inside and out and then having a fan of the band come in bring us to a different level and then we have these two guys collaborating together. That was a very interesting process. To go back to the songwriting thing, I suddenly the more melodies that I came up with, the more I could tell that they were influenced by some old western gunslinger movies I had watched as a kid. So there is definitely a western influence on the new Volbeat album, now was just the right time for those melodies to come out and the lyrics, having a lot to do with some of the characters from those old movies fit in really well with the music and the whole Volbeat universe. It was a very interesting process to bring those melodies and characters to life and that is what has become the Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies album."

Volbeat have announced headline dates in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Italy and Spain, in support of their latest and fifth studio album, Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies. The album reached #1 in Denmark, Canada, Germany, Norway, Switzerland and Austria. In Finland the album landed at #2, in the Netherlands and Sweden at #4, and in the US at #9.

European tour dates:

October

11 - Milan, Italy - Live Club
12 - Strasbourg, France - Laiterie
14 - Lille, France - Aeronef
21 - Bilbao, Spain - Santana 27
22 - Barcelona, Spain - Apollo
23 - Madrid, Spain - La Rivieria
25 - Paris, France - Bataclan

November

23 - Herning, Denmark - BOXEN
24 - Copenhagen, Denmark - Forum
25 - Gothenburg, Sweden - Scandinavium
26 - Stockholm, Sweden - Tele2 Arena
30 - Oslo, Norway - Spektrum

Pre-sale started May 3rd. More dates will be added.

Check out BraveWords scribe Aaron Small's new Volbeat feature at this location.