Ryan Sparks at Classic Rock Revisited recently caught up with MR. BIG bassist Bill Sheehan. An excerpt from the in-depth interview is available below:

Ryan: Forgetting for a second that I’m stating the obvious when I say that this is the first album with all four of the original members since 1996’s Hey Man. In no way am I attempting to dismiss the rest of the bands back catalogue but I have to say that What If... definitely feels like a return to form of those first two albums.

Billy: "I think you’re right that it does, for a lot of reasons. We made this record very much like we made the first two records. The first two were made very much in a band way, where we’d be together in the same room. After that we started to go off in our different ways and make stuff. I still like the Bump Ahead and Hey Man records, but I think the first two records were much closer to how we intended the whole thing to be in the first place. So when we went in for What…If we very unconsciously wanted to make the record similar in that fashion and we really did it that way. Everybody would get together in a room, we’d come up with the parts, we’d work on it together and we’d blow through it. We were able to do that and we also got lucky because the way Kevin Shirley (producer) works is very live, with almost no overdubs. Without him we may have inadvertently slipped into what a lot of people do on records these days, which is to have unlimited opportunity to fix anything. It used to be that you couldn’t even punch in drums in the old days. You had to first lay down the drum track correctly and build the album on top of it. Whereas nowadays, you can punch individual drums in with the technology that’s available, it’s incredible. So not only did we approach it that way from a writing standpoint, but also the production ended up being that way as well. So I think that double dose of reality [laughs], helped to bring about a record, that as you said is kind of more back to the way things ought to be."

Ryan: Would you say that was the main difference between the first couple of albums? As you progressed and got more successful after the second album, do you think that the pressure to follow that up was part of the reason why those later records took longer to make?

Billy: "In a way you’re correct. You’re heading down the right path. I think that once the record company starts to smell cash and smell hits, that’s when they want to get their nose in and micro-manage what you’re doing in the studio. That’s a giant mistake, because it's like the hostess at the restaurant going back into the kitchen and telling the chef what to do. The chef knows how to cook the stuff, you can’t come in and show him how to do it. You can’t come in and show us how to make a record, because you’ve never made one. Sell it, promote it, talk to the radio and do whatever it is record companies do, they’re certainly not doing it anymore, but let the band make the record. That gets lost with almost every label executive. They started to think that they could jump in the studio and tell somebody what was right and was wrong."

"We had a song called 'Never Say Never' off of Lean Into It and there was one spot on it, just before we sang the chorus, Eric went 'Yeah', it was in that one spot on the demo. On the second recording it was about a beat later. We actually had to go in and re-record the vocal to make sure that the 'Yeah' landed in the same spot as the demo. It was just incredibly foolish of the label to do that. In the end it’s our money that we’re using, because we had to pay all that studio time back. So just foolish little things like that started to put pressure on us. There’s all kinds of pressure, some of it’s good and some of it’s bad or some of it is well intended and some of it isn’t. I prefer good pressure. Good pressure is we have to make a good record, we have two weeks to do it, let’s go. Pressure from outside the band is always bad, pressure from within is always good. It’s self discipline as opposed to someone disciplining you. If somebody comes in and tells you what to do, its never nearly as good or it will never be done nearly as well as you telling yourself that you have to get your shit together."

Click here for the complete interview.

What If… is Mr. Big’s first all original album since the reunion of the four original members, Eric Martin, Paul Gilbert, Billy Sheehan and Pat Torpey back in early 2009. The tracklist is as follows:

‘Undertow’

‘ American Beauty’

‘Stranger In My Life’

‘Nobody Takes The Blame’

‘Still Ain’t Enough For Me’

‘Once Upon A Time’

‘As Far As I Can See’

‘All The Way Up’

‘I Won’t Get In My Way’

‘Around The World’

‘I Get The Feeling’

‘Unforgiven’ (exclusive bonus track for Europe / North America – not on vinyl edition)