Guitar legend and Deep Purple founding member, Ritchie Blackmore, is featured in a new interview with Long Island Weekly, in which he discusses Blackmore’s Night (his project with with spouse Candice Night) his rock history and love of renaissance music. An excerpt follows:

While fans of Deep Purple and Rainbow might wring their hands at not being able to hear Blackmore wring out massive power riffs, he’ll give a quick nod to his plugged-in days via numbers like the re-recorded instrumental “Darker Shade Of Black” (from the Blackmore’s Night album, Nature's Light) and its Bach-flavored nuances. As someone who was constantly touring since he was 16, the septuagenarian Rock And Roll Hall Of Famer is very content with his current creative station in life.

“I’m not really interested in the modern approach with modern instruments,” he admitted. “We use synthesizers on certain things, but they are there to see how we’re going to progress with the other instruments. It’s all about going back to the basics - simple music. Melody is very important to me. It’s an important thing. That’s why, even in Deep Purple, towards the end, before I left, our music was a bit monophonic. There wasn’t too much melody and if I don’t hear a melody, I can’t be inspired. I find that with a lot of hard rock bands today - not the death metal or whatever - the melody is certainly not there and I can’t relate to that.”

Read the complete interview with Blackmore at Long Island Weekly.