RON "BUMBLEFOOT" THAL On Singing For ASIA - "The Goal Is To Try To Make People Feel As Close To When They First Heard The Song As They Can; I Am Not Going To Paint Over Those Pictures"

December 13, 2020, 3 years ago

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RON "BUMBLEFOOT" THAL On Singing For ASIA - "The Goal Is To Try To Make People Feel As Close To When They First Heard The Song As They Can; I Am Not Going To Paint Over Those Pictures"

Speaking with Kylie Olsson for Life In Six Strings, Sons Of Apollo guitarist Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal talked about what it was like to work on the Guns N' Roses album, Chinese Democracy, how he works with Asia, and what makes him unique as a player.

Bumblefoot joined Asia in 2019, replacing Billy Sherwood - who had stepped in for an ailing John Wetton - and guitarist Sam Coulson. Wetton passed away on January 31st, 2017 at age 67 due to cancer.

On singing for Asia

Bumblefoot: "The goal is to try to make people feel as much like they're going to reminisce and make them feel as close to when they first heard the song as they can. I am not going to paint all over those pictures, I'm not going to rewrite the songs changing the sound, the style, anything like that. I want to as closely as I can sound like the original so that after the show, people say, 'Wow, that took me right back 30 something years. Made me feel like I felt when I first heard it. You made me feel like the summer in 1982...'  or whatever it is. That's what I want them to experience. 

Now I can never be John Wetton (vocalist, bassist) or Steve Howe (guitarist). No matter what, I am not going to sound exactly like them. But, if at least I try to approach it the same way and make people feel the same way, that's what you want. You want people to react the way they did, you want them to get the same feeling from the songs. If I went out there and I sang everything with this like gritty voice, and all this vibrato, and a lot of distortion on the guitar, people would feel like I'm rewriting the song, and I'm taking away that nostalgia that they came there to experience, and I don't want to do that. That's the opposite goal that I have. I want people afterward to have that feeling that they always have when they listen to the songs.



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