Daniele Carlucci, editor of Italy's SpazioRock, caught up with Tesla guitaist Dave Rude on the occasion of the Frontiers Rock Festival near Milan. An excerpt from the interview follows:

Q: Let’s talk about the new album, Simplicity. We've read that it is a come-back to the roots, I’ve listened to the record and I can say that’s definitely right. It is a great album written with the pure Tesla sound and style...

A: "Thank you!"

Q: Would you like to introduce Simplicity to us?

A: "Oh, I would love to. We’re so proud of this record, prouder than anything I've ever done and I know the other guys are super, super excited and proud. We spent a really long time working on the album from the beginning. We spent a month just working on songs, before even went to record which was important and it’s not how we made our records in the past. So it really helps to get everything of the all important stuff done before we started actually trying to get sound or productioning. And then we went in the studio two months getting everything perfect, but at the same time we still captured really pretty raw and live, which is also part of the old school Tesla sound.

You know, the first few records were kind of recorded live in the studio and that's what we exactly did with Simplicity… we played it live as a band and nine times out of ten those were the tracks that were on the album and Frank added one or two guitar tracks, maybe we did the solos but for the most part there was a lot of live tracks we kept on the album. And also we didn’t overdub the tone of tracks. In a lot of albums you can make four guitars on each side, tons of overdub you can never do live. And it sounds cool, but we wanted it to be more like… us in a room, stop. It’s not intentionally old school but we just didn’t worry about the radio, we didn’t worry about trying to be contemporary. We just wanted to make songs that we liked… and that we knew our fans like, cause we’ve been touring so much, we know they like the old album tracks like “We’re Not Good Together” or fucking “2 Late 4 Love”."

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Simplicity, Tesla's seventh studio release of all new material, is out today, June 6th in Europe via Frontiers, and on June 10th in North America on Tesla Electric Company Recordings with an arrangement through Entertainment One Music And Distribution. Simplicity was released in Japan on May 21st with two bonus tracks.

Tracklisting:

"MP3"
"Ricochet"
"Rise And Fall"
"So Divine..."
"Cross My Heart"
"Honestly"
"Flip Side!"
"Other Than Me"
"Break Of Dawn"
"Burnout To Fade"
"Life Is A River"
"Sympathy"
"Time Bomb"
"Til That Day"

"Burnout To Fade" (bonus track, writing demo version)

"Taste My Pain" (bonus track Japan)

"So Divine":

"Taste My Pain":