Don’t be alarmed by that lightning on the horizon, by the peel of thunder in the skies overhead, that’s just the gods alerting us to the new that Yngwie Malmsteen – the latter-day Mozart of neoclassical shred guitar – has announced a new album.
This record is called Hell Or High Water. Mr Malmsteen has shared the video for its first single, and it will hit stores worldwide on November 13 via Music Theories Recordings/Artone Label Group.
Malmsteen is not someone who typically enjoys the easy life. He’s always got a Stratocaster in hand. Right now he’s preparing for the road again, with September dates upcoming in China and Japan. He has a work ethic all right, but even so, Hell Or High Water was a significant undertaking.
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He went to the mattresses for this one, holing up in his studio as the seasons passed, and… Well, he wrote a lot of songs.
“I realised it was better to focus completely uninterrupted, so I stayed at home to write this album over the course of eight months,” he says. “I had around 80 or 90 tracks finished, and then I had to decide which ones were the strongest.”
Nine made the cut. Among them is lead single Now Or Never, which is a typically orchestra-coded work of power metal (or plain old capital H, capital M ‘Heavy Metal’ in old money) that finds Malmsteen back on the mic.
We talk about Malmsteen’s solos tearing the fabric of time, or metaphorically bombarding the nucleus with neutrons in search of some kind of baroque atomic epiphany. Such creative energies can be hard to marshal into musical ideas, at least for us mortals, but Malmsteen says they’re always just there within reach.
“Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me,” he says. “It’s like that movie Amadeus.”
Not that he is explicitly comparing himself to Mozart. There are some crucial differences in how these ideas arrive.
“Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form,” explains Malmsteen. “I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like.”
Consider him your very own shred jukebox. He can compose to order. No request too tough.
“If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you,” he promises. “You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want.
“The language of music is simple. There are certain notes that belong together in whatever stylistic direction and sound pleasant to the ear. The ideas don’t come all the time, but when they do, it’s like an avalanche. The pieces I choose for my records are like gifts that I capture because they amaze me. I’m very lucky in that sense.”
Some of these songs speak to Malmsteen’s preoccupations with the classics, such as Antikythera, a track referencing the analogue computer built of bronze and found in Greece 200BC, or Beyond Zeta Reticuli, which casts Malmsteen’s gaze to the heavens, and a star system some 39 light years from Earth.
Others are more personal, such as Father, which was written and recorded as a tribute to his dad, who died last year – and to whom the entire album is dedicated.
“He was an amazing man,” says Malmsteen. “I was proud to have him as a father, and I loved him. I wanted to dedicate all of this to him, and that one particular track is for him. I wanted others to feel what I felt when they hear it.
“Nicola Paganini once said, ‘One must feel strongly in order to make others feel strongly’. It’s one thing to be a typewriter and another thing to be someone who writes stories that can touch people. That was always the point.”
For more information, head over to the official Yngwie Malmsteen website.
