Legendary rock super group Mr. Big have returned with a possibly their most hard hitting, most powerful record to date, titled …The Stories We Could Tell. An album that is sure to dazzle longtime fans, as well as create new fans of this one of a kind group. Fresh off a promotional stint in Japan, and just before they embark on tour across Europe and Asia, Metal Exiles had the opportunity to speak with bass icon Billy Sheehan, to discuss the formation of the new record and gain perhaps new insight into the band known as Mr. Big.
An Interview With Billy Sheehan
By Michael Knowles
Metal Exiles: For starters thank you very much Billy for taking the time I’m sure your busy with all the other promotional work you have going on for new album which is fantastic by the way.
Billy: My pleasure
Metal Exiles: If I’m not mistaken you and your bandmates were recently in Japan promoting the new album, what has been the overall reaction by the Japanese fan base, since they have been the most loyal and committed Mr. Big fans over the years?
Billy: Yes we were, yeah, they were wonderful the album charted very very high, we would have been number one except for gosh darn Ariana Grande, but I guess with a little ass that cute how could four old men beat her out. So we were number two Ariana was number one
Metal Exiles-I was actually of the opinion that your last album What If was your best album to date, but somehow you guys have managed to top yourselves with …The Stories We Could Tell. It seems that now that you guys are beyond the reunion stage and that you just genuinely enjoy playing together and writing new music and it’s not just to appease the fans. Is it safe to say that the band is jelling together maybe better than you have in the past?
Billy: That’s correct. Yeah absolutely and that is the case too and you’re very observant, we don’t have to do it, which is kind of great, a lot of guys are kind of broke and they need to do it no matter what, but we are all in good shape you know, were not zillionaires, but we’re all in real good shape, we were all smart with our money, and nobody was a drug lunatic, or drinking lunatic and nobody collected vintage cars or invested in weird things. We’re all sensible guys and we’re all in good shape, so we don’t really have to play as Mr. Big in order to survive which makes it really wonderful because we do what we do, because we enjoy it and it makes me very very happy to look out into a crowd of people and see people having a great night and enjoying themselves it’s kind of what our job is, to bring a night of entertainment to your city and have you enjoy it and we’ve certainly enjoyed doing that job.
Metal Exiles- How do you guys decide the musical direction of an album? In this case …The Stories We Could Tell is a very soulful blues rock sounding album, reminiscent of the legendary rock bands from the early to mid-70’s. Does this decision come to life organically, or is a decision made before the song writing process?
Billy: It’s certainly a 70’s thing. Yeah we almost never have a meeting about what we should do or what we need to do, we just start putting pieces of music together without any discussion really. I imagine there very well may be bands that discuss…that we should have a plan, we just get together start writing songs we like that one we like this one, we’ll leave that one behind and move ahead you know we. There’s never really a conscious effort on our part to achieve any particular thing. I know a good song when I hear it whether it’s from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, so… and I think that’s true with everyone and I think a good song is a good song no matter what. And we try and write good songs, and build around that only. We know that people have enjoyed what we have done in the past and so have we so we try to stick with things that are sort of around, or don’t sound too far out from what we did through the years. And suddenly we’re not going to into a free formed Jazz motif or a screaming cookie monster vocal metal thing. Those are both perfectly legitimate forms of music and wonderful in their own right, just not particularly our thing. You can probably put our sound between 1971 to 80 as far as our real…what we really play like, and that’s pretty much what we get. Now all of us evolve on our own, because we are all doing things on our own outside of Mr. Big so when we come back to Mr. Big all of us have a greater vocabulary a greater experience, stories, that when you bring them back into the band it leads to new stuff, new ideas. I’m always trying new things on my bass, different ways to play, approaches, all kind of stuff it never ends, I’m always working. Everyday I’m learning something new. So when a couple years go by, a few tours, and a few records go by, I get together with Mr. Big I’ve got a whole bunch of new stuff for us to experiment with. And the same with Paul, same with Pat, and Eric as well. Our life experience brings us together every couple of years to document that experience, and this is what we come up with.
Metal Exiles- I guess a follow up question would be, what was the song writing process like for this album, was this record a very collaborative effort like What If appeared to be, or did certain members have to take the lead on songs?
Billy: No we managed to carve out time to get together in a room. Not playing as a band necessarily. But myself, Eric, Paul we got together. And we would bounce around ideas with different members, which is good because we all influence each other in different ways. So Paul and I would get together and do certain things, me and Eric would get together and do a certain thing, same with Pat and when we bring it all together it all has the making of Mr. Big to a large degree, but each of us adds a little different flavor. We get together in a room start fooling around with things, and next thing you know there’s a song there. And we’ve done it for so long, and since we’re all always writing, at any given time you get the four of us in a room we can probably…give us an hour and we could probably come up with 3 or 4 songs and that’s kind of the way it works. I like it like that, for me I’m happy that most of the bands I’ve ever worked with, the writing was not a difficult thing. It’s an enjoyable thing to just sit around and say hey what do you got, you need a chorus hey how about this, ok let’s do a bridge and knock this thing out. It’s a pretty easy process. I’ve done a lot of research on song writers and song writing and it’s pretty interesting a lot of great great song writers have never had any training or any instruction as a songwriter, but they were in bands that played great songs for years before they ever wrote one. I’m happy to say that we all have played in bands where we played a lot of songs. Paul not as much but on his own learned a million songs. It would be difficult to stump him with almost any Beatles song, he knows them all. And then myself playing years in bars, playing the hits to keep the dance floor full. It’s a great training, so we get together all of us having that experience it’s pretty easy to come up with a bunch of things. And it will have some sense of being put together well, because for years that’s all I did was play the songs that were hits. So you get really used to wondering why is that a hit? We got really good at picking the hits. A new record would come out, and we would have to pick songs off the record to learn, without any knowledge that as to the fact that that was to be the single, and 9 times out of 10 we always guessed it. Picked the song that was the big song off the record. After a while you get an ear for what was going to be a hit.
Metal Exiles: It seems like this album came together rather quickly, not that it sounds rushed at all in fact just the opposite. I’m sure you guys only had a short window of time to put this album together with your other career obligations. Do you and your bandmates find it easier to create an album under sort of a deadline, almost having to thrive under the pressure in a sense, or would you prefer to be more of a drawn out process with no time table to meet?
Billy: Sometimes it’s better to have a deadline. If not things sort of meander along and they don’t really go anywhere. As opposed to its got to be done by July 30th, or the record is not coming out better hurry it up, and then you know by July 28th we’ll really be going. It’s just human nature, I think it’s just a good idea to put a point on it. Every record I’ve ever done where all in all we can just do it whenever, just do it whenever time, the record never gets done ever. Sometimes we got a week we have 12 songs we have to record, and mix, and master, in a week, and I’ve seen it done. I’ve seen a record done in 3 days, 3 days that’s all we’ve got and we have no material, let’s go and it happens. When you really light a fire like that it’s amazing…it’s a good kind of pressure it really forces you to get moving and I kind of like that myself.
Metal Exiles: To me this album is so strong from top to bottom that it is difficult to isolate a favorite track or favorite tracks. For you personally and maybe the rest of the band, what are your favorite moments on the album and what were the most rewarding songs to write?
Billy: Gotta Love the Ride has a great sentiment, good philosophy, and the title track The Stories We Could Tell that’s a really…it appeals especially to myself and Pat because we are the two oldest in the band. It’s got that 1971 all over it. It’s got that tonality, the song structure, choice of notes, very much like that so that’s pretty cool. Forget to Breathe another good one, Monster in Me I love that one, a lot of fun to play. We’re happy now because we get to play them live; we’re leaving for rehearsal in about an hour now. It’s enjoyable to play them, which for us is the most important thing. The studio is kind of a necessary evil if you will, I enjoy recording and its rewarding, but the real reward for me personally is when you’re up on stage in front of people for real and playing new stuff. I mean for me that has always been more important than…that’s the thing about music for me. Everything I do, all the playing, practicing, all revolves around standing on stage and doing it. It’s wonderful to pick these songs, not sure how many we are doing, I think we are doing 4 or 5 off the new record, and work them out. There’s little details and things you have to adapt to live. You have to remember what you are going to sing and sing and play at the same time, get the harmonies right. It’s a lot of fun, and once we have it down, when we can play without thinking at all, then we can really enjoy it, the tour starts and it’s a great experience.
Metal Exiles: I especially enjoyed hearing how natural and seamless the title of the album came together. For the fans that are unaware of how the title of the album developed as well as the overall meaning behind the title track would you mind explaining it? And did you see the way the title came together as maybe a sign that you guys had created a very special record?
Billy: Well it’s true that every time we get together anybody in the band, the topics that come up are, what’s going on what’s been happening, and the stories that come out about what’s happened and who did what, what happened in London, What happened in Tokyo? Any crazy ass adventure always happens no matter what, and the stories we tell about it are hilarious. We have just a huge vocabulary of stories all of us have. My Dad in particular was a story teller, he was an Irishman and he would recite poetry in the pubs and in the bars for entertainment, and so when I was younger I remember my Dad telling these amazing stories. We knew the ending of the stories, it was like watching a movie we already knew the ending to, but we’d laugh because he was such a good story teller. And I realized at an early age what a great thing that was to tell a story, so early on I was the story teller, and the guys in Mr. Big picked up on it too, and they would begin relaying their stories. All the amazing stories in the band, all the stories we could tell, and many of them we could not tell too. It’s very much performance art too, you have to be sitting around a table, maybe a bottle of red wine just to let your guard down and really let go, and tell exactly how things happened, and how it went down. It’s really a lot about our whole band, our experiences through the years. There have been an amazing bunch of stories through the years, things that have gone down. To Be With You becoming a hit, Paul getting the drill caught in his hair, the shenanigans on the bus. Just amazing stuff, so we thought it would be appropriate at this time, at this advanced stage in life, to title the record that. And put a little stamp of authenticity on the fact that we have lived through so many great experiences, and that experience has really enriched our lives. Therefore Gotta Love the Ride is also about that too. The ride has been amazing, I don’t know what the destination is but the ride has been incredible.
Metal Exiles: What also stood out to me right off the bat with this record is how huge the production is; you guys worked with Pat Regan again someone you especially are quite familiar with. For fans like myself who are unaware of the impact of a good producer on an album what specifically did he bring to the table this time around to put …The Stories We could Tell over the top?
Billy: Well Pat is good at bringing distant parts together into a unified whole. He is also good at fixing anything. No matter what it is Pat will make it work. And so with the situation with our drummer Pat Torpey was such that we had to use some drum programming, some pads, and other unusual things to get the drums on the record. We thought he would be an ideal choice for us to solve any problems we would have, because it was our first time doing it like that, and he did. When I listen to the record now I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that a lot of it is programmed, because it sounds real. We even made a joke at the end that we shouldn’t have told anybody, we should have just kept our mouths shut and nobody would have known. It was Pat Torpey sitting with a programmer, and he really got him to do stuff how a drummer would do it. When a real drummer hears program drums they know that a real drummer would never do that, a real drummer would never play that. The average listener wouldn’t understand particularly but a real drummer would say no. You have the snare drum, the hi hat and the tom’s going off at the same time, you only have two hands, a real drummer wouldn’t do that. Whereas programming with a drummer next to you explaining to you the nuances of his particular style, really sounds great, and we’re really pleased with it.
Metal Exiles: You guys will be touring the UK and Japan over the next couple of months, for the U.S. fan any plans of doing to tour the states in the foreseeable future?
Billy: We’re touring the UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, then some more in Southeast Asia, and then I think we have a spot in February for USA and South America. But I’m not sure, and also we’re still not sure how well Pat can hold up on tour, he is going to go out with us now. We have a fill in drummer, Pat will be singing and may be able to play a song or two, but he’ll be there with us for sure.
Metal Exiles: Thanks again Billy for your time, any last message you would like to send out to the fans?
Billy: I’m just forever grateful and thankful to have people listen to what I do and come to my shows, and I will do my best always to give as much as I can and give my best, and I consider myself very lucky to have people listening to the things that I do and I appreciate it.
BUY …The Stories We Could Tell
Official Mr Big Site
An Interview With Billy Sheehan
By Michael Knowles
Metal Exiles: For starters thank you very much Billy for taking the time I’m sure your busy with all the other promotional work you have going on for new album which is fantastic by the way.
Billy: My pleasure
Metal Exiles: If I’m not mistaken you and your bandmates were recently in Japan promoting the new album, what has been the overall reaction by the Japanese fan base, since they have been the most loyal and committed Mr. Big fans over the years?
Billy: Yes we were, yeah, they were wonderful the album charted very very high, we would have been number one except for gosh darn Ariana Grande, but I guess with a little ass that cute how could four old men beat her out. So we were number two Ariana was number one
Metal Exiles-I was actually of the opinion that your last album What If was your best album to date, but somehow you guys have managed to top yourselves with …The Stories We Could Tell. It seems that now that you guys are beyond the reunion stage and that you just genuinely enjoy playing together and writing new music and it’s not just to appease the fans. Is it safe to say that the band is jelling together maybe better than you have in the past?
Billy: That’s correct. Yeah absolutely and that is the case too and you’re very observant, we don’t have to do it, which is kind of great, a lot of guys are kind of broke and they need to do it no matter what, but we are all in good shape you know, were not zillionaires, but we’re all in real good shape, we were all smart with our money, and nobody was a drug lunatic, or drinking lunatic and nobody collected vintage cars or invested in weird things. We’re all sensible guys and we’re all in good shape, so we don’t really have to play as Mr. Big in order to survive which makes it really wonderful because we do what we do, because we enjoy it and it makes me very very happy to look out into a crowd of people and see people having a great night and enjoying themselves it’s kind of what our job is, to bring a night of entertainment to your city and have you enjoy it and we’ve certainly enjoyed doing that job.
Metal Exiles- How do you guys decide the musical direction of an album? In this case …The Stories We Could Tell is a very soulful blues rock sounding album, reminiscent of the legendary rock bands from the early to mid-70’s. Does this decision come to life organically, or is a decision made before the song writing process?
Billy: It’s certainly a 70’s thing. Yeah we almost never have a meeting about what we should do or what we need to do, we just start putting pieces of music together without any discussion really. I imagine there very well may be bands that discuss…that we should have a plan, we just get together start writing songs we like that one we like this one, we’ll leave that one behind and move ahead you know we. There’s never really a conscious effort on our part to achieve any particular thing. I know a good song when I hear it whether it’s from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, so… and I think that’s true with everyone and I think a good song is a good song no matter what. And we try and write good songs, and build around that only. We know that people have enjoyed what we have done in the past and so have we so we try to stick with things that are sort of around, or don’t sound too far out from what we did through the years. And suddenly we’re not going to into a free formed Jazz motif or a screaming cookie monster vocal metal thing. Those are both perfectly legitimate forms of music and wonderful in their own right, just not particularly our thing. You can probably put our sound between 1971 to 80 as far as our real…what we really play like, and that’s pretty much what we get. Now all of us evolve on our own, because we are all doing things on our own outside of Mr. Big so when we come back to Mr. Big all of us have a greater vocabulary a greater experience, stories, that when you bring them back into the band it leads to new stuff, new ideas. I’m always trying new things on my bass, different ways to play, approaches, all kind of stuff it never ends, I’m always working. Everyday I’m learning something new. So when a couple years go by, a few tours, and a few records go by, I get together with Mr. Big I’ve got a whole bunch of new stuff for us to experiment with. And the same with Paul, same with Pat, and Eric as well. Our life experience brings us together every couple of years to document that experience, and this is what we come up with.
Metal Exiles- I guess a follow up question would be, what was the song writing process like for this album, was this record a very collaborative effort like What If appeared to be, or did certain members have to take the lead on songs?
Billy: No we managed to carve out time to get together in a room. Not playing as a band necessarily. But myself, Eric, Paul we got together. And we would bounce around ideas with different members, which is good because we all influence each other in different ways. So Paul and I would get together and do certain things, me and Eric would get together and do a certain thing, same with Pat and when we bring it all together it all has the making of Mr. Big to a large degree, but each of us adds a little different flavor. We get together in a room start fooling around with things, and next thing you know there’s a song there. And we’ve done it for so long, and since we’re all always writing, at any given time you get the four of us in a room we can probably…give us an hour and we could probably come up with 3 or 4 songs and that’s kind of the way it works. I like it like that, for me I’m happy that most of the bands I’ve ever worked with, the writing was not a difficult thing. It’s an enjoyable thing to just sit around and say hey what do you got, you need a chorus hey how about this, ok let’s do a bridge and knock this thing out. It’s a pretty easy process. I’ve done a lot of research on song writers and song writing and it’s pretty interesting a lot of great great song writers have never had any training or any instruction as a songwriter, but they were in bands that played great songs for years before they ever wrote one. I’m happy to say that we all have played in bands where we played a lot of songs. Paul not as much but on his own learned a million songs. It would be difficult to stump him with almost any Beatles song, he knows them all. And then myself playing years in bars, playing the hits to keep the dance floor full. It’s a great training, so we get together all of us having that experience it’s pretty easy to come up with a bunch of things. And it will have some sense of being put together well, because for years that’s all I did was play the songs that were hits. So you get really used to wondering why is that a hit? We got really good at picking the hits. A new record would come out, and we would have to pick songs off the record to learn, without any knowledge that as to the fact that that was to be the single, and 9 times out of 10 we always guessed it. Picked the song that was the big song off the record. After a while you get an ear for what was going to be a hit.
Metal Exiles: It seems like this album came together rather quickly, not that it sounds rushed at all in fact just the opposite. I’m sure you guys only had a short window of time to put this album together with your other career obligations. Do you and your bandmates find it easier to create an album under sort of a deadline, almost having to thrive under the pressure in a sense, or would you prefer to be more of a drawn out process with no time table to meet?
Billy: Sometimes it’s better to have a deadline. If not things sort of meander along and they don’t really go anywhere. As opposed to its got to be done by July 30th, or the record is not coming out better hurry it up, and then you know by July 28th we’ll really be going. It’s just human nature, I think it’s just a good idea to put a point on it. Every record I’ve ever done where all in all we can just do it whenever, just do it whenever time, the record never gets done ever. Sometimes we got a week we have 12 songs we have to record, and mix, and master, in a week, and I’ve seen it done. I’ve seen a record done in 3 days, 3 days that’s all we’ve got and we have no material, let’s go and it happens. When you really light a fire like that it’s amazing…it’s a good kind of pressure it really forces you to get moving and I kind of like that myself.
Metal Exiles: To me this album is so strong from top to bottom that it is difficult to isolate a favorite track or favorite tracks. For you personally and maybe the rest of the band, what are your favorite moments on the album and what were the most rewarding songs to write?
Billy: Gotta Love the Ride has a great sentiment, good philosophy, and the title track The Stories We Could Tell that’s a really…it appeals especially to myself and Pat because we are the two oldest in the band. It’s got that 1971 all over it. It’s got that tonality, the song structure, choice of notes, very much like that so that’s pretty cool. Forget to Breathe another good one, Monster in Me I love that one, a lot of fun to play. We’re happy now because we get to play them live; we’re leaving for rehearsal in about an hour now. It’s enjoyable to play them, which for us is the most important thing. The studio is kind of a necessary evil if you will, I enjoy recording and its rewarding, but the real reward for me personally is when you’re up on stage in front of people for real and playing new stuff. I mean for me that has always been more important than…that’s the thing about music for me. Everything I do, all the playing, practicing, all revolves around standing on stage and doing it. It’s wonderful to pick these songs, not sure how many we are doing, I think we are doing 4 or 5 off the new record, and work them out. There’s little details and things you have to adapt to live. You have to remember what you are going to sing and sing and play at the same time, get the harmonies right. It’s a lot of fun, and once we have it down, when we can play without thinking at all, then we can really enjoy it, the tour starts and it’s a great experience.
Metal Exiles: I especially enjoyed hearing how natural and seamless the title of the album came together. For the fans that are unaware of how the title of the album developed as well as the overall meaning behind the title track would you mind explaining it? And did you see the way the title came together as maybe a sign that you guys had created a very special record?
Billy: Well it’s true that every time we get together anybody in the band, the topics that come up are, what’s going on what’s been happening, and the stories that come out about what’s happened and who did what, what happened in London, What happened in Tokyo? Any crazy ass adventure always happens no matter what, and the stories we tell about it are hilarious. We have just a huge vocabulary of stories all of us have. My Dad in particular was a story teller, he was an Irishman and he would recite poetry in the pubs and in the bars for entertainment, and so when I was younger I remember my Dad telling these amazing stories. We knew the ending of the stories, it was like watching a movie we already knew the ending to, but we’d laugh because he was such a good story teller. And I realized at an early age what a great thing that was to tell a story, so early on I was the story teller, and the guys in Mr. Big picked up on it too, and they would begin relaying their stories. All the amazing stories in the band, all the stories we could tell, and many of them we could not tell too. It’s very much performance art too, you have to be sitting around a table, maybe a bottle of red wine just to let your guard down and really let go, and tell exactly how things happened, and how it went down. It’s really a lot about our whole band, our experiences through the years. There have been an amazing bunch of stories through the years, things that have gone down. To Be With You becoming a hit, Paul getting the drill caught in his hair, the shenanigans on the bus. Just amazing stuff, so we thought it would be appropriate at this time, at this advanced stage in life, to title the record that. And put a little stamp of authenticity on the fact that we have lived through so many great experiences, and that experience has really enriched our lives. Therefore Gotta Love the Ride is also about that too. The ride has been amazing, I don’t know what the destination is but the ride has been incredible.
Metal Exiles: What also stood out to me right off the bat with this record is how huge the production is; you guys worked with Pat Regan again someone you especially are quite familiar with. For fans like myself who are unaware of the impact of a good producer on an album what specifically did he bring to the table this time around to put …The Stories We could Tell over the top?
Billy: Well Pat is good at bringing distant parts together into a unified whole. He is also good at fixing anything. No matter what it is Pat will make it work. And so with the situation with our drummer Pat Torpey was such that we had to use some drum programming, some pads, and other unusual things to get the drums on the record. We thought he would be an ideal choice for us to solve any problems we would have, because it was our first time doing it like that, and he did. When I listen to the record now I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that a lot of it is programmed, because it sounds real. We even made a joke at the end that we shouldn’t have told anybody, we should have just kept our mouths shut and nobody would have known. It was Pat Torpey sitting with a programmer, and he really got him to do stuff how a drummer would do it. When a real drummer hears program drums they know that a real drummer would never do that, a real drummer would never play that. The average listener wouldn’t understand particularly but a real drummer would say no. You have the snare drum, the hi hat and the tom’s going off at the same time, you only have two hands, a real drummer wouldn’t do that. Whereas programming with a drummer next to you explaining to you the nuances of his particular style, really sounds great, and we’re really pleased with it.
Metal Exiles: You guys will be touring the UK and Japan over the next couple of months, for the U.S. fan any plans of doing to tour the states in the foreseeable future?
Billy: We’re touring the UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, then some more in Southeast Asia, and then I think we have a spot in February for USA and South America. But I’m not sure, and also we’re still not sure how well Pat can hold up on tour, he is going to go out with us now. We have a fill in drummer, Pat will be singing and may be able to play a song or two, but he’ll be there with us for sure.
Metal Exiles: Thanks again Billy for your time, any last message you would like to send out to the fans?
Billy: I’m just forever grateful and thankful to have people listen to what I do and come to my shows, and I will do my best always to give as much as I can and give my best, and I consider myself very lucky to have people listening to the things that I do and I appreciate it.
BUY …The Stories We Could Tell
Official Mr Big Site
