Location: Rock Cafe / Postojna / Slovenia
Interview date: 22.01.2010
Alen Brentini is a Croatian guitarist, singer, writer and composer from Rijeka. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Page, Jason Becker,Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy and Robert Johnson are just a few of the names Brentini likes to cite as the core inspiration behind shaping and sharpening his style. With his new album “Iza zidova tišine” (“Behind the walls of silence”) fresh out, the man rolled into Postojna with his backing band on 22.01.2010, treating Slovenian connoisseurs of guitar wizardry to his vision and his take on the music world.
The guy has already made a name for himself in music circles, especially abroad, and he’s a respected figure, so it’s no surprise to see his collaborations so far with international players like Michael T. Ross (keyboards, Lita Ford, Lizzy Borden, Angel), Richie Kotzen (guitar, ex-Poison, ex-Mr. Big), Kee Marcello (guitar, ex-Europe), Marco Mendoza (ex-Thin Lizzy, ex-Whitesnake), Mike Terrana (Axel Rudi Pell, Masterpan, ex-Rage)
RockLine: How did it come about that you’re playing here in Postojna for the first time tonight?
Alen: I found Rock Cafe through MySpace. A friend who’d played here before told me about the club and said it was a great place. So I got in touch. I got a reply from a man with a big heart (Sebastijan Martuljaš, author’s note.), who accepted all our conditions, and here we are. It’d be ideal if my band and I got the chance to “rip it up” all over Europe in clubs like this one in Postojna. Places like this suit us, because you can get closer to people during the show.
RockLine: How do people back home in Rijeka see you, your playing and your band?
Alen: Honestly, playing at home is the worst for us. It’s the hardest place to play, because Rijeka is a small city and everybody more or less knows you already. And then it goes something like this: “Oh, Alen Brenitni is playing in Rijeka?! I ran into him this morning at the café. No point, why would I go see him again!” Ha, ha, ha… They definitely appreciate our work, all of us in the band, but they don’t pay us enough attention to come out and support us at gigs in Rijeka. Rijeka is the best city to live in, but I can’t always say the same when it comes to making music.
RockLine: Your music covers a wide range of genres. On top of excellent guitar playing, you can also boast a really good voice. With that approach, your music must surely be relevant abroad?
Alen: Right now I’m working with musicians from Los Angeles. There’s even a chance I’ll be heading over there soon and maybe setting a stage on fire. At the moment I’m working with Michael T. Ross…
RockLine: Wait, wait… Are you kidding me? Michael T. Ross! The keyboardist! That guy played in the legendary seventies hard rockers Angel?
Alen: Yes. In Angel. He’s currently working with Lita Ford. He’s a very good friend of mine. On the horizon there’s also more work with Richie Kotzen, and with Kee Marcello (ex-Europe, author’s note.). The guests on my new album are Kee Marcello, the already-mentioned Michael T. Ross, and Kenny Sundin. The latter is a Swedish bassist who played in Alien, Swedish Erotica and Da Vinci, and also worked with Kee Marcello.
RockLine: Was it hard to find your own band, the kind you’re presenting tonight here in Postojna? One that follows you, that’s behind you.
Alen: Yes. Hard. It’s hard to find normal people who play with their brains switched on and aren’t hung up on showing off on stage. So posers aren’t welcome in the band. These are people who know when to play and when to stop. You know, the pauses sound really beautiful in our playing too.
RockLine: You’re working on your new album right now?
Alen: Yes. And it’s a double. The first CD will have vocals, the second will be completely instrumental. I’m a singer and a guitarist, but lately it looks like I might just give myself over entirely to an instrumental career. The reason is simple. Croatia is too small a market for me. There’s not much interest here in the kind of music I play. And if you head abroad, you’re left with two options. Either you start singing in English, which doesn’t come all that easily to me. Not because I can’t speak English, but because I can’t think in English, so the question is how I’d express myself through English lyrics and still keep the feelings genuine enough. The other option is purely instrumental music, which doesn’t give me any headaches at all.
RockLine: Your voice serves you well. You sounded great at the soundcheck.
Alen: Depends how loud they put you in the mix, ha, ha, ha…
RockLine: In the past you’ve worked with plenty of respected musicians and picked up a lot of valuable experience, right?
Alen: Yes. In Croatia that’s Aki Rahimovski, half of Parni Valjak, then Dado Topić from Time, and Neno Belan & Fiumens. I’ve spent a huge amount of time sitting around in different studios as a session guitarist. I’ve racked up a lot of mileage over the years, and now it’s high time I did something of my own too. It’s hell being put in the position of someone who has to listen to others about when, how much and where. It’s miserable for a musician who’s confined to two meters of stage and isn’t allowed to move anywhere else, show his own ideas and so on. When you’re on your own, you don’t have to worry about that. So I put together a band that’s mine. Kruno Kukuljan is on bass, Marko Duvnjak on drums, Sandro Šupak on guitar. Right now this lineup is a great crew!
RockLine: I just remembered another excellent shredder among Croatian guitarists. That’s “Šime”! Are you going to follow in his footsteps?
Alen: You mean Damir Šimič – Šime. Yes, he’s an excellent guitarist. I know him personally. He lives in Los Angeles now. He’s a “shredder”. He belongs to the neoclassical technique and school….
RockLine: Malmsteen?
Alen: Like Malmsteen. I’m not interested in being Malmsteen or Damir Šimič. And I definitely don’t want to be Richie Kotzen either. I’m looking for something of my own. Something that makes you recognizable, unique. Say I was in Los Angeles, like Šime… the competition there is brutal. The place is crawling with great musicians like me, all fighting for recognition… There are really a lot of those people there. Everybody’s into music. They’re specialists. Now it’s just a question of how all those parameters fit together. Say, the quality of the vocal delivery, the instrument playing, the arranging skills, how you structure compositions, the sound production and so on… And in the end, when you put that person on stage, he has to leave a real impression. These are the attributes you have to tick off today if you want to get anywhere. I don’t know if I’ll be that lucky, but I’m carrying a full bag of good spirits with me. That seems very important to me.
RockLine: When did you discover this gift in yourself, being able to put a song together from head to tail? A song that’s the fruit of your own authorship.
Alen: I still haven’t discovered it, ha, ha, ha… You know what this whole thing is about? The first one you write is always the dumbest. That’s obvious. Then you write the second, the third, the hundredth. And you progress. That’s how you slowly shape yourself. Your own musical authorship. Anyone who claimed he was happy with himself and didn’t need any more polishing would be a fool. For several years I got hung up on the details of this side of things. Especially with vocal songs. There you often ask yourself whether you’re overdoing something and so on… Once there are lyrics. Political, love, sociological,… Right now I’m thinking about and focusing on instrumental arrangements. Those are the steps a person climbs through life. When I’m about 70, I’ll be able to tell you when it became clear to me and whether it ever did. For now, everything I create is just a lot of fun.
RockLine: You hinted earlier that you’re not exactly a fan of English lyrics. So will you record the vocal songs for the new album entirely in Croatian? I ask because English is definitely more interesting abroad, where more could open up for you as your career goes on.
Alen: Recording the music is the smallest problem. As far as English goes, you have to be precise so the lyrics fit the beat metrically. If I used English in my songs, someone would really have to think exactly like me to catch what I want to express in my feelings through playing music. That means I’m open to an English-language lyricist, but the problem is being limited to the Balkans. Someone once told me when we met: “Kid, you picked the wrong continent!” Not just the wrong country, the wrong continent. I won’t argue. In Croatia there are plenty of good clubs, plenty of good people ready to listen to your music. I’d rather play for eighty people who get me than for 800 who just stare at me blankly. I don’t want to put myself through that. The only problem is you can’t make a living from it. Right now I’m somehow scraping by financially, but I can’t predict what will happen in the future.
RockLine: Now that the market has loosened up, if we can call it that, given the lobbies that still keep talents and bands with their own identity pushed down, now that borders between countries are blurring more and more, and Yugoslavia has been gone for a good while,… Rijeka is once again full of young, ambitious and incredibly colorful bands. How do you see this situation? Bands like Father or Morso, for example, don’t come along every day…
Alen: Yes. Those are two brilliant bands. Similar story. They’re pure export products. They have nothing to look for in Rijeka, they were born for abroad. Sadly, they can hone their skills and knowledge for 25 years and still get nowhere here, while abroad they could make a good living from it. And then you realize it would have been better to spend all those years smuggling cigarettes…. Or if you’re like our Simona Gotovac and everyone stares at your chest when you’re on stage, nobody cares about the music. Here I’d make it just by having one of her two breasts, ha, ha, ha….
Sandro: You can still get some silicone implants, ha, ha,…
Alen: And I can get my lips done too, and then I’m perfect.
RockLine: What can we expect from tonight’s show here in Postojna?
Alen: Everything. We’ll play some covers, some of our own material. Blues is number one for us. All the guys in the band are bluesmen. There’ll be a few instrumentals. Some funk, some metal riff action, basically a cross-section of everything. There’s no show business if you can’t entertain people. If Malmsteen does the splits on stage and pulls off crazy stunts, and Vai puts top hats with lights on his head… The point is, you’ve got to know how to entertain people.
RockLine: What about short-term plans for the future? You just mentioned the new album, any other surprises?
Alen: So “Iza zidova tišine”, my second album, will be out soon, and of course continuous gigging will follow. I’d really like to get the band out to play in Slovenia and the rest of Europe as much as possible, because that’s the most interesting market for us. I see my music mainly here, in these parts. We’ll definitely stay on stages in Croatia, but since we don’t have much luck in our home country, we’re focused on abroad. We’re also connecting with some foreign artists we could share stages with.
RockLine: Besides the Slovenian Bor Zuljan, you’re the only Ibanez guitar “endorser” in the Balkans. Funny enough, he’s playing in Ljubljana today too, presenting his new album, just like you in Postojna.
Alen: To be completely honest, I didn’t make any special effort around that. I was put in touch with Ibanez by the guy who represents Ibanez for Croatia. He asked me if I was interested. I certainly wasn’t against it, and he sorted out the paperwork with the Japanese himself. Ibanez currently has the strongest guitarists under its wing, like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert, and it’s certainly welcome and useful to have your name show up among them.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photo Gallery
