Author: Jernej Vene
Interview date: 30.06.2004
About the album Is there love in space
Is there love in space is definitely a very rock-oriented record. I can draw parallels with the albums Surfing with the alien, Flying in a blue dream and Extremist. The tracks are mostly instrumental, with a few vocal ones too. I think my collaborators and I managed to create livelier, more modern-sounding music than what I’d made before.
On choosing the guitarists for the G 3 tours:
Whenever I plan joint tours, I want to play with guitarists who play different styles. First I check whether Steve Vai is available, and so far he’s almost always been on board. We’re old friends, so we want to play together as often as we can. Putting a lineup together is often tough because musicians are so busy. Sometimes it takes a whole year just to nail down who’s playing. I’m constantly looking for unusual combinations of guitarists.
On Robert Fripp:
Steve Vai, Robert Fripp and I played together on the second edition of the G 3 tour in 1997. Kenny Wayne Shepherd helped out back then too. We’re used to playing together. Robert Fripp also played on my album Strange beautiful music, since we’ve been working together for quite a while. We want our collaboration to get even closer through playing together. When the opportunity came up, I wanted to put together a different edition of the G 3 tour, bringing our different musical styles together.
How the tour has gone so far and how the crowds have reacted:
It’s been a lot of fun, and the crowds in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom were great. They get the differences in our musical messages. Many times they were surprised to see how well we click on stage. They totally enjoy the show.
What can we expect from the joint show at Hala Tivoli?
This time I decided to go for a different approach. Instead of playing other people’s songs, we’d rather reach for tracks from our own catalogs. We play Ice 9 from my album Surfing with the alien, then comes a medley of In the court of the crimson king and Red by King Crimson, and at the end we play Vai’s song The Murder, which finishes with Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the free world.
