“What happens a lot of times is, I’ll record an album, and then I’ll listen to it when I’m finished and try to decide what it needs to balance it out. With Passion And Warfare, I recorded the whole record, which took me years and years because of so much that was going on, and then I thought, OK, I need something else. I wrote The Animal in a day and a half. I wrote it, recorded it and mixed it.
“Same thing with Racing The World. I thought, Gosh, the record is so dense and intense at times... I need something simple that I can just play, where I won’t have to worry about knobs and wah-wahs and things like that – something that just gives you the melody on a silver platter.
“There a lot of people who want to just hear me do instrumental guitar stuff, and it’s hard to do an instrumental guitar record without sounding like Satriani. [laughs] He’s really got that covered. I’ve tried to avoid that my whole life, but then I just thought, Ah, just do it. There’s a lot of things I do that don’t sound like him at all, but every so often, you put a melody on a certain type of groove, and it’s going to smack of Satch. [laughs]
“It’s fine with me. We’re very different in many regards. I wanted a nice, easy, beautiful melody that’s fun to listen to. I was going to make the ending longer, actually. When I get to the finish line, I’m like a boxer – I punch and punch until I have nothing left.”