TESLA guitarist Dave Rude recently spoke with Clint Switzer of the “Music Mania” podcast. When asked about Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, who produced the upcoming album ‘Shock’, he said (via Blabbermouth):
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“It was really cool and pretty organic. All the guys in LEPPARD are really nice and personable, and they’re one of the few bigger, huge, icon, headlining acts — at least that we’ve been out with — that hangs out. They’re there all day. You’ll see them in catering; they soundcheck every day. Some of the bigger bands kind of don’t hang out – they just show up right before they go on stage, and then they leave. These guys are there for the duration and [are] totally approachable.
We were all hanging with Phil and being his buddies and kind of got talking about music. He started giving us some advice — like, ‘Hey, why don’t you do a live record for ‘Mechanical Resonance’?’ Then we started doing that, and he’s like, ‘Hey, if you’re going to do that, for a bonus track, I got this song that I wrote. Why don’t you try and do it and I can produce it?’ In the process of working on that song, it went so well, we were kind of, like, ‘Why don’t we do a whole, real record where we write the songs and Phil produces it?’ It was such a nice experience working with him on that one track, so that’s what we did.
We did a lot of the writing and a lot of the recording on tour with DEF LEPPARD because we were together for so long, that we could use all those downtime hours in the afternoon. For us, the opening band on those big tours, we don’t get a soundcheck, so we don’t really have anything to do until the late afternoon, so we were just working on the record. Phil would be able to be there for most of that, and it was really, really cool.
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He helped co-write all the songs; he had a lot to do with the sound of it as well. It’s a very produced record, with tons of guitars and tons of vocals that still sounds like TESLA, but definitely a little bit different phase.”