Great White’s Mark Kendall recently talked to the “Mark 2.0” podcast about the band’s new singer Brett Carlise who joined the band replacing Andrew Freeman (Last In Line), who sang for Great White for only five months.
About Carlise, Kendall said:
“[Brett‘s] got a range from A to Z. He was [initially] just filling in [for a show in Las Vegas], because… Andrew, [he’s] a wonderful singer [and] a kicka** dude, I love him, but he’s in [another] band. He’s a part owner of the name. They just made a record. They’re touring. It’s hard for a band like us to have a singer that’s in other bands too. ‘Oh, who’s your singer?’ ‘The guy from Last In Line.’ So this was just a fill-in thing.
”I almost didn’t wanna do it. We had to audition some guy from George Lynch and another guy from Sons Of something; I don’t even know. And then we heard this kid, 25 years old, sing on a couple of tracks. We gave him just the music and he overdubbed his vocals.
”I go, ‘Well, this guy is at least singing close.’ I go, ‘But I’m not doing it if we can’t rehearse. We’ve gotta at least rehearse once.’ And so we rehearsed in Las Vegas, and I felt a little better but still nervous. [I thought], ‘This could be career-ending.’ And it ended up being completely the opposite of what I felt; he went out there and just totally killed it. We’re doing, like, ”Stick It”, and he’s singing it verbatim, I mean, hittin’ all those notes.
”And it is high; that stuff is up there. And some of the songs, like ”Lady Red Light”, are very difficult to sing. It’s in that Foreigner range, the real upper midrange that hits a part of your voice that’s very difficult. Everybody that tried to sing it always struggled. The kid nailed it, I mean, just absolutely… I didn’t have to say anything, just one, two, three, four, go. So it was really good.”