Metal Contraband’s Chelsea recently spoke with Yngwie Malmsteen, to discuss the new album Tokyo Live, his recent 40th Anniversary tour, influences and style, and more. Check it out below:
Photo Credit Hikari Yuba
Chelsea here, honored to be speaking with the legendary Yngwie Malmsteen. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Hey, how you doing?
Thank you so much. I’m very excited to talk with you about your brand new release Tokyo Live. And it’s exactly what it sounds like, a live album of one special night of your 40th Anniversary Japan tour last year. So, to get things started, I’d love to start off talking about your experience on the Japan tour, and what you feel made this particular concert the one to capture for your live album.
It’s a great question. It’s kind of a coincidence, really, because I did an album called Parabellum a couple years ago, and I was on tour with it forever. Just toured around the world, toured and toured and toured. So ’22 and ’23, ’24 comes around and someone says, “Hey, do you know that it’s 40 years since your first start of your solo career”, basically. I signed my first solo deal in January 1984. So everything I’ve been recording since then has been solo albums. “Oh yeah, let’s call it that then”. So I’m touring Europe, touring Australia, I’m talking, you know, all over the world, right? And I come to Japan and the Japanese promoters go, we want to record and film the show. I’m like, okay, but only if I get to control the audio and see the footage and see if it’s good enough. And it’s meant to be Japan only, right? So I get the tapes, you know, the video and the audio, and I mixed the sound in my studio and I go, “Wow, this is really good. I’m going to put it out around the world”. So that’s how it happened. It could have been recorded in Bulgaria or Turkey or something, or Sweden or America, wherever. But it was Tokyo, and in a funny way, that’s kind of appropriate because it’s come on full circle, because my first solo deal was in January 1984 in Japan as well.
That’s great. Yeah, a full circle moment, I love that. And, you know, wherever it happened to land in the world, it lined up very nicely. You have an excellent album here.
Thank you.
And I’d also like to ask you about your band lineup that you took along with you for your 40th anniversary tour that led to Tokyo Live.
Yeah, it’s not always the same guys, but funnily enough, on this particular tour I had six different drummers.
Oh, wow! *laughs*
Yeah, so it’s like Spinal Tap, like, I have to change the drummers all the time. But anyways, so we have…Emilio Martinez on bass, Nick Marinovich on keyboards, and Kevin Klingenschmid on drums. It’s changed a little bit since then, but they’re the guys on that recording. And they’re all good, really good.
Definitely. And you have such a great balance between the classical touch and the metal on this setlist. You have tracks like a Fugue, a Toccata, Adagio, to tracks like “Rising Force” and “Soldier” and “Top Down, Foot Down”. So could you share some of your thought process of building this setlist, and how you narrowed down what made the cut?
It’s a great question because every night is a different setlist. I don’t like to do the same setlist because if we do, for instance, I just did nine weeks straight, six nights a week in America, right? I’ve been doing a lot of touring now and I don’t like to do the same setlist every night because it’s not a challenge to me then, you know? Not only that, but also I like to improvise all the solos and everything like this. So what I do is about an hour before the show, I kind of put a setlist together that’s different from the night before, and I tell them to print it out. So now it’s printed all over the stage. Everybody has the same set list everywhere, and we go on stage and I end up playing a different set list than most on the floor anyway. So it’s never the same, never. The only thing I did specifically for this tour, I put one song called “Hiroshima Mon Amour” on it that I haven’t done, because this is a sort of dedication to the Japanese.
That’s a great touch that I’m sure was definitely appreciated by the audience that night. But that’s fun, it feels like you’re always throwing curve balls at your band that way, then. Because you say, “Okay guys, here’s the set list”, and then go somewhere completely different with it.
Oh, yeah! They’ve got to be on their toes, like, you have no idea. And I kind of conduct the starts and finishes with my hands and my guitar neck and everything, they have to know little signs. *laughs*
Yes, that’s great. Well, I mean, that’s good, communication is important and you guys definitely pull it off beautifully.
Thank you.
Another thing I love about this album is the acoustic medley. I feel like you and your keyboardist had such a great balance throughout the album, but it really stands out in this track. I love that you’re perfectly in sync, we get a little harpsichord tone, a little Baroque style going, which is beautiful and impressive. Can you share your thoughts on the “Acoustic Cadenza” track?
Yeah, I used to do two Acoustic Cadenzas a night, but then I went down to one because it’s more effective. And it’s basically sort of like the beginning of the encore, and it’s never really quite the same. I do a fugue and I do “Air”, a whole lot of different things I throw in there, and the keyboard player just has to follow *laughs*. But it’s always interesting that it’s a little bit of a different sound in the hall. There’s a lot of things that play a role in what I want to end up playing on the acoustic. They have great sound in Japan, so you can’t blame anything on that, but sometimes when you play other places, it’s a little dry, maybe not so much echo, and you play little different things and stuff. But it’s all about the feeling of the moment, you know?
Absolutely, and that’s what’s really great about any show that you perform is just that there’s a sense of improvisation, but it’s just very natural. It doesn’t feel like it’s off the cuff or, you know, anything crazy. It feels like you planned it. It feels very natural, the way that you perform.
That’s great, thank you so much, because nothing was planned. The only plan I have is to improvise something that sounds planned but is not.
There you go! It works.
It’s certain rules you have to follow, it’s always a challenge, it’s always fun, but you’re not really quite sure what you’re going to do when you go on. *laughs*
It comes through as well, that energy that you’re just really having fun with it. It’s very natural to you. And I love that you encourage so many people to pick up the guitar and have fun with it as well. I saw a quote from you saying that music and playing the guitar is not a competition. And that’s such an important statement because so many people, especially with social media, about the trending videos and fast, crazy players, so many people seem to think that it is a competition and just becomes a speed shredding contest, and I love that you give such a good message of keeping true to the music. Do you have any thoughts to share on that?
Yeah, no, it’s spot on there. Music is not a sport, you know. It’s a funny thing, though, because it’s not unique to this era, because in the early 1800s, there was a period called the Virtuoso area, and Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt, and some other…mostly pianists, Virtuoso, Chopin stuff. They were sort of like in a competition, which is weird also. And then of course, in rock and roll era, it’s always been the guitar player. Always. It’s always been like that, and I don’t really understand that, because I don’t take part in that. I just do what I do. You know what mean?
Yes. It’s funny you mentioned Franz Liszt because, I studied music as well, and one of the things that always stuck with me from the music history classes was that Franz Liszt was essentially the original “rock star” because he had a “groupie”-esque following.
Well, yeah. Yeah, but you should read up on Niccolò Paganini. He was even worse. He was the rock star. He was nutty, you know, but Liszt and Paganini, they’re pretty much definitely the pioneers in that. *laughs*
Definitely, yeah, kind of on the same level for sure. And you’ve cited a great deal of classical influences over your history as a musician from Paganini, of course, to Vivaldi. And I really connect to your nod to Bach in songwriting. Bach’s counterpoint is a big part of learning composition, and the Chorales for learning vocals. And I’d love if you could just speak more specifically on how you took those studies and incorporated them into your own songwriting.
Well, it was a long, long process. I actually wrote a book on it called Relentless. It’s basically, I grew up in a very musical family, opera singers and classical musicians. And I was the youngest, and when I was five, I got my first guitar. I didn’t really play. Then I took trumpet, and played piano and violin and all this stuff. When I saw Hendrix smashing up a guitar, I said, “That’s what I want to do”. So I took the guitar off the wall, started playing that moment. And obviously the first thing I learned to play was the blues and rock and stuff like this, which is the pentatonic five notes per octave things, and I started feeling that there’s got to be something else to this, because I was playing like 24/7, you know? Again, I’m seven years old, very, very young, but everybody in my family, if they weren’t practicing scales on vocals, they would be on piano or the violin or something. I would hear more natural minors and stuff like this in these things. And then eventually I heard a band called Genesis when I was 10 years old, 9 or 10. And that band became a pop band later, but in those early days, they were actually extremely…sort of like a prog band, kind of. And the keyboard player in that band, he would play all his pedal notes and the diminished and suspended chords, I was like, “Oh, I like this stuff”. So I was intrigued by that, and I realized everything that I liked about what he did was Johann Sebastian Bach, essentially. So, my mother had hundreds of Bach and Vivaldi and Mozart records. So I started listening to them, and I gravitated to Vivaldi and Bach. Having already been a guitar player, I loved the sound of the Marshall stacks and I liked double bass drums and smoke machines and all that stuff. I just want to incorporate some of the classical vocabulary. I’m not saying verbatim, I’m talking about the thought pattern, really, more of a composer. You know, speaking of counterpoint, and pedal notes, and diminished, and inversions and all those things that you can do with a hard sound and that started really early on and it became my thing.
And you do it well. And I think that those origins definitely show through because it always feels like there is a reason and a purpose in the lines and phrases you write, and even when you’re improvising and playing, and that’s the difference between true musicality versus kind of…shredding for the sake of shredding, you know?
Yeah, I always kind of felt that even if he plays fast, something fast, it should be melodic, you know? To quote Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he said, “music is melody and melody is music”. So yeah, it’s very important because to play repetitious fast stuff, that’s one thing, but it has to have melodic quality no matter what. And the vibrato is extremely important as well, the vibrato in expression of the notes. One must not forget that.
Exactly, yes, it’s all composition elements that you include in there, which can tend to be forgotten in the hard rock and metal world once in a while. So it’s definitely appreciated that you do that. And I love that you mentioned early Genesis as well. I’ve always appreciated them, and I feel like it can be overlooked sometimes, because people focus a little more on later Genesis when it was the radio pop hits, but the early progressive records. I mean, Nursery Cryme was one of the coolest records I think they’ve come up with. You know, “The Musical Box”, that was a little bit off the wall, progressive, but had that fundamental composition element to it that you were just saying. And it was a really cool era of that band.
Yeah, the first one I heard was Selling England by the Pound.
Ah yes, that one too!
And that one, it knocked me out. And then I heard Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme and all those. I also liked ELP, Emerson Lake and Palmer, I liked them a lot. So it wasn’t guitar playing really that I was listening to, it was the music. You know what I’m saying? Because Emerson Lake and Palmer didn’t have a guitar player even.
Right. No, that’s the thing, Prog Rock has always kind of had a similar philosophy of taking those classical elements, and it’s not copying it, it’s just kind of being inspired by and keeping those fundamental compositions, songwriting philosophies, and translating into rock music, which is super cool.
Yes!
Now, the first song I ever heard from you actually was “I’ll See the Light Tonight”. And the first time I ever heard you in that song, I was utterly blown away by everything about it. The riffs, the melodies, harmonies, it was instantly stuck in my head for days. And I love that you close out the Tokyo Live album with this amazing track, too. So, I know that I love it, but what do you think makes this song so special that it resonates with so many people?
Well, I mean, *laughs* it’s so funny you should say that because I wrote that song…how long is the song, four minutes?
Just about.
Yeah, it took me four minutes to write it. That one was done in one go. The song was finished the first time I played it. It’s really funny because it’s very simplistic, but it’s to the point and, you know, it’s a good one. I like it.
Sometimes when things just flow out naturally and easily, it ends up being the best thing ever when you don’t even expect it, right?
Yes, that’s exactly right.
That’s great. I’d also like to go back a few years to when you did Generation Axe. That was such an amazing concept, and just so much fun to watch you all showcasing your different styles and talents all coming together. So I’m curious, can you talk to me about what a rehearsal or even a performance for Generation Axe was like since you had so many different contrasting guitarists all bringing your own personal touch to the same songs?
Yeah, it was, me and Steve Vai go way back, I’ve known him since 84 actually. When I left Alcatrazz, he joined Alcatrazz. So we’ve been friends for a long time, and he calls me up…I think it was 2015 or something, ’16, I can’t remember now. And he calls me up, “Hey, I’m doing this thing. I really want you to do it”. I’m like, “Yeah, we did G3 but you want to do G5? This is crazy! There’s so many guitar players”. “Yeah, but we’ve got to do it differently”. So I was curious and I didn’t think “no”, I just was going, “How the hell are we going to do this?” You know? G3 was tough enough. So, we started rehearsals and I thought it was going to be like, you know, we play our sets and then we play together at the end. But no, we got to play together at the beginning. *laughs* I’m like, “What? This is crazy”. So we decided we got to play one song together and then Tosin goes on, and Nuno, and Zakk, and Steve, then I went on. I do my thing, but in this, you had to be a lot more more structured, which I didn’t mind really. I mean, I play with symphonies, after all, but the thing is that it was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was great. I had a great time. It really was fun, it’s a lot of fun.
It was fun all around. I feel like you guys definitely had a great time with each other, the audience had a great time just experiencing all these different amazing guitarists in one. So that was a cool concept and I’m glad you were a part of that.
Yeah, me too. *laughs*
Of course, you mentioned playing with symphonies as well. I’m curious about that contrast, do you feel like it’s very similar or very different when you’re playing with a band versus playing with a symphony?
It’s extremely different. If you know classical music, there’s something called Rubato. Rubato means, it’s in time, but it’s fluid time. And then you have, what’s even more important in the concerto setting, is called Colla Parte, which means “follow soloist”. When you have a 96 piece orchestra, if I make an inflection and I’m playing a bit around, you know, there’s a little bit of a loose time, a Rubato so to speak…the conductor’s job is to look at me and kind of translate what I’m doing to all these people playing the part with me. It’s an extraordinary experience when you play with a good symphony orchestra, and I’ve play with a few, you know. And the conductor, what he does, he’s just outstanding. But what I did when I did my classical stuff, I did completely different from anyone else I’ve heard of anyway, because everybody that used to do classical orchestra, they just play their song with the drummer and everything, and they put an orchestra with it, which is great. But I didn’t do that. I composed and performed as if I was an 18th century concerto, basically. As classically influenced as I am and stuff like that, I definitely had to adapt to that because even though the conductor was keeping the orchestra in tune, I couldn’t help but feel like you’ve got to connect with them somehow too. And it was so weird because it’s like controlling an elephant or something. How do you do this? It’s too big, what is this stuff? But it worked out great, I loved it.
Absolutely, no, it’s a lot of pressure on both you and the conductor, kind of nonverbal communication in a way.
Oh no, it’s all like a vibe thing, you know?
Especially such a huge machine as an almost 100-piece orchestra. It’s different than if you had a little chamber ensemble going on, that’d be different, but this is a massive machine.
And a 60 piece choir as well!
Oh, crazy. *laughs* But you pulled it off and did an amazing job, so that’s really fun.
*laughs* Yeah, it was amazing. Thank you.
Now, I also want to ask, going back to Tokyo Live, you’ve also released this on Music Theories Recordings, and that’s not your first release with this label. So do you feel they bring something special to the table that’s helping you to stick with them?
Yeah, we have a good thing going, I think it’s the third record now. I believe it’s the third or fourth, I can’t remember. *laughs* But yeah, so it’s a good thing. They know exactly what I’m about, they just let me do what I do and then that’s it. There’s no interference. It’s good.
That’s great. Now, of course, we’ve spoken about the existing music you have out now, but looking towards the future, what is the next step you’re thinking of lining up? Do you feel more focused on touring or thinking about writing new music right now?
I’m doing both. Writing, I’m in the studio now actually…well, not this second, but I will be. And I have tours coming up as well. So I’m doing both. Which is what I’ve done lately anyways, it’s not like it used to be, a cycle, you do an album, tour, album, tour. It’s basically, you tour all the time and you go in and record whenever you feel like it, which I do, because I have the luxury of owning my own place, you know.
That definitely helps for sure, *laughs*. It’s like, whenever the whim hits you, just hop on in there and get to work.
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
That’s great. Do you feel like you have certain habits when it comes to composing? Any kind of go-to techniques to get you in the zone and writing? Or does it just vary depending on the day?
It is as varied as anything because it could be coming from any sort of source or from nowhere. I get a melody in my head basically, or there’s a lyric, or there’s a melody that I sing when I’m playing a couple of chords on the guitar. It’s all different. It never is the same way.
As varied as your set lists when you’re on the fly there, right? *laughs*
Yeah, I guess. *laughs*
It’s great to just get any kind of insight into your amazing composing and writing and playing techniques, and everything. You’ve created quite a legacy of music and I’m glad to hear that you keep on going because you are making some wonderful things out there. It has been such a rare honor to speak with you, and I greatly appreciate your time. So to close out our conversation, would you mind sharing a quick message to your fans and admirers who are listening?
Well, I have to take a double…I get freaked out – not freaked out – but I get like, wow, has it been that long already? So I thank everybody for sticking with me, and I’m still going, and hopefully you guys can hang out with my new stuff and enjoy the new record.
Well, thank you again so much for your time. This has been wonderful. Tack så mycket (“Thank you” in Swedish). Thank you so much. Wonderful to speak with you. Enjoy the rest of your day, best of luck with touring, and I will continue to enjoy Tokyo Live and anything else you come out with. Thank you again!
Yes, yes, thank you. Thank you very much.