ROBERT MASON: ‘There’s No Urgency’ For WARRANT To Release New Music

In a new interview with Joe Scibilia of The Rock N’ Roll & Coffee Show, WARRANT singer Robert Mason was asked if there are any plans to release new music as a follow-up to 2017’s “Louder Harder Faster” album. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “We have something that might happen. I kind of feel that there’s that huge nostalgia component. My ego doesn’t mean I have to put a record out just for the sake of it. And I understand you make a certain piece with — fans wanna come and hear the nostalgia, and that’s our role, that’s our lane to kind of stay in. If we come up with something great and we wanna put something out, we certainly might. I’ve got ideas. I know [WARRANT bassist Jerry] Dixon does as well. He and I worked together just a couple of years ago on a bunch of material for something that might have been a record that we just kind of put aside for a minute because he started playing with the band less and we were trying to concentrate on just making our live band and our consistent touring as good as possible for us.”Asked if there is really a reason for a band like WARRANT to put out an album in today’s musical climate, Robert said: “We wrestle with that, but that’s the nostalgia component. Sometimes promoters or agents say, ‘Well, we can sell a new tour and a thing,’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, but there’s so much nostalgia and that’s what really fans [want to hear].’ We play a couple of songs off the two records which I did with the band, songs we wrote to do that, and people dig it. We do ‘Louder Harder’ and I get ’em to scream the chorus and they’re still into it. There’s a certain component — and I love those people — that are into that. But I think as years go by, the one thing is if you’re one of the last bands standing, then the herd narrows and you become one of those bands. It can go either way, and I sometimes I wake up and I’m, like, ‘Man, we should do a record,’ and then I go, ‘You know what? I watch the people’s reaction to the catalog material and I still get off on doing it. And so does the band.'”He continued: “There’s no urgency to put something new out there. The climate of a band of guys in their 60s — what are we gonna get? A radio hit? It’s a bygone era, and if it makes a good story for interviews, cool. And it’s satisfying to play new songs. I will always do that in one respect or another. I write for other people. There’s some film and TV work and stuff that we’ve all dabbled in. It’s still satisfying. And it’s something in your soul. It makes you feel good to be creative if you’re a songwriter type. But then again, those hits are the hits. They’re still fun to play, and that gets a great reaction from the audience. So then is that my time best served? No.”Regarding whether he would ever put out a solo record, Mason said: “I’ve been asked. And I play piano. I wake up and make coffee every morning and go sit at a very nice antique grand piano in my house and go hammer away on it heavy handed, like I do everything. And I write a ton — I have a ton of guitar stuff and a ton of piano stuff.”It seems almost gratuitous and weird and like egocentric to [make a solo album],” he explained. “I write with a bunch of friends in Nashville, and some in particular you just get on great with and every time you hang out and do something, it’s just magic.”I might someday. I would almost wanna do something to throw a curve ball and do an acoustic-piano-and-voice thing only, or very little instrumentation. I wouldn’t wanna put a rock band together and do it necessarily, ’cause then it’s, like… The thing is, if you go play live, you’re, like, ‘I do that. That’s my job.’ I would rather explore something completely different. Or at least genre specifically different that would be, like, ‘Wow, that’s that guy? Really? He doesn’t scream like he’s coughing up a lung. He can actually sing that too.”Elaborating on the musical direction his solo music might take, Robert said: “I grew up, man, in love with my dad’s music and crooners and music from the 40s, 50s and 60s. So, I have lots of sides.””Louder Harder Faster” was released in May 2017. The disc was recorded with Jeff Pilson — a veteran bassist who has played with DIO, FOREIGNER, DOKKEN and T&N, among others — and was mixed by Pat Regan, except for the song “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here And Drink”, which was mixed by Chris “The Wizard” Collier (FLOTSAM AND JETSAM, PRONG, LAST IN LINE).Mason replaced original WARRANT singer Jani Lane in 2008 and has brought a degree of stability to the band after Lane’s unceremonious departure and subsequent 2011 death.Last month Dixon told Mark Strigl about WARRANT’s plan to release new music: “We’re kind of thinking and probably implementing kind of like a box set of things we have with Jani, unreleased stuff. We have maybe a song from a demo. We’ve got, like, nine records that [the rights] have come back to us over the years. So we wanna do some sort of box set with some new music as well, but also include all of WARRANT — Jani years, Jaime St. James years, ‘Born Again’, ‘Rockaholic’, all of [it].”Asked if there are “numerous tracks” with Jani Lane that have not been released, Jerry said: “There actually are hardly any, but there’s a few that we got back that we’re working on finding. There’s a lot of things that happened with the legality of stuff, but there are a couple diamonds that we have found. But we released everything with him. We never did anything just to go do it. If we were gonna record, it was a purpose — it was for a soundtrack or a record. So, you pretty much have 99.9 percent of everything out that we’ve done.”Elaborating on what might be included on the aforementioned box set, Jerry said: “Like, say we’re writing and we’re recording with Jani and he’s talking, but it’s not a finished song yet. So it may be something that entails video. We’re sharing all that stuff. The making of ‘Dog Eat Dog’, we have a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff of that record that nobody’s ever seen.”Regarding WARRANT guitarist Joey Allen’s comment from October 2024 that he and his bandmates were collecting footage for a possible documentary, Jerry said: “Yeah, we have that in the works too, but it’s a lot of speculation and people have ideas, but who’s doing the work? So we’ll figure it all out. But, yeah, I think it’s time to do that and not give everything away on social media for free and just let people steal it and take it and molest it. And it’s disgusting. We wanna put something out that people can take home and enjoy, like the old days.”Last October, Joey was asked by Become A Guitarist Today whether there has been any talk of a follow-up to “Louder Harder Faster”. He said: “Here’s the deal with WARRANT on records, is that the first three records, Jani Lane was the the creative force behind all the songwriting, which is fantastic. I mean, he was great at it. And it was a magic time for everybody. When you’ve got a guy that’s bringing in songs like ‘[Mr.] Rainmaker’ and ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, and nobody else is bringing in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, you’re, like, ‘Okay, keep on going.’ And so when he wasn’t in the band, and then you’ve got the five of us, it’s kind of the same thing. Whoever writes the music brings it in. If it’s good and it’s complete, then there you go. And I’m not a songwriter as much as I am a guitar player. I’m great at interpreting people that can’t play guitar great and turning it into some cool-sounding riffs, the way I play. But it gets to the point where if there’s riffs out there and you need somebody to come in and write lyrics to it, well, then everybody should pay attention and see if there’s a riff out there. So the choices of songs and how we put a record together is very arduous. It’s very difficult for WARRANT, for some reason. And it’s amazing that after a record like ‘Louder, Harder, Faster’ that the band was still together. So, looking forward to another record, you’re, like, ‘Hmm.’ [Laughs] ‘Do you wanna do that again now — what is it? — seven years later?’ And I think there’s some desire, but it’s not heavy.”He added: “New music’s different now. People do records, nobody cares. So do we do a few songs at a time and release a song or two? I don’t know what our model is gonna be. We’re not going away. How’s that? You want us to go away? We’re not. And we still do 50 or 60 shows a year over here [in the U.S.].”Allen went on to say that WARRANT fans can expect to see something else that might satisfy their craving for new product.”We’ve gotten through a lot of our archives of videotapes and pictures and things that we all four of us have in our boxes in the attic and we’ve gotten them down,” he said. “Because everybody had those little video cameras back in the day. So, there is private video from 1987. And I think we’re trying to catalog all that data and kind of put together some type of a documentary with that stuff. And that’s the next project. So if anybody was in the band from the front end on, from ‘Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich’ on, they’re gonna get a peek behind what we were doing, what you thought we were doing. Were you right? Were you wrong? I mean, it’s certainly not gonna be X rated by any means, but if you see some of the shit that did go on, it’s great fun. I don’t know if it’ll be rated as a comedy or what, but there’s some funny shit in there. So that’s it.”Joey previously talked about the possibility of a new WARRANT album in March 2024 in an interview with the “Rimshots With Sean” podcast. He said at the time: “New record? I don’t know. The last one was fun to make, and [producer] Jeff Pilson was fun to work with. And the one before that [2011’s ‘Rockaholic’] with [producer] Keith Olsen — God rest his soul — was great and fun to do.”It’s such an undertaking for us, and the return on making a record is [miniscule],” he explained. “You know what I mean? And not everything’s about money. It’s, like, can we play it live? Well, you can, but people are just gonna sit there and look at you, like, ‘Where’s ‘Cherry Pie’? Where’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’? Where’s ‘Down Boys’? Where are those hits I wanted to hear?’ And so you can’t go out and play three or four or five new tunes, which would be — for me, thumbs up. I would dig to do that. But we have a responsibility to play the songs that people really wanna hear too. So it’s a double-edged sword. And that’s what I mean when I [say], what’s in it for us? It’s not financially. The thing in it for us is to play new music, to create new music, to grow. Let’s not be a nostalgia act. So I don’t know if it’ll be a new record or if it’ll be a song at a time or whatever — I’m sure sooner than later something [will] happen — but nothing’s going on right now.”In December 2023, WARRANT guitarist Erik Turner told Robert Miguel of Uvalde Radio Rocks that he and his bandmates were “not sure” what they were going to do as far as new music was concerned. “It’s just been a little bit — there’s just been some stuff going on where we haven’t really been doing any new music,” he revealed. “We have some riffs [being thrown] around. We have some half-finished songs going on. Due to some personal stuff going on, we’re just kind of on hold as far as the new record goes. Nothing horrible, but just band stuff.”In March 2023, Allen told Mankato, Minnesota’s “The Five Count” radio show that he and his WARRANT bandmates were “actually writing right now for a record. So people are sending riffs around. You can do it on the Internet nowadays,” he explained. “We just have a cloud-based files system where we just upload ideas. And somebody will take an idea, a music idea, and put some lyrics to it, and we’ll start to craft our songs. So maybe by this fall we’ll dig into the studio again and [record] the follow-up to ‘Louder Harder Faster’, which came out, I think, six years ago this year. The recording process takes about four or five weeks, so maybe early next year we’ll have something new out for everybody to listen to and back on the road we will go to support that.”Nearly four years ago, Mason told the “Thunder Underground” podcast that there wasn’t “a defined schedule” for WARRANT’s next studio album, but he added that he and his bandmates are “always writing.”In 2020, Turner told the “Talking Metal” podcast that WARRANT was “throwing some ideas around” for a new LP. He said: “I’ve been sending Robert some riffs, and Robert’s been working on songs. I’ve got a song going with Jerry. So it’s a slow, long process for us, but the seed of a new record has been started. Now, that doesn’t mean the seed will grow into a record. We’ve got a long way to go. We don’t have one finished song. We’ve got a couple of things cooking, and we’re actually sending ideas around back and forth to each other.”WARRANT is rounded out by original drummer Steven Sweet.[embedded content]