Nikki Sixx: "This Album Comes From Our Demented Souls"

• Click here for a Q&A with Nikki Sixx
• Click here for a report from the Mötley Crüe press conference

Tell me about the new record.

It's called Saints of Los Angeles. Mick Mars and I started writing about four months ago. I had done a record with James Michael and DJ Ash for my side project, and we had such an amazing chemistry together that me and Mick and James and DJ were just on a songwriting mission from hell. It was amazing. We brought in another friend called Marty Frederickson. Doing the whole Heroin Diaries project really helped me to focus on a specific issue. Like, instead of writing a love song, make it about a moment. Make it about the kiss. So for this, what we really wanted to do is take the concept of the autobiography, The Dirt, and make it into songs. I was really trying lyrically to do that, and to work so closely with Mick and really develop the phenomenal songs working with James and Marty and DJ Ash. For the first record we've done in ten years, it's really, really, really good. I got to tell ya. I'm very excited.

Is the sound similar to any previous Mötley Crüe records that you could compare it to?

You know, there's a sound with Mötley Crüe, and it comes with Vince's voice, which is such an important part of the show, and Mick's guitar. And the way Tommy and me play together is an important part of it. When we're all together, it really is Mötley Crüe, but we've done albums, like Generation Swine, where we went left of center just to see what it felt like. But this album feels a little truer our core. You hear something like "Saints of Los Angeles" and you don't go, "Who's this? It kind of sounds like Mötley Crüe." You go, "Fuck, new Mötley Crüe!" It would be like AC/DC coming on the radio with a new record, or Aerosmith. You either like the band or you don't like the band. It's not the band trying to make you like them. It's the band doing what they do. And that's our strong point.

Where was it recorded?

We recorded it all out in Los Angeles in different studios. Today, that whole thing about spending $2,000 an hour in some recording studio is ridiculous. We don't do that anymore. We own our own equipment. It's small, it's compact. You get in, you get out. I'm not into sitting there and fidgeting at a console for days about a guitar sound. I mean, you plug it in, it sounds fuckin' good, and you go. Rock & roll is dirty, and it's bad, and it's either clever or it's not clever.

Do you and Mick still write the same way you did twenty years ago?

Absolutely. He has a bunch of riffs, I have a bunch of riffs. I usually stop him half way through his riff, and go, "Change that note, and change that note." And then I play, and I ask, "What about this part?" and he goes, "What if you changed that part?" and I go, "Good idea." And I just start singing something over it, and there's some naughty little lyric with some sarcasm dripping off of it. Like, "Don't go away mad, just go away" just came in one minute. It will kick-start my heart. It just comes. It seems that the times that we try so hard to craft stuff, it ends up sounding processed.