Germany has produced some great Hard Rock bands over the years but at the moment there is none better than The New Roses, a band whose mix of Hard and Southern Rock with a pinch of Country really hits the spot. Their Last album ‘One More For the Road’ wowed us in 2017 but on the verge of the release their new album ‘Nothing But Wild’ all we can say is that this is a band that gets better and better with each release. We talked to Timmy Rough to find out where the inspiration came from for this remarkable collection of songs…
Mark: Hi Timmy how are you Sir?
Timmy: I’m good how are you Mark?
Mark: Very good indeed thank you. It’s great to speak to you again. I’ve had the new album for a couple of weeks now so I’ve had plenty of time to give it a good listen.
Timmy: Oh man, I hope you like it!
Mark: It’s my favourite album of the year so far, everything just keeps getting better to me as far as The New Roses is concerned.
Timmy: Oh that’s great, that’s good to hear and a very good start for an interview. A good foundation.
Mark: It is (laughs) we’ve had a few good chats over the years and each one I’ve been dying to get into the new album to try to get across to the readers what a great band you have there. Last time we spoke you were taking the previous album out on the road to the UK and a lot has happened since then. I’ll bet over the years there have been many highlights but just to pick one recent one, what does playing with Scorpions mean to you?
Timmy: The Scorpions is just one great crazy thing that has happened to us in the last couple of months. Since we last spoke we’ve been to the USA which has been crazy it was our first US tour and we expected to start off small but we ended up playing on the Kiss Cruise which was great. We’ve played hundreds of shows since then, we played that UK Tour and we’ve been to a lot of Festivals this year, we’ve played Russia for the first time! So many things have already happened and so many more are about to happen! So inspiration for writing songs wasn’t so hard this time! (laughs)
Mark: I’ll bet! So were a lot of the songs written on the road?
Timmy: Yeah, pretty much all of them.
Mark: Where does the inspiration hit you? Soundchecks? Between gigs? Or do you set aside time to write?
Timmy: When I’m touring it’s more like I’m collecting stuff, I just try to keep my heart open and collect whatever I can find , it might be a particular situation or great people that I meet or interesting stories or just road stories. So I collect all that in a little notebook and then when I’m home in the gaps between touring I put those lines or ideas into songs you know. I collect for a year or so and then I take just a couple of weeks and turn all these ideas into songs.
Mark: OK so when you have the material it all comes very quickly then?
Timmy: Yeah all in one hit because I’ve learnt over the years that the songs must fit and relate to each other when they come alive, it’s like a series (of songs) because I know myself when I listen to Soul music and I think it’s the best thing that’s ever been recorded then I have my Hard Rock phase when I know AC/DC is the best ever, then I listen to Southern Rock and Country music, but at the end for me I need to write all of the songs in one stage so that I’m in the same state of mind when I’m writing. That way the songs fit together better than they would if I wrote them over two years, you know.
Mark: That makes a lot of sense, and you’re right while there is a mix of all of those elements on the album they do work together really well as a collection. It just flows so beautifully from ’Soundtrack of My Life’ which I love,, right to the end. And the acoustic tracks that close things bookend it nicely and I imagine give a really great insight into how the songs are originally conceived? Am I far off the mark? Is that what the songs sound like when you first lay them down?
Timmy: Exactly, that’s one hundred percent correct – we started playing ‘Fight You Leaving Me’ as an acoustic track during the middle of our shows because we wanted to show the audience how these songs start coming alive, and people loved that little gap in the show where they can breathe a little and listen. And of course I sing then differently when I do a fragile acoustic song than when I’m shouting Rock and Roll tunes. So that’s why we picked that song for the album as a little memory of the last tour as ‘Fight You Leaving Me’ has been constant in our mindset over the last year. And for all the people that came to our show and liked it we wanted to give something with this record where they can have a little memory of the last tour. So that’s why we picked that one from the last record and ‘Down By the River’ the other track should be one more example of how I write all these songs.
Mark: It must be hard though when you release an album this strong to decide what you’re going to leave out of the live show. I listen to this one and think “I want to hear all of this live!”
Timmy: Yeah! I really don’t know how many we’ll get in this is the first record where we have this very luxurious problem where the record company calls us and says “look we pick, this, this, this and this as a single” and management calls us and says “we’ll take this, this and this is the single it’s the best song” and the radio stations who we always give a little sneak preview pick two other songs pick two other songs. And then you finally realise that every song on the record has been picked!
Mark: (laughs) that’s a great problem to have!
Timmy: So this time it’s going to be really, really difficult to satisfy everybody you know, because there are no obvious favourites that everyone prefers, so even though it’s a great problem for us its still a problem we have to solve so we either have to kick out a couple of old favourites or resize the set and play longer! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs) my vote goes for playing longer, that works for me!
Timmy: I think so, I definitely think it’s going to be a longer set than it used to be for our headlining shows but for festivals I really don’t know how we’re going to fill a 45minute set. It’s going to be difficult for us.
Mark: But like we said it’s a great problem to have. I think the thing for me about the album is how it all hangs together, we have the Hard Rock, the Southern Rock and the Country and there’s this wonderful mix and balance, and in the final track ‘Glory Road’ you have something a little different as well. Tell us how that song came about?
Timmy: There is something that I keep searching for on every record and I think the closest we’ve been so far with ‘One More For the Road’ was the title track and I think that song had the same spirit. The thing about that song is that I wrote it as a Country song at first and when the song starts you hear just me singing the chorus with only a very high gain electric guitar. And the first version I showed to the band it was like an Eagles opening, so no guitar at all and just four harmony vocals, you know like that song ‘Seven Bridges Road’.
Mark: Oh wow.
Timmy: (Timmy sings the opening harmony) So I had that big harmony thing going on and I sang it to the guys and they all loved it but said it was just way out of our style, so sorry man try another one! So I sat back down and tried to give the song the right attitude and I worked through the lyrics and the verses and added an electric high gain guitar which did the job and that was how that mix came together, because it was supposed to be a very Country song but with the guitar and the drum groove if you listen to that it’s still a Country groove. (Timmy sings the drum groove) You know – like that – which is very common in Country music but very, very rare in Rock music so it was that combination of high gain guitars and Country drums that gave that song that little twist you picked upon. And I wrote that first line off the cuff “Somebody’s heart and the night so cold, for every dream come true a star goes up in smoke” I wrote that while we were in Afghanistan playing for the troops. During the day you felt like you were in an oven because the air was so dry and it was so hot you felt like you were slowly baking, but during the night it got really cold you know, sometimes it even snowed in the night, so everything is very extreme. And when I was laying in my bed in Afghanistan in the little housing area I felt that this weather represents the life we live, it is what it is but it’s much more extreme than in other areas, so I wrote those lines and I carried them around for a long time until I knew what I wanted to say and the context I wanted to put these words in. First of all that song was called ‘Two Kinds of Pain’ because I had that idea of looking at our whole life from a real negative way saying every good comes with a cost, for everything good you have to pay with something, so you never get a good thing for free – that’s where that line “for every dream come true a star goes up in smoke” comes from. So I wrote the whole song and took it to the guys and they said “we like the song but we would like to hear it from the other direction” – you know in every bad there is a good. And so I changed the whole song from ‘Two Kinds of Pain’ to ‘Glory Road’. That song has the same spirit but from a positive direction. So the whole spirit of the song changed, very interesting for us.
Mark: It’s a wonderful song too, one of my favourites on the album. But there are plenty of other great songs and some great lyrics too, one of the songs that I guess has a simple message, and I kinda see it as your ‘Wanted Dead or Alive is ‘The Bullet – I love that song, it’s on one hand a tale of loss but also a song about the soothing power of music!
Timmy: Thank you! You know I wrote that song about how I feel about my favourite song ‘Soulshine’ by The Allman Brothers Band – that song has accompanied me since, I don’t know, maybe I was sixteen when I heard it the first time. Every time I’m happy I listen to that song and get even happier and each time before I go on stage I have it in my headphones and it gives me this wonderful feeling of inner peace; and every time I’m really sad and something bad happens it helps me to get back in shape you know. So I know everybody who lives with Rock and Roll music either as a fan or as a musician has a song that does that job for them. So I thought it was about time to write a song to thank all these songs, you know. I’ve been there myself and It is a very autobiographical song about a relationship ending and how you deal with that and my way of dealing with it was always drinking way too much and not sleeping at night, and when you hit rock bottom there is a song that picks you back up or tells you it’s time to get back on the horse, and for me that has always been ‘Soulshine’. So I wanted a way to try and write about the power of that song, and then I heard a story about the Vietnam War – there is this myth that no one can confirm or deny that soldiers used to bite on their bullets when they were getting their wounds seen to so that they wouldn’t cry out or pass out. They bit on their bullets so that they could get through that pain and that story impressed me so much the image of biting the bullet was very powerful to me and so I wanted to use that image in the song, so like they’d bite on the bullet I’d bite on that song.
Mark: I love that explanation. It’s another great song and I think on this album it’s the slower numbers that just edge it, the Rockers are all great but tracks like ‘The Only Thing’ really hit home, I’d love an insight into that track? There’s a lot of Springsteen sentiment in there to these ears?
Timmy: Yeah, a lot of Springsteen, I can’t keep the Springsteen out of my system because I grew up on him! So there’s always a little in there (laughs).
Mark: You’re hitting a few festivals this summer too, some big dates in there so far!
Timmy: Yeah, we get to play Wacken this year! We release our record, and then we get to play Moscow, our first Russian show, and then more Festivals before we take our ‘Nothing But Wild’ Tour all over Europe.
Mark: And the next single must be on the way?
Timmy: The next real single is going to be ‘Glory Road’ but in between the two singles we’ve got ‘Can’t Stop Rock and Roll for those who can’t wait!
Mark: The album is out on Friday 2nd August so everyone should have that date in their diary but when people hear it I know they’ll be wanting to catch you guys live. Where are you taking the tour, I saw you had some local dates but wondered if you were looking at more shows?
Timmy: The feedback so far in reviews like yours has been overwhelming and as it’s been so positive we have to change the whole strategy and reconsider everything – for example in the UK they started playing ‘Down By the River on Planet Rock Radio and it went down so well it’s changed everything. So we’ll have to sit down and rethink it all again, but in a good way! So we might need a little more time to figure it all out but definitely we’ll be playing shows all over Europe.
Mark: And what great note to end things. As always our interviews seem to fly by, I could talk about the new record all day. Thank you so much for taking the time today Timmy and giving us an insight into the songs.
Timmy: My pleasure buddy talk to you soon.
