“What could be more of a concept than this?” Paul Gilbert asks rhetorically, speaking about his new solo album, WROC. “It’s as concept album as it could possibly be, but hopefully, with repeated listenings, the music will take over and the concept will fall like the scaffolding of a beautiful building.”
The guitarist certainly has a point: WROC (which stands for “Washington’s Rules of Civility”) is indeed one wild and wacky concept album, an utterly unique and unorthodox set of tunes based around a French etiquette guide from the late 1500s that America’s first president copied as a school penmanship exercise.
“It was an English translation called Rules Of Civility & Decent Behavior In Company And Conversation,” Gilbert explains. “George Washington wrote it all down, and he took the ideas to heart. While everybody around him behaved like ruffians, he was decent and stoic, so people were like, ‘Well, we’ve got to listen to George.’ I think that’s why the book became attributed to him.”
Article continues belowGilbert had first read the book decades ago, but on a flight home to Portland, Oregon, from Tokyo, where Mr. Big concluded their farewell tour, he poured through it again – and was seized by a crazy idea.
“I kept thinking, ‘Does a record have to be about something in the first place? And if it does, what should that be?’” he says. “I’ve never been particularly enamored with that part of songwriting and record making. My favorite part is the melodies and the guitar riffs and what pedal I'm using. But I decided that if the record had to be about something, I ought to try to do it as well as I could.”
Drawing on his own experiences as the basis for songs has never been Gilbert’s forte. “I’m just not that interesting to myself,” he says. “Either that or the things I think about in my daily existence just aren’t great food for material.”
For years, he had been looking for a proper lyricist – “my own Bernie Taupin or Neil Peart” – and he jokes that “George Washington became my collaborator. The rules of a centuries-old etiquette book is an unusual place to draw from, but something about it puts a smile on my face.”
Gilbert notes that such an uncommon collaboration yielded another, totally unexpected but convenient benefit: No need to pay royalties to a co-writer. “Public domain!” he laughs. “That worked out nicely.”
He admits that he turned to another source – AI – for lyric-writing assistance, which delivered mixed results. On the one hand, the technology rendered elaborate and cumbersome lines from the book as actual song verses and choruses – to a point.
“AI did provide some structure, but it’s not a real songwriter,” Gilbert says. “I would have a conversation with it and say things like, ‘We need to work on this. It needs more repetition in the chorus. So it did that, and I’d say, ‘Okay, but it’s too long and it needs a bridge.’ After a while, I realized what needed to be done to make the words feel like song lyrics, and I didn’t need AI anymore.”
There’s nothing genteel about the music on WROC – these are some of Gilbert’s hardest rocking tunes yet. Go Not Thither is a heavy artillery loadblower that sees the guitarist knocking out gnarly, Billy Gibbons-esque blues riffs, while Keep Your Feet Firm and Even is a stomping and raging twin-lead guitar behemoth.
George Washington Rules is a double-musket boogie burner, and for madcap, blitzing prog-rock there’s Maintain a Sweet and Cheerful Countenance.
Throughout the set, Gilbert sounds fresh and alive, and it’s no wonder: Most of the time, guitarists are rehashing their usual routines; the tunes are stiff and dead before they’re even laid down.
But Gilbert is way out of his comfort zone on these songs, and he’s having the time of his life.
“I’m like anybody else – I pick up the guitar and play what I know,” he says. “But these tunes made it impossible for me to go to the same old places, and it all started with the writing. I mean ‘let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive, be not tedious unless you find the company pleased there with’ – I can only remember that because I figured out a melody for it.
“Oh, my God, I was tearing up laughing when I sang that. It was so much fun to take this archaic English, plus the meaning of it, and put it to a rock groove.”
Gilbert convened a tight team of players – drummer Nick D’Virgilio, bassist Timmer Blakely, and guitarist Doug Rappoport – at Portland’s Hallowed Halls Studios and ripped through the album’s 13 songs in four days.
“Budget-wise, the temptation is to record everything at home, but I just find it harder to rock that way,” he says. “I like playing with a band. Making music is a lot more fun in the studio, and the other benefit is, it forces you to decide and move on.
“You go in and hear it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, absolutely. This is great.’ At home, you’re tempted to tinker and go over the top with everything. It’s constantly, ‘Well, I don’t know… Maybe if we put on another double guitar part – that’ll fix it.’ You can spend forever making a song worse.”
In the video of Go Not Thither, Gilbert brandishes one of his Ibanez FRM350 signature guitars while decked out in a bespoke reproduction of a Revolutionary War outfit, complete with tricorn. He’s considering wearing the costume on tour, but that depends on whether he can order some duplicates in time.
“I’ll definitely need another pair of pants, a little longer and not as baggy. I didn’t do such a good job of measuring myself,” he says. “They’re not actually called ‘pants,’ they’re called ‘breaches.’ Once I get my breaches in order, I should be in good shape.”
- WROC is out now via Music Theories
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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