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Adrian Smith and Richie Kotzen have revealed their highly anticipated debut album Smith/Kotzen will be released on March 26, while the music video for its lead single, Taking My Chances, is out now.
Recorded on the Turks and Caicos Islands in February 2020, the nine-track long-player is set to feature guest appearances from Smith's Iron Maiden bandmate Nicko McBrain and Kotzen's touring partner Tal Bergman.
Smith/Kotzen - Taking My Chances (Official Video) - YouTube
Says Smith, “Richie and I started working together a couple of years ago. We’d been jamming as we’d been friends for a few years before that. We both share a love for classic rock and bluesy rock so we decided to get together and start writing some songs and it went from there.
“Pretty much everything on the album is handled between Richie and myself including the production. We had developed a really strong idea of how we wanted it to sound and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. There’s a lot of cool songs on there that we are really happy with.”
“We had a very fluid process in writing,” Kotzen adds. “Sometimes Adrian would send me a riff and I would immediately hear some kind of melody or a vocal idea. And sometimes it was the other way round so it was a kind of circular motion.
“We’d get together whenever we could and throw some ideas around and it just evolved, which was great because there was no pressure and nothing other than just a natural course and I think the record really speaks for that.”
Sam was Staff Writer at GuitarWorld.com from 2019 to 2023, and also created content for Total Guitar, Guitarist and Guitar Player. He has well over 15 years of guitar playing under his belt, as well as a degree in Music Technology (Mixing and Mastering). He's a metalhead through and through, but has a thorough appreciation for all genres of music. In his spare time, Sam creates point-of-view guitar lesson videos on YouTube under the name Sightline Guitar.
![[L-R] Adrian Smith and Richie Kotzen](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/NHgwg2hFts8rbK29LJgDwA-1890-80.jpg.webp)
