By Andrew Bansal
Los Angeles-based musician Monte Pittman is known for his stint in heavy metal band Prong and as the guitar teacher and touring guitarist for Madonna, but his solo career began in 2009 and now has reached a point where he’s ready to release his third full-length solo album called ‘The Power Of Three’, his first on Metal Blade Records and slated for release today, January 21st. It’s most certainly the heaviest solo material he’s ever created, and has found an apt home at Metal Blade. He performed at the Whisky-A-Go-Go last month and debuted a couple of the new songs to a great response from the audience, and a similar reception should be expected from listeners once they get hold of the whole album. A few days ago, I did an interview with Monte to talk about all things ‘The Power Of Three’, Prong, Madonna, teaching, and more. Read the conversation below.
Monte, it’s great to have you on Metal Assault. I saw you performing a headline set at the Whisky in December. What did you think of that show?
The Whisky has always been really good to me. It’s one of my favorite places to play in LA, and that show we did was the first time me and my band had played together since the last show we did there in March. Everyone had so many other things going on, and we were kind of waiting till right before there was some new material to be released, for people to hear. We’ll be back there on February 22nd, so make sure you mark that on your calendars!
I was going to say. I actually just noticed that show on the Whisky’s calendar. So you’ll be playing there pretty soon.
Yeah, and it will be all the new material then. I’ve been excited to play that. I’ve been in kind of a limbo in 2013 because I had all the new music that’s coming out now, but people had only heard the previous material and they wouldn’t know the new songs so we couldn’t play them live. So the show in February will be a different one altogether.
At that show last month, you did play a couple of tunes off of your new album ‘The Power Of Three’ which is coming out on January 21 via Metal Blade. The title of the album, is it purely because of the band being a three-piece and the power of three which comes from that?
That’s one way. The power of three has got several meanings. In music theory, the ‘three’ tells you major and minor. There’s a lot of musical references to that, it is a three-piece, and there is a lyric in the song ‘Blood Hungry Thirst’, the strength and the power of three. It’s a term I’ve heard for a majority of my life, kind of a rule to live by.
That’s cool. But are you a fan of three-piece bands in general?
Well, this could have very easily been a four-piece band, but I do love three-piece bands. I used to play in Prong which was a three-piece band. I love power trios. It’s always a great combination. There’s a saying that less is more.
Right, exactly. So, what’s the songwriting process like? Is it all just you writing everything?
Well, I do write everything but it’s not like the other two guys aren’t allowed to write. It’s not a situation like that. It’s just that I had all these songs that were already written and done. We do plan on writing some songs together as a band. One thing that I wanted to do at the beginning is establish what the music was going to be. But I wrote everything, made demos and then I gave them to Flemming, Kane and Max. Actually, the band didn’t even get to go through all the songs before we went to the studio. One common problem about being in LA. Getting everyone together is really difficult (laughs). That’s why when I started my career as a solo artist, I was just doing acoustic gigs, just me and an acoustic guitar, because if you had a potential gig booked and someone said, “Oh, I can’t do it! I’ve got another gig that night.” Or, “I’m going to be out of town.” So if that was the case, you couldn’t do the gig. So that’s why I just started playing out there on my own, and that’s kind of led to me establishing what the Monte Pittman music is. You know, it would be really cool in the future for Kane to come up with some beats and for Max to come up with some bass lines and then add that to what I’m doing, and just collaborate together. Everything so far has worked out. It’s been a nice, slow but steady build, and a natural progression to get it to where it is now. I don’t really know any other way to say it.
As you were saying earlier, everybody has their own things going on aside from your band. Is that always going to be an issue in terms of doing a string of shows, or is it going to be one of those things where you’ll just do a few shows here and there?
I don’t know, that’s something which is kind of a transition right now. It’s like a new beginning, and we’re starting over. Kane joined Portugal The Man. He’ll only have a couple more commitments with them, and then he’s done with that and I’ll have him back. I’ve got some shows at the NAMM convention in Anaheim and Aaron Rossi is going to fill in on drums. He did that when I opened for Diamond Head and Raven back in October. Aaron and I used to play together in Prong. So you’ve got two-thirds of Prong at one time, so that’s going to be fun. I love what Aaron adds to it.
When and where exactly at NAMM are you playing these shows?
We’re doing the Orange party which is going to be on Friday January 24th, and the Seymour Duncan party on the Saturday night.
Coming back to this new album, I would say it’s more metal than your previous solo albums. Would you agree with that?
Oh, it’s definitely way more metal. At that Whisky show we played ‘Dark Horse’ and ‘Before The Mourning Sun’ because those are the two singles that are out and the only ones that people knew. I didn’t want to play any of the new material and have some distorted YouTube clip and that be the first time people hear the album, and all the hard work that’s been put into this, everybody included in the process of making it. Going back to doing my first acoustic stuff, some of it is heavy music done on the acoustic. There’s a song on The Deepest Dark album called ‘Out Of The Black’. We play that song heavy live, and that was always the heaviest song we did live. People really responded to that. Every time someone would say they liked something, I would just kind of take note of that and add it. I’m doing that now for the next things that I’m writing. As an artist I want to make my audience happy. I want to give them what they came for. Some people will say, “Hey, they’ll like whatever I give them.” Or, “I want to do my song this way. I don’t want to play it like the album.” That’s not me. I want everyone to get what they came for, and there will be something for everybody. I like all different kinds of music, so if I do that there’s a chance other people will like it too.
Interesting, man. But with your signing to Metal Blade Records, was it a conscious thing to do a full-on metal album this time, because of their association?
No, the way that happened, I was going to record with Flemming. We kept saying while knowing each other in the past that we had to work on something together some day. I had a day off in Copenhagen, and he suggested we go fire up the studio and knock out some things. So we knocked out four acoustic songs in a day, and that became the ‘MP3: The Power Of Three Part 1’ EP. But when I gave Flemming all my demos, he said, “What are these heavy songs? Because that’s what you need to be doing.” I told him it was just for fun and may be I’d want to put out a couple of heavy songs. I felt like I had already done it with Prong and all that. But he insisted that it’s what I needed to be doing. And then Flemming’s wife told me she was driving too fast because of whatever Flemming had on the CD player. That was the demo for the track ‘Delusions Of Grandeur’. So I said, alright let’s make plans and record. So that’s what we did. It started out as an EP but I had ten songs and we just knocked those out. So after doing that and after hearing it, I already had plans to meet up with Brian Slagel. We were going to grab lunch, coffee or whatever. I remember sitting one day with Flemming when things were starting to come together, and I thought there’s got to be somebody out there who’d want to get behind this. I didn’t want to release it on my own, because that’s what I’d done before. So I played it for Brian, thinking may be he could help me know where to go with it, what I should do with it and who I should send it to. I was like, may be there’s some new label starting up that I could send it to, thinking it was nearly not heavy enough for Metal Blade. I played it for him and he said, “You need to send this to me.” And that was it. I signed to Metal Blade, and I wasn’t even thinking about that when playing it for him. That changed everything.
That’s awesome. So it was the other way round. It was not like they signed you first and told you to make a metal album.
Right, I played him the album, he offered me the deal and we started talking about it right away. A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I grew up playing metal. I played my first gig when I was 14. I started playing guitar when I was 13, and right after that I met my friend Chris Sheehan. We started a band together in a friend’s garage. When we first started playing at that age, that’s when Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, Testament, Megadeth, Death Angel and all those bands were coming out. So it was a very exciting time. Looking back, you couldn’t have picked a greater time to be getting your first guitar and starting a band with your friends in a garage. You couldn’t have better influences.
Right, I was going to say, a lot of people know you as Madonna’s guitarist and teacher, but you’ve always been a metalhead.
Yeah, I always have been. When I moved out from Texas to LA right at the end of ’99 going into New Year’s of 2000, the first month out here was really quick. I joined Prong, I started teaching guitar lessons, started teaching Madonna and became friends with her. And then she asked me to play guitar for her on tour because she wanted me to keep teaching her. So that’s how that happened. It wasn’t something like, “Hey, I heard Madonna is having an audition. Go get in line!” I wouldn’t have even thought about something like that. At the time I didn’t think Madonna even had or needed a guitar player. A lot of those songs are mixed so well and put together so geniously, you don’t notice all the guitar parts. The song ‘Ray Of Light’ has got 8 guitar parts. When you put it all together, it all becomes one sound. For me it was kind of difficult picking all those parts out. Someone would say, “Wait, aren’t you playing that guitar part?” And I’d be like, “What guitar part?” They’d play it and I’d be like, “Oh, I thought that was the keyboard.” (laughs)
Very interesting. Obviously you mentioned Prong, so from that to the music you’re doing solo, has anything carried over in terms of your heavier side?
Well, I think it’s a lot different and I purposely didn’t listen to Prong before making this album. I didn’t want anything to sound like Prong. Ten years ago if I had to write something heavy, it would have been to submit for a Prong song. Tommy Victor is one of my favorite guitar players ever. He’s probably the most underrated guitar player there is. Prong has been a huge influence on me, and it was a great thing for me to be involved in putting that back together, because when I first joined Prong, they were broken up. They had dropped from Sony a week after ‘Rude Awakening’ came out because it sold only 10,000 copies (laughs).
That’s crazy! You brought up the teaching part. Are you still doing lessons with anybody or do you not have time anymore?
Yeah, I’m teaching a lot actually. When you go on tour and then you get off tour, it takes a long time to kind of build it back up. So yeah, I’ve been teaching, and I started teaching vocal students now too, and that’s really cool. I’m really enjoying that. It helps me learn it more and understand it better by having to explain it to someone else. By using the guitar there’s some different things you can do, like bending notes for scale exercises to warm up the voice, something you can’t do on the piano. I thought that was really cool. I teach at the School Of Rock a couple of days a week too, and I teach a lot of 5-10 year old kids but I welcome it as a challenge. I like being the person that plants the seed in them, and getting them started on the right foot. A lot of kids love One Direction and want me to teach them those songs (laughs), so I’m like, “Ok, here it is. Just three notes that go through the whole song. Alright, you got that. Now check out Iron Maiden!” It’s an introduction to start them on their path.
Visit Monte Pittman on the web:
MontePittman.com
facebook.com/MontePittman
twitter.com/MontePittman
instagram.com/MontePittman
Monte Pittman’s NAMM schedule:
1/21: Musicians Institute Performance / Q&A (2:30 PM – 3:30 PM)
1/23: “Who the Fuck is Arthur Fogel?” – Screening/Premiere
1/23: Seymour Duncan Signing – 3:00 PM
1/24: Product demos/interviews with Orange (10:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 2:00 PM) including NUMUBU live broadcast, Premier Guitar, and Guitar World
1/24: Fullerton, CA (Evening) @ Slidebar (Orange Party)
1/25: Acoustic Performance at Fishman – 12:30 PM
1/25: Seymour Duncan/D’Addario Party @ The Sheraton – 8:30 PM
1/26: Signing at Orange Booth – 1:00 PM