In a recent chat on SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk,” Tesla‘s bassist Brian Wheat and guitarist Frank Hannon offered a glimpse into the band’s latest musical endeavors. They discussed their new song “It’s All About Love,” which debuted during Tesla‘s Las Vegas residency.
Brian shared: “We just recorded it a couple of weeks ago. And it’s done, and we’re playing it live, and this summer we should have it out.”
Meanwhile, Frank revealed the song’s origins, explaining: “It’s actually the first song that J.K. and myself wrote after a dry spell of writing songs during the COVID lockdown. And the first lyric of the song is, ‘I wanna get back to where I started.’ That was influenced by how we were feeling during COVID. So we chipped away. We made a little demo of it, and then we just kind of shelved it for a while, ’cause I always knew that I wanted the band and Brian to produce it and make it sound rocking. And the original demo was really chill and almost sounded like Air Supply. It was mellow. And I knew, and I told Brian, I go, ‘I love this song, but it needs to be rocked out Tesla style.’ So that’s what we did. And we worked on it over the past six months at soundchecks during the gigs, practicing it and really developing it and turning it into a rock song.”
When asked about the possibility of a new album, Brian indicated that while they’ve released a few singles like “Cold Blue Steel” and “Time To Rock!”, a full-length album might not be on the horizon just yet.
“It takes too much time. Here’s the thing. It’s no secret, we’re getting older. Jeff is 65, 66 years old… In order to do an album, takes so much out of the band — time and energy. And right now, I think we’re all on the same page that we’d rather take that time and energy and go around and play while we’re still able to play at the level we play at because we still play very well. Jeff Keith still sings very, very well. And we can address making an album where you can be in a studio and you can do things 26 times and all that thing, if you have to, later. But to sit there and make an album right now… Frank told you, we’ve been working on this song ‘It’s All About Love’ for six months.”
Frank elaborated on the challenges of creating an album in today’s music landscape, stating: “It’s different now. See, what people don’t realize, for a band to make an album that’s really great, you have to get locked in a room for about a year and really hash it out and argue and make demos. And then what you’re doing is you’re fabricating 10 songs, and you’ll usually have two great ones and then the other ones are kind of half-assed written unless you spend that time doing it. And that’s what we did on the first four albums, or all of our albums that we did up to this point. Now what we’re doing is creating singles and touring and playing live and getting them out while they’re fresh.”
Brian added a pragmatic perspective: “We’re not independently multimillionaire wealthy guys. We’re a working band. Trust me, if we were millionaires, multi-millionaires, and we could afford to take two years off, we maybe would, but we can’t. We have to work. We’re a working band.”
“I’m a statistics guy,” he added. “And if you wanna get into this, I can go people buying records versus buying tickets. And there are way more people that are buying tickets than are buying records. And they wanna hear all them hits. And then there’s the hardcores, which is a much smaller percentage, and you have to go, you have to look at it realistically and go, ‘How much gas is left in that tank?'”
Despite some fans’ criticism of Tesla‘s 1980s-style production in their 2019 album “Shock,” produced by Def Leppard‘s Phil Collen, is seems the band remains focused on delivering music that resonates with both long-time fans and new listeners.
