In a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment, MÖTLEY CRÜE bassist Nikki Sixx talked about songwriting and how the songs are specifically made to suit Vince Neil‘s voice.
He said: “With MÖTLEY CRÜE, Vince has this amazing, unique voice — sometimes like Robert Plant, Perry Farrell… they have these interesting voices that are… they’re not pitchy, they’re just raw and just kind of on top. I always loved that about Vince’s voice and I would write for Vince.”
“Vince will tell you ‘Nikki wrote all those lyrics for me.’ I did. I gave him stuff. I understand his voice so much.”
He also discussed on how MÖTLEY CRÜE would sound with a vocalist with more traditional blues-rock chops.
“I got lucky! I got a guy with a really different voice,” Sixx says. “Imagine if he was a bluesy singer — if he was a David Coverdale? I love David, I love his voice — or Glenn Hughes, some of my favorite people and favorite musicians… Could he deliver ‘Ba*stard’? Could he deliver ‘Dropping Like Flies’? Could he deliver ‘Generation Swine’? I don’t know, I’ll never know. But I do love that about MÖTLEY CRÜE that we kind of four individually… I don’t know. It’s almost like we don’t belong together. We’re all so weird and different and it makes for some really interesting magic.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Sixx spoke about MÖTLEY CRÜE‘s “The Stadium Tour” with DEF LEPPARD which was originally scheduled to take place last summer but ended up being pushed back to 2021, and then to 2022, due to the coronavirus crisis.
“We thought we were gonna tour this year,” he said. “Then the delta variant came. And some of my friends went out and did it, and some have had no problems, some have had big problems.
“On a business level, you can’t get COVID insurance. So if you’ve got a big show — MÖTLEY, DEF LEPPARD, POISON and JOAN JETT — that’s generating a lot of… If that show goes down because somebody whatever, you just lose money, and you can only lose so many shows and then you’re basically on tour for free. So we chose to stay back, waiting to see how AEGs and Live Nations and how other bands were gonna handle it. And I think we made the right decision.
“We restart designing the show in April. It’s basically designed, but there’s some new technology that happened in the last few years we might wanna involve. And then we’ve already got our set — it’s done — so it’s not like we have to have that meeting where it’s, like, ‘I wanna play this song’ or ‘I wanna play this song.’ Everybody agreed on these songs, and it’s a really cool set, and there’s some medleys in it.
“We start band rehearsals in May,” he added. “I don’t know what that looks like. We like to rehearse for three or four weeks. Even if we have four weeks and we’re pretty tight at three weeks, sometimes you lose a day here and there — a guy gets sick or someone’s car breaks down — so we always [give ourselves] four weeks. And then we go to Atlanta where the tour opens and we do pre-production with everybody on the bill and we set the show up and tear the show down so it all fits. And then June 19th, I think, the tour starts. And I can’t wait.”
