DEF LEPPARD frontman JOE ELLIOTT has discussed the and's just announced 2015 tour with Billboard, but also touched on the new album due this year.
Elliott says there are 15 songs "on the go" for the set, which he considers "remarkably strong" and predicts will sound both familiar and fresh when it's finally out. "It's very varied," Elliott says. "It sounds like Def Leppard, but it sounds like Def Leppard stretching their wings a little bit. There are a couple of songs tied to our DNA, instantly recognizable as us, and some of the stuff that's not so much like that and represents who we are now, a band that's in their early- to mid-50s, the kind of music they should be making without it sounding old and farty. We're not trying to write 24-hour party songs at our age; that would be silly. "The good thing," he adds, "is we're not tied down. Like, when you say
AC/DC, you kinda know what you're gonna get. We're more in the Queen ballpark where you can have a slow thing and you can have a full-on rock song on the same record and they go side-by-side. That's where we're coming from on a lot of this stuff."
Elliott says the group thought about getting the album out during the spring, but it's likely to be later because of what he calls "an unprecedented amount of offers from various different people to release this record, which we weren't expecting and has changed the whole dynamic of how we want to put this record out." Elliott says Def Leppard is still "wedding through" the offers but is confidently the album will be out "absolutely this year."
"The important thing is we make a good record," he says. "I don't think people are queuing around the block to buy a Def Leppard release right now; if they're doing it for anybody at all it'd be Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. But for us it's really important that we keep the high quality we've always tried to deliver and we don't let ourselves down. We're never gonna be the kind of band that goes, 'Well, it doesn't matter, nobody buys records anymore so let's jsut piss one out in a month.' That's not our style. It never will be."
