Virtuoso Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen recently spoke with Sonic Perspectives and was asked if he would ever want to collaborate again with musicians like keyboardist Derek Sherinian and drummer John Macaluso. Yngwie responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “No, ’cause I don’t collaborate with people. I write all parts. Even when I hire people such as them, when they were hired to record with me, then I wrote the parts and sounds and so forth.
“Listen, I never say never to anything, but right now this is exactly where I wanna be.”
Malmsteen also spoke about his musical direction choices, choosing his own style instead of conforming to what people are currently listening to.
“The thing is that I’ve done this for such a long time, and I was a very accomplished musician already — very young, but very accomplished; I was in junior high, I think — when the first punk wave came, SEX PISTOLS and stuff,” he explained. “And I was going, ‘What the fuck is this? Why don’t you tune the guitar? Why do you sing like that?’ And then, of course, that wore out. And then in 1991, the same exact thing happened again with the grunge wave. So, obviously, as you might already have figured out, I’m not a follower — I don’t follow trends. If anything, I make trends; I don’t follow. And I’ve always been very clear in my vision on where I wanna go and what I wanna do. And my art is too important to me to dilute with trying to follow other things. So I just don’t do that.”
Yngwie’s new album, “Parabellum”, will be released on July 23 via Music Theories Recordings/Mascot Label Group. Only four of the songs on the LP feature vocals. The album title is Latin, translating as “Prepare For War”.
