And finally Artist News Concerts and Festivals
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday, August 30, 2022
When Kiss finally wraps up their long farewell tour and actually retires from that touring loop, what will they do? Well, while they’ve hinted at various post-tour plans, none of them involve recording new music. So says guitarist Paul Stanley, anyway.
It’s now been ten years since the band released their last album, Monster, and so the question of a follow-up naturally came up in a new interview with Stanley on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast. But the answer to the question “will there be a new Kiss record” is a simple “no”.
But not because any new record wouldn’t be good. Stanley is confident that any new music the band creates will be as good as anything they’ve done before. It’s just that fans will never get nostalgic for the new songs.
“At this point I came to the conclusion that [new material] it can never compete with the past,” he says. “Not because it’s not that good, but it’s not related to important moments in your life. It doesn’t have that patina of, ‘Well, I remember hearing this song when I was eighteen,’ or, ‘I heard this song when I was on my first date or whatever.’ You can’t compete with that. It’s more than a song; it’s a picture of your life at a certain moment”.
“There are songs in progress [’Monster’ and 2009’s ‘Sonic Boom’] which are as good as anything I have ever written, but they are new. Someone says, ‘Why don’t you make a new album?’ You make a new album and you make a song – we have a song, ‘Modern Day Delilah’, which is as good as ‘Love Gun’ or any of these songs, but it hasn’t aged; it is not like wine that has a chance to rise in importance. Not only because of what it is, but because of what it is surrounded by.”
He adds that, with all that in mind, he feels that making a new album now would just be setting yourself up for disappointment, saying: “Not crushing disappointment, but when you put your heart and soul into something and it kind of to be done. a polite nod, there are other things I’d rather be doing.”
How about just going on an endless farewell tour? Originally announced in 2018, the band embarked on their final tour in 2019. After a pandemic-enforced hiatus, they started again this year, with plans for shows to take place in 2023. Although it now appears that the tour will be extended further still.
Speaking to Chaoszine last month, Gene Simmons said: “We’re adding 100 more cities to the tour before we finally stop. The band is strong. We feel good. We’re playing hard, so we’re going to take it a little longer. But once we stop, of course, it will be like running in the Olympics. When you win a race, sometimes, they just drop to the ground exhausted due to the physical demands of the race. [But] even though you’re tired, you feel excited.”
“It’s like climbing the highest mountain in the world,” he added. “The climb is really hard, but when you get to the top of the mountain, there’s no feeling like that. So you’re happy, but of course, you’re also sad because we’re never going to do it again. But everything in life is like that. At some point, Olympic athletes have to stop. At some point, the world champion boxer has to get out of the ring, because age is the ultimate winner.”
So while they’re currently still adding shows, the farewell tour can’t go on forever. He concluded that the plan is to “get out of the ring… while we’re still champions, and that’s because we admire and respect the fans, but we also have self-respect.”
Right now they still feel like champions, so who knows when this tournament will end? “This is a tournament that won’t stop until it stops,” he said. “So we’re not going to take a year off and then start again. We are in tournament mode. We will stay there until we stop.”
And then the holograms can take over.
