1. AC DCBack In Black
I think I discovered that record when I was in seventh grade. It’s like a perfect album, from beginning to end, which is a difficult thing to achieve.
I’ve been a fan of AC/DC for years. Highway To Hell is another record I think is pretty perfect. That record was so huge and it hit so hard, it was a kind of bookmarker in your life, for me and millions of people.
Oddly enough we went through a few things that they had to. Down the road we would go through the loss of a member and make a decision to continue on and do it successfully. I thought it was such a brave thing for AC/DC to triumph over that sort of tragedy [the death of singer Bon Scott in 1980], to continue to have their sound, and also to have Brian on such a fucking impactful record – it’s obviously charged with a ton of emotion from losing Bon. That process, it was a fairly quick change. Brian wasn’t trying to sound like Bon, but it’s still AC/DC. Our band is a kind of parallel in a way.
When I started I was more of a rhythm player in whatever band I played in, so I really identified with Malcolm [Young], yet I was wanting to play lead like Angus. He’s a phenomenal lead player, but I’ve always thought the backbone of band is the rhythm guitar. I guess a lot of the bands that I like are dual guitar bands. And I actually really wanted another guitar player in this band when we first started, but the other guys didn’t want one, so I had to learn to play a little bit [laughs].
