BlancaWhite - Ken Savage
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 12:06AM 
When international lawyer and 70’s and 80’s hard rock music lover, Ken Savage, grew tired of listening to his CD collection over and over again while traveling across the world, he decided to do something about it. He got out a legal pad and started writing his own lyrics. After accumulating pages of lyrics, Savage thought he may have something of interest. He then presented his lyrics to his longtime friends and musicians, Austin and Rick Schell. After reading the lyrics, Austin Schell instantly realized that he could create music that would turn the lyrics into rock anthems.
The team of Savage and the Schell brothers then decided that they were going to create a project in which they would create the songs, but use a cast of known vocalists to sing them. They decided to call their project BlancaWhite, which was named after a world-famous bar in Matamoros, Mexico, near the childhood homes of Savage and the Schell's.
The next step for Blancawhite was to find the vocalists to fit the songs. After months of searching, they found Paul Shortino (Quiet Riot, Rough Cutt, King Kobra), Terry Illous (XYZ, Great White), Lorraine Lewis (Femme Fatale) and Jeff Paris (Cinderella, Vixen, Slash). All four were excited to be part of the project. What finally resulted was an anthematic and vintage rock sounding album, entitled “Resurgence of Rock.”
What follows is an exclusive interview with Blancawhite’s co-founder and lyricist, Ken Savage. During this interview, Savage discusses the writing process for the “Resurgence of Rock” album and much more.
RockMusicStar: Hey Ken, I’ve been listening to your new CD, “Resurgence of Rock,” for the last few days, and I have to admit that I’m very impressed by it. It has a great 70's and 80’s rock vibe to it.
Ken Savage: Thank you. We worked very hard on it for a couple of years.
RMS: It must be extremely gratifying that it turned out as well as it did.
KS: It is very gratifying and I’m grateful to everyone that joined in with us on the project. It really exceeded our wildest expectations.
RMS: You have a rather prestigious full-time job as an international lawyer. But if you could trade in your career for that of a rockstar now, would you do it?
KS: (laughs) Well, I’m not personally performing on the album. I wrote the songs, along with my partner in crime Austin Schell. And we brought in some really talented people to work on it. I certainly want to continue making music and more albums. But unfortunately, I’m not a musician myself. So, I’m a bit limited.
RMS: BlancaWhite, seems very similar in structure to that of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. You have a few main individuals with a revolving casts of talented singers and musicians.
KS: That’s a really good analogy. We certainly looked at them (TSO) and thought of them a lot over the last couple of years. But we really used the Alan Parsons Project as our model. They had two guys that were making the music, and they brought in other talented singers and musicians to perform. That’s definitely the idea. I wrote the lyrics and came up with the song subjects. Austin wrote the music and arrangements for everything. Then we brought in some amazing singers and great musicians to perform on the album.
RMS: When listening to the lyrics, at first it seemed as if they were written from the point of view of a seasoned musician. But, with all the travel that you do in your full-time occupation, I’m now wondering if some of the songs are autobiographical.
KS: (pauses) Many of the songs were autobiographical. There is a lot of truth in some of the lyrics, so yes, you are right about that.
RMS: Since you wrote all the lyrics, were you at all involved in shaping and developing the songs at all? Maybe, even suggesting a melody line here or there?
KS: Austin did most of the melody lines. He and I would certainly get together, and go through the songs to make sure that we were both happy with it. But he is the one that did the musical writing. One of the most unique things about this album, is the way that put it together. I’m based in Europe and Austin lives in USA. You can do that nowadays, with technology and the way that you can share files. We would sometimes get together in either France or Texas every three to four months, and work through the material in detail. During the interim periods, we would send a lot of stuff back and forth.
RMS: When you wrote the lyrics, you must have had an idea of how you wanted the songs to sound?
KS: Yes, I did. But it was very simple. I wanted a basic, hard driving AC/DC-esque type of rhythm and vibe. Some of the songs maintained that, like the last song “Woman Side.” The other songs, however, were made much stronger because of Austin.
RMS: Was this the first music project that you have ever worked on?
KS: Yes, it is. Austin has worked on many projects, he has spent his lifetime on music. He’s been in the Austin, TX rock scene for many years. He has produced projects in the past. But this is the first one in which I’ve been involved.
RMS: It’s pretty amazing that your first project is so successful.
KS: There was a lot of hard work. We certainly went down some trails that didn’t pan out. We also got really lucky on some critical moments during the project, were we needed to find certain singers, or were struggling to find singers. We ended finding some people to mix and master that really strong and knew what they were doing. There is a substantial amount of luck in anything that is successful and we certainly got lucky.
RMS: Everyone talks about the guest vocalists that appear on this CD. But in addition, the guitar work is quite noteworthy as well. Did Austin do all the guitar solos as well?
KS: He did nearly all of them. The soaring guitar solo in “Hundred Years War,” was one of them. The Lorraine Lewis ballad “Woman Side“ was another. However, we also brought in some specialized guitarists from a band in Austin, Texas to do some of the lead guitar on the title track, especially during the chorus part of that track. They also play on the musical piece we have at the end, “Famous Last Chords.”
RMS: Ok, let’s discuss the all-star cast of vocalist that sang on the album. You have Paul Shortino, Terry Illous, Jeff Paris and Lorraine Lewis. Was it originally in the game plan to have different vocalist? And were these the four vocalists that you wanted right from the beginning?
KS: In the beginning, we set out to find the type of voice that we wanted for each song. So, we had an idea of the type of voice we wanted. The first one we found after several months, was Terry Illous from XYZ, who also has been in Great White for a while now, and Lorraine Lewis from Femme Fatal. Right form the beginning, we knew that we wanted to do a couple songs with a female vocalist. We found Lorraine relatively early in the process, because the number of hard rock female vocalists from the 80’s is rather limited. We were thrilled when she came on board. We found Terry illous back in the summer/fall of 2010. We were really thrilled about Terry in particular, because we had written a song called, “Your Boyfriend is Lame.” The key line in the song , which is the guy telling the girl that her boyfriend is lame. We say the line in English in the first verse, and the second is in Spanish and the third is in French, because the song is set in three different countries, by verse. We were thrilled to find Terry, because Terry’s father is French and his mother is Spanish, and he’s lived in California for about 25 years. So, he’s tri-lingual (in all three languages). He’s probably the only hard rock vocalist in the planet that is trilingual, and can speak all three with no accent. So, he fit that track perfectly.
We then went through a difficult process that took another five to six months, before we found Jeff Paris and Paul Shortino. We knew during that process that we wanted another hard rock vocalist with a gravelly type voice and that’s what we found in Paul. And Paul’s terrific. He’s been in many bands, such as Quiet Riot, Rough Cutt and King Kobra.
For Jeff, we had a couple songs in which we wanted a smoother voice. So we were thrilled to find him as well. It was actually by a fluke that we found him. It turned out that Terry Illous had performed on a French 'reality' TV show, and he had a legal issue stemming from that, and he called me up in France, six months after we recorded “You’re Boyfriend is Lame.” In the meantime, we had shipped these songs out to vocalists all over the world and we really weren’t happy with what we got back. So in the midst of talking to Terry about his issue with the TV show, I asked him if he knew of any other singers, and he’s the one who ultimately turned us on to Paul and Jeff.
RMS: I think that it really worked out well having four different and unique voices. It really gives the album some variety.
RS: I agree. It’s a neat album to listen to from beginning to end because it changes a lot. With using the four different vocalists, there isn’t a lot of monotony and that’s one of its very unique features.
RMS: Yeah, and many of the songs are rock anthems. You want to just crank up the volume on this one.
RS: (laughs) Well, that was our intention. And I’m glad that’s your reaction. We really set out the capture the 80’s sound and make this album appeal to rock music fans, like me and you, who grew up in that era and are now in a different stage in their lives. I think that it’s a good mix of the modern perspective, with the classic sound.
RMS: My last question is, how do you plan on promoting this release?
KS: Well, we plan on releasing the full album on February 7th. You can also get updates on our website www.resurgenceofrock.com We also have a ton of interviews lined up. And there has been some discussion of live shows. But we are faced with a bit of a logistics issue, we don’t have a full time band and we have four different singers. But there is active discussion on some limited shows at least in the spring and summer.
Special thanks to Chip of www.chipsterpr.com for making this interview happen.
Thomas