SLASH’s LATEST CONSPIRACY

Slash, with his trademark top hat and thick, curly, raven black hair hanging over his dark sunglasses (and occasional cigarette dangling from his lips), looks more like a character out of a graphic novel than a hard rock guitarist slinging a Gibson Les Paul for a living. He’s played the rock and roll bad boy in Guns N’ Roses, the band that brought him fame that began in the late ’80s with the breakthrough album Appetite for Destruction. But as he has matured his craft over the decades, he has fit in exceedingly well collaborating with other renowned musicians, such as the late Scott Weiland and Velvet Revolver, Carmine Appice’s Guitar Zeus and, of course, Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. Perhaps nothing can top the lightning rod that was Appetite for Destruction, but the latest album by the Conspirators, 4, is further proof of Slash’s innate ability to produce quality music with his rock and roll peers.

Slash recently spoke to Goldmine about both his current creativity and a lifetime in rock and roll.

GM: When did you write material for this latest album with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators?

SLASH: I wrote a whole lot of stuff during the COVID period of time. But the majority was written during the last tour. We write when we’re on the road; we had compiled a lot of music from the last tour in 2019, so the majority of this is from then. There are a couple of songs on it that were written during the pandemic. It was written pretty quickly, regardless. Once I started putting it all together during the pandemic, it came together pretty fast.

GM: So, you write mostly on the road?

Yeah, I mean, as a rule it’s for no other reason other than it’s how I fill my downtime when we’re touring. And then just put the stuff together after the tour and then put out the record for the next tour! (laughs) It works out that way. This record, we had a conversation about how