Duff McKagan, if you had to define him, is a man who loves his wife, rocks out on stage, and is conscious about taking in his surroundings.
On November 6, Duff McKagan will bring his “Lighthouse Tour ’24” to New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge. “I’m super curious about the venue I’m playing,” he says during a recent call from his Seattle home. “I’ve never been inside of it, so I’m looking forward to that. And I saw everybody who’s played there in the past is super cool – I love that kind of history of venues. Like, who’s been in this dressing room before? That kind of stuff is really cool. You get the vibe, you really do.”
McKagan and his backing band are primed for this show thanks to a series of European dates they did earlier this fall, and he promises that they’re going to throw some new songs into the setlist for the U.S. shows, too.
He’s also excited that Lee Ving’s Range War will be on the bill for this New York show. Ving, who rose to fame as the frontman of the legendary hardcore punk band FEAR, is one of the artists that McKagan says has had a particularly big influence on him. “There are heroes from my early development of playing and discovering music, and they never stopped being my heroes, and Lee Ving is one of those guys. In the past few years, we’ve become friends, which is kind of unreal to me.”
Although many fans likely know McKagan because of his own influential work with the iconic hard rock band Guns N’ Roses, his solo career covers a broad range of musical styles. This, as he explains to us, was a deliberate choice he made.
“Guns N’ Roses is big rock band – we play a wide spectrum of heavy rock, and it’s groovy,” he says. “I’m not going to go out and make a rock record on my own during the times of Guns N’ Roses. That would be too much, I think. I’m just exploring other territories, and it’s really kind of rewarding and cool. I don’t need to go out and do a solo tour and be this loud rock band.”
Instead, when McKagan started writing songs as a solo artist, “It was my acoustic guitar telling me which way to go, really.” This approach is in evidence on his third solo album, Lighthouse, which was released last year.
His lyrical content also tends to be quite different than what is in Guns N’ Roses songs (or McKagan’s other iconic band, Velvet Revolver): “I write a lot of songs about historical cultural observations,” he says. “I travel the world – I’ve been doing it for 40 years – and I’ve always been super curious. And I read a lot of history books. You step into different cultures and just observe; don’t try to insert yourself. For whatever reason, I’ve always just loved doing that. Still do love going to coffee shops in Indonesia, and art museums, and churches and castles and all that stuff. And when you do that, you meet people. You get the vibe of your environ, so I write a lot of songs about this stuff.”
Lighthouse was well-received by fans and critics alike, but McKagan says he realized that this kind of success was never guaranteed when he struck out on his own. After all, the music business is littered with musicians who have been in successful bands, but who failed to find any momentum as solo artists. However, McKagan says that he had a specific strategy as he approached this aspect of his career.
“You’ve got to have confidence in yourself, and it really helps you take that next step. This saying swirls in my brain: ‘Confidence is knowing that you can do something even though you’ve never tried it.’”
McKagan says this “confidence factor” has proven useful in all aspects of his life. “It helps me be a husband, it helps me be a father, and it helps me go out and do shows under my own name. So, fortunately, I’ve got that little something that tells me, ‘It’s OK, you can do this.’”
This can-do attitude certainly helped McKagan as he created Lighthouse. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he remained productive, working tirelessly in his recording studio in Seattle to create the songs that would eventually end up on the album. Despite this origin, though, “I don’t call it a COVID record – at all,” he says. “It was just an extreme time of creativity, and a wonderful time to discover what my studio could do.”
Post-pandemic, McKagan hit the road for two years with Guns N’ Roses, then took a much-deserved vacation in Hawaii. After that, though, he was ready to book his solo shows around the world.
He has also been releasing more new material lately, including a soaring cover of “Heroes,” the David Bowie classic. “It’s heady territory, covering David Bowie, but everything kind of just clicked – it really came out really quite nice,” he says, “and it’s a really nice song to play live. Everybody knows it. It’s a big, huge, sing-a-long song. Everybody knows the words.”
Another new song, “True to the Death Rock N Roll Ballad,” was written for his wife, Susan. They’ve been married for 27 years and McKagan feels “so fortunate” to have her. “Every day, it just gets better, and I’m more into her, so I end up writing songs about her. I could write 10,000 songs about her, but that would be a bit too much!”
He’s also recently released three more new songs: “All Turning Loose” (with Lee Ving), “My Name Is Bob” (with Joey “Shithead” Keithley of D.O.A.), and a live version of “Heroes” (featuring Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols) that was recorded at a concert in London.
All of this work demonstrates McKagan’s diversity as an artist, but he notes that the common factor in all of it is a dedication to authenticity. That is, he notes, the thing that helped him become successful with Guns N’ Roses in the first place.
“Guns N’ Roses never tried to write a pop song to get into the pop charts,” he says. “We didn’t try to write commercial music. [Our debut album] Appetite for Destruction is not a commercial record. There’s not one commercial song on it. ‘Sweet Child [O’ Mine]’ became a big hit, and then that opened the gateway for ‘Paradise City’ and ‘[Welcome to the] Jungle,’ but at first, it was not. But we had this core fan base of people that understood that we were telling stories of the truth, and the music was very honest and in your face.” He adds, “I think we’ve continued to be that thing.”
Even though McKagan is proud of the music he’s made, he still shies away from contemplating the legacy that he has created with it. “I’m just doing what I’m doing right now,” he says. “I don’t know when I’m going to stop and take a gander back over things that happened. I know I’ve been able to enjoy a lot of really cool moments as a musician. Something will come back to me and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, we did this thing!’ A lot of highs and lows. At some point, I might look back and try to gather that all in, but right now, I’m not there yet. I just haven’t stopped. I don’t have time to do that!”
FOR TICKETS TO DUFF MCKAGEN’S INTIMATE SOLO ROCK SHOW AT LE POISSON ROUGE THIS WEEK IN NYC, CLICK HERE!
