Hailing from Japan, by-way-of-Maryland, Marty Friedman is set to arrive in the Big Apple on February 4 to perform at the great City Winery, of which he is following up with another set of shows, including in a post-Big Game Philadelphia on February 10.
Rockstar, Megadeth alum, J-pop icon, and author. Marty Friedman just may do it all… and there’s a chance he’s showcasing all of that for the masses right now with a tour of both album and book underway.
“This is my first book in English,” Marty Friedman says of Dreaming Japanese, his almost 400-page memoir that was released two months ago today. The universally acclaimed guitarist is no stranger to writing, though. “I’ve written three books in Japanese, but this is my first book in English – and it’s really a monster. I mean, it’s a big, long book. Even the books that I wrote in Japan were maybe about half the size.” However, he admits that they also weren’t as personal as the in-depth Dreaming Japanese.
“This is an autobiography, so this is really the first time I’ve ever done book signings in America. Of course, I’ve done so many album signings that I believe that an album that has not been signed is more rare than an album that I’ve signed [Laughs]. My book signing career has not even started yet in America, but I’m just looking forward to it.” Bookends, one of our home state’s best book stores and frequent event host, is welcoming Friedman and Dreaming Japanese on February 3 for a personal signing event.
“It just feels like an out of body experience. It’s kind of weird knowing that the people who come to this book signing are gonna know all sorts of personal details about me that I’ve never shared with anyone before. That’s the weirdest thing, but the main feeling is pure appreciation for the people who care enough to read it. I hope they enjoy it.”
Friedman’s 2024 album, Drama, is also worth noting, as it is one of the best albums in his solo catalog. The beautiful intricacies and tales of musical passion are laced within these heavy riffs and runs on the guitar and it is outstanding to listen to. “So far everything has been really, really positive about it,” the musician shares of the record’s reception. “I kind of try to stay out of the results as far as that goes, but when people are enjoying it, that makes me very happy.”
“What is most important is when I finish pretty much anything, before I let it go, I want to make sure that it’s what I want it to be; that way, if people don’t like it, it really doesn’t affect me at all. I’m still very satisfied with it. For example, if I wasn’t happy with a piano part and I didn’t have time to fix it, I’d let it go. Someone might say, ‘I don’t like it because of the piano,’ and then I would feel bad [Laughs]. I’ve pretty much covered all the bases, though, and did [Drama] the way I wanted it to and I’m very happy with it.”
Friedman should be, because the LP is riveting, and it has an orchestral aspect to it. It fuses a lot of sounds and styles, has an almost effortless complexity to it, and it shapes a sonic, global metal journey. The way it flows is almost too good to be true, but Friedman takes the order of an album into “very big consideration,” as he tells us.
“I like an album to be one piece of work, a landmark, a timestamp, or even a yearbook actually. I think as musicians and artists, we have the lucky thing of having ‘high school yearbooks’ every couple years or so from each time we put out an album, because it’s like looking back on that year’s yearbook and seeing the people, seeing the names, being reminded of the sounds of that year. An album is like a stamp of that year, so I like to think it as one whole piece of work. Especially for instrumental artists, it’s really easy for a lot of guys to make an album that sounds like a resume. It’s like, ‘Here’s my heavy rock song, here’s my country song, here’s my fusion song.’ It is very hard to listen to that unless you’re looking to hire somebody for something. I think over my experience, I’ve been able to make one statement out of an album. I spend some time with sequencing, like you said, and it’s not that difficult, but it does take a little trial and error because you want to put things in an order that keep people listening.”
It’s not easy to make something cohesive, intriguing, and accessible after decades of being a multi-platinum recording artist, but that is what Drama is, and what it encapsulates on songs like “Illumination,” the album opener, and “Deep End” and “Icicles,” as well. Somehow, within the nuances, the musicality becomes understandable – surprising and exciting, but not difficult or weighed down. Maybe it has to do with how it aligned with the writing of his memoir, which came about earlier than the album, but each project was fairly in tune with the other. “I’d been working on the book little by little for maybe five or six years, and just in the last year or so, I really turbocharged the work on that. Drama was about two years in the making and it kind of all came out around the same time, but ‘Deep End’ was actually the last song I came up with for the record. I knew that I wanted a long piano intro that is so long that the listener doesn’t know what’s gonna happen.”
Still, it’s as comfortable of a record to sit back and enjoy as it is a thrill. We shared that we found this record to be on the edge of being an easy-listening experience with Marty Friedman, even though we did not want to diminish how deep the soundscapes are. He believed we actually hit the nail on the head with our assessment of his latest release.
“I think that easy listening is definitely not a bad term at all. There are a lot of elements of easy listening in my music, and maybe that’s why the term came so naturally to you. Within easy-listening music, of course there are extremely complex arrangements and concepts, but the thing is, I don’t care if people know about those or not. I just want people to have an easy time listening to it. When I listen to music, I completely disregard the fact that I make music and I listen completely as a fan,” he explains. Like most of the free world, he just wants to fall in love with art and connect with it. Unlike most of the free world, though, he’s a genre-defying, shapeshifting, truly electric guitarist. And yet, we listen to music the same. “I couldn’t care less about the details of it; all I care about is whether I enjoy it or not. How I enjoy it, how I feel when I listen to it. I don’t care if the players suck or if they’re virtuosos; it doesn’t matter in the slightest. I also don’t care if they’re really nice people or if they’re mass murderers [Laughs], it doesn’t affect it because once the music is on, it’s mine. I’m listening to it.”
“At the end of the day, I don’t think any of us are doing this to impress other musicians. We want to get an emotion across to everybody, and we don’t need to be appreciated for the nuts and bolts and the technicalities of making the music, just the feeling that gets across.”
Those feelings evolve over time without fail, and being a massive Japanese personality and overall arts and culture entity surely helps. The more he experiences and the more he travels, the more material he absorbs and the more inspiration he comes in contact with. “It subliminally comes into you,” he says of gathering influence on the road and overseas. “When you’re on tour, you have so little time and you really only see the hotel and the venue and an airport and your tour bus, but from meeting people, hearing accents, hearing local music, you definitely still have things that soak in – especially with foreign countries, obviously being Japan, but not only Japan, as other countries have left a big musical impact on me: China, for one, and Argentina. […] That area in America where I grew up on the East Coast, too – they’ve contributed a lot. If you look at the entire country, a lot of great stuff has come out of that area, and growing up on the East Coast and knowing a lot of my family is from the New York and New Jersey area, I’ve been there a billion times (even before I played music), so I know what it’s like there and I know that we’re gonna bring something that they’re gonna enjoy very much while on tour, and hopefully something they can take with them after they come see the show.”
Pop and rock are two of the biggest genres in both the U.S. and Japan, but the sounds of those in Japan have very clear local trends to them that Marty Friedman can’t help but include in his work. He also can’t help but enhance such musical trends and traits with his skillset and background being so robust. The dissonant melodies of Japanese hits can be found on Drama and experienced on tour here in the states, which we are ecstatic about. And, honestly, so is Friedman himself.
“I’m looking forward to touring in America, and I’m also looking forward to my band being very Japanese in spirit. I am, of course, American, but I’ve lived in [Japan] a third of my life, so there’s definitely a Japanese spirit inside of me somewhere. What I like to bring to my American friends is a presentation that only could be done with these four Japanese members – myself included. It’s just something different from what you normally see in a concert, especially in a guitar-centric presentation. You expect to see some virtuoso playing really, really wonderful guitar, but that’s not really the way I present my music. You’ll walk away feeling uplifted. You’ll feel like you got something. You’ll feel like you have some new energy that you didn’t have before, and you’re ready to face another week of whatever it is you’re doing with more enthusiasm and power and fun because of it. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m trying to bring to everybody. Of course, there’s gonna be a ton of guitar played – don’t mistake that, but I don’t want people walking away saying, ‘Wow, he’s a good guitar player.’ That would mean my mission is not complete.”
FOR MORE ON MARTY FRIEDMAN’S NEW MEMOIR, HIS LATEST ALBUM, OR HOW TO CATCH HIM ON TOUR, VISIT HIS WEBSITE!
