Rick Nielsen on Cheap Trick’s New Album
Out today (June 16) is We’re All Alright!, the 18th studio album from Cheap Trick and the second in as many years.
Co-produced by the band and Julian Raymond, who also worked on 2016’s Bang, Zoom, Crazy…Hello, the 10 tracks are mostly vintage Cheap Trick hard rock and power pop, which guitarist Rick Nielsen tells us is the only kind of album the band knows how to make:
“We never make, like, a concept record at all so it’s like we just tried to find the best ones to put together. There’s a couple older tunes we never used, a couple, one or two were left over from the making of ‘Bang, Zoom, Crazy…Hello,’ and there’s a bunch of them that were written just really for the thing. You can’t really tell the time period of the songs; It’s kind of Cheap Trick style. We’re kind of all over the place.”
Cheap Trick will play at the Azkena Rock Festival in Spain on June 23 before beginning a summer tour with Foreigner and Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Experience on July 11 in Syracuse.
Gary Graff is an award-winning music journalist who not only covers music but has written books on Bob Seger, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.