Guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen explained why he doesn’t perform well with others and how collaborations taint his mastery. In the new issue of Classic Rock, the guitarist revealed that people take his dislike of partnerships for egoism while claiming it’s the other way around.
When asked about how much negative attention is deserved or whether he’s misunderstood for refusing to work with other rockers, he touched on no longer being in a band and said the following:
“Nobody is perfect. But people really don’t understand what I’m doing. This is not a band. It hasn’t been a band since 1984. That’s strange for rock’n’roll people to comprehend, but it’s how I work. I’m a painter. I won’t do half a painting and call you up and say: ‘Dave, please finish it for me.’ Working with others, I felt like I was subtracting something, and not adding.”
Addressing the misunderstandings of other artists, he continued:
“That’s often mistaken for egotism, but really it isn’t. Singers have a real problem with the fact that they are part of the ensemble, performing my music. They just don’t get it. I need to explain something to you. The way I work is different to everybody else. I can wake up in the middle of the night and hear a perfectly completed song – including the production. Therefore I don’t need producers, outside writers, and I no longer need singers.”
After leaving his former band, Alcatrazz, Malmsteen focused on his solo career to find out it was easier for him to work solo:
“When I had singers, I wrote the vocal melodies the way I heard them in my head and taught them to [former Alcatrazz bandmate] Graham Bonnet or whoever. Until I came to the States, I was the singer, guitar player and writer, all I needed to do was hire a bass player and drummer. Over my career there was only a small [period of time] when I used singers. It’s just easier to do it myself.”
The guitarist has addressed his problem with collaborating earlier as well. While sharing his disappointment with the constantly changing music genres and trends, he stated that he doesn’t follow trends but rather prefers to make his own.
Despite disliking collaborations, the rocker still claimed that he never had a ‘Paul McCartney-John Lennon’ moment, and all of his collaborations have been great. So it seems that despite the outsiders’ view on Malmsteen, he didn’t have any misunderstandings among the people he collaborated with, and agreed to collaborate with many nonetheless.
