Danny Vaughn has been very active on the live front for the last few years and has at last released his first album of all new material since 2001's ‘Fearless'. His first to feature his UK based touring band, ‘Traveller' should appease those hoping for a return to the hard rock sound of Tyketto, but also features the trademark melodies and personal lyrics of his Vaughn material. With most of his band based in the North-West of England it made sense to record the album at Jelly Jam Studios in Runcorn. I caught up with Danny to talk about the album he considers to be the best of his career so far.

This new album was a different way of doing things from what you're used to, but was it a good experience for you?

"Oh yeah, absolutely! I mean overall the things that stressed me out and made me crazy have faded. It's a weird thing – I've never been a concept guy, once in a while I might come up with an idea or a title or something, but artwork and things like that, we'll figure all that out later. This time I had all these ideas and didn't know how in the world I would make them all come together in the one place. I've always wanted to have one of my father's paintings on an album cover but there was never an album that called for it, being as that sort of thing is mostly what he does. Hayley and I were looking through a whole bunch of paintings of his that I have on file and we just came across it and thought that one would work. It's actually a detail of two paintings and she's done a bit of interesting re-touching to it – the original had no sky, it kind of ended right in the middle – so she really worked hard on it and designed the logo – she really put a lot of work into it.

"The album itself was a twenty-eight day recording marathon – I mean I don't remember the month of June at all – it was supposed to be very warm, but I wouldn't know (laughs). It was ten hours every day in that studio. But yeah, beaurocratic nonsense aside it was great fun to do things like create textures of sound, normally that's stuff you can only do if you have a big budget and lots of time, but I just found ways to get myself locked in a room with a synthesizer for a couple of hours with a pad and paper, just running through sounds and finding stuff I liked. It was great fun to be full-on producer for the first time and it's such a charge – I've seen several reviews that say "stellar production" or "as good a production as Tyketto records" – well, maybe not but thank you!"

And of course it helps when you've got Dennis Ward to mix the thing?

"Yeah, the studio we recorded it in didn't want us to take it somewhere else, but I think Dennis knows what he's doing. To be fair we went back and forth on that a few times and to Dennis' credit he was very open about what I was hearing – I went back to him a few times and said "This doesn't seem quite right", or "This seems quieter than this one, maybe I'm crazy?". He came back to me and said "You know what? You're right, I measured it and it's about two Db quieter". He was very flexible and easy going, he didn't seem to have an ego at all, so that was really nice."

So how did it go having the new band in the studio when some of them haven't done as much recording as you have?

"Lee (Morris – drums, ex-Paradise Lost) being the exception of course, but to be fair Lee's stuff is usually done in the first couple of days – and on this album it really was the first couple of days! I think that's one of the reasons I had the time to piffle about with certain things – he had all but one drum track done in two days – and that was thirteen songs because of the bonus track. The one we had to go and re-do was, of all things, the final track with that little military drum buzz-roll thing, so he really helped us along. We were working under the usual constraints of people having to go to work and limited budgets, and all that kind of thing. Steve (McKenna - bass) was coming in straight after work to do his parts in the evenings, he would do two or three songs a night. Pat (Heath - guitars) is just a very relaxed person in the studio – but yeah, I didn't know what I was going to get myself into, and usually in every recording there's a trouble spot where somebody is not connecting and really having trouble being under the microscope, but that just didn't happen – luckily, because I don't think we would have had the time to straighten that out. The key, for anyone who's interested, is lots and lots of pre-production work before you get into the studio because everybody did that, either as a unit, or a couple of guys would get together, and you especially need to do that when you have two guitarists. That was a very important thing because Tony (Marshall - guitars) and Pat don't play on every track together – there was no ego involved – Tony would say "This is more of a Pat song, let Pat handle this one" and vice versa. It was really nice everyone mixing it up, and even I got to play guitar on it, which was fun."

To everyone else these songs are all new but some of them aren't. Can you tell me all about songs like ‘Restless Blood' and ‘Lifted'?

"If you look back though Phil, it's always like that with me. I don't think I've ever made an album, with the exception of ‘Don't Come Easy' probably, that was all songs that were recently written. It's all been taken from different places, which is how I like it because I think an album has more layers when it comes that way. ‘Restless Blood' was damn near on ‘Strength In Numbers' – we were trying very hard to work it, we would whip it out in rehearsals or on soundchecks and play through it – I have several recordings on little Walkman tapes of Tyketto playing it, but the guys never felt it was finished. I have to admit I was baffled, it's not too far off from what we've done here, but for whatever reason they never thought it was good enough or was finished enough. When you work with Frontiers and you say "I've got a song that sounds just like Tyketto" – I'm gonna be their best bud for weeks after that (laughs), so I was happy to bring that one in. ‘Lifted' – yeah, that's a strange one. That was a case of where I was going through some very old rehearsal tapes – I never throw out any working tapes, if there's anything on there that hasn't been used it's not because I don't intend to use it, but things happen. Years down the road you'll look through something and suddenly understand where that music needs to go, and for whatever reason you didn't at the time – there are still several other ideas on there that could still pop up. ‘Lifted' was co-written with Charlie Calv from Shotgun Symphony – he and I had gotten together after he toured with us and just noodled for a few hours and ran tape – nothing much came of it but I found this tape and put it on and part of what turned out to be the introduction to ‘Lifted' kind of led me to the next thing, and it suddenly became this whole piece. It took twelve or thirteen years (laughs) and I suddenly understood what the song was supposed to be. That's pretty normal for me – if something's not ready to be put out I generally don't try to make it ready."

‘Think Of Me In The Fall' was another old song wasn't it?

"Yeah, I did a demo in about '98 or '99 - I'd been out of music for a couple of years and had been writing songs just to do it, because I never stop writing – I had no plans for them and no idea what to do with them. I did a demo of ten songs and a great number of them ended up on ‘Soldier and Sailors…', one or two were on ‘Fearless' and ‘Think Of Me In The Fall' was one of the few I hadn't done, only because I already had a number of ballads on those albums and you've got to be careful with that – you don't want too many ballads on an album. So I just let it sit, but I played it for people and it's a really personal song, and people got it, but I knew eventually it would find it's place and I'm happy that it did."

Since Tyketto a lot of your arrangements have been a lot simpler, but ‘Death Of The Tiger' is the exact opposite isn't it?

"Yeah (laughs), that's one of two songs on the album that for me I will consider complete personal indulgences. It's Led Zeppelin, it's completely inspired by and in homage to – the best metal band there ever was. I don't know where that started – maybe a couple of years back with just the intro, having no idea that it was going to become this stomping thing, and I started putting bits and pieces of it together but it never had a chorus. It was Tony that really came across with guiding it to a chorus that we were really happy with. I said "Let's just kitchen sink this thing – what can't we throw in?" So there's backwards guitars on it, there's just multiple, multiple keyboard lines going through it – some of that stuff that sounds like a woman's voice is actually a keyboard. We just played with it and had a great time with it – it should have ended about a minute and a half before it did but I just couldn't bring myself to do it (laughs). It was supposed to be a fade-out but for whatever reason, when Johnny (Larson – keyboard player) was playing his lines at the end he just kept holding and the keyboards were the last thing standing – so I said "We've got to keep it" – but…over-indulgent? Yeah! I think I would do more pieces like that, between that and ‘Miracle Days' I have a definite desire to make atmospheric kind of music as well, whether it be hard rock or not – and as I'm such a movie fanatic maybe it's a desire to make movie soundtracks or something."

Talking of ‘Miracle Days' there's quite a tragic story behind that one isn't there?

"Yes there is, and strangely enough I just heard from that family yesterday, they sent me a DVD of Mason. The story, as short as I can make it, is that several years ago I was contacted by a gentleman named Chuck Lindley who told me the story of his son. The basis of the story is that mum is outside riding a very large lawnmower and dad is inside, and both of them think that the other one is watching the four year old – meanwhile the four year old has figured out how to get out the door. She puts the lawnmower in reverse and runs over something – it was him, he was right behind the machine. The way she described it, without being too graphic, is that when they did manage to get the machine off of him there was pieces of him missing, you could actually see his spine from the front. They got him to the hospital and somehow he was still alive – he had no colon and no spleen, they were just shredded. Anyway, he had thirty-two operations and the little kid just wouldn't go down – he wouldn't have it, and apparently he was this really joyous young boy. So Chuck had written to me and said he had always wanted to tell his son how much he loved him in a song except he wasn't a musician, he said of all the songwriters out there he thought I could do it best. I'm stunned huh? Of all the people you can think of? So I set about it a couple of years back and to my shame I didn't finish it - not out of laziness but out of being in a really awful period in my life, being really upset about a lot of things and generally being uncreative. I tried and tried and tried, but perhaps it was the size of the task as well, everything I came up with I thought, "This just isn't good enough". I did have the title and a bit of the chorus, I knew what I wanted to say, I just didn't know what to do with it. So it sat, and then coming up to do this album I thought "I must make that song happen – I can hear it in my head but I don't know what the exact notes are, I can feel it as a song". I started working again and got it finished and demoed it up in my home studio, and the thing I'm ashamed of is that Mason did eventually succumb to all kinds of infection two and a half years later, and things that are normal for what he'd been through, so Mason never got to hear it. That's the sad thing. His family have heard it, and I think I wouldn't have included it on the album if they'd disapproved of it in any way, but they like it very much. They have a big organization, the Mason Lindley Fund, that's devoted to helping people with children who have massive hospital bills – they're real crusaders for that now, they're really good people. I'm hoping I'll meet them eventually one day."

‘The Warrior's Way' is probably the heaviest song you've ever done. It was written for Bob Catley wasn't it?

"At least in my mind it was. I know Bob and we'd spent some time chatting and he said "I'd love to get a couple of your songs" and I said "What type of songs would you want on an album?" and he'd say "Oh, you know, whatever! Just good ones!" (laughs). I think he was probably looking for something different from what he was doing. After I'd done that acoustic tour with him I'd kinda got hooked on Bob a little bit – I'd gone back and listened to a bunch of stuff I hadn't heard, I thought his songs on Gary Hughes' ‘Once And Future King' were the best songs on the record, but what I noticed between his stuff and Magnum is that he does tend to do stuff on a grand storytelling scale. It's going to be historical and it's going to be an epic – I never do that, I never write about wars and soldiers and castles and things like that, but let me give it a shot. But then when I was halfway through ‘The Warrior's Way' I didn't want to give it to him so I kept it (laughs). It was just because I'd played it for Hayley, who's a very good sounding board for a lot of my ideas, and she said "I don't know, this is a bit different for you – but God it would work live!" That's what I thought about and that's what this version of the band really is, it came about because it's so strong live. I've done a lot of German interviews in the last week with people who'd seen us at UFOR II and had seen Tyketto in the heyday, which they said were great but this band I have now were better. That's a statement I think! If we made that much of an impression then we must be doing something right. We've tried really hard to make ourselves come across as a good live band and to utilise the two guitar guys – there are several songs like this one and ‘Badlands Rain' and ‘Miracle Days' where it was really designed to let the guitar players have more of their way than I think I have on my own albums."

Those kind of songs remind me of ‘Inherit The Wind'.

"Yeah, exactly right! Funnily enough, when I first started writing that song it was me and Michael (Clayton) jamming – I was playing bass and then when Brooke (St. James) came in as well and said "What was that?" and I said "Zeppelin?"(laughs). It basically is ‘Immigrant Song', and then we just kind of morphed it from there. If it's coming from a Zeppelin perspective then I don't consider it as out of bounds to me – I don't know if ‘The Warrior's Way' is melodic rock or not, but I think the chorus brings it back to centre a bit."

One thing I don't think I've ever asked you about, and you've talked about it a little bit, is the connection to American Indians and your blood brother Charlie White Elk. How did you get involved in all that?

"It's a bit odd, as most of my stories are, but I'd been fascinated by the culture for a long, long time – as you can tell by the cover. My father has painted that kind of material for many, many years, his work is in galleries all over the south-west. I was always surrounded by the culture because my dad's a researcher – he didn't just paint stuff out of his head, what you see is information he's gathered – what sort of weapons they carried, what the stuff was made out of – a lot of authenticity. We had books upon books and I would read about their connection to the world – how they view things – their religious feelings – and I felt very strongly about it. What ended up happening was that another friend of mine one day came to the same conclusion – he saw the movie ‘Dances With Wolves' and he was just enchanted and he had to meet an Indian (laughs). He went ahead and was relentless about it, he got in touch with several tribal councils across the States saying he wanted to do something – he wanted to have a concert or something to make money, he just wanted to be involved. We weren't real close or anything but one day he phoned me and said "You have to come visit me", I said "Why?", and he said "Because next week the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian tribal council is sending a council member here to discuss the possibility of doing a concert", and we were talking about re-uniting my old cover band Allied Forces in the New York/New Jersey area. We said if we could re-unite and do this we could raise money for the reservation, but he said I had to come meet this guy. So I did, and he was just everything you didn't expect – he didn't stand in the corner with his arms across his chest and scowl, he was absolutely hilarious – and Charlie and I just connected. We ended up spending a lot of time together and he just declared right then and there, and it was a very Indian thing to do, that I was his brother, and he means that very realistically. It sounds hokey but it's really not, it's called recognition, and we've been close ever since. I get out there when I can – it's been several years but I visit when I can, and that's where I get these stories.

"‘Bad Water' was a story that Charlie told me about how the spirit of alcohol announced to a group of Indians that this evil (alcohol) was coming before it came. So, on almost every album some of that comes in, and ‘Badlands Rain' is one that's existed for quite a while but I never really had the chorus right, but the story has always been there. You have to see the Badlands to believe it – you can't believe human beings live there, it's like the surface of the moon, it's what you call basalt and you can't believe that human beings would survive out there. Then in the middle of all this Indian land I come across this creaky old bar, and it just struck me, because alcohol is their main demon – they have an 85% addiction rate on the reservation – so here's this guy and who's he going to serve? There's nothing but Indians for five hundred fucking miles – so here's this guy, knowing what he's making money off of, and it really kinda hit me. I just started writing this story and the Indian on the Harley is Charlie, that's kinda his thing. I got approval, I sent the lyrics off to him and said "What do you think? Can I do this?" and he said "Yeah, you go ahead!"

So are you the ‘Traveller'?

"I am definitely the traveller, more and more so. Actually there was something I wanted to tell you that occurred to me, I thought "When I talk to Phil, we always get into these conversations", but what interested me when I looked back at it and I'm looking at all these lyrics, there's really two themes running through the whole album and that's love and death. I didn't realise how much I was writing about death, but I'm happy to say that it's not necessarily from a doom and gloom perspective, but I don't know Phil, is this what happens to us when we get to our 40's?" (laughs)

It just seems to be weighted on the side of death rather than love on these songs.

"Yeah. ‘Think Of Me In The Fall' is basically told from the point of view of someone who has passed on and is saying to the person they've left behind, don't forget about me – go on, live life, be happy but don't forget about me, and it's kind of like how I would like to be given the choice. ‘Death Of The Tiger' is rather obvious. ‘Better By Far' is actually one of my favourites, it's one of those that just came together in about fifteen minutes and it's just basically my fantasy of when it's all over. You come to this lovely glade and there's a big roaring fire, and all your travelling buddies from your life are all waiting there for you, and you sit around and you drink and tell stories and marvel at what a life you've had. There's a lot of that in there and it kind of surprised me as well that it kept coming up. I guess this stuff is what's on my mind and as long as I'm not putting out a big indulgent piece of shit – I guess I want people to be able to enjoy it and not have to know what it's all about if they don't want to concentrate on it. That's what I've always done, but I think people are beginning to notice that there's a bit of a downward turn to it – it's not the happiest album in the world but not the saddest either. I don't really know – I guess I'll have to leave that to the listener to decide what it is."

One song that your fans may have heard is ‘That's What She Said', which I think you played on your last tour with the US Vaughn band – has it changed much since then?

"Not really. That was one that I'd demoed at home and it's not even three minutes long, and all through the different guises we've played it I've never seen any reason to expand it. It's in and out, it does exactly what it's paid to do, so no – I've never really touched it, that's pretty much as we had it before. That's kind of a nice thing because that's how bands used to do it, they used to play the songs first – get the audience reaction and make the changes live, work out what's working and what isn't – and then record it. That's probably one of the few songs I'll ever get to do that way. It was based on audience reaction – everyone seemed to really like it and it definitely sounds like me."

Like I said to you before, the album is like a bridge between the Tyketto albums and the Vaughn albums.

"Yeah, I like that because that officially makes it a success. Obviously Frontiers wanted the Tyketto stuff and I didn't want to lose my personal identity as far as where I'd grown to, but I don't consider it a retreat or a sell-out to do something like ‘Restless Blood' – it might not be my favourite song on the album but that could just be because it's been around. It's still me and I've never tried to go too far away from where I was, if anything some of the more Americana stuff might be more off my map than something like ‘Restless Blood' and even that's not as far leap at all from some of the stuff I've done over the years."

I think it's a very varied album, especially the second half.

"Yeah, I think on every album I do there's always one track that is heavily discussed, you know – "Why did he do that one?" I'm not sure if it's going to be ‘Death Of The Tiger' or ‘Measure Of A Man', but it'll be one of those two.

It can't be ‘Death Of The Tiger' surely?

Well, one thing that surprised me when talking to fans is that a lot of the people who listen to melodic rock don't have their roots in Zeppelin, so they might not get that one at all. The other one, ‘Measure Of A Man' is a slice of Bruce Springsteen, and unashamedly so, it's just what I wanted to do.

So all you have to do now is get out and tour with it.

"Well yeah, there's a few things going on. I just got a call from Jeff Scott Soto about two days ago, and in his words we're "99% sure" that we're going to open for Journey on their UK tour, acoustically."

I did hear a whisper, yes.

"He said the band is all in favour and it's just got to go through their UK booking agent to make sure there aren't any hiccups there. They don't need an opening act, they were just going to do the same thing they did last time with no support – but Jeff pushed it for us and the deal is that if we're hassle free, we can do it. They don't want to pay anything, they just wanted someone who was in the UK and could show up. They didn't want the whole band because they didn't want the hassle of setting up and taking down. We're game – it's a twenty-five minute set, six or seven songs in front of 2,500 people a night for twelve shows. We'd be very, very happy to do that but at this point there's still a slight chance that it could fall through. I don't know if you've heard the rumblings with me and Terry Brock?"

I'd heard the Scandinavian shows with Mark Mangold had been cancelled.

"Yeah, it's a funny thing. It was originally going to be a Drive, She Said kind of tour, with Mark playing mostly that and some of his other stuff. Then Al Fritsch couldn't go so Mark phoned and asked me to come and do some of Al's parts – and then he rang Terry and said to me "You and Terry sang together really well when you did The Sign show, so let's get Terry again". Okay, so he calls Terry, and Terry and I love working together so no sweat there. It was going to be two or three of my songs, two or three of Terry's and this career retrospective of Mark's. As things went on in the planning stages Mark kept adding things and it was getting seriously unrealistic. It was going to be eight people on stage in a club in Finland that might hold 200 people – it was going to be Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. So the guy who was putting it all together, he was the promoter and also the guitarist who was putting together the key members of the band, he said "To be perfectly frank I've got to pull this because he won't back down from what he wants, it just can't be done". He'd wanted to bring all this computer stuff in, he wanted two more singers on top of me, Terry and him – I was joking with him, I said "Mark, we really don't need Cirque Du Soleil onstage" because that's where he seemed he was headed. So he got upset with me, he said I was being an egomaniac and wanted the stage to myself, and I said "No, man! I just actually wanted room to breathe". He annoyed the promoter enough that the promoter came back to me and said "Would you consider just you and Terry doing it? I can sell this on you and Terry, no problem". So I called Terry and he said "Absolutely!", so we're going ahead with it. It starts around the 23th March and it's going to be ten of his songs and ten of mine, roughly. I'm really excited.

"It's funny - Terry and I have been sending stuff back and forth and I was listening to some of his stuff, like ‘Coming Home' and thinking "It's not exactly the same but it's not far away from something I would write at all", it sounds like we have the same influences. Then he called me and said "I can swear I can hear myself singing back-up's on some of your stuff" (laughs). It's really odd. We're just two singers you can get into a room and we don't try to bitch-fight each other – it's a rarity. We're just going to have fun. With the Vaughn band we hope to have something organised for the Spring and Summer, and fingers crossed we might get one or two festivals. At the moment the reaction I'm seeing to the album is really encouraging, I think people are giving it the listen that it needs because I don't think it's a quick listen."