If you’ve kept up, you’ll know it’s been five years since Tom Keifer put out his last solo record, Rise. And it’s not like he doesn’t wanna release new music. He’s just not rushing it.
Keifer was recently interviewed by Meltdown at Detroit’s WRIF and said he’s still in “idea collecting” mode, the same process that’s worked for him since the start. “Song ideas are floating around,” Tom explained. “Once you’ve got a pile that feels like an album, that’s when you start recording.” Right now? He’s got voice memos, scraps of lyrics, and riffs bouncing around in his head.
“It’s getting there,” he teased.
Keifer compared songwriting to catching lightning, you never know when the strike’s coming. “The ideas that stick are the ones worth finishing,” he said. His wife and bandmate Savannah works the same way, and when they hit that critical mass of ideas, they shut out the world and just… make the record. That’s how Rise came together in just six months after a long touring run in 2018.
Of course, COVID and the pandemic threw everything off. Keifer admits he wasn’t feeling creative during lockdown, “I know some people got creative; I didn’t” but getting back on the road last year reignited the spark. “That antenna’s going up,” he said. “Song ideas are starting to drift in again.”
No timeline yet, but he’s clear: there will be another album. “Records come in their time,” he said. “I don’t like to rush them.”
For now, Keifer’s still balancing the muse, the road, and the occasional break (after 12 years of non-stop touring, he says the forced pandemic downtime was probably overdue). But the moment he sees that “pile” of songs start to stack up? Boom, it’s studio time!
Tom Keifer has to be one of the most underrated rockstars of the 80s/90s. Name a more underrated singer. I’ll wait.
