The Gargoyle Of The Garden State, Skid Row’s Rachel Bolan On His Solo Album And More

It's always great to reconnect with Rachel Bolan of Skid Row. Usually, we're discussing Skid Row, but this time he told me about his new solo album, Gargoyle of the Garden State, that drops in June, and much more.

Rachel's solo album is called Gargoyle Of The Graden State and comes out in June. How did this come about? Drinks and hanging with one of his friends, producer Nick Raskulinecz. "I was like, man, I should know that like, I'm gonna
have downtime, I should see if the label is interested in doing a solo record." He went on, "So what
kind of started from a conversation with a friend, ended up coming to fruition, you know what I mean? And
it's it's uh it's been a lot of fun doing it. And just I mean, except for the drums and some of my
friends that came in to play certain parts, it was just Nick and I in the studio, and so we laughed a lot.
You know it's really cool to do some stuff like this with something you're really close to."

The other guests on the record include Slipknot's Corey Taylor, Danko Jones, Brother Cane's Damon Johnson, Snake Sabo, Scotti Hill, and Rob Hammersmith from Sid Row, and more.

As far as picking the right songs for guys to play on, Rachel had it figured out. "Well, when I was thinking that I was going to ask friends to play stuff on it, I kind of knew which songs fit them the best. And, you know, being that, like all these people that I talked about, I'm really good friends with, so I knew like their style would fit perfectly to the song.
And like the song that Corey sang on, we like the same type of stuff. We have the same punk rock background as far as taste in music."

If you didn't know, the guys are searching for their next singer. I asked him how it was going. "We're still looking.
We're taking our time. But Snake and I do get together and write. We just wrote a little bit today, as a matter of fact. He just left about 10 minutes ago. So, yeah. We just keep the machine rolling. And when we find someone, we'll find someone. But we're not going to rush it. You know, we did this promotion through Sweetwater and probably have listened to about 300 submissions at this point. And there's some really good stuff on there. And we've auditioned people outside of that as well that were really good, you know? So it's a long process. And we were prepared for it."

I asked him if he'd thought about bringing someone known into the band, like a Lzzy Hale from Halestorm, or someone of the like. "You know, I would think people would want to hear like, wow, what would it sound like for Skid Row to play a Halestorm song, you know? But yeah, that's the one thing about bringing in someone well-known. But I guarantee whoever we get will be well-known as soon as he's in the band."

I love talking to Rachel and will always support his projects, be it solo or with Skid Row. Watch the interview above, or listen to the audio-only interview here.