When he's not busy with his day job in the biggest band in the world the Foo Fighters, Chris Shiflett is a prolific solo artist. Swapping hard rock anthems with Dave Grohl and company for his own rootsy Americana style, the guitarist and singer released his latest album 'Lost at Sea' in 2023. He's also a popular podcaster, with his 'Shred with Shifty' series proving hugely popular on YouTube. Back on tour in the U.K. and Ireland,  we sat down with Chris to talk all of the above. Times like these; Eamon O’Neill. 

Photo: Press.

Hi Chris, how are you doing today?
I'm doing great today. I've been busy just rehearsing with my band and, you know, ordering T shirts and dealing with promoters and blah, blah, blah; all that stuff that you do to get ready to go do some shows.

It's like a little cottage industry; is it nice to be so hands-on?
Yeah, it really is. It's great. I like that approach. I've always done it that way for my own thing. It is a small little thing. My solo stuff operates at this tight little level, which is fun because you can really apply the things you see, and the mistake you've made in the past to what you're trying to do. You can keep making mistakes, but you try to learn from them.

I mean, you're a punk rock guy, aren't you? You come from that background with that DIY ethos.
Well, that's funny. I mean, really, that started for me before punk rock. I was like that when I got into high school and started playing in bands. I was a teenage glam rocker. It's like the mid '80s, and all the bands that we were going to see in the clubs down in L.A., we go collect their flyers, and even like to a 14 year old kid, you can see it was just slapped together at Kinkos, on pink paper or whatever. So we just real quick took that up and we spent a lot of time at the coffee shop cutting things out making a logo and taking a dumb picture and sticking it on there. As funny as it is, it just kind of continues now. It's like the same thing in a different format; now you're doing it on Instagram, but it's like the same idea.

We're here to talk about your solo tour that you're bringing to the U.K. and Ireland next month. You were here a year ago, weren't you?
Yeah. It was exactly a year ago. We always seem to kick off in Dublin. This will be the third time I've kicked off a solo tour in Dublin, and since then that's always the jump off point to start it. Last year, we had a great show in Whelan's, and so yeah, we're doing it again. This time, we're getting up to Belfast, which I've never played as a solo artist. So we're doing a couple shows, and yeah, looking forward to it.

You've played in Belfast with The Foos in the last couple of years.
Yeah, one of them festivals. Yeah, we've done it a couple times over the years. 

What's it like for you to go from doing these huge shows with Foo Fighters to the likes of Whelan's? I mean, they're clearly very different, aren't they?
Yeah, I mean, on some level, every show is kind of the same, and as a performer, you've got to get up and you've got to play and connect with the crowd. But it's a different energy in small venues, and it's a very different energy when you're playing music that people don't really know. People come to Foo Fighters shows and they know every word to every song, and there's a real back and forth and a connection there, but with my solo stuff, it's definitely it's a little more like I'm out there trying to win people over, and that's kind of the excitement of it. You're like; "come on, join us, you've never heard this. Get in here!" 

So you're having to really work for it?
Yeah, it's a different thing. And so that's the fun of it all, and when it works and you do have that connection with the crowd, it can be really wonderful.

Photo: Press.

​​From a musical standpoint, you're going from a three guitar band to a one guitar band; what are the differences and the difficulties going from three to the one?
Yeah, it's really different. Probably the biggest difference isn't even so much that it's just a one guitar band, it's that I've got to sing and play guitar at the same time. Singing and playing guitar, you have to make choices; like there's little creative choices that you have to make, but musically, it's just a different dynamic.

I think my solo stuff is in that Americana / country rock, kind of land, and it's just a bit of a different thing. It's even in the guitar I play and the sound, the amps I play through; it's from a very different type of guitar sound compared to not only what I do in Foo Fighters, but what I've done most of my guitar-playing life. I always played in loud rock bands or punk rock bands or whatever, and to go up and play a Telecaster with a single coil pickup through a [Fender] Princeton with a little bit of grit on it is totally different. That's also one of the big thrills of it for me; I get to explore a different dynamic with my guitar playing.

Before we talk about the album, I was watching one of your podcasts and I wanted to ask about, your first real guitar, the '82 Les Paul; are you bringing that out for these shows?
Yeah, I think I am going to actually bring a Les Paul to the shows, but I don't think I'm going to bring my black Les Paul that you're referring to because I'm a little like, I have to kind of baby that one nowadays, because out of any guitar I own, that's the one with the most nostalgic connection. But I think I am going to bring a Les Paul, because I've started working a Les Paul into my solo stuff, so I'm going back and forth between the Tele and the Les Paul. 

But yeah, that guitar is interesting because I retired it from the road years ago because I just didn't want anything to happen to it. I've had guitars destroyed in shipping and stuff like that, and I was just nervous about that. And then it just sat in my garage for like, probably for 10 years or something. I wasn't playing it, and guitars get weird when you don't play them; you have to play them to keep them as they just start to warp and bend and do funny things when they sit there for too long. So I pulled it out of retirement recently and returned it to its former glory, and I've worked it back into my Foo Fighters A-rig. And, oh my god, it's heavy dude! That era of  Gibson s are so heavy! Like, I never thought I would hit a point where, I like to think I take care of myself and everything, but oh my god, playing I'm like; "this thing is a beast. I don't know if I can handle this for more than a few songs!"

Are we likely to see it on this forthcoming European run, which includes a date at Hellfest in France?
Assuming our A-rig. We have like an A-rig and a B-rig, and they sort of criss-cross, depending on where we're touring. So, yeah, I think that we'll have that out there.

You recently said that your first gig was a Dio show; did you know that Vivian Campbell uses his first Les Paul - also black - the original Dio guitar when he goes out with Last in Line?
I know that Les Paul you're talking about. I didn't know that. I tell you what, he was one of the first people that I asked to be on Shred with Shifty, and we haven't lined it up yet, schedule-wise, but he's one of the guests that would mean a lot to me because yeah, that was my first concert ever, and I love his guitar playing.

I know you're a real guitar nerd from your episodes with Alex Lifeson and Mike McCready; have you played any of Viv's solos?
Oh yeah, I try to take a little bit from each one. We're just right now editing, putting the finishing touches on the next episode, which is a guitar player named Brent Mason, who's a Nashville session player who's played on everything for the last 30 years or so, and it's one of the more technical solos that we've tackled, and I've just been sitting there woodshedding that; his licks that he breaks down in the episode. I mean, I like to steal a little bit of this and a little bit of that from everybody that comes on; that's why I choose the people that we go after. Because I'm a fan, I want to see how they do what they do, and learn it. You always take these things and then you work a little bit of it into what you do. You don't do it exactly the same, and then it becomes your own thing.

We have to talk about the 'Lost at Sea' album; as you said, you're using the Telecaster as it was recorded in Nashville; you obviously went into that with a very definite modus operandi.
Yeah, but also, I like to write everything before I get into the studio, make sure I have all my lyrics together, do demos of some of the songs, and I did that with all this stuff, but the thing that gives it the spark, to me, is that you're getting in there with a bunch of people who probably just learned it that day, maybe even learning at that moment. They're just kind of responding to the song, and all the cats that played on the record like Jerry Rowe, and Charlie Worsham, and Nathan Keeterle; they brought a tonne to it. That is the thing that I love about making records out in Nashville; it's the talent pool of players. And then you have Jaron [Johnston] that produced it, and he's doing all this stuff and brings a lot of his style to it. That's why I make solo records, to take your idea and elevate it so it always turns into something better.

That type of 'live in the room' approach is almost old school these days.
Yeah, and that's what it is. I always like to point out how much those guys bring to it because in those recording sessions you're banging out a lot of music pretty quick, and everybody's just working it out in real time. I'm always just trying to get a good take and I'm not even thinking about what everybody else is doing, and there really weren't any moments that I felt like I had to change anything. We would just make little little tweaks, but yeah, you just put it into some good players hands and all of a sudden it becomes so much better than you ever thought it would be.

In terms of the production, with the reverb on the voice etc, it's very country, isn't it?
Yeah, it's interesting. The stuff that leans the most towards country on the record to me is like, 'Dead and Gone', 'Carry Midnight', 'Texas Queen', 'I Don't Trust My Memories Anymore'; those are the ones that are like real, real country. I guess this gets into that question of' "what is country music?", and there's a lot of different opinions about that. But with all of them, those are country songs, but they're all roughed up around the edges. 

'Dead and Gone', for example.
'Dead and Gone', I intentionally put that, that Micro Pog [effect] thing on it, so it's like this fuzzed out, octave, nasty sounding thing. In my head I was thinking; "what would a Waylon Jennings song sound like through my hands?" So it's got to be a little more fucked up and nasty and rock and roll. Even like 'Carry Midnight', 'Texas Queen'; the first take guitar stuff that I did was just a little too clean; It was a little like too on the nose, you know? It felt a little like Disney or something; like, it didn't feel enough like me, and what I mean by that is, I don't want to feel like a tourist in it. I want it to be fucked up in the way that I play guitar, and the way that my personality comes through, so I just re-did all that shit and just made it like a lot noisier.

Then you have the likes of 'Weigh You Down', which is really catchy, but it has that real heavy riff.
It's a baritone guitar on that, and I then drop-tuned it. It's funny you bring that up because we were talking about that and we're playing that one, and I'm trying to work out how to play it live, because I can't! I mean, I could bring a baritone, but then the rest of the song's not a baritone, so it's one of those things where I'm trying to figure out like; "well if I dropped it into D, and then put a pitch shifter on it, get the riff...", so yeah, we'll figure it out before we get to Dublin.

Another one that jumped out at me is the anthemic 'Overboard', which has the likes of The Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson, the Eagles in it.
Big time. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That song was interesting. It was probably the fastest song I wrote, in terms of the actual writing of it, We recorded the record in a few different sessions, which gave us the luxury of that, once we got a few in the can, you could get a sense of what the record needed, and I've never really done that before. So I was talking to Jaron, and he was like; "oh, it needs something that kind of feels like this or feels like that", and made some references, and we got off the phone and I had that guitar riff, and then just wrote the lyrics, like almost as fast as I could write them down. It just kind of spilled out, which to me, that's the best moment of song writing; when you're writing so much that you don't have to think about it. 

I tend to write in spurts, and if I haven't been writing for a while, I have a bunch of like, half baked ideas, but then you've got to sit down and go to work, throw it at that pad and paper, and it's a little; "fuck, what am I trying to say?!", but when you're in it, and you're doing that, and you're writing all the time and demoing and just woodshedding and doing it, you get to hit this rhythm where all of a sudden things just start to feel much more effortless, and then that song happened, right in that sweet spot.

It sounds like it's been an inspiring time.
I don't know if you know, but we did just record a couple of cover songs, because my label over there was like; "it'd be cool if you recorded some new stuff just so that we could use around the tour." So we record a couple of cover songs, and the first one we're putting out is, we did a cover of 'Cowboy Song' [by Thin Lizzy]. Oh my god, we did like of countrified version of that.

'Cowboy Song' is such a classic.
That's coming out March 1st. I mean, I've been wanting to cover that song for a long time because lyrically, it's a pure country song. It's so perfect, lyrically, for a country song, and then we have sort of a question of; "well, how do we squeeze the music and the whole thing into into that style?" So we did it with like a Waylon Jennings, outlaw country, disco feel. is That's what we're aiming at.

That's interesting because that's been covered a lot of times, and I don't think anyone to my knowledge has taken it down that pure country route.
I mean, right? Yeah, you could do a lot of his [Phil Lynott] stuff. He was a great storytelling lyricist, and that's what country music is; it's storytelling. You know, it's very specific, and I always felt like a lot of his songs, lyrically could lend themselves really well to like, a country version, and that was the one that I've just been wanting to do for a long time. So yeah, that'll definitely be in the set when we get to Dublin.

Have you visited the Phil Lynott statue just off Grafton Street?
Oh, yeah, of course, all the guys have been. Thin Lizzy is like, one of the great guitar bands. As a guitar player, they're just one of the greatest guitar bands ever, with all those guitar solos and the harmonised guitar parts. They're like a reference; every time you ever throw a guitar harmony on anything, somebody's like; "oh, do that Thin Lizzy thing." So to cover that song, and it's got like that big solo section and yeah, to do my take on those guitar solos, it was really fun.

While we're on the subject of great guitarists; having Alex Lifeson on Shred with Shifty must have been such a trip for you.
That one was such a trip, especially with that song ['Limelight'] because, 'Moving Pictures' [1981] , that was their newest record I started getting into Rush. My older brother Scott was the one that brought those records in our house, and those videos were just played on MTV on heavy rotation when I was a kid. So everything about him and his guitar playing and his music is just so familiar. So to get to sit with him, out of all the interviews I've done, he had such a great take on his approach to crafting a solo. Like, it was so much headier than I expected; where he's talking about how the solo is intended to be a reflection of the lyrics and everything else. Most people I think, play to the music; he's playing to the lyrics and the music. 

I think some people can forget that because Alex is a very funny guy, isn't he?
Oh, yeah, and he's just a one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet in this business for sure.

As a guitar nerd, what are your favourite guitar licks or favourite solos or moments?
Oh god, there's so many. The opening riff of 'Unchained' by Van Halen pops into my mind, because that's a big one! I mean, any AC/DC song, but probably particularly 'Highway to Hell'; that record which was the first AC/DC record we got. I was a huge huge Randy Rhoads fan, you know, those first two Ozzy records, and particularly the live version of 'Mr. Crowley'. That is guitar playing that I always go to. Man, all the old country pickers, all the guys that played on Merle Haggard records, and Waylon's guitar playing I think, is amazing and wonderful. There's just too many country pickers to even mention.

Who are some other ones? I am a huge Johnny Thunders fan. I his attack and sort of simplicity of what he did. It informed my guitar playing a lot when I was first playing in bands. There's also Ace Frehley. of course; that's maybe the biggest. Mick Taylor from the Stones. Of course, Keith [Richards] and everybody that played guitar in the Stones over the years, but Mick Taylor in particular, as a lead player. Mike Campbell from the Heartbreakers, he's another one. Brilliant

Finally before I let you go, what's coming up next for you and the next few few months?
So, we are closing out season one of Shred with Shifty, so in this break between Foo Fighter tours, I'm trying to get all the last interviews done. There's just a couple we need to finish up, so that's a big thing that I'm working on. 

I'm getting ready to come over to Dublin to kick this tour off, rehearsing with my band and getting all the details sorted out and working on that. Then come the beginning of May, we start back up with Foos, and we're doing a tonne of shows all summer long. And then yeah, beyond summer time, I'm not really sure. But the immediate thing, it's just a lot of rock and roll!

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Chris Shiflett plays the U.K. and Ireland in May 2024
Weds 20th – Academy, Dublin
Thurs 21st – The Limelight 2, Belfast
Sat 23rd – Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow
Sun 24th – Academy 2, Manchester
Mon 25th – O2 Academy 2, Birmingham
Weds 27th – Electric Ballroom, London

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