Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe weighs in on the future of albums for the band

Nikki Sixx, the bassist and principal songwriter of Mötley Crüe, was asked in a recent interview with Joann Butler In Studio With… if he had a favourite album or song from the band’s four and a half-decade existence, as per Blabbermouth.

They all mean something different to me. I was at different places at different times in my life. Writing a song like ‘Knock ‘Em Dead, Kid’ after I’d got in a fight with the police on Sunset Boulevard and ended up in jail is something that I needed to do at the time. I was in revenge mode. I was in my 20s and full of piss and vinegar. And yet by the time we moved over to ‘Theatre Of Pain’, the band had been on the road for so many years, opening for Ozzy [Osbourne] mostly, we got an opportunity, like with ‘Home Sweet Home’ to do some different kind of halftime things, like a song called ‘Save Our Souls’. So that’s a departure from ‘Shout At The Devil’, which was a departure from ‘Too Fast [For Love]’. And it’s a constant evolution. We never quite know where we’re going. When opportunity strikes, something comes up.

Honestly — I know fans don’t wanna hear this, but I don’t believe in making full-length records anymore at this time on the planet, for me. The amount of work that goes into… If you’re doing 10 songs on a record, you gotta write 20. And you better hope five of ’em are stellar. It’s a lot of lyrics, a lot of notes, a lot of chord changes, a lot of time in the studio, which is all fine. That’s what we do. We work hard. But what I don’t like is that when people hear one song, and you recorded 10 or you recorded 20, and then 10 of ’em were demos and 10 was an album, they only hear one.

Radio’s changed, streaming is changing and evolving as we go. So I’m really into the idea of lightning strikes, something comes down, I call the guys. I got this song, it’s just sitting on the tip of my tongue right now. I told Tommy about it a year ago. I just told my friend, and he goes, ‘You told me to write a song called that 25 years ago.’ And I go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna finish the song and then show it to the band.’ But it’s like having a song and a whole team behind a song and being able to get the fans to really understand what the song is about. It’s just not something that they just pass by, or they go to the new Mötley Crüe album, and they only listen to one song. So I love the idea of like we did ‘The Dirt’ [film soundtrack in 2019]. We did five [new] songs from ‘The Dirt’. We did three songs on this EP [‘Cancelled’] we just did [in 2024]. I mean, that’s already a full-length record. So I think we’re just gonna keep going, like whenever something comes up, you feel something — heartbreak, joy, rebellion — let’s write a song about it, and let’s go cut it in the studio.