“There’s more Guns stuff to come here sooner than later” – Duff McKagan shares some updates on his solo project and Guns N’ Roses

In a recent interview with Pełna Kulturka in Poland, bassist Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses—who is gearing up for a tour in support of his third solo studio album, 2023’s “Lighthouse”—was questioned about if he is already writing new solo material. 

Well, I’m gonna release a new song, I think the day we start touring in Dublin — with a B-side. It’s the way I still think — a single with a B-side; I still think that way, although it’s digital and all that stuff now, but you just make more material available. So I’ve got a couple of songs coming out in a couple of weeks. And I have — one other record’s completely already arranged song-wise. We’ve got that record. And I don’t know when I’ll put it out because there’s more Guns stuff to come here sooner than later. So I don’t wanna put out a record while Guns is doing a thing. I try to stagger all of that stuff. So when that record will come out, the next record, I don’t know. I could just put three records out at one time, but that’d be too much.

He was also asked if it was still important to release albums rather than standalone singles.

Yeah, it is. To me, and I’ll never give this up, it’s just the way I came up — albums you listened from side A, song one, flipped it, listened the whole way. And those records became these soundtracks to your life. And you would look at the vinyl, look at the packaging and where the record was recorded and all that stuff. And it’s really nice for me to see vinyl really coming back, in a real way. And my daughter’s looking at albums now, like, ‘Wow, look at that.’ It’s not just a little thing on your iPhone screen, like the record cover’s this little… We do artwork, and it’s all important to me. I still like to tell a story with an album. And ‘Lighthouse’ was no different. It starts with the song ‘Lighthouse’ and it takes you on this journey. It ends you up at ‘I Just Don’t Know’, which is pondering what’s next. So I liked it. There’s hope in the middle of the song, with an actual song called ‘Hope’. There’s peaks and valleys to the lyrics, lyrically. So it’s important for me. I’ll always put out albums, no matter what anybody else thinks. And people seem to like vinyl. I do well on vinyl, ’cause I give a shit. And I make the vinyl sound good at test pressings, and mastering the vinyl and doing all that stuff is important to me.