Since I started Defenders of the Faith, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with legends, heroes, and icons within the world of hard rock and metal. This week, I broke new ground and spoke to true metal royalty, none other than the Metal Queen herself, Lee Aaron. After 40 years in the music industry, Queen Lee shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, she’s on the verge of releasing a brand new studio album, Radio On. We sat down with Lee to discuss this upcoming release, as well as her influences, the 80s, and being a pioneer of female empowerment in heavy metal. This interview will rock your soul and take control!
It seems you release a new album every couple years. Was the making of this latest album, Radio On, impacted at all by the COVID pandemic?
Lee Aaron: Yes and no. We had to cut our studio time a little bit short when we were recording our bed tracks. We had time booked in the studio to cut the beds. The day we went into the studio, which was that week in the middle of March, 2020, COVID exploded around the world. It was crazy because we were monitoring. We’d cut a track and then we’d go back to our phones and we’re watching all this insanity and craziness around the world. People dying in Italy. Our level of tension was escalating as we were in the studio. My guitarist, his family wanted him to fly home, obviously. He was from the otherside of the country and he was concerned he might not even be able to get on a plane. Luckily, the good news is we got all the bed tracks done. All the bed tracks on Radio On are cut live off the floor, with the band in the same room with each other. No trickery. Thankfully, we were able to capture that energy. I like to do albums where everyone is in the same room at the same time, making eye contact and playing together as musicians. To me, that’s the magic that makes a great record.
And then we all got on the same platform for recording in our home studios so that we could record the rest of the overdubs. We finished the vocals, the background vocals, the keyboard tracks, and I think Sean (Kelly) did his solos at home. The nice thing is the luxury of time once COVID hit. That was a bit of an upside because we weren’t confined by the studio clock and concerned about money and time. I could go downstairs in my pajamas and cut a keyboard track. If I didn’t like it, I could erase it the next day and do it again *laughs*. That’s the beauty of home recording. I think moving forward, as recording artists, that’s probably the methodology we’re gonna use in the future for making records.
I’ve interviewed many artists in the last year who have released albums despite the pandemic. Some were lucky enough to cut their record live. Others had to resort to recording remotely. And then there’s some who have said they’ve been doing it remotely for years, so this didn’t have an effect on them at all.
LA: Yeah, I know a lot of acts who do that. Digital technology has provided a landscape in which you can do that. But when you’re cutting everything remotely, what I don’t like about that is that the band never even has to be in the same room with each other. You’re laying down a drum track and a bass track to a click track. To me, that’s not real music. That’s not being in a band. That’s not playing together as a band. Maybe I’m old school that way, but my favorite albums were those like The Who’s Live at Leeds. That could’ve never been done to a click track. You know what I mean? It’s pure magic.
I assume the title Radio On refers to the era when old school rock and pop music ruled the airwaves. Did you have a favorite radio station growing up that inspired you to become a musician?
LA: *laughs* There was a station in Toronto and it still exists called Q107. There was Q107 and CHUM. CHUM was the AM station. That was the station I listened to a lot when I was a kid from the age of 8 through 12. On my 11th birthday, I got a little yellow transistor radio with a telescoping antenna. I would climb to the very top of my slide in the backyard and listen to the AM radio *laughs*. And then of course, as I got a little bit older, I was craving things that a teenager wants to listen to, so I gravitated towards the FM station which is Q107. They were playing AOR rock. That was where I ended up hearing all of the bands that were influential to me.
Another thing that happened is my father used to work at a local college called Humber College. In the mid 1970s, they just decided they were gonna get rid of their entire vinyl library and switch to the long lived format of 8-track *laughs*. Don’t ask me what they were thinking. My dad was walking down the hall and said, “Hey, what are you guys doing with all these records?” “We’re getting rid of them.” “Oh, I think my daughter would like those.” So he piled them in his trunk. I was 13 or 14 years old. He came home and said, “I got a surprise for you. Go look in the trunk of my car.” There, lo and behold, was Fleetwood Mac, Heart, The Runaways, David Bowie, Elton John, The Strawbs, Steely Dan, Genesis, Supertramp, Boston. That became my soundtrack. I think everybody thinks that the music of their teenage years is the best music of the century. You’re at a very impressionable age, so the music that you discover at that point in your life. For me it was Zeppelin and The Who and Hendrix and Bowie. You think it’s the best music ever.
A handful of singles have been released in advance, including a piano ballad entitled “Twenty One”. I’ve asked other musicians and songwriters this question, so there’s no wrong answer. What would you say makes the perfect ballad?
LA: What makes the perfect ballad…that’s a great question. No one’s ever asked me that before.
You’ve had many perfect ballads in your career.
LA: To me, a great ballad…there’s not a formula for it. It can be played on guitar. It can be played acoustically. It can be a piano ballad. It can be an electronic ballad, but the thing that makes a great ballad to me is that it tugs at the deepest parts of your heartstrings. To me, that makes a great ballad. It moves you in a way that other songs don’t move you. It’s interesting because I had a couple of fans personally write into my website and send me messages when they heard “Twenty One”. And then I played it for…it’s funny. I was at a barbecue with my daughter’s theater director. She was having a wrap party for all the students in her theater program. She was inquiring what I was up to and I said, “Well, I’m putting out this album.” She said, “I’d love to hear something from it.” I just got out my phone and played her “Twenty One” and she started to cry! Looks like my mission is accomplished. I was really hoping that song would make people feel nostalgic and I guess it worked *laughs*.
Totally. While it stands on its own, it reminds me of “Barely Holdin’ On”, “Only Human”, and all these great power ballads you’ve released in the past. It joins a long lineage of excellent songs.
LA: Why thank you.
The most recently released single is a Zeppelin inspired hard rocker entitled “Vampin’”. What was the inspiration behind this song?
LA: A common thread throughout all of my albums have been songs of empowerment, female empowerment especially. I think when I was young, I was writing those songs more as a pushback against the sexualized nature of the hard rock industry back then. I felt that I had to rise above quite a few obstacles including being oversexualized and exploited. My image was exploited when I was quite young. It was a tough thing to weather through. Life is a game of survival. Throughout the course of our lives, we experience a lot of wonderful things and a lot of joys, but there’s a lot of pain and a lot of struggle. That’s a common theme that, universally, people relate to because life is full of challenges. I’m always feeling like I want to write a song that inspires you to go out there and just kick some serious ass. You know what? Yeah, I’ve had some crap thrown at me in my life, but I am going to rise above it and I’m going to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. That’s what “Vampin’” is about. It’s about coming out of a dark place and getting your groove back. Sean brought this killer riff into our writing sessions. I’m like, “Oh yeah! I have this idea for a song called “Vampin’” in my book and that has its name all over it.” That’s how the song evolved.
It’s interesting you bring up the empowerment angle in your music. I always found it ironic how back in that early 80s era, you’d have Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P. and the likes all over MTV, yet the “Metal Queen” video got banned for being “too graphic”. I never understood that.
LA: Oh my gosh. Don’t even get me going. When I wrote the song “Metal Queen”, it was a pushback. I’ve mentioned this multiple times in interviews, but in terms of MTV and MuchMusic, it was very common to have women, supermodels, oiled up to the max, dancing around, or conversely getting sprayed down with water in t-shirts and washing the cars of the rockstars. Women were definitely sexualized to the max and exploited that way to make the male rockstars more masculine. I was just like, “Screw that. I’m gonna write a song about a female matriarch.” It was inspired by the movie Heavy Metal. I had seen that movie and I loved how the heroine takes control. It was really supposed to be a message about equality and taking back our power, depicted in this video as a story of good triumphs over evil with a female heroine. It was the whole Tipper Gore era of explicit labels on records and warning labels and censor boards. The BBC looked at that video in England and said, “That’s violence against women.” What?! She’s in control! And they banned it. That was definitely something I was trying to reconcile in my head.
The interesting thing about that is what that whole image and that whole video was supposed to stand for got lost in the oversexualization of women in the 80s. Back then, women were ornamental in videos. They were groupies. You were the guy in the band’s girlfriend or you were the female rocker who was expected also to be a sex symbol. That’s how it was. When I did that video, rather than the message getting across in its pure form, which it should’ve, I think a lot of male fans saw that video and went, “Oh, Lee Aaron. She’s self proclaiming herself to be our metal goddess.” It somehow symbolized me in a different way than I was hoping. Years later, since we’ve had all of this me too stuff come to light with the film industry, I think people are starting to see that it was also rampant in the music industry. People are now asking me a lot of questions about that song and going, “Now we really see it for what it was. That was your me too moment back in 1984!”
Another theme throughout your career, going back to 80s classics like “Lady of the Darkest Night” and “Steal Away Your Love”, is very picturesque lyrics. Growing up, did you ever consider a career in writing before embarking upon music?
LA: That’s really lovely that you see that in my early work *laughs*. Sometimes I listen to my early albums and I cringe a bit. I don’t know. I feel that I’m writing much more mature content these days, but thank you for saying that. I actually won some poetry contests and verse speaking contests when I was in school. I was very creative and I had my poems published in the yearbook. I had done a fair amount of writing prior to becoming a songwriter, but songwriting is what completely captured my psyche. Poetry is fine, but I wanted to write songs and get on stage and sing them. I felt like my voice would be so much more powerful and louder if I did it that way.
While writing is therapeutic, I imagine recording and performing is far more cathartic.
LA: Totally.
Back in the Metal Queen days, I’ve read that a lot of people compared your image and vocal delivery to Ronnie James Dio. Did you ever meet Dio and how do you feel about these comparisons?
LA: I never met Ronnie James Dio. He’s one of the people I never crossed paths with. I absolutely admired his vocals. The first real big concert I ever saw…I saw a couple of bands do all ages shows in my neighborhood when I was a kid. And then a band called Max Webster from Toronto played at my high school. But the first real big concert I saw at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto was Black Sabbath with Dio on the Heaven and Hell tour. That really impacted me. I thought, “Wow, that guy’s got some serious power vocals.” He was definitely an inspirational figure in my early years. I certainly consider that a compliment that people thought I had vocal cords like that. He was certainly a respected singer.
I saw on one of those heavy metal Facebook pages that a couple weeks ago marked the 36th anniversary of Call of the Wild, which was co-produced by the legendary Bob Ezrin. What was it like working with him?
LA: Interesting *laughs*. Truthfully, it was still that cocaine era, so there was a little bit of crazy stuff going on in the studio, not really with myself and John (Albani). I was 22 years old when I worked with Bob Ezrin. I was a kid. How that came about was that we were actually in the studio with Paul Gross, who had produced Metal Queen and was one of the owners of Phase One Studios in Toronto. Paul had a bad racquetball accident and was blinded in one eye for a while, so he had to take a sabbatical in the middle of our recording.
Simultaneous to this, Bob Ezrin was next door in studio B recording some big compilation project. I think Lita Ford, Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe, and a bunch of the big, big 80s rock bands were involved. He kept popping his head over into our studio and listening in because he was fascinated by me and my voice. This kept happening throughout the course of our recording. Then Paul had his accident and was out of commission. We were like, “What are we gonna do?” When this happened, Bob went in for a meeting with my label and said, “Look, I’m right next door. As soon as I’m done with this project, I’ll continue recording Lee. I’d love to finish her record.” Again, it was the crazy era of excess. He brought Dick Wagner up. Dick Wagner was Alice Cooper’s guitar player and someone that Bob had worked with quite a bit. He brought him in to song doctor a couple of songs at that time with us.
It was a great experience. I learned a lot working with Bob. He’s actually one of the first people, besides Rudy Schenker, that showed me in detail how to do proper vocal warmups and exercises. He certainly stretched me vocally in the studio. Yeah, I definitely learned a lot working with Bob.
After the release of Call of the Wild, you shifted towards a more hard rock/AOR sound with the release of your self titled 1987 album. What led to this change in direction?
LA: A couple of things. I had really struggled in my own country to get noticed. Call of the Wild sold 100,000 albums out of the gate in Europe. “Barely Holdin’ On” became a big hit over there. I couldn’t get arrested in Canada *laughs*. Canada, to a large degree, is a fairly conservative country. Certainly at that time, it was very parochial. Stores shut down on Sundays and we were still saying “God save the queen” at school every morning *laughs*. They just weren’t ready for a female hard rocker. They just weren’t. I was literally the only person in Canada doing that style of music. This was the land of Gordon Lightfoot and The Guess Who and Joni Mitchell. I was just too weird for them.
To be honest with you, even today, and I know I’m going a little off topic here…I met my guitarist, Sean Kelly, because he was writing a book about the Canadian rock scene in the 80s and all of these great bands that have pretty much been excluded from Canadian music history. They’re not recognized, so he felt he had to write this book to bring to light all these bands. Even today, the Juno Awards, the rock category and the hard rock category, aren’t even televised. They’re presented off camera because nobody cares enough. Back in the early 90s, I sat on the CARAS Board of Directors for the Junos. One of the things that the Junos is supposed to do is reflect what’s happening on the streets. I said, “You’ve got to make a hard rock category because that’s what’s all over AOR radio right now and you don’t even have a category for it.” I didn’t do it to be self-serving because I didn’t win it, but you know who won it? You know who won a Juno the very first time they created a hard rock category?
Who?
LA: Rush! They never won a Juno! (Rush’s manager) Ray Danniels phoned me personally and said thank you for creating a category so Rush could win a Juno. This is one of the biggest bands in the world and nobody in the industry treated them with the respect and recognition they deserved. Anyway, to make a long story short, I couldn’t get arrested in Canada. My label was really pressuring me to make a more commercially viable album to get radio play in Canada. We ended up singing with Virgin and working with Peter Coleman who had produced multiple Pat Benatar records. And I loved working with Peter. He was great. I learned the most about singing in tune from Peter. He was a stickler. He would make me punch a line in 50 times to get it perfectly in tune *laughs*. In a way it drove me crazy, but I don’t record that way anymore. I’ll sing the song five times, put a comp together, it better be good enough. Anyway, we did this album that shifted a little bit in a more melodic direction and I finally had my first Top 40 hit in Canada with “Only Human”. It was tame enough for Canadian radio.
Could us American fans expect any Lee Aaron shows or perhaps a tour in the future?
LA: I appreciate you asking. One of the issues I had in the past is when I signed to my Canadian label in 1983, they owned my worldwide rights. I had no power to sign to distribute my own records outside of the Canadian territory. That was up to my label. Because of some fairly complex politics, I never ended up with an American release in the 80s and 90s. Of course with Amazon, my albums are available everywhere. I would love to get to the states and do some shows. It’s really a matter of…I don’t think I’m prepared at this point in my life to do a little small club tour, but if there’s a festival that would be interested in bringing a Canadian band down, I’m there. Tell me some good festivals in the Chicago area!
Legions of Metal! They’d love to have you.
LA: Really?!
They had to postpone last year and this year due to COVID, but it’s a traditional metal festival that features both 80s bands and new bands.
LA: Get them to call my manager because I’d love to come. I’d love to be on that for 2022. You would not be disappointed. I have a great band. I’m excited to get out there and start playing live again.
I saw a video of you doing Wacken in Germany a couple years ago. How was that?
LA: Crazy. It’s one of the biggest hard rock festivals in the world. It was a little intimidating. We got there and it took 45 minutes in a golf cart to get from one end of the festival to the other end. They were like, “Okay, you’re finally at your stage.” It’s multiple stages. I don’t even remember which stage we played on, but we played for at least 20,000 people. It was wacky. It was a really amazing festival. Just such passionate fans. I really love my European fans. They are so passionate. Hard rock is a religion for them over there. It’s a family affair and I truly respect that, but it was a bit nerve wracking.
I’m really glad that we brought our own sound guy from Toronto. A lot of the time when I do European festivals, if it’s a one off, I arrange for us to fly a day early so that we have a day to recover from jet lag before we walk on stage for the show the following day. I’m in Vancouver. We flew from Vancouver to Toronto. We get to Toronto. Our flight to Frankfurt was delayed 26 hours. We were just waiting on the edge of our seat at a hotel to get the greenlight to come back to the airport. We arrived in Frankfurt and had to catch a connecting flight to Hamburg. We landed in Hamburg. I literally had 45 minutes to wash my face and put on some makeup *laughs* and put a stage jacket on before the shuttle came to take us to Wacken.
By all intents and purposes, that show should’ve been a disaster, but I guess we were so hyped and under so much stress trying to get there. And of course, at all those big festivals, you don’t get a soundcheck. They’re all throw and gos. It’s one band after the other, back to back. We had 10 minutes to go on stage and get our gear set up. There’s a countdown clock at the side of the stage with big red countdown numbers. They were like, “Okay Lee! We’re going to introduce you and then it’s going to be 45 seconds. The curtain will open and you’ll play your show.” “Okay!” *laughs* Thankfully, I have a fantastic sound guy, so the sound quality for Wacken ended up being great.
Finally, in all your years in the music industry, what are the biggest lessons you learned?
LA: Trust your gut. If someone is pressuring you to do something that feels uncomfortable, your gut is probably correct. Don’t compromise. If you feel like you’re being pressured to compromise musically or artistically in any way, you’re probably right about it. I know because I’ve done it in the past, in the early parts of my career. Nobody is going to care as much about your music as you do, so if you want it done right, do it yourself. That’s one of the things I’ve learned. I produce my own records now. I hire my team from the studio to the engineer to the mixer to the artwork design team to the person taking the photographs. Radio On was a completely finished package when I gave it to Metalville and said, “Let’s work together. You’ll be my distribution partner for this album.” I like it that way *laughs*. Then I end up making the product. Whether it’s commercially successful or not, I’m happy with it in the end.
Radio On comes out via Metalville on Friday, July 23. For more information on Lee Aaron, visit www.leeaaron.com.