Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan Preps 2019 Solo Album

Duff McKagan has announced plans to release a solo album in 2019, an LP inspired in part by the bassist’s journeys while touring with the reunited Guns N’ Roses. The album, produced by Shooter Jennings, is a “musical follow-up” to McKagan’s 2015 book How to Be a Man (and Other Illusions).

“I wrote a couple of articles about historical places I passed through on this last tour and people kept asking if that was going to be the focus of my next book,” says McKagan. “But an unseen and irrepressible force guided me to write little vignettes of reflective prose”¦little instant-reactions.

McKagan continued, “The heartbreak, anger, fear, confusion and divide I have experienced over the last two and a half years of traveling this globe of ours coerced these words into songs that tell my truth, and one that I hope will spread and help us all. I do this for my daughters”¦I do this for my love of where I grew up”¦I do this, because I truly feel it must be done and said right now.”

McKagan’s last solo album Believe In Me arrived in 1993, while his Duff McKagan’s Loaded outfit released The Taking in 2011. The bassist began working on the album in March 2018 at Los Angeles’ Station House studios, with McKagan resuming work on the album between GNR tour legs.

“From the first night we sat together at my piano hashing out arrangements of his songs, before going into the studio to record them, I felt it was a really important record that had to be heard,” Jennings said of the collaboration in a statement. “The songs have so much heart and are so musical that I could just hear all the arrangements immediately and I could really feel them.”

McKagan has not set a date for his upcoming solo album but added that he’s putting “finishing touches” on the LP. Guns N’ Roses’ lengthy Not in This Lifetime Tour concludes December 8th with a gig in Honolulu, Hawaii; the reunited band’s future plans are unclear.