Deep Purple's Roger Glover to release solo album

Eagle Rock Entertainment/earMusic will release the first solo album from longtime Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover since 2002’s Snapshot. If Life Was Easy, by Roger Glover and the Guilty Party- produced by Glover and Peter Denenberg - will be released on September 6. Taken from snippets of ideas that the bassist had for years, the album is introspective, thought provoking and its 16 tracks are filled with experimental techniques both instrumentally, compositionally and vocally. [MSRP $13.98]

Instrumentally, Glover plays the baglama on “Don’t Look Now (Everything Has Changed).” He found the seven-stringed instrument—a cross between a lute and a sitar—in Istanbul. He’s on fretless bass during “The Car Won’t Start,” a song inspired by the first music he ever loved, skiffle (a British take on folk music that most Brits of Glover’s generation, including the Beatles, loved when they were kids). Still, the song comes out more ska than skiffle! Fellow Purple bandmate Don Airey plays his own personal pianet (a rare German electric piano only made from the ‘50s to the ‘70s) on “Stand Together.”

Compositionally, Glover plumbs the depths of human emotion with songs about his painful divorce (“Box Of Tricks”), loneliness (“Staring Into Space”) and the joy that his being in Deep Purple has brought him (“Feel Like A King”). He describes “Get Away (Can’t Let You)” as “disturbing,” “Welcome To The Moon” as “silly” and “When Life Gets To The Bone” as “prescient, uncannily predicting a decade of uncertainty, pain and expense.”

Vocally, each song gets the proper vocal treatment that satisfied what Glover heard in his head upon creation. Whether it’s his own daughter Gillian, Walther Gallay of France’s Café Bertrand, Nazareth’s Dan McCafferty and Pete Agnew, Mickey Lee Soule of Elf/Rainbow or Glover himself, each song is tailor-made for its individual vocal.

Recorded in hotel rooms, on the tour bus or in proper studios, If Life Was Easy is dedicated to his mom Brenda, who passed away, and who loved the grammatically incorrect title song so much, Glover left it as is.