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The lanky cue-bald guitar god needs no introduction here in Canada – Kim Mitchell is an Order Of Canada-destined institution, having cut his teeth with the unfathomably great Max Webster through the ‘70s, then enjoying a robust solo career through the low ‘80s with such hits as ‘Go For Soda’, ‘All We Are’, ‘Patio Lanterns’ and ‘Rockland Wonderland’ (even if his incendiary debut EP comprises his five best songs ever. From both bands. Seriously). Anyway, the golds and platinums piled up, and then things got a bit more sporadic, as the years between releases became decades and then centuries and millennia.

Having recently landed a high profile radio gig with Toronto’s Q107, life just gets better for this “chicken that is mostly feathers.” And now the icing on the blockhead has arrived in a blinding new album called Ain’t Life Amazing, in this writer’s opinion, his best since Akimbo Alogo, which, well, can do no wrong (I think I’ll go play ‘Rumour Has It’ right now).

“Well thanks, I'm pretty happy about it,” says Kim, incidentally verifiable as the third greatest guitarist who ever lived, after Brian May, officially #2, and Billy Gibbons, certified as #1 (look it up). “Hey, I'm pretty proud of it actually. It's been a long time since I've had new music and the process of making this was fun. I just heard it (‘it’ being the ebullient, slamtastic title track) on the radio yesterday for the first time as I was driving to work. And it sounded good; it made me want to go buy a convertible because it's a summertime tune. Not that I'm going to buy a convertible, but it just had that summertime ‘up,’ cool, rockin’ feel to it. And I just had to breathe a sigh of relief. Who knows what's going to happen with it, as far as whatever, after this, but it was just nice to hear it on the radio and go, ‘You know what? It sounds good and it's everything I hoped it would be.’”

I did of course have to clarify which track he meant. Given his power at Q107, I thought heck, maybe they’re playing the whole CD in one shot every couple hours. Just joking – of course it doesn’t work like that, and Kim isn’t really getting any sort of preferred treatment at the station. But I did wonder if there was a second single Mitchell might have been referring to…

“Well, obviously, radio is just so focused and scared to do anything with anything, so for now it's just ‘Ain’t Life Amazing’. I would like to see them go with ‘Got A Line’ or ‘Love Overtime’ after this. Who knows? I can't figure anything out anymore; not many people can. So the fun for me and the high for me of making music was putting the thing together. It was all the dynamic of, you know, being at the studio and playing like shit and then going to have a beer after and being depressed and wanting to quit the business, to where you’re playing great and you feel great about it, and the song is turning out. All those dynamics you go through recording. That's the high for me. It's the jokes, it's the hanging with the dudes, it's all that stuff to me. As soon as it was done, I did really feel like I took it out back and shot it, like an old dog or something. ‘Okay, well, my fun is over.’ Now I don't know what's going to happen. It's kind of like you're not guaranteed anything… it's nothing. Other than you’re guaranteed the enjoyment of making it. I enjoy the process, I can listen back to these tunes… I listened to it when I recorded it and I hope people dig it - that's all.”

Ain’t Life Amazing is the follow-up, in recent history - Kim Mitchell time anyway - to Itch and Kimosabe. Itch rules – it’s the great undiscovered Kim Mitchell album, and pertinently the reunion record with legendary lyricist Pye Dubois. Kimosabe, on the other hand, blew.

“Well, Kimosabe, I was just in a horrible place, divorce-wise and all that stuff,” muses Kim. “I just think I was in a really good space for this one. I just wanted to… first of all, I guess the interaction between musicians. Actually, interaction between people. When people do things in life, and they have that laugh that says this is fantastic. When you pull something off at work and you have that sort of laugh – HA!, ‘This is great, this is fantastic.’ We wanted to do that to each other as musicians. The drummer wanted to do that for Joe Hardy and myself. I wanted to do it for Joe Hardy and the drummer. So we wanted to seriously just get each other off. And I don't mean that to sound in a dirty way, but just buzz each other up. And that was sort of what we wanted to do. And we wanted to make an album that was good songs, but yet, as it was rolling down the street, it was like a bus with pieces falling off of it. So there's a bit of racket, there's a bit of noise. Joe wanted to bring that up in my guitar playing. He says, ‘You're a wacky guitar player. Not only do you play notes, but you have all these wacky sounds you do on the guitar, that most engineers would go “Oh man, can you do this again without that noise?” I like that stuff!’ So he wanted to showcase me as a guitar player; he said ‘Hey, you've got nothing to lose. People always want you to play guitar so let's have you rip on this album.’”

Ah yes, Joe Hardy – producer. Of the album. Down in Nashville. Combine him with local studio wiz drum monster Greg Morrow, and you get this ridiculously shiny, bright sound – which you also get on the godly modern era ZZ Top albums, again, some of the great unheard records of our time. Joe played the bass as well, and we’ll talk about that later, but man, as a producer, he’s sorta ‘Ain’t Life Amazing’ in sound picture terms.

“Yes, Joe likes a bit of a racket; Joe has a lot of racket going on in his head. But I like that. It sure beats making them, for me, anyway - and lots of people like this stuff - but it sure beats making a Michael Buble album - pristine, beautiful, clean, audiophile. I like a bit of rawness to it. I like a bit of fur around it. So that was intentional.”

In keeping with the irrepressible sizzle, Kim turns in a guitar sound which is astringent yet clean, combative yet not sorta expected distortion pedal heavy metal.

“Nope. Man, it’s just a straight Fender Stratocaster, which I haven't played much of, through a Marshall amp - pretty straight up. And one little pedal for solos, and that was it. And in ‘Got A Line’, I actually sing into the guitar a little bit at the end - I'm yelling and stuff. Yeah, I'm pleased with the guitar sound. It was inspiring. At the beginning of the sessions I was digging around with other stuff, and then all of a sudden I did this one day, I thought hey, this is inspiring to me. This sound is getting me off. So I decided to stick with it, pretty well the whole record.”

And man, weird, weird story around the lyrics on this one. They’re by Craig Baxter, who writes as substantively as the great Pye Dubois, but with a little more street toughness, less fragility… let’s call it efficiency, but fully as colourful and as mature and intelligent as Dubois.

“Well, Craig Baxter I met through Max Webster keyboardist Terry Watkinson, eons ago,” says Kim. “He spent a brief stint as road manager for about a month with Max Webster. And we sort of lost touch and then all of a sudden I saw Craig Baxter posting on my web site. And everything he was writing on the web site was killing me. It was great. It was, well, this guy has a great writing style. He is so entertaining, he's humorous, he's smart, he has a way with the English language. And I thought, I'm going to ask him if he's ever written lyrics. That's how it all started. And he really hadn't done it before, but I believe he rose to the occasion huge, because - and I don't mean this in a pretentious way - but if you're writing lyrics for my music, I'm used to Pye Dubois, who was just fucking incredible. You’re not going to get away with just shit with me. There's going to have to be something going on there. And he really did deliver.”

Asked to point out a highlight on the literary end, Kim thinks for a minute, and then says, “You know, fuck it, I'm going to do the cliché line - they all speak to me. But I really do like ‘Dreamthieves’, I really like ‘Rock That Ride’, and I like ‘Ain’t Life Amazing’, because you know, dark clouds do happen for everyone. But yet life is worth living and life can be amazing too.”

And back to the fat strings, again, there’s this Joe Hardy, who unsurprisingly, picks a prickly, slightly edgy sound to slot into the rest of the chromium steel mix of his Mitchell machine. For anyone who has seen Kim Mitchell live, it may comes as a bit of a surprise that Kim’s consummate sidekick Peter Fredette isn’t playing the bass on the album. After all, Peter’s a monster whacker of the plank, not to mention a soulful singer extraordinaire – big part of the band equation in other words (watch him spin on ‘All We Are’ someday – ranked by the same governing body we mentioned above as the greatest rock ballad ever penned).

So why not Peter?

“Because Peter is more… Peter is not as much a composer on the bass. You know, Peter is great at taking something that somebody else basically composed, wrote, put down, and running with it. Peter is a great presence. He's been a serious asset to my career as far as singing, and he’s a great bass player. I just found that he lacks… I don't even want to put it in a negative light, because I found Joe to be more melodic, being able to compose great parts around the song. He just moves around on the bass a bit more. And Peter’s the first one to say that too. Peter's going, ‘Jesus Christ, I just love what Joe played on this. It’s so melodic. I wouldn't have even come close to thinking that! I'm just loving learning the parts.’”

“I don't look at it as radical,” continues Kim, disagreeing with my quip with respect to the rest of the rhythm section, the drums, or more specifically the drum sound. “I just look at it as a lot of attitude. We're not doing any strange weird special effects or it's not recorded in any weird, unusual manner. The drummer is an “A” list drummer in Nashville. So he's sitting in studios doing country all day and he wanted to seriously bust out and do some rocking. Although he does play on all kinds of rock records too. But I don't think it's unusual or radical. I think it fits the sound of the album. The album has a certain sound and everything. Yeah, it's not a metal drum sound, it's not a Michael Buble drum sound, it's not a Beatles drum sound, it's a Greg Morrow drum sound. Very aggressive. And cool drumming.”

And back up to the guitars on our survey. By the way, we didn’t talk about Kim’s singing (and what is there to talk about?) – I love it, always have, and never thought anything odd about it. Still, playing Kim Mitchell and Max (the world’s only Zappa-esque pomp rock band) for various American friends, oddly, I’ve had more than a few point out the vocals as a bit off-putting. OK, axes afire… all over this thing, they are. And weirdly, there’s a bluesiness to the playing, but never, ever in a blues idiom. “Yeah, I think that comes from my attitude on the guitar, a lot of the bluesy riffs,” semi-agrees Kim. “But it's surrounded with all sorts of racket, like I say, pieces falling off the bus.”

Favourite solos? There’s a crazy one in ‘Killer’s Name’ - live last year at a festival in the idyllic forested heart of BC, Nakusp – saw 21 deer and two rabbits on the midnight drive back to my parents’ house on Kootenay Lake – Kim played a monstrous solo guitar showcase of this song, done that way, he says, ‘cos he hadn’t taught the band the track yet.

“Yes, I have a crazy one in ‘Killer's Name’,” laughs Kim, “but my favourite two guitar solos are, ‘N’awlin Nights’, the last tune on the album, because there's like a duck quacking. It goes quack, and we fuckin’ laughed every time that went by, because in the middle of the solo I go, ‘OK, what am I going to do?’ And I just hit that note, switched the pickup and went blasting into another section. And then there’s ‘Rock That Ride’ which is a little more structured - I like the solo in that.”

Did you pull anything new out of your toolbox, as a soloist, and did you put anything away?

“Let's see, that's a good question. I don't really know. I just sort of played to the tune. And tried to be as disinhibited as I could, without the aid of any other things, like drugs or alcohol. I just wanted to be disinhibited and relaxed. I didn't want to hang on tight. If there were any days or hours playing the guitar and I was hanging on tight, I’d go ‘Fuck this, let's go eat wings and drink beer.’ I don't want to be holding on tight. When I'm not hanging on tight, when I’m loose and not thinking about it, there’s shit just flying out of me. That's when you're going to capture me as a guitar player, at my best.”

“I'm happy with it; that's all I can say,” concludes Kim. “I'm not sitting there going, ‘Geez, I would've thought I could do better here.’ No, I'm going, ‘I'm really happy with this.’ It just came out the way I wanted it to. It has a ton of attitude, a ton of snot, and I like the tunes. And I love the players on it - the drumming is inspiring to me, the bass playing is inspiring to me. That alone made me want to work really hard on it and it’s paid off.”

For more on this 11 track (plus a hidden 12th) album of shimmery guitar flash and finesse, please visit www.kimmitchell.ca.