Dokken to release songs recorded back in the ’70s along with re-release of Don Dokken’s ‘Solitary’ album

Dokken to release songs recorded back in the ’70s along with re-release of Don Dokken’s ‘Solitary’ album

Dokken frontman Don Dokken was recently interviewed by the WSOU radio station and spoke largely about the group’s follow up to the Broken Bones album released back in 2012. Although Dokken‘s next studio album does not yet have a release date, Don Dokken did reveal that he has two other releases in the works for the summer of 2019.

Don Dokken indicated (as transcribed by Blabbermouth with slight edits):

“For now, it looks like I might have two records coming out, worst-case scenario, for the summer, which will be my solo acoustic album, ‘Solitary’, which I might rename,” he said. “I’ve added three more songs to it. My solo album will be coming out for the summer. We’re trying to get out another album, which is kind of fun. It’s gonna be songs recorded in the ’70s when I was a little pup in my early 20s. And I have 12 songs that I haven’t released. So we’re gonna go in and remaster them and all that, and I might put out that record for the summer, if we can’t make the release date, and call it something like ‘Dokken: The Early Days’ or ‘Dokken: The Lost Tapes’, or something like that. ‘Cause it was just an accident. I was cleaning out my locker and I found a bunch of master tapes from ’77 to ’79. And I said, ‘What the heck are these?’ And it turns out it was all these demos I did in the early ’70s, before we had a record deal.”

He continued: “The solo album, I made it several years ago and I put it on the Internet and sold maybe a thousand copies. And I pulled it on iTunes. It’s acoustic. It’s a departure. It’s more ethereal. I call it the kind of music you wanna listen to having a glass of wine and a candle burning. And it’s kind of gonna be along the lines of some of the Robert Plant acoustic albums he did. So, that’s been done for years. And I added three more songs, so it’s twelve. So right now, I’m just doing the artwork on that, getting it ready for the summer. And if we can get this early-days Dokken album [ready as well]. It’s kind of fun record. My voice sounds a lot younger. I listen to it, and I go, ‘God, I sound like I’ve got helium in my voice.’ I was 23 years old. I sound like Mickey Mouse. We’re gonna put that out, for sure.”

Sleaze Roxx stated the following in its review of Solitary back in 2014: “I was surprised when I recently read that Don Dokken had made a solo album that had only been available at select shows during a small run of acoustic gigs that the singer was doing while opening for Queensrÿche in 2008. However, upon hearing Solitary, I completely understand why the CD was never sold again — until now, but only in digital format. Most of the songs on the acoustic Solitary are just terrible. It is not even comparable to Don Dokken‘s first solo effort Up From The Ashes, from back in 1990. That CD had a few really good songs and was semi-close to the Dokken sound, Solitary on the other hand offers dull boring songs that will further alienate Don Dokken from whatever fan base (including myself) that he has left.”

Sleaze Roxx concluded in its review: “For fans of the ’80s hard rock era, hoping that Don Dokken takes them back on a nostalgia journey, this is very, very far removed from that. Quite simply, the songs on Solitary should have never seen the light of day or simply been kept in ‘solitary confinement’.”

You can read further transcribed excerpts from the interview by the WSOU radio station with Don Dokken at Blabbermouth‘s website or listen to the interview below:

Don Dokken by WSOU

Katie sat down with Don Dokken to speak about new releases, spring and summer tours, and the metal scene m/