Red Dragon Cartel's Jake E. Lee

By Jay Oakley

First off, Jake thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. How's the tour going so far?

The tour's going good. We've got our guest singer's thing going which a lot of people don't understand. We're not actually looking for a lead singer right now. We had dates set up and we thought it'd be fun to use different singers. People keep judging us but I thought it'd be fun to have different singers.

When it comes to the current lineup and with Shawn (Crosby) being your current singer how's that going and how do you feel about it?

It's good. It's quite possibly the tightest we've been so far and with Anthony (Esposito), he's a gem. He's solid, he looks good. He's the handsomest bass player I've ever had.

It's been well documented in not only TV interviews but others as well that you've been out of the limelight for a little while. How does it really feel to get back out there with a band that you can call your own?

Well, it's great on stage and that's what everybody says, "You live for the moments on stage." I love playing but with the touring, I'm getting old and tired. Touring's really starting to get to me and my back, I just have a bad back. I broke it like eight years ago so it's never going to be good but with touring this is pretty much going to be our final run for the year at least and after that if I do tour it's going to be a lot more sporadic. It's not going to be big chunks of playing all the time because physically, my back, it just can't take it.

So, after this run of shows are you going back home to Las Vegas?

Yeah. We go back to Vegas and in September we have two shows on the West Coast and then we go to Japan and then we're done. Then we actually start working on another record in October.

So you do plan to put out another Red Dragon Cartel record?

Yeah, Anthony has a ranch out in Pennsylvania with a studio in it and there's a great studio next to it that the band Live owns. They're really cool guys and they let us go there for free and we've got a golden opportunity there. We don't have to have a lot of money before we start the record, just need a little.

Are you currently planning to record with this lineup?

Definitely with Jonas (Fairley, drummer) and Anthony. The singer thing we're still playing with, we haven't made any commitment, obviously. Shawn sounds great, I think what we're going to do is finish it up with Shawn and start recording and see what direction it looks like. It might not sound exactly like the last Red Dragon Cartel album, I'm pretty sure it won't sound exactly like it. We'll see what we come up with and take it from there as far as singers but definitely the core band is in place and is going to be that way.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you take the time to play for us and especially with the physical toll it takes. Thanks so much for taking some time to talk and fill people in on what's been going on recently and what they have to look forward to.

Thank you and I thank everybody for still having me.