When we went looking for the Spaceman, we found him in Green Bay, Wisconsin, believe it or not. That’s where former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley was on Tuesday afternoon when we caught up with him via phone for a brief conversation. He comes to Northeast Ohio on Saturday night to perform at Hard Rock Live.
Space Invader, Frehley’s latest solo album, continues the successful comeback story for the 64-year old veteran guitarist who scored a Top 10 debut on the Billboard charts when the album was released last year in August. The chart debut added another milestone to Frehley’s career, as he became the first KISS member to have an album debut in the Top 10 as a solo artist. Anomaly, his previous solo album, released in 2009, peaked at #26 on the album charts.
The artwork for Space Invader came from Ken Kelly — well-known in the KISS universe for creating the cover art for the classic Love Gun and Destroyer albums. Frehley had been keen to have Kelly work on art for one of his projects and he finally got his wish with the new album and he says that the space theme that populates some of the material on the record began to take shape as he was in the midst of discussing album art ideas with Kelly.
“It kind of started up with the cover idea,” he says. “I wanted to get Ken Kelly to paint something and then we figured that [it should have] me coming out of the spaceship and it just snowballed from there.”
Frehley assembled the bulk of the album in less than a year, writing 11 songs in the process, something that demonstrated that he still had creative mojo that he thought he might have lost.
“You get to a certain age and you just think that sometimes you can’t recapture some of the things that you had in your youth,” he says. “One of the comments that I got a lot on this last record was that my voice still sounds like it did in my twenties, which is kind of funny, you know? Sobriety,” he adds, “has really helped me focus and be more creative. It was kind of fun towards the end as the songs started falling into place and we got really hot on the space theme. ‘Space Invader’ was the last song that I wrote for the record and it just kind of came together during the mixing process [which] was a big surprise and a nice surprise.”