Def Leppard's Back With Updated Sound On 'X'

08/09/2002 10:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Matt Ashare

(8/9/02, 10 a.m. ET) -- Def Leppard's latest album, X, debuted at Number 11 on the Billboard 200 album chart with sales of more than 70,000. The album is spurred on by the collection's first single, "Now." With X, Def Leppard marches forward using the latest technology. Singer-songwriter Joe Elliott told LAUNCH about the band's 10th album.

"There's things on the album like 'Gravity' for example, which is, production-wise, very different to anything that we've done in the past. But a lot of that is down to the arrangement of the song. Allowing us to do all this, almost techno drop in and outs of the guitar and stuff, because of the stuff that's available with Pro Tools. But it all comes from here. It's all in your mind. So you can chop silence into stuff, which you couldn't... It was very difficult to do that naturally in the old days. Now, everybody from Garbage to all the pop artists are doing stuff like that."

Elliott added, "What we've tried to do with this record is use all the techniques that pop people use within our sound, which really isn't a million miles away from what we did on Hysteria."

Def Leppard's Hysteria was released 15 years ago, and it has sold more than 12 million copies in the United States.

-- Darren Davis, New York

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