Pat Benatar hasn’t put out a studio album since Go in 2003, but in a recent Billboard interview, the lauded singer revealed that the delay hasn’t been because of a lack of new original material.
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“We have about 125 songs around, waiting to be recorded,” Benatar admitted with a laugh. “If you can get my husband in [the studio] to do it, please be my guest.”
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Benatar’s husband, of course, is Neil Giraldo, who has been her lead guitarist and main songwriting collaborator for most of her career.
Giraldo told Billboard that a new album was “a possibility, if the time feels right.”
[RELATED: Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo Announce Summer 2024 Tour]
The guitarist, who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame alongside his wife in 2022, acknowledged that he and Benatar “have a lot of songs” waiting to be recorded, but he feels that they haven’t been able to set aside the amount of time to make an album the way he’d like.
“Here’s the deal…the best records, I believe, are done in 29 days; you just get in there, do it and get done,” the 68-year-old musician maintained. “You have to be able to block that time out so your primary focus is on that recording. That is the most difficult part. As you get older…it’s hard to find that block.”
Plans to Revise the Benatar Musical Invincible
Benatar and Giraldo just launched a new U.S. summer tour that’s mapped out through the middle of August. The couple also told Billboard that after the trek, they’re planning to focus on reworking Invincible. The stage musical features Benatar’s songs that premiered in 2022 in in Beverly Hills, California.
The production, which uses Benatar’s tunes to help tell a story based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, received mixed reviews for its debut performances.
“The place we’re at right now is about tearing it to shreds and starting over,” Benatar explained. “We have the liberty to do that because we haven’t gone to even off-Broadway or anything like that. So we’re tearing it apart, doing a similar show but with a lot of different elements to it.”
Invincible features such well-known Benatar songs as “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Heartbreaker,” “We Belong,” “Hell Is for Children,” and the title tune.
Benatar told Billboard that among the changes they might make would be to present the songs with arrangements that are more similar to the original versions of those tunes.
“The goal for the production we did was to do a hybrid of taking our music and reinventing it into a more theatrical form,” she noted. “Some of the songs didn’t really work like that. … [W]e learned that some of the arrangements that are on the original [recordings] are very exciting and actually work better [in the musical] if we keep them closer to the original.”
She added, “That was kind of a surprise, and a big lesson to learn. But that’s something you can’t learn until you put it in front of human beings to see it.”
More About Benatar and Giraldo’s Tour Plans
Benatar and Giraldo’s U.S. summer tour kicked off on July 6 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The trek is mapped out through an August 16 performance in Airway Heights, Washington. The duo’s next show takes place July 9 in Washington, D.C.
Tickets for Benatar and Giraldo’s concerts are on sale now via a variety of outlets, including StubHub.
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