Def Leppard Influenced By Aerosmith's Approach On X
Tue Jul 30, 2:57 PM ET

(7/30/02, 3 p.m. ET) -- Def Leppard released its tenth album, aptly titled X, on Tuesday (July 30). The first single from the collection is "Now." The band decided to try different producers for this album, after being encouraged by the success of Aerosmith's "Jaded."

Guitarist Phil Collen told LAUNCH about how the band took a different approach on X. "Actually the big difference with this album and all the stuff we've done in the '90s, I think we were desperately trying to be accepted. We wanted people to like us during the '90s, and it wasn't a very natural experience, looking back on it. With this one, it was like, 'We know what we want to do. We want to use different producers, get some different kinds of spice in there and stuff,'" he said.

Collen added, "One of the things that attracted us was 'Jaded' by Aerosmith. It was, like, 'This is great. We've got to get this guy,' and we did. We got Marti Frederiksen. He produced three songs on it, and we co-wrote them with him as well, and just straight off the bat the energy was perfect."

Def Leppard played an impromptu gig on Monday (July 29) at New York's Irving Plaza, which sold out in less than 10 minutes. On Tuesday, the band appears at Wal-Mart in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, to mark the release of X. The band travels to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for an in-store appearance at Wal-Mart on Wednesday (July 31).

-- Darren Davis, New York

Def Leppard's Back With Updated Sound On X
Fri Aug 9,10:57 AM ET

(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.

article resource: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/020809/143/20dbh.html