After a five-year hiatus, painstaking guitarist Tom Scholz and his band Boston are back and seeking revenge on Corporate America, their fifth album in 26 years.

Tom Scholz likes to do things his way. As the guitarist and figurehead of arena-rock pioneers Boston, he ll lay down hundreds of tracks to get a song the way he wants it, and if he can t find a processor to shape a sound properly, he ll build one of his own. When he is forced to compromise to cut two-track masters in digital, for instance he does so grudgingly.  It finally became a bad idea to mix anything down to a two-track analog tape, he says,  because nothing is available to the consumer that has not been digitized.

And why does he dislike digital?  It sounds like crap, he says, laughing.  You want a more technical discussion?

Scholz may be a noncomformist, but he s a successful one. In the Seventies, as the leader of Boston, he cut the group s demos in his basement using recording equipment he built by himself. The effort landed the band a record deal in 1976 that spawned Boston s multi-Platinum self-titled debut and its hit singles,  Long Time,  Peace of Mind and  More than a Feeling. In the Eighties Scholz invented the Rockman, a headphone-equipped personal amplifier that was a precursor to Korg s Pandora, the Line 6 POD and numerous other modern digital wonders.

But his perfectionism, combined with his technical pursuits, prevented Boston from releasing records on a more frequent basis. Eventually, his band mates guitarist Barry Goudreau, singer Brad Delp, bassist Fran Sheehan and drummer John  Sib Hashian were forced to ply their talents elsewhere.

Yet with the release of Corporate America, Boston s fifth full album in 26 years, the group seems more like a real band than ever. True, Scholz still does the lion s share of writing and recording, and is the only instrumentalist to be heard on four of the album s 10 tracks. But Corporate America is the most collaborative effort Boston which currently comprises Scholz, Delp, singer Fran Cosmo, singer/guitarist Kimberly Dahme, guitarist Anthony Cosmo and multi-instrumentalist Gary Pihl has ever released.

 This is the first Boston album to have complete songs by other people, says Scholz.  Anthony wrote three of the cuts and Kimberly wrote one.

It s also the first ebony porn Boston album to take a stand politically, and for Scholz, that s the biggest change of all.

GUITAR WORLD A vast majority of the songs here are love songs, yet you titled the album Corporate America. That seems to suggest a priority.

TOM SCHOLZ It absolutely does. [pauses] You re looking for more than one-word answers, huh? [laughs]

GW Well, kinda.

SCHOLZ  Corporate America was a very important song. To me, it was the most important thing on the CD. It s as simple as that. Actually, we didn t know whether it would fit in or not with Boston and a Boston CD. In fact, we originally put the song on the  net under the name  Downer s Revenge, and  Corporate America is now No. 1 on the progressive charts on mp3.com.

So as we got more and more experience with the song, we realized that Boston audiences have a lot broader musical taste and are quite open-minded. So we eventually decided to include that original version of  Corporate America on the Boston CD.

GW Like other artists, in the past you ve made reference to your political and social beliefs in album notes. Was it harder to set such things to music?

SCHOLZ It was very difficult. And that particular song was incredibly hard. It was rewritten and re-recorded over and over again complete different versions, complete different lyrics, complete different melodies until I finally had something that got the point across. For a long time, I just didn t think I was capable of expressing well, it was about more than expressing. I was hoping that maybe I could do something to motivate other people to think about these issues.

After the financial shenanigans of Enron, WorldCom and all, people started to pay attention to corporate America. But frankly, those things the fact that powerful executives were stealing people s money are really small potatoes compared to other things they ve done. But maybe it took hitting people in their pocket books to make them realize, You know what? These people don t have our best interests at stake.

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