Velvet Revolver Bassist Duff McKagan Talks About Loaded, Economy

Plus, Duff talks about the search for a new VR singer and their "Zeppelinesque" new songs...

Ex-Guns N' Roses and current Velvet Revolver bassist Duff McKagan is busy with a pair of side gigs lately. One is his band Loaded. The other is a pair of financial columns for a Seattle paper and Playboy.com.

"If you're like me, you get kind of sick watching guys talk about market-to-market and aggregates and...'What the hell did you say to me?'," McKagan explains. "I actually know what they're saying, but I know that 99 percent of us don't. We're getting all this information, and people don't really understand what happened to our economy, why it failed, what the credit crunch actually meant, what predatory lending practices were."

"People ask me, 'Is now a good time to buy a house?' so, OK, I'll write about that. Or I'll get an email, 'Hey Duff, can you tell us about' this or that, then I'll write about those things. I just want to give people solid information so they can get some knowledge and get prepared for when this economy turns around."

Duff's band Loaded, which has been together since the 90's, is also set to release a new album, Sick, this Tuesday.

"We got together and these songs started coming, and we were having such a good time," McKagan says. "I was saving myself, really, and it worked. I didn't know if Loaded was going to be the thing to save me or not. I was just kind of swimming around, but this was so much fun, and [Sick] is one of the most inspired records I've been a part of."

McKagan also took a few moments to discuss Velvet Revolver's ongonig search for a new vocalist.

"We will find a singer at some point," he predicts. "We just have to find the guy. There's bee a couple guys I thought were perfect, but everybody's got to be 100 percent into it. We have an albums worth of material -- great, big, huge songs. Zepplinesque. Once we find the guy that can complement those and take it to another level, that'll take off. But I can't give any sort of timeline at all."