“What we have in common is that we don’t shred for the sake of it. In my case, it’s because I can’t!” Brian May on his unlikely guitar kinsmanship with Steve Cropper and Billy Gibbons

Not content to rest on his (formidable) legacy, Booker T & the MG’s and Stax Records guitar legend Steve Cropper is still releasing new music, his most recent offering being this year’s Friendlytown.

One byproduct of that aforementioned legacy, though, is that Cropper had little difficulty recruiting some famous friends for the album – Billy Gibbons and Brian May being the two most prominent.

Along with Cropper, both Gibbons and May sat down with Guitarist to discuss the making of Friendlytown, and their respective approaches to its material.

Though Cropper’s immaculate, soul-flavored rhythm work, Gibbons’ Texas-flavored blues riffology, and May’s stadium-filling electric guitar heroics have little in common on the surface, according to May, the trio are more alike in their playing than you might think.

“What we have in common is that we don’t shred for the sake of it. In my case, it’s because I can’t!” May told Guitarist recently. “Guitar playing, for all of us, is the voice; it’s how you feel. If your guitar can express that feeling, you’ve done your job. We have that in common.

“Nobody is showing off or zooming up and down the fretboard,” May continued. “Everyone is playing what feels right, and there’s passion in it. There’s an incredible sense of integrity that Steve helped to create.”

Steve Cropper &The Midnight Hour (feat. Brian May) – “Too Much Stress” – YouTube

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Though he’s the author of some of the world’s best-known and beloved riffs and solos, May showed great deference to both Cropper and Gibbons during his appearance on the Friendlytown track Too Much Stress (Gibbons appears on almost every one of the album’s tracks), to the point where May actually tried not to solo with the latter.

“Billy had already played half a solo. Jon [Tiven, the album’s producer] said to me, ‘Can you play the other half?’” May told Guitarist in the same interview.

“I said, ‘Jon, look, can’t you give him a whole solo and me a whole solo?’ Jon said, ‘No, this is the way it’s going to be.’ I said, ‘Oh God, all right.’ But I listened and thought, ‘Actually, this probably does make sense.’”

To read a full breakdown of Friendlytown with May, Gibbons, and, of course, Cropper, pick up the new issue of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.