Tuesday, December 6, 2016

"Kip Winger has a contemporary classical album? The hard-rock guitarist discusses his Grammy nod"

LAT:
You’re listed on the album under the name C.F. Kip Winger. Can you talk about the initials?

I added the name because my name is Charles Frederick Winger, and when I started writing classical music, I thought, “Should I be Kip Winger? Or should I be Charles Winger?” I actually tried Charles Winger, and got told, “But you’re Kip Winger.”

OK, I’m Kip Winger, but it’s a different brand. It’s a different thing. And so looking back in history and I saw some guys with initials and stuff. “You know what? I’m just going to put my initials on the front of my name for my solo work, just as a notice that, hey, this is different.”

...

Does this feel like artistic vindication?

Yes, it does, to be quite frank. We took a lot of heat. I personally took a lot of heat in the music business with MTV and all that stuff. The irony of my life was that my whole thing is like, there’s two things I want to do in life: study music and write music. So being kind of a musicologist geek that I am, it was ironic to become known as a poseur-y ’80s figure.