“I often work for much less money than I should, because of the names involved.”
Session veteran Tom Denander suggested that missing credits are becoming a major issue for his line of work, noting how he often works “for much less money than [he] should, because of the names involved.”
Lately, there’s been a lot of doom and gloom about the state of rock — and music played on actual people on actual instruments in general — but this industry veteran feels like it’s due for a big comeback. Aged 57, the Swedish-born guitar prodigy Tommy Denander has seen it all and done it all, including appearances on over 3,500 records, including over 100 with gold or platinum certifications, as well as eight LPs that topped Billboard charts.
“Real music is coming back” is the short of the answer Denander gave Guitar World when asked about the state of the music industry in a new interview. At the same time, the guitarist isn’t oblivious to the pitfalls industry pros can come across, and he says that missing out on songwriting credits has become a prominent one:
“Something that’s more important these days than in the ‘good old days’ – it’s when credits are missing. It happens more often now, and it pisses me off big time. It happened with Paul Stanley, and he was pissed because I’d been in the album press release that he put together himself. He said an idiot messed it up for the product.”
“Then Ace Frehley ‘forgot’ that I wrote the music to a song on his latest album. I missed credit on, like, 25 variations of vinyl and all the CD and digital versions. It’s corrected now, but I lost a lot of media, and PR was lost.”