Army Of One: Fozzy's Rich Ward on Headless Guitars, Shredding and Why You Might Not Hear A New Fozzy Album For A While

Words: Tom Gensler

CREDIT : Scott Legato

Fozzy are the iconic old-school heavy-metallers making people rock around the

world, fronted by the famed wrestler-turned-rockstar (but still very much wrestling)

Chris Jericho. Noted for sharp riffs, powerful songs and infectious, rocking live

shows, they’re one of the worlds biggest heavy acts. This February, they embark on

their first UK headline tour in a while, and we caught up with their riff-slinging legend

Rich Ward, to talk guitars, set-listing, and their change of approach to releasing

music!

YOUR FEBRUARY 2026 UK TOUR IS CALLED ‘EYES ON YOU’. WHAT CAN WE

EXPECT FROM THE TOUR?

R: It’s our longest setlist to date, we’re playing more songs than we ever have,

because we wanted to include more songs from all the albums, so a complete

retrospective. Now, we’re still playing the big hits that everyone knows, because you

can’t show up and not play Judas or Painless and you must play the songs people

know, but we also wanted to add some additional songs, that maybe we haven’t

played in a while, so adding additional songs allows us to cover more of that. The

other thing is that we’ve got two incredible opening bands, Tailgunner and Marissa

and the Moths, who we’re really excited to have with us, and it’s the first time we’ve

been over in over a year, and I really feel like we’ve missed the UK, and I hope the

UK has missed us, and we’re excited about it. I mean, ticket sales are crazy, we

were looking at the numbers and we’re so excited that people are energised and

excited to see us again, so we want to meet that enthusiasm with the best setlist we

can possibly bring.

HOW HAS YOUR SONGWRITING AS A BAND CHANGED OVER THE YEARS?

R: We started working with a producer/writer named Johnny Andrews. We used to

self-produce our albums, and part of the reason for doing that was that Chris’

schedule was crazy, he was always travelling and it made it easy for me to produce,

and for Chris to co-produce, our albums, and just focusing on what we needed to do.

We knew what we wanted to accomplish on the albums, but now, we’re working with

someone from the outside, who has fresh ideas. It's like bringing a new coach onto

the team who can get the best out of you, who’ll say “I like that idea, but what if you

did this, what if we took this piece here and moved it here,” and it's like having a fresh

pair of eyes and ears on the process, and it's really made us better at what we’re

doing, because we actually have someone extracting the best bits and helping us

consider new ideas and new ways that we can do things, which has been great, it

really has helped us refine our process and its like having a new team member in the

locker room with you, you know.

IT'S BEEN SOME YEARS SINCE A NEW ALBUM. CAN WE EXPECT ONE

ANYTIME SOON?

R: We’re probably going to release singles, for the undetermined future, and the

reason is, on the Boombox album that we released, we had three singles off that

album and the rest of the songs just kind of went away, because when we first

started as a band, people used to go to the stores and they’d buy CDs or they’d buy

vinyl, now everything’s basically streaming, people pick their favourite songs, put

them into playlists, and the other songs kind of just go into the dustbin of history,

and, the idea for us, now, is to focus-in on one song at a time, and that way, instead of

writing 12 or 13 songs and only having two or three that people hear, and

the other songs basically are ghosts, we now have feature songs, that we know,

every six months or every eight months, you’re going to have a new release from

Fozzy, and it's going to allow us to focus-in better on ourselves, instead of spreading

our focus on many songs we’re now just focusing all this energy, which is why I think

Fall In Line is good, it's an excellent song, it drew outside of the lines a little bit, it

allowed us to stretch out and try a few different things, but it still feels like a Fozzy

song. So, I think that’s our plan in the short term. In the long term? Who knows? You

know, we could find ourselves doing an EP or another album again. Every season of

life, you’re trying new things, and I think that this is where we are for now.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVOURITE GUITARS THAT YOU OWN OR HAVE

PLAYED OVER THE YEARS?

R: So, my career has been in seasons. I first started playing Ibanez guitars when I

was in school, and they were shredder guitars, because I was fascinated with the

shredding technique, then when I turned 21, I got my first Gibson Les Paul,

because I was fascinated with all of the rockstars who played Les Pauls; Zack

Wylde, Jimmy Page and Gary Moore. It was just this quintessential big long piece of

mahogany, it had masculinity about it, there was just something about it, that at that

age in my life, I was attracted to. It was a heavier guitar, it was darker-sounding than

the Ibanez, so tonally it kind of matched the kind of music I was playing at that time,

and more recently I’ve started playing a guitar called a Kiesel, and it’s a different

guitar, because it does something completely different. Its voicing is still heavy but its

voicings are more towards aggressive in the mid-range frequencies as opposed to

the Gibson in the dark range of the frequencies. In life, I feel like my personality and

my persona was attached to the Gibson. When people saw me, they saw me as a

Gibson player, and one day I picked up this crazy guitar that had no headstock, no

tuning gears, the tuning gears are here [down at the bottom of the guitar; it is

important to note that at this point Rich is showing me the Kiesel], and the guitar had

this incredible balance to it. A lot of guitars are neck heavy, so they have a tendency

to, when you take your hands of the nick, it’ll tilt because the weight distribution is all

on the neck, causing it to have a dive, but this, the balance is so incredible, so I

started playing these and it was very comfortable, and I really just fell in love with it

so now I’m playing these. I put my Easy E on the back of it to make sure it's cool and

hip, and I don’t know, there’s just something cool about this guitar and I’ve fallen in

love with it. The older I get the more I’m open to new things, you know. I find new

bands and new styles of music that I’m obsessed with. Now all of a sudden, I’m

obsessed with this kind of modern synth-wave music; it's cool I guess. The cool thing

about streaming is: the way I discovered music or guitars was in rigid magazines, or

if someone was on MTV, or if I went into the music store and I saw the guitar hanging

on the wall. Now, as a 57-year-old man who has gone through so many

seasons of the change of how music and guitars are discovered, now I just do

research into finding these small boutique companies, that make guitars in a shop in

some small town and make N guitars a year. It's amazing. You know, people always

talk about the dark side of how the internet has changed the relationship between

fans and music and musicians; I find it incredible. I mean everyday being able to talk

to people like you face-to-face. When I toured in the 90s, I used to have to find a

payphone, and get a calling card and phone my mom and say “Hey, how are you?”

The difference between just 25 and 30 years, the way things have changed. For me, if I'd have found out about these guitars 20 or 30 years ago, maybe I wouldn’t’ have played the Gibson you know, but your accessibility to things was just based on what your local shop had.