Kip Winger recently backed Winger’s hit single “Seventeen” and argued that both legendary Beatles frontman Paul McCartney and Kiss wrote songs about similarly controversial topics and that he lifted the lyrical idea off the Germany-based rock band Kingdom Come.
Back in the day, Winger flew high on the mainstream hits charts before its wings got clipped in the early ’90s (in no small part due to Metallica and Lars Ulrich’s dart-throwing practice), with songs such as “Headed For a Heartbreak”, “Miles Away”, “Without the Night” and “Can’t Get Enuff” becoming mainstays of rock radios across the US.
“Seventeen”, for which Winger eventually received a lot of backlash, for reasons that should be obvious in most countries around the world. Even so, Kip Winger himself believes that a lot of the backlash is not irrelevant especially given that other musicians got away with similar (or worse) trespasses, as he argued during a recent appearance on the “Appetite for Distortion” podcast.
He said via Ultimate Guitar:
“People can’t compute this. They want to pigeonhole you into, ‘Hey, he’s Mr. ‘Seventeen”… And you know, I’m going, ‘Yes. So is Paul McCartney’, [sings ‘I Saw Her Standing There’] – and we’re all fucking following The Beatles. If you’re worried about that lyric, call up McCartney and ask him if he feels strange about it, singing it at 75.
“I mean, Kiss does ‘Christine Sixteen’… I’m just saying, people are like, ‘Oh, how dare you sing this song?’ I’m like, ‘It’s a pop song, man.’ You know, it was just a fun pop song. I stole the lyric from Kingdom Come; they had a song on their album called ’17’ – I was writing the song and I was out of ideas.”
Winger is preparing to release a new studio album titled “Seven” on May 5 in order to celebrate their 35th anniversary. It is also the first new Winger album since 2014’s “Better Days Comin'”.
