Peter Frampton is dying. Or at least that’s the headline that floated around in 2019, when the guitar legend announced his farewell tour due to inclusion body myositis, a degenerative muscle disease. But here we are, years later, and not only is Frampton still very much alive—he’s arguably more productive than he’s ever been. “Since October, we’ve just finished a fourth album,” he told me, like he’d accidentally overwatered a houseplant and now there’s a jungle in the living room.
The crown jewel of that batch is All Blues, an album that Frampton says brings him back to the earliest spark that made him want to play guitar in the first place. “Before Humble Pie,” he emphasized. “When I was 15 or 16, hearing Muddy Waters, Freddie King, Howlin’ Wolf—those were the records that changed my DNA.” He even goes full circle with “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and “I’m a King Bee,” both made famous to him via the Stones but traced back to Slim Harpo and Willie Dixon. “We wanted to hear the very first version of the song,” he said, “so we could do our own authentic cover of it.”
Authentic is the keyword. Frampton is too reverent—and frankly, too damn British—to half-ass the blues. So when his keyboardist Rob Arthur suggested covering B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone,” Frampton’s first instinct was, “You are kidding me.” But then Arthur sweetened the deal: “What if we got Sonny Landreth to play on it?” Frampton laughed, “You could share the blame.”
Blame isn’t really a concern, though. The album isn’t a blues cash grab. It’s Frampton standing in a mirror with his heroes, tipping his hat to the songs and players who made him. There’s even a Miles Davis cover, because apparently Frampton doesn’t believe in rules. “It’s from Kind of Blue,” he argued. “So it’s literally blues. Plus, if I could only take one album to a desert island, it’d be Kind of Blue.”
The Miles cover was also a first take. “We’d never played it before,” he shrugged. “We just went for it.” A lot of All Blues feels that way—loose, limber, the kind of record you make when you know time is short but the strings are still ringing just fine.
Frampton’s diagnosis of IBM hangs in the background like a dimmer switch slowly turning down. “It moves very slowly, but it affects the arms and hands,” he said. “Which is not great for a guitar player.” He’s been fighting it with five-day-a-week workouts and is part of a Johns Hopkins trial. “They’re surprised how slow the progression has been,” he said. “So I’m doing good. Right now, I’m at the top of my game.”
Which makes the “farewell” tag on his tour a little complicated. “We’re calling it the last one because we just don’t know,” he said. “Someone out there’s probably saying, ‘He’s got enough money now, he just wants to stop.’ But that’s not it. It’s never been about the money. It’s always been about walking out on that stage.”
That humility masks a mind that’s still sharp enough to remember every mile marker of his musical life. He recounted Humble Pie’s debut (As Safe As Yesterday Is) being the first record to get tagged with the term “heavy metal.” He rolled his eyes at Where Should I Be—the 1979 album recorded after a car crash and a hangover from mega-fame—and countered that When All the Pieces Fit from 1989 was “pretty much all good.”
That one came after a world tour with David Bowie. Frampton’s old schoolmate brought him out of the shadows—literally—on the Glass Spider tour. “David reintroduced me as the guitar player instead of the image,” Frampton said. “And that was a gift.”
The humility, again. It’s become something of a trademark—see also “I Saved a Bird Today,” a 2017 one-off about, well, saving a bird. “It’s really about who’s saving who,” Frampton said. “There’s a line in there: ‘To care for other people is the reason we’re here.’ And I believe that. That’s why we’re here.”
Maybe that’s the answer to his longevity. He never stopped caring. About the songs, the audience, or the bird. “We’ve gotta put the hate in the backseat,” he said. “And get down to sorting out how we can live together again.”
But don’t mistake tenderness for softness. He’s still got teeth. “People say, ‘The electric guitar is dead.’ No, it’s not,” he said. “There are so many great young players. It might not be in the Top 40, but it’s not going anywhere.”
Neither is Frampton. Not yet.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
