Brian Wheat says TESLA’s high-water mark came in 1991 and 1992, when the band was behind Psychotic Supper and playing two-and-a-half-hour shows. In a new interview with Charlie Kendall's Metalshop, the bassist and founding member said the group now keeps its sets to 100 minutes, a change he credits with helping TESLA keep going 41 years later.
Wheat said the shorter shows matter because the band has lost a lot of great singers over the years and, as he put it, the voice is a muscle. He said age and abuse can wear a singer down, and added that he feels lucky that frontman Jeff Keith’s voice is still in such strong shape.
The comments come as TESLA prepares to release Homage on July 17, 2026, via Frontiers Music Srl. Wheat said the record was originally meant to be an EP before it grew into a full-length album, and said it arrives more than 20 years after the Real To Reel series, which he said helped inspire the TESLA song “Never Alone.”
That long gap fits the way Wheat describes the band’s business now. He said TESLA is not wealthy enough to stop working and that the group earns its living when it plays live. He said the band has managed itself for the last 20 years or so, puts out a couple of new songs every year, and prefers to stay on the road or focus on special projects rather than spend years making a full album of new original material.
Wheat also drew a hard line between TESLA and the biggest arena acts of its era, saying the band was never as large as Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Metallica or Guns N' Roses. He called those groups the “A bands” and TESLA the “B band,” saying the difference still matters because the band has to keep going out and earning its living. That reality, he said, is made sharper by the way the music business has changed, with fans no longer buying records like they used to and streaming and radio paying little. “Terrestrial radio, you make four cents a play,” he said.
He said the trade-off is always time. Making a record, he said, takes a lot of time, and that is time TESLA would otherwise spend off the road. “Do I wanna put two years on his voice in the studio, and then that's two years he could've been singing, because he's getting older,” Wheat said. “And when the voice goes, it doesn't give you a warning — it just goes.”
