Kip Winger Doesn’t Want to Pull a KISS With Winger Farewell Tour

Kip Winger said he won’t rule out future performances with Winger even as they embark on a series of farewell tours in various parts of the world, joking that he didn’t want to wind up on a decade-long goodbye run like KISS.

“At some point I’m gonna play a final show with the band,” the namesake frontman told White Line Fever TV. (You can watch the interview below.) “I don’t know when it is. But that’s not to say I might not do a cruise or something. I don’t really know. I’m not going, ‘Hey, this is the last show we’re ever gonna do,’ because — well, hey, KISS did it for 10 years, so … [laughs].”

Winger will play a series of farewell shows in Japan and Australia over the next month, touting the Down Under shows as “the first and final ever Australian tour featuring the original lineup.” The band is also set to appear at Maryland’s M3 Rock Festival in May, performing alongside the likes of Sebastian Bach, David Lee Roth and Ratt’s Stephen Pearcy and Warren DeMartini.

Although the glam metal platinum-sellers are winding down, Kip said he didn’t know when or where the final Winger show would take place. “I do have some thoughts about it, but nothing’s totally worked out yet,” he said. As for the possibility of special guests during their final bow, he added: “That would be cool. I did think about that, but it depends on the location, like where we would be. So I don’t know yet.”

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Kip Winger’s Biggest Life Change After Winger Farewell

Kip Winger has no plans to abandon music once Winger is finished, as he’ll continue his extensive work in the classical realm. Still, he acknowledged some ways his life will drastically change once his band ceases touring.

“The biggest thing is the traveling,” he explained. “If you do 40 gigs in a year — and sometimes we do more than that — you have twice that many days on each end traveling. So, you spend half of the year of your life sitting in an airport, and it really … Listen, we’re not a huge band — we don’t fly around in our own Learjet — so it tends to take a toll on you. And then, all of a sudden, all my personal goals just end up drifting away in an airport somewhere in Chicago. So my life will be different in that way.”

The singer and bassist also has no qualms about putting Winger to rest following the band’s seventh and most recent album, Seven, which they released to positive reviews in 2023. “I’ve made my final statement on the last Winger record,” he said. “And a lot of people think that’s, like, if not our best record, it’s close to being our best, along with Pull. And I kind of brought back the original guys and put the original logo on and gave it a nice full circle. So, there’s nothing else that Reb [Beach, guitarist] and I could do with Winger that wouldn’t just be, like, ‘OK, let’s write another one of those’ or ‘another one of those.’ And now I’m in this whole other mentality where the sky’s the limit, and I’ve got 30 more years of expressing myself in a world of things that haven’t been done by me.”