With Def Leppard beginning to tune up for another summer of touring (a co-headlining tour with Poison is rumored), guitarist Phil Collen says they’ll hit the road with at least a little bit of new music to share with the fans.

Recording is definitely in the plans for the Leppard boys and Collen tells Music Radar that they’ll try to knock down at least a “song or two” before the tour begins. They will definitely have the material to draw on — Collen boasted that he himself had written two songs the week of the interview.

He says that a full album from Def Leppard probably won’t happen this year. “There’s so much involved with putting a record together, and the demographics for the people who buy albums is shrinking.”

But a Leppard album is very possible in 2013, and Collen says that he’d love to see the notoriously meticulous band approach things differently in the studio.

“It would be cool if we could do it differently. I’d love to do what we did with the Manraze album, recording the entire thing in two weeks.”

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise takes a swing at Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ in the upcoming ‘Rock of Ages’ film, and Collen says that he was impressed with Cruise’s vocals on the track — and even more impressed when he found out that Tom was a newly-minted “vocalist.”

“We were just knocked out by his singing, which he was doing for real. We said, ‘We didn’t know you could sing.’ He smiled and said, ‘I couldn’t — I just learned five months ago.’ He was having lessons and practicing five hours a day — crazy stuff. Extremely impressive.

If Cruise were to show up at a tour stop this summer, Collen says they’d love to have him sing ‘Sugar’ with the band. “We’d let him!” he laughs. “Absolutely. That would be amazing. Him singing ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me?’ Totally! Hey, he knows the words…”

Collen is hopeful that their summer touring will feature a bill of fellow ‘Rock of Ages’ bands like Poison and his personal pick, Twisted Sister.

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