Music and Philosophy with Dave Nachmanoff

Dave's Dissertation Title

SPEAKER_03 0:00

All right. I am here in the studio of Dave Nakmanoff in Davis, California, University of California, which I understand that you were a student one time. Is that correct? I was for a number of years, yeah. And in 1997 you published a dissertation? I did. And as a matter of fact, that dissertation's name is the moral justification for the right to national self-determination. It is. And I tried to get a copy of it. Oh my goodness. Well, if you actually read it, you'd probably be one of three people in the world or something, yeah. Yeah, I was there at seven o'clock when they opened. It's on microfish, and the young lady says, uh, we'll have to find somebody that knows how to use this. I said, Well, I'm old enough to know how to use the microfish machine. That's incredible. Man, that's dedication.

Gramps' New Jingle

SPEAKER_04 0:49

Doing poetry, you're about to hear something sweet, talking about programs. He's been in lots of places, and we see many faces. Now we sit surrounding some do you something funny. He's not asking for your money, just another way to waste your time. You might save your life with a piece of a spot.

SPEAKER_03 1:24

You're actually my third PhD guest. I noticed that listening to some of your other podcasts. Very cool. So, like I I I think I mentioned to you, I'm gonna start marketing to Mensah as a podcast uh opportunity. But we're here about the music, and I was uh very grateful that you were willing to chat with me for the podcast. Uh we met in Cambria in the middle of uh January there this year, and you were one of the instructors, and you were very generous with your time, but I was most taken with the energy that you brought into each of the rooms that you played in. And so one of my questions that I had is do you have to go into training to perform live? Because you bring a lot of energy to it, man.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

That's very kind. I guess I was kind of born with a performing gene. I never really understood stage fright particularly. And people do tell me I have a lot of energy when I perform. These last couple of years I've been doing a lot less performing. And I think maybe it was kind of fun to get back amongst people again and perform when I could see that feedback. I've been live streaming and want to continue to do that, but the thing with live streaming is you don't get that same kind of energy feedback that you get in a room with people. And so yeah, I probably should, as I get older, I probably should start training for uh for performances, but no, I don't. It just it just kind of comes naturally. And my son, who's fifteen now, seems to have gotten the the gene as well. It's pretty hard to stop him from performing the drop of a hat.

SPEAKER_03 2:52

That has to be very uh satisfying to see your son follow in a footstep.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Well, it's it's satisfying and horrifying at times. Just because well, because I I sort of see myself and I, oh my gosh, am I really like that? Or was I really like that when I was fifteen? Yeah, I guess I was. He's totally unafraid to put stuff out there and then to do what he does, and it's completely different than what I do. But do you recall your first memory of music? I thought about that a little because I listened to your other podcast. I knew that was something you always ask people. I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and when I was born, they were living in a small apartment that was right near the Iwo Jima Memorial. And if you've ever gone there during the summer, they have a rather moving sort of ceremony most most evenings where they have military musicians performing music near the memorial. I think they call it the Sunset Tattoo or something like that. So my parents left that apartment when I was a year and a half old, and my dad took a job up in the Boston area for a while, and then they came back to DC after, I don't know, a year or two years, and and I was and I grew up in northern Virginia. The funny thing is I remember that I really liked that music, the military music from the Sunset Tattoo, which I probably heard for the first time when I was less than a year and a half old, because it would have been before we left to go to Boston. But there was always my parents, neither of them were musicians, but they both loved music a lot, and there was always music in my house growing up. So it's very hard for me to remember my first memory of music because it was just constant. I mean, my parents sang lullabies to me almost every night when I was a baby and even when I was a young child, and my mother really didn't have much of a voice. She's not great pitch at all, but that didn't stop her. She loved to sing and uh she was great at remembering lyrics, so she knew lots and lots of songs. My father had a better voice, and he loved to sing to me too, but it was a somewhat narrower line of songs. Interestingly, one of the things I remember he used to sing to me as as a child was Irish lullabies or sort of faux Irish, probably written in Tin Pen Alley, but uh like you know things like Gaway Bay and Tura Lura Lura. You know, I don't have any Irish heritage whatsoever, but I've developed a fascination for James Joyce, and maybe that's that's that early. Those early Irish lullabies. Uh my parents even wrote a song that they used to sing to me as a lullaby, and I don't know which of them wrote it. I've in later years I tried to see if I could get them to tell me they it was about Babar, because you know they used to meet the Babar. Has that been recorded? Well, when I first set up my studio, the very first recording I actually ever did in my studio, I believe, was my father. My parents had come out to visit, and as I said, he he liked to sing. He never had any training or anything, and he never performed as a singer, but he's quite musical and he liked singing. So I invited him to come out of my studio because I didn't really know what I was doing recording yet. But I was like, hey dad, well, you want to come out and sing something, and I'll I'll try to record you. So I wound up doing a a little album of my father singing, which I'm so glad that I did. I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't I didn't have pitch correction, I didn't have you didn't have a click track. I mean, I it was just basically I think it was mostly just him singing a cappella, just off the cuff. And he didn't care for this recording too much after I finished it. Because well, because I mean he wasn't he wasn't really prepared, he hadn't rehearsed. It was very I mean it wasn't it wasn't by any means a polished recording. But I'm glad that in fact we talked later about me going back and trying to edit it and fix it and change it, and I don't think I ever was able to to do that. You know, he did he did sing he did sing some of those Irish lullabies and the other things and some he was in the Navy for a while, so he had some of these Navy songs and some of those college fight songs and just random stuff. So I grew up hearing a lot of a lot of music all the time.

SPEAKER_03 6:33

What's what's your mom and dad's name first of all?

SPEAKER_02 6:38

Are they still with you? Sadly, no. And I lost them both within the last couple of years.

SPEAKER_03 6:42

I'm very sorry. Thanks. But your son had a chance to to meet them or know them.

SPEAKER_02 6:47

Yeah, right. Yeah, although he was pretty sadly my my mom um had Alzheimer's and it it hit her fairly early. So he didn't really get to know her as she was. My my daughter, who's uh older than my son by five years, had a little more well, a fair bit more time with her, which was great.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that's important in recordings like that. And one of the reasons that I've chosen to do the podcast is not so much that the grandchildren are gonna listen to it now because they're ages twenty-two to three months. Oh, there's five of them. Five of them. Fantastic. But and they're not gonna listen to this thing until they're probably fifty years old when they wonder. They may be the younger ones might. They might, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

So maybe the older ones will too. You never know. That's the funny thing, too. I mean, my kids don't generally listen to my music. Whatever. But I mean, my my daughter's twenty and she's in college, and she's I think starting to get her own slot on the college radio station as a DJ, or she will be. There's a chance maybe she'll play one of my songs occasionally. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

Yeah, but it's for the legacy, I think. Right. A lot of fun is having evidence that you were here. Absolutely. And to that end, you also have some siblings, I understand. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

And uh my much more accomplished siblings.

SPEAKER_03 7:58

Um, I actually found one of your brothers on Wikipedia. You had uh I traced it from one of the songs that I saw on YouTube. So I wanted to capture the names, and it was Michael and Jeffrey. Yep. And uh is that your only two siblings? Yes. Oh, okay. So all of you are musicians of Yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:15

We played as a band for a little while. I mean, it was when they were in when I was in high school and they were younger, and then when they were in high school, but then when I I went to college and they were with my parents in England when I was in college in the States. So the band sort of fell right apart for a while. Yeah, and then they went off to college and we all were in different places. But during the pandemic, we kind of put the band back together long distance and got some equipment so that Jeffrey could cut electronic drum parts at his house, send them to me. I could send stuff out to Michael to add bass parts. And we went wound up making some pretty rough but fun videos which make it look like we're all playing at the same time and the zoom boxes and all that. Yeah. Well, that's the magic of Zoom. The tracks came out pretty well, so I'm I'm I'm thinking at some point we may try to remix the tracks that we recorded and get them properly mixed and actually release it as an album.

SPEAKER_03 9:04

Oh, that'd be a lot of fun. It would be it would be fun. And you said more accomplished, that's hard for me to believe. But what is the nature of their uh profession? So Michael is a federal district judge. So he went into the legal practice.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

Yes, he was he was a he was a federal public defender for many years. So public service is is a legacy from my father who served in government for many years in different capacities. And so Michael, very, very smart and went went into the law and I'm sure could have had a a more lucrative career in corporate law or something like that, but he chose a path of public service and he tried his first case before the Supreme Court before he was fifty, I think.

SPEAKER_05 9:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Um and won. It was a landmark case. Excellent. Um and so now he's a he's a judge, and I'm sure he's very good at it. Yeah. And Jeffrey is a filmmaker, so he's a writer and director, and managed to survive doing that in Hollywood for years and not just to survive, but to succeed. That's an according to the Which is a pretty tough, tough gig. He's still active and he's working on some new projects. Now he's kind of quiet during the pandemic. Everything kind of shut down and it looked like maybe he was even going to step away from what he was doing for a while. But he seems to be back into it, and I think he's gonna have some ex I can't talk about it, but I think he has some exciting stuff coming up in the next few years. And if you go look at the IMDB, you can see some of the things he's done. So although it's funny because you'll also see it says brother of Dave Nakmanov's siren, which I did not I swear I did not put that in there. I don't I don't I don't know how that got in there. I really don't. Um I was tickled when I saw that. Sometimes to find out what's going on with him, I have to go look at the IMDB. Check and see what he's up to, yeah. In Wikipedia, right?

SPEAKER_03 10:44

Right. But yeah, they're both pretty amazing individuals. And well, it sounds like your your family, uh your mom and dad had to be very proud of the work that their sons have done, both in uh public service and in uh arts. Pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

They were amazingly supportive. And there's it's I think it's not an accident that we've all been able to do some slightly unusual things to have the and uh a real blessing to have the the the freedom and the support to do that, because I know a lot of people, their parents will be like, You want to be a folk singer? What are you talking about? That's crazy. And even Jeffrey, I mean, when he when he wanted to be a filmmaker, he went down to Hollywood and spent, I don't know, probably two years or something before he really got his first job. I mean he got into USC, did a master's in film at USC, and he landed a gig out of that but didn't really make any money for it. It was it was a sort of a stud almost a student project that that wound up going to some film festivals and things and he got himself an agent. But I mean there were l lot of periods where he really wasn't working at all. But of course in that world, if you can if you can land something and you do work, you can can do pretty well, and then you can wait a while for the next job. But it's you know, you have you have to have faith, and I think a lot of parents would have been like, you need a regular job and just give up this nonsense. Yeah, and they were never they were never like that, and they were never like that with me either. I mean, I focused on music, then I took a detour and went to go do a PhD in philosophy.

SPEAKER_03 12:01

I I'm anxious to talk about that, but uh we can we can save that for just a minute here. But stay in with your childhood, if I could. I was fascinated that you were singing with an older lady when you met her. From what I understand,

Remembering Libba Cotton

SPEAKER_03 12:15

at age eleven, you were playing with Libby Cotton. Yeah, Libba Libba Cotton. Libba Elizabeth Cotton.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

She has quite a story of her own. Amazing story. And if people don't know who she is, they should look her up. And she was just admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I saw that as a legacy artist, which you know was an influ as someone who influenced a lot of the greatest. The rock and rollers. Yep. She wrote her most well-known song, Freight Train, when she was about twelve. When I met her, she was eighty-two and going strong. And she started a musical career in her mid-sixties, so I find that inspiring. It's never never too late to start. She had picked up a guitar as a child. Actually, she picked up the banjo, I think, first, but she was not given a musical instrument. She wasn't considered proper for girls to play music, and so her brother got a banjo. And she didn't, but she wanted to play, and so she would sneak into his room when he was away, and she taught herself to play. And she was left-handed, so she held it the way that was comfortable for her, so it was upside down and backwards. So she played guitar kind of like Jimi Hendrix, except not quite, but in her own distinct way, using a thumb and one finger to pick, which became known as cotton picking. I love that story. And she was told when she was in her teens by a minister that the blues was the devil's music. And that's I mean, she'd really been playing kind of a Piedmont blues kind of style and writing her own songs and stuff, and she didn't want to be a bad person, so she she stopped playing. This is almost like your story about being told, you know, by a teacher. You can't do music. It's just so terrible when people do that. And so she stopped playing for years. And then she was working in a department store in DC, and the Seeger family was there. One of the kids, maybe it was Peggy, got lost in the store or something. And she helped to restore the child to the mother. And the mother was so grateful, she said, Write your name and number, or here's my name and number, wrote it on a piece of paper. If you ever need a job, you call me. And she wound up being hired as a nanny by the Seeger family. And one day, you know, she was helping watch the kids and stuff, and of course they had lots of guitars around. She picked up a guitar and and the kids, one of their parents said, You gotta hear what the nanny's doing. And the next thing, you know, she was down at Smithsonian Folkways Records and recording her debut album. Wow, in her sixties, yeah. And there's hope. It's hope for all of us.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Free train, free train runs so fast. Please don't tell for train out. No more to have place the stones at my head and feet. Tell them all that I'm trying to speak. Way down on old chestnut street, so I can hear oh now as she control and by and she and she went on to become a you know folk star, although uh funnily enough, Freight Train became a hit, a commercial hit, in the UK, in England.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

It was picked up by sort of skiffle musicians there. I think a woman named Nancy Whiskey sang it and a couple of other acts. I don't think she ever saw the royalties from the pop hit that she had in England. But she did play folk festivals and toured all over the US and, you know, was just an amazing person. And I I had the good fortune to kind of bump into a fellow that knew some people who knew her who were neighbors of mine. It was it was just I'd won a little talent competition in my local like rec department. My guitar teacher had said, Oh, they're doing a talent competition downstairs, you should try out for that. So I played I I think I played Paradise by John Prime and Frey Train by Lou Cotton with my two songs. I'd only been playing for a year or so. My prize for winning the competition, besides a little trophy they gave me, which I've sadly lost since then, was I got a little set at the Arlington Folk Festival. And so I was playing at this little festival. And I only had you know maybe an hour's worth of material, maybe half an hour, I don't know. But one of the songs was Frey Train. Okay. And I finished my set, and this guy came up to me and he said, You play that song better than anybody I've ever heard, except for one person. And being a cocky nine or ten year old, I said, Oh, who's that? You know? He said, Well, the woman who wrote it, would you like to meet her? I was like, Really? Of course. So he managed to set up this dinner. The incredible thing is, so I went to this these people's house, these neighbors of ours, and the wife, Susan, was kind of working as not really working, but volunteering as kind of a roadie for Libba. She was driving her around to gigs and helping her in various ways. So this family had me over for dinner, and afterwards, they got out the guitars, and Libba and I sat and played. And after, you know, playing for, I don't know, an hour or whatever it was, somewhere in there, Libba said to me, Well, I'm doing a concert in a few weeks or month or something, and I wonder if you want to come and play a song with me at my concert, honestly. Sure. So I wound up playing on the grounds of the Washington Monument at the Sylvan Theater in this traveling blues workshop with Libba Cotton and some other people. So years later, so I wrote I wrote a song about it called Kindred Spirits. And years later, I mean, after that that long after I'd written that song and performed it many times, the son from that family, Danny, who was some years younger than I was, found me on Facebook or something and and got in touch. And he'd never heard that song and didn't know anything about that. But he he knew that I'd met Lib because he was, of course, there at that dinner. And so I got back in touch with the family. And his parents, I said, Are your parents still with us? And he said, Yes. They lived near him in San Diego. So I I was down in San Diego doing a house concert, and I I'd sent so I'd sent his parents a copy of the album with Kindred Spirits on it and thanked them for introducing me to Lib all those years ago. And they showed up at this house concert I was going to do, and Susan, the wife, took me aside and said, What you don't know about that concert or about the about the dinner that we had with Lib Buggottin was that while you guys were jamming after dinner, I had a tape recorder set up and I actually recorded it. Yeah, you could have knocked me over the feather. I was like, Is there still a recording somewhere? It's like real to real, I would imagine. I don't maybe cassette. I don't know. I said she said, Oh yeah. She said, I've I've got it digitized and I can send it to you. And I couldn't believe it. I was like, that would be amazing. So she sent me this MP3. It's actually on my Facebook page somewhere. It's I mean, it's kind of embarrassing because my voice hadn't changed. I'd only been playing guitar for a year. I didn't know what I was doing. But you can hear Libba actually talking to me about stealing her brother's guitar and the whole thing and inviting me to come and play with her. And you can hear me whining to my mother about how I don't want to have to leave because I had school the next day and uh I want to stay and play with Libba longer. And my mother's like, well, you gotta get up for school tomorrow. And it's it's hilarious. That's a treasure, right?

SPEAKER_05 19:21

I couldn't believe that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:23

I have another, I have another recording like that that was out of the blue. The night that I met my wife, Jennifer, I'd graduated from college and she was still in college, but there was a folk club on the campus of uh Columbia University where we where we both were in college, and um I used to play there a lot. It was in the crypt of the chapel, so it was called the postcrypt. Very long-running folk club. And I was playing a reunion gig with with a sort of jazz band that did like kind of Django Reinhardt swing and Western swing too, like Bob Wills. And the band had broken up, but we we got back together for one night. We did this reunion show, and it was in January, and there was a blizzard, and I wound up meeting this young woman after after the show who was only at the concert because it was too snowy to go downtown where she was gonna go to another concert. Anyway, that woman became my wife. But the night that that I that I met her, I was playing at this little folk club, the postscript. Well, years later, I was at a folk festival where the violinist from that band that I was playing with was performing and I was MCing and things. And I his name was Jeff Sick. He's since changed it to Jeffrey Castle, very good player. And Jeff said to me, you know that show, that reunion show we did at the PostScript. I think somebody recorded it on cassette and sent it to me as an MP3. I was like, that's the night that I met Jen. I'd I'd I'd love to have a recording from that night. Of course. About a year later, like I think it arrived, like on our anniversary by chance, I got a CD with that recording from behind the bar, like somebody had just recorded on cassette or something. Yeah. And and I mean it's not a fantastic recording, but it was I didn't know it existed. And that was years later. So you just never know. If you're that's one fun thing about being a performing musician, especially these days with cell phones. You never really know. That's a good and bad thing. Anything could be saved. Yeah, somebody may have a video of you doing a performance that you don't even know about that's that's out there.

SPEAKER_03 21:09

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, those are family uh you know legacy items that your great-grandchildren will.

SPEAKER_02 21:14

They may or may not care, but if they want them, they're there.

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Trevor Burrus, Jr. About the early work that you did, and of course we're talking when you were eight, nine, ten, eleven, uh, that's going back away. Are any of those songs songs that you still play at concerts?

SPEAKER_02 21:28

Aaron Ross Powell There's one of the first songs I wrote was called Spotlight of the Sun. Uh my parents listened to a lot of John Denver. This is the mid-70s, early 70s. Everybody was listening to a lot of John Denver music. So he was a big influence. In fact, I think I first kind of got the idea of that's what I want to do, thinking about John Denver. Like, that's that's who I want to be. You know, that would change later as I listened to other artists and things. But so Spotlight of the Sun was written as I was walking home from elementary school. And the crazy thing is, I don't think I'd read Shakespeare at that point, but there's a line in it. I am an actor in a play of life, the world is my stage, which I thought was pretty good for like a nine or ten year old. I would agree. And uh it's a very, it's a very John Denver sounding song. Anyway, my brothers and I, as I said, played uh as a band in high school and everything. And then years later, after we'd all moved to different places and had families and things, we were all visiting my parents in Virginia where we grew up. And my brothers thought it would be fun to get together and record, just for the fun of it. So being uh a little better off than I was, they they offered to spot the studio time, which is kind. And so we we hired a studio in in Virginia, and we I mean we didn't rehearse, we didn't really plan it, we just kind of went in there. And my brothers being my brothers, instead of wanting to do a bunch of my songs, I had some new songs that I thought maybe we should record. They were like, no, no, let's do some other songs. So we wound up recording a bunch of songs by a wonderful songwriter in London named Pete Hamilton, who I played with in some bands back when I was living over there, and my brothers are big fans of his music too, and so no, we'll do some of Pete's songs. We didn't bother to ask Pete or tell him about it. We just recorded them, told him later, you know. Thank you, Pete. Thank you, Pete. And uh luckily he wasn't he wasn't too upset. And then we did a few of my songs, and then my mother walked in towards towards the end of the session. We'd booked, I don't know, six hours or something. So we literally were just banging through things, just just knocking them out. And my mom walked in and she's like, Oh, it's so great to hear you guys playing. She was always you know our biggest, our biggest fan. She said, David, you should record Spotlight of the Sun. I said, Mom, I wrote that when I was nine. She's like, Yeah, but you should record it. And I was like, you know what? After all she's done for me, she wants to, it doesn't matter. This we the the intent was never to make an album or anything. It was just let's get together and play and record something. So I, you know, reminded my brothers of how it went real quickly and we we bashed through it and we recorded it. Well, it turned out all the tracks came out so well that I took the hard drive back here, and this was in the early days of when I had the studio, so my engineering skills were not nearly where they are now. But I took the tracks that we'd done back there, and then I added some stuff here. I mean, it's still pretty much all just the three of us. There's nobody else on the record. But I, you know, worked with those tracks, added some parts, and mixed it, and we released it as an album. So it's called The Threads of Time, out of print, but I think it's probably on Spotify or somewhere. And one of the tracks on that album is The Spotlight of the Sun. So you can you can probably find it

Spotlight of the Sun

SPEAKER_02 24:20

if you want to.

SPEAKER_03 24:20

Well, we gotta feature that one. That's absolutely true. Yeah, we can we can bookend this uh computer issue with the early days and some stuff that you're doing right now. Yeah. Um I and and of course you listen to Joe Peters' uh podcast uh and where I talk a little bit about all these uh celebrity PhDs that are artists. And Brian May is one of my favorite as an astrophysicist, right? Absolutely. He's one of my favorites, but it's not uncommon for celebrity uh entertainers, artists, people that also have this drive to go into academia in a way that surprises a lot of people. You know, for those of us rock and rollers that were listening to Queen back in the day, little did you know. Little did we know that uh, you know, one of the band members was a dentist. And so can you tell us a little bit about what was going on there? Well, I have philosophy, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Yes. So I was lucky in high school, I had a a wonderful English teacher who who um got us reading uh a fair bit of philosophy as well as English, and I really enjoyed it. My father had actually majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. So I I was always I like I liked school for the most part, and I was always a pretty good student, not so good at math, but but strong in in most other things. And um I liked school, but I also, by the time I was in high school, was very, very focused on music and and and also very certain that if I just applied myself, I would I would be able to be successful in music. And I you know had this idea I was gonna be a rock star. That was of course the standard dream in those days. And um so my well my parents uh I was in my sophomore year, I guess, tenth grade, and my father decided to change careers, and he'd been working in government for for many years, but uh he was basically a civil servant uh in different areas, um decided that he wanted to have more opportunities for his sons to go to possibly private colleges if they wanted to, and so forth. So he needed to do something that was more lucrative than what he was doing, and he wound up finding a job at an investment bank in London. Now they were gonna leave to move to London in what would have been my senior year of high school. But I didn't want to go change schools for one year.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

Of course not.

SPEAKER_02 28:33

Because it was especially to a different system. Um so I asked my parents if I could possibly come with them if I graduated early, and they said sure. And I I was at an alternative school, it was not too hard to kind of double up my classes. So I I finished school in eleventh grade, got out. My parents were all set on me going to college, so they were having me look at colleges and things, and I was just dead set against it. I was like, nope, I don't want to go to college. So we hit this kind of impasse, and what they said is I said, No, I want to go to I want to go to London with you, and I want to try to find Al Stewart and play guitar for him, and I want to, you know, join a rock band and be a big star. And I had these you know grand dreams, and bless them, my parents were willing to humor me a little bit, and they said, Well, you know, we think you've got talent. Um we'll give you a chance. We'll give you one year. You can come to London for one year and you can live in our house and we'll feed you and you know, keep you off the streets, and you get out there and hustle. If you get a record deal in one year, you don't have to go to college. Wow. If you don't get a record deal, your side of the deal, then you agree you're gonna go to college. I said, That sounds like a fair deal to me. Yeah. Which really was. So I went over there, I answered an ad in a in a thing called a Melody Maker, which is kind of like the village voice. So they had classified ads in the back for musicians. And somebody told me that that's what you do if you want to find a gig as a musician there. And I saw this ad, and the guy said he he was looking for a youthful acoustic guitarist, must be able to play lead and rhythm uh for a band that's going to be touring, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, That's me. I'm a youthful guitarist. I'm 16, 17 years old, you know. And uh I called the guy up and he said, Well, who, you know, who are you? What are you doing? I said, Well, have you ever heard Al Stewart? He said, Yes. I said, Well, I sound like his guitar player. I remember, I remember the conversation. He's like, Oh, okay, well, you better come down and audition then, and we'll see. So I came down and I auditioned, he liked it. I joined the band. Actually, Pete Hamilton, who I referenced earlier, he was in that band as well. He was the accordion player in that band. That's where we met. He wasn't the guy, he wasn't the main guy. The main guy turned out to be a bit of a confidence artist and trickster. Um but he was talented in his own way and convincing, and he bamboozled four or five people into joining his band on the premise that we were going to be doing this big tour opening for John Martin, who was a pretty well-known folk, sort of folk rock artist. His best song was his best-known song was May You Never, which Eric Clapton covered. Anyway, John Martin did have a tour coming up because I checked the Melody Maker, and I was like, unbelievable. I've been here a week and I've joined a band and we're going to be opening for John Martin. And look at the places we're going to be playing. I couldn't believe my fortune. You know, I'd I'd made it. Well, I worked on this guy's songs. We, you know, we were learning his original music. I liked the music. It was interesting. And about two weeks later, he announces to the band, well, there's been a change in management. John Martin has a new manager now, and they want a different opening act for the tour, so it's it's not going to be us. But don't worry. I've got other things in the works. Just keep working on the music. Then it was going to be the roaches were going to tour, and that was going to happen. That didn't happen either. So I learned rule one about the music industry is never believe anything anybody tells you. It's probably not going to happen. Um, you know, only only trust what you've done yourself that you know that you know is for real. But it was a great apprenticeship because the guy was super confident. And you're 16. I was I was actually 17, I think, by the time I arrived. I was 17. And the rest of the band was in their mid-twenties or so. So I had a lot of time on my hands because we weren't gigging all the time. It was, you know, maybe every once a week, a couple times a week. And you're playing in clubs, playing in pubs, yeah. Pubs, some colleges. It really like, I mean, I was literally making like you know five or ten pounds for a gig, which even in the eighties, it was not that much money. It wasn't nearly enough to survive on. But it was good training for just learning how to like face rejection. Because we were going in with this kind of weird sort of acoustic experimental music, facing crowds, some of whom did not want to hear that. Um and you know, it was it was good. But I had a lot of time on my hands. So while I was at home, I started just for fun, just started reading my father's philosophy books. And I got into it. I was like, this stuff is interesting. And as time went on, I started to kind of miss being around people my own age and having a social life because the band I liked the band, but they were older than I was, and they were kind of in a different place in their life for the most part. And I think by the time the year was up, I was I was ready to be amongst people my own age. So by the spring, when it was clear that we hadn't gotten a record deal yet and didn't look like maybe we would, my parents were like, Well, you have to start applying for colleges.

SPEAKER_03 33:30

Well, I think that was uh clearly their best idea for your future, right? Is to have something to fall back on. Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

So I got into Columbia University, which is the Columbia College of Columbia University, which was very good school, and I liked the idea because it was in New York, and I knew that that was a hub of the music industry. So again, I was only doing this to humor my parents, but but you know, if I had to go to college, at least I could do it somewhere where there were recording studios and managers and record labels and things like that. And uh so I got I got to New York and I remember just before I went off to college, my dad said, So what do you think you're gonna major in? And I said up philosophy. He's like, Well, what do you want to do when you finish college? I said, Well, be a rock star. You're just making me do this for four years, and then I'm back to trying to get a record deal. He's like, Well, so you want to be a musician? I was like, Yeah, I've wanted to be a musician since I was 10 years old. He's like, Well, don't you think you should study music? I said, But dad, I I've had some theory, I've I play you know some instruments, I I know what I'm doing. I don't rock star doesn't need to go to college to learn music. He's like, Well, it wouldn't hurt. Maybe you should at least minor in music. So I said, Okay. You know, I said, I just I just want to be a rock star. He said, Why couldn't you be a folk singer? I said, because folk singers don't make any money. Even though I'd sort of started out in folk, and that's really what my parents like. I said, Folk singers don't make any money. Well, we were both right. I mean, you know, he said, uh just just consider it. Ironically, of course, my father was right about everything. I mean, I minored in music, so all the theory and ear training and composition stuff that I did is incredibly useful for the work that I do now as a producer, and even as a musician, it was really helpful uh years later for for everything that I did. And of course, I did wind up more or less becoming a folk singer for a while after all. And I kind of got to live my dreams of being a rock star a little bit by eventually meeting Al Stewart and touring with him and and and getting a little a little taste of the uh the sort of rock star experience. So, you know, it all sort of worked out. But there's a little more to the story in terms of how I wound up leaving music and going into philosophy.

SPEAKER_05 35:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

Which is I finished my degree in 1986, and amazingly, some of the people who had played in different bands with me over the years at in college and even before, called me and said, What are you gonna do when you finish college? And I said, I'm gonna try and get a record deal in New York. They said, Well, you need a guitar player, I'll come and play. You need a sound guy, I'll come and help you. And I wound up putting together a band of basically some of the best people that I'd worked with in those years kind of leading up to it, two of whom were guys that came over from the UK, including Pete Hamilton, who I've referenced once before. He he moved to New York in order to play in my band. So that was an amazing and beautiful thing. People believed enough that that maybe I actually had a shot at this that they were willing to gamble and come and were these people also that you met through your university studies? Absolutely. One of them was a guy named Martin Lewis, uh really nice guy and great guitarist who I met at Oxford. I spent my junior year of college at Oxford and we had a band there that was very active, and he was the guitar player in that band. So he again he said he'd finished his degree at Oxford and he w he could be a mechanic. He was a mechanical engineer. I mean, the guy was working at Rolls-Royce building aircraft engines. He said, No, you know, I really want to try the music thing. So he moved to New York and uh to be in the band. The irony about all of that is he wound up eventually living here in Davis, California. He lives five minutes from me. No way. And has retired from a career in civil engineering, and we've recently started playing music together again. Well, that is yeah. Yeah, in fact, I just saw him yesterday for a rehearsal. So thirty, forty years of connection. But he lived here for years, for a number of years, while I was touring with Al and we didn't play together, but now we're starting to play again.

SPEAKER_03 37:21

Al's names come up a couple of times, and of course the uh stories that you regaled us with down at Song Camp are very compelling, and I gotta ask the connection with I think it's more affection to begin with that you had for Al Stewart's music.

SPEAKER_02 37:35

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:35

Uh tell me a little bit about that. Aaron Ross Powell Okay.

SPEAKER_02 37:37

Do you want to circle back though to what happened with this with this band after college? Because there's more to that story. Do you want me to do that? No, let's let's continue the college story and the evolution. And then I'll I will I will get to the Al Stewart part. So I put this band together with the help of these amazing friends who came to the name of the band. It was called the Press Gang, sort of half English, half-American, and the British Navy used to press people or impress them into the Navy by basically finding people who were drunk in a pub or something and knocking them out, and the next thing they know they're on a ship and they had to be in the British Navy. So we we thought the press gang was kind of a strong, strong name for a folk rock sort of band. Anyway, we had very, very big dreams and um The band lasted for I don't know, a year, year and a half, something like that. But as I said, two of the guys were from the UK and they were on tourist visas, so they couldn't stay, they wound up going back. We had this idea that we were gonna, you know, make a demo tape, get signed to a label, and become huge. Of course. Doesn't really work like that. We didn't think we were gonna like work in the clubs and pay our dues and work our way up in all of the things that you really have to do. So after two years or so, the band fell apart. It kind of went from a six-piece to a four-piece to a three-piece to just me. And I was looking for a manager and maybe a producer. I thought that's what I needed. It was like a manager who could help me get somewhere. Instead, I wound up running into a guy who was basically a con artist. It was becoming a theme. I was I was just gonna say there's a theme in the music industry, right? Yeah. And I won't give all the details, but the long story short is he can he claimed that he wanted to manage me and said that he was gonna, you know, put together a demo and a promo package and all this thing and take it to the labels. And instead, what he did is he managed to wheedle me out of money, and even a couple of friends who invested in me and wound up, you know, having to lose their money, which I paid them back eventually, but it was a very discouraging, expensive lesson, and just yeah, it was just horrible. I kind of lost my sense of what I was doing. And I basically decided I was getting out of the music industry. I mean, just wanted nothing to do with it. But I'd had a very good time when I was at Oxford, where I was really focused mostly on philosophy, and I thought, you know, gosh, being a professor, that sounds like a a nice quiet life and you know, none of this horrible shark tank business of the music industry. And uh my girlfriend now wife uh was finishing her undergraduate degree and getting ready to go to graduate school, and I didn't want to lose her, and I thought, well, if I could apply to graduate school while she's applying, we could just both go to graduate school together. So it didn't quite work out that way. She's much smarter than I am, and uh she got a full a full ride offered to her at Stanford, and I got into Davis with with some support, but not uh not a four-year fellowship or anything. And uh we looked at the map and thought, this is gonna be tricky, but if we were in Berkeley or that area, we could just commute outwards. So as soon as she graduated, or just before she graduated, I I proposed to her, and we got married the summer after she graduated, so we were children basically, and we moved to California, and you know, it's a big, a big change. But at that point, I kind of also wanted to get as far as I could from the con artist in New York and everything. I just wanted to leave all that behind, start a whole new life. I I I wasn't even gonna play music, I wasn't even gonna play much a dramatic lifestyle change. It was and and and that didn't stick too long. I I thank goodness, yeah. I couldn't I couldn't really not play music, but I hadn't, you know, I was like, I'm not gonna play, I'm not gonna perform, I'm not gonna do anything that would have any commercial potential, I'm only gonna play just for fun. And you know, I I went into grad school very excited about a new start. And I loved the first couple of years. I loved all my coursework. So we commuted outwards from El Cerido, but the earthquake hit. It was 1989. So when the earthquake hit, her commute suddenly got ridiculous to Stanford because the bridge was down, the high freeway was closed, and she was not as well suited to her department as I was to mine. Neither one of us was exactly in grad school for the right reasons, I think. She was doing it, I think, partly because her parents were in academia, and that was kind of expected that she'd probably go on to do, you know, further studies, and she didn't have anything else she was burning to do at the time. I did it because I was running away from the music industry, seeking a safe haven. And yeah, so we both kind of went into it for different reasons that weren't necessarily the best, and neither one of us was completely happy with our experience there. Anyway, after some soul searching, she wound up leaving with a master's because it just made sense, and we didn't have to stay in the Bay Area anymore because she didn't have to go to Stanford. So we moved to Davis. That was in 1991, I think. What was her studies at Stanford? She was doing human ecology. Okay. So it was in the anthropology department. And, you know, the first couple years, as I say, I was loving, loving my coursework, everything was good. Then it got to the stage of dissertation. And it got a make it or break it time. Yeah. Yeah. And I always tell people, you know, if you want to get a PhD, that that's that's a great thing. But you have to really have a good reason for it, and you have to be really passionate about what you're doing. It's the same thing I tell people going into music. If you want to try and make a living doing music, you have to really almost have no alternatives, and you have to be so committed that you're willing to give up everything else in your life. Because if you're not, there's plenty of other people who are, and they're the ones that are gonna do it. And so we moved up here, and that was a good thing. I love Davis. And Jen went into environmental consulting for a while, and that was good too, because she she was good at it, and she did pretty well, and she was actually our primary breadwinner for a number of years when I was in grad school. And I eventually sort of ran out of funding from my department, but I started teaching community college, which I liked. I always liked the teaching side of it. I didn't care much for the research side. And as I slogged away at my dissertation, I mean, it took me eight and a half years to get that PhD, I realized that I really didn't want to teach at a research institution. I if I was gonna do anything, I want to teach community college where I could just focus on the teaching. But even that was really hard. I mean, when I when I got my PhD in '97, there were something like fifty jobs in philosophy nationwide. Five zero. Yeah, and 2,000 newly minted PhDs that were coming out. The odds were not good. Especially for somebody whose heart it really isn't in it. Because by that time, I had drifted back into music. And basically the digital revolution had come along and it was no longer necessary to deal with record labels and managers and all of that stuff. And I was like, well, if I could do music without the industry, that's a whole different thing.

SPEAKER_03 43:47

Your time had come.

SPEAKER_02 43:48

Yeah. And I was just very fortunate about that. And and I discovered there was this whole world of like independent acoustic artists, people like Michael McNevin, who were out there doing this stuff. Part of it was I went to a little Festival called the Napa Valley Music Festival, which is where I first saw Michael McNevin, I think, actually. Um people like Chuck Brodsky Chuck Brodsky and Michael, who had established themselves as you know independent singer songwriters without labels and without big management and all that stuff. And I saw that it was possible and I was like, wow, this is this is maybe what I need to be doing. And, you know, I was lucky that my spouse was very supportive. That doesn't always happen, but you know, as I was finishing my my degree, my PhD, I started to look at, you know, jobs going on the market, as they say, and I came back from an interview in Jen and I talked and she was like, Well, I don't really want to move. I was like, Well, I don't either. But I have to because I'm not gonna get a job here. That that doesn't usually happen. She's like, Well, but I like I like my job, and you don't really want to be doing this anyway. Maybe you should just try doing music. I was like, Yeah, but you know, that's is that realistic? And she's like, Well, you could try it. If it doesn't work, you could go back to trying to do philosophy. And you know how lucky you are to have this woman in your life, right? I do, yeah, I do. And yeah, and so I you know, I'd already been playing locally, uh, you know, kind of while I was doing teaching community college and working on my dissertation. But I, you know, totally ramped up my activities, did my first tour going up to the northwest. Uh, we didn't have kids at this point, which made it a much easier choice. And she like I said, she was doing quite well as an environmental consultant, so we we knew it would be it would be doable for you know, wasn't making much of anything as a graduate student uh either, so it it wasn't like a huge gamble. It wasn't like I was giving up a lucrative career somewhere else. I got into it, I got serious about it, I started touring, I started getting into some songwriting competitions and winning awards or going out to compete, and um it just it started to grow. And and um then eventually I wound up meeting Al Stewart, which we'll talk about at some point, and um that again kind of raised my profile in a different way, and um one thing led to another, and then we started a our family in 2002. My daughter was born, and and s not too long after that Jen realized that it was just too hard for her to kind of be doing the work she was doing and do what she wanted to do as a mom. And um we were able to kind of make that transition so that she stopped doing the the environment consulting work and I started doing the music as as our support and kind of been doing that ever since. And and um She's uh I mean she's also a a potter, she's also an an artist, so she was able to kind of have a little more time to to do some of that. Is there a kiln in your home? There is, yeah. Yeah, not a not a gas kiln, an electric kiln, so the smaller, smaller one. Yeah, she's got a little studio.

SPEAKER_03 46:44

Nice. At Song Camp at Cambria, the Pacific songwriting camp with Michael McNivan and Carolyn Tester, thank you very much. Your song, The Loyalists, and Spinoza's Dreams introduce a lot of good information through music that I would imagine, oh, myself included, I would have never been introduced to hadn't they been put to uh some great lyrics and some kick and ass lead guitar.

SPEAKER_02 47:07

Well, and Spinoza's Dreams, some some of that kick-ass lead guitar is actually not me. It's uh my favorite one of my favorite favorite guitarists in the world, a guy named Tim Rennick. Tim Rennick. That's like Renwick, yeah. He played with uh Al Stewart back in the in the day in the 70s. Okay. Um but he also went on to play with Pink Floyd, played with Elton John. I've heard a few of these people. Yeah, he's he's not a household name, but he should be, because he's I think he's probably one of the people that that influenced Mark Knopfler, who's another favorite guitarist of mine. But I I said to Al's manager once, you know, I I detect some Mark Knopfler and Tim's playing, and he laughed and he said, Well, think about when Tim was playing and then when Mark Knopfler came along, actually it's the other way around. Yeah. Yeah. Um so Tim and I sort of split lead guitar duties on the Spinoza's Dream album, but man, it was just such a gift to get to work with him.

SPEAKER_03 47:52

Trevor Burrus, Jr. The idea of of historic songs uh maybe I'm um not phrasing a lot of songs about history. Songs about history, thank you. That's something I'm not familiar with. I mean, I grew up with some some uh as a child, some Davy Crockett and a couple of other songs, but nothing in the popular song stuff.

SPEAKER_02 48:09

So where do you think The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, there's uh The Battle of New Orleans, I guess. There's a few, but they're they're they're they're usually one-off, sometimes they're funny songs, sometimes they're it's it's definitely not a a genre unto itself exactly. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 48:22

Is that something that you were doing uh prior to uh working with uh Al?

SPEAKER_02 48:26

Aaron Powell Not exactly, but because I I was a huge Al Stewart fan in my teens. So I literally dreamt of playing with him when I was when I was in my teens. So I was very influenced by by his music, including all the history stuff. I probably tried my hand here and there at it, but you know, it's it's not easy to to write good songs on historical topics. He's he is truly the master of that.

SPEAKER_03 48:47

Aaron Ross Powell But you introduced the The Loyalist uh as being sort of a family-related song uh to talk about that. And it was fascinating. And I'd I'd it this may be uh one of the songs that I'd like to feature in the uh podcast place. But could you tell me a little bit about what drove that what was that a prompt? Uh learning something about your family?

SPEAKER_02 49:07

Well, it's actually my wife's family. It's uh about her great, great, great, great, great great grandfather, something like that. His name was uh

The Loyalist

SPEAKER_02 49:14

Adam Bauer, or I think it was actually Johannes Adam Bauer, was born in Germany, and uh he came over from Germany in the time just before the American Revolution. He and his family were granted land by King George III, mad King George. And when the revolution broke out, of course their neighbors wanted to fight the British, and he and his family said, Absolutely not, we we owe everything to the king. And it got ugly. He wound up actually literally losing an eye. Um Yeah, I mean they they beat him up. It was it was it was pretty bad. But they they and they fled. They were basically driven, they had land, far successful farms in the Carolinas, but they had to flee because it wasn't really safe to stay there, and they wound up fleeing up to Nova Scotia, which is where a lot of the so-called loyalists, people who remained loyal to King George III, went. Unfortunately for them, the land up in Nova Scotia is not great farming land. So it's good fishing. Well, it was good fishing at one time. Yeah. Very beautiful place to go. But he and his family managed to survive up there in Nova Scotia. And to this day, there's still he had, I think, can't remember the exact number of seven or ten children, something like that. And you know, they each had five, six, seven children, because that's how people did it in those days. So there are still some some Bowers, uh including um one of uh Jen's aunts and one of her uncles are up there. Um, and there was a Bowers like sporting goods store, and so there's a line in the song, I see my name all over town, from the shop signs to the graveyard, and that literally was inspired by me visiting Shelwer, Nova Scotia, and seeing the bower name on some of these things.

SPEAKER_01 50:44

I see my name all over town from the shop signs to the graveyard. I've wandered here two hundred years through every generation Sometimes I wonder Do they ever think to be a distance figure from the past Musk of a head stone Just a piece of just a free How did my story fit so fast I am a lovely Our crops were in Oh undressed We heard the hoofbeats in the twilight We were told horses and gold We need it for the insurrection No side Whose bright is what I say Black Risplay I am Revolution Freedom This is King George So once again We had to flee Tella Taking just one week of every I'm not seeing Try once more Well These rocky shores the rock Build on farms in this new country Like dancing fingers We did the letter Twinkle Climbing Land by Shelf State Move on I am What happened since this was Jen's family, what happened, what was the trigger that caused you to want to dig into that a little bit more?

SPEAKER_02 54:51

Well, one of her distant cousins or something wrote a book, which I guess some members of the family dispute how accurate is, of course, uh kind of the Adam Barris story. And and having been to Shelburne a number of times, which I really loved uh in Nova Scotia, and then hearing this story, I was like, man, that should be a song. And of

Getting to know Al Stewart

SPEAKER_02 55:08

course, by the time I wrote that song, I was just getting to know Al Stewart and starting to work with him a little bit. And just having listened to his music for years, I thought, man, that's that's like an Al Stewart song or something. That should be a song. So I tried my hand at writing it, but it it was such a complicated story. It wound up being about 19 verses and and not very good. And uh I was kind of stuck, but I really wanted to do it. So I called Al, who was at the time living in um San Rafael, about an hour and a half from here, not not too far. And um I said, I've got this historical song I'm trying to write, but I'm I'm really stuck, and I wonder if you might be able to help. And he's oh, come down. And so he invited me to just come down to his house and and we literally sat in his kitchen and started coming up with ideas and and started writing it. And it wound up being I mean, it's probably more more me than Al because he we we got a uh I think a verse and maybe a chorus and um well there isn't really a chorus in it, there's just sort of a refrain, but we we had basically like two verses started and he was kind of like, okay, now go go work on it. It's a bit like graduate school. So I I went off and you know, did my thing, worked on it a bit, and then came back and and we rewrote it some more. So it was it was a team effort, but but it definitely was was um you know it's you can definitely hear some somehow in there.

SPEAKER_03 56:27

So as a teenager uh you were uh imagine lying in bed one night listening to music and all of a sudden Al Stewart songs came on. So tell me a little bit about the genesis of all of that.

SPEAKER_02 56:40

Well, I mean, I was I guess so 77 was his big year. That's when that's when Year of the Cat came out, early 77. So I would have been 13, something like that. And I gotten a radio by then little, you know, clock radio or whatever, listened to the big top 40 station and whatever. And that song came on, and I remember what really captured me about the song was the way that it went from an acoustic guitar solo that I really liked into an electric guitar solo and then the saxophone. But I particularly liked that acoustic guitar solo going into the electric solo. Found out years later that actually both were played by Tim. Oh Tim Rennick, who we talked about earlier. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Tim. And um I just I loved those solos and I love the production on it, just the sound of it. I mean, I liked the song too. It has some wonderful imagery. Um but I didn't buy the album. I don't know why. I just I wasn't I don't even know if I had a record player at that point. I just was listening to it on the radio. About two years later, this the uh album Time Passages came out, and by then I had a stereo system, and I as soon I think either somebody gave it to me or I went out and bought it, but I got that album, and when I got it, I just you know ripped it open and I listened to every track and I started learning all the songs. And I just got kind of obsessed, and then of course I went and got You're the Cat album, and then I went back and got all this early stuff, and I literally went to the library to find who's who. Because he wasn't the sort of artist that people really knew much about. It wasn't like Rod Stewart, where you know everybody s knew what he looked like, and there were all these stories of things that he'd gotten up to and things he'd done. I mean, he was just kind of this voice that was everywhere, very distinctive voice. Um and the you know, the songs themselves were really big. But I didn't know much about the guy himself. So I went to the library and I found who's who and I looked him up. And I learned that you know he was British and born in Scotland, but grew up in England. So for all I knew, he was still living in England. I I didn't realize this, but about the time that Year of the Cat came out and he started to get big, he moved to LA. Been in California ever since. So it's funny because when I was moving to London with my parents, I was thinking maybe I would go find Al Stewart over there, but he wasn't there, he was in California. Yeah. Little did I know. Um anyway, so so that was the the beginning of my my Al Stewart obsession. And I used to literally have daydreams about playing guitar with him. I'm not sure why. It just it was a thing. Did you read the music or did you just learn to play it by ear? I learned it by ear. I have I still have somewhere, I think, a songbook for one of his albums that I don't know where I acquired. I don't know if I bought it or if somebody gave it to me. I picked it up by by ear.

SPEAKER_03 59:12

For somebody who would love to learn how to play the guitar, watching you play uh and knowing that you did it by ear, I'm just truly amazed. So that's enough gushing on my part. But uh Well Jesus Christ, man.

SPEAKER_02 59:24

Again, you know, probably thanks to my father for uh encouraging me to do that minor in music and doing all the ear training and theory that I did. That's probably what enabled me to be able to sort of pick things up and you play keyboards as well, right?

SPEAKER_03 59:36

And Al Stewart music has some keyboard.

SPEAKER_02 59:39

Yeah, although playing with him, that wasn't really a keyboard gig. We were touring as a duo, as an acoustic duo, so it was mostly playing acoustic guitar. I played violin uh sometimes with him. I played accordion occasionally, uh may have played bass once or twice. So I you know kind of used used all the arsenal uh occasionally.

SPEAKER_03 59:55

But those are very different instruments. So uh let me go back a little bit. How did you you picked up the guitar first or were there keyboards?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:04

Again, my parents uh I owe a lot to them. They for some reason they knew I loved music, and when I was in kindergarten or something, five years old, they found this this um class called Orf Lessons. If you've heard of the composer um Orf O-R-F-F. Not familiar. I think it's Carl Orf. Um he developed like a system for teaching young children music, but it's not um teaching a particular instrument, it's more kind of learning how to read notes and time values and that kind of thing. So I remember we did a lot of stuff with the kind of handbells and wood blocks and just very basic sort of the building blocks of music. Um so I'd have these orf lessons when I was like five or six, and when I went to learn piano, it it came a little quicker because of the orf lessons. And I didn't like piano lessons myself because I don't think the teacher was bad, but the music we were playing was kind of dumb and annoying. And so after like a year or two, I I quit piano. I didn't stick to that. So that was actually first was piano. Then uh I wanted to impress a girl in my school and knew that she liked the Partridge Family and David Cassidy and thought that if I could play guitar, that might win her heart. Uh didn't work, but I thank goodness learned the guitar. And so I started playing when I was like eight years old. Um and doing that. And then in fourth grade I took up violin because we were allowed to to pick up like a stringed instrument for orchestra. So I started playing violin. I wanted to play viola, but I wasn't big enough because they made you reach around the end of the the scroll of the the the instrument to see if your arm was long enough. And viola's larger than violin, and I was too small. So they said, We're gonna start you on violin. So I did. Out of necessity, right? Yep, and but I switched over to viola in uh junior high school or something like that. And I still I still love playing viola much more than violin. I play I play both, but I don't play either particularly well. Um, you know, I hear people like David and Laura and so forth from Late from the Train, and it's like, yeah, okay, that's how I want to play. But uh but I I do okay. And and um so I've yeah, I've played so I so I started playing violin at nine. Um I heard uh Deliverance and you know there's a real banjo craze when I was like ten or eleven, so I had to get a banjo, so I got a five-string banjo and took some lessons on that. I I don't really play that much anymore at all because it's I just it's one of those instruments where if if you get the hang of it with the right hand and the picks and everything, it it can be very cool, but I don't have the patience to to relearn, so I'm really not much of a banjo player. And I I think I pick up the mandolin when I was 13 or 14. I had a a great uncle by marriage who was actually a professional mandolin player, and I met him uh when I was like 12, and he put a mandolin in my hands, and because it has the same strings as a violin, but it's fretted like a guitar, I was able to figure it out pretty quickly. And he's like, Okay, next year I'm gonna send you a mandolin. And he did. He sent me a little student mandolin, which sadly, yeah, it was super nice. Unfortunately, that got stolen in the great thievery of 2002 or whatever, along with some other instruments. But I've got I've got another mandolin now. So I play, you know, play that again, not as well as I'd like to, but but a bit. Do you do you uh like Marty Stewart's music? Oh, yes, he's phenomenal. I don't I don't really know all of his work, but I've I've heard him and playing with other people too, and he's just a monster great musician and great singer.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:20

And like yourself, he started out very young on the stringed instruments.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:25

The the 10,000 hours is is real. I mean, I think you anything you want to do, you you have to get those in somehow. And if if you don't start when you're young, it's kind of hard to catch up. Not to say that you should ever let that stop you, because it's never too late to start. And some people are just naturals and they pick it up late in life and they just they take to it. And songwriting, I will I will say songwriting you can start at any age. Never too young or too old to write a song. And I've taught songwriting workshops with kids. I've done a lot of work as an artist in schools, used to do a lot with second and third graders. Um, but I've even worked with little kids and you know, kindergartners and stuff. And I I had a grant for a number of years from the city of Davis to do songwriting with elders. So I worked in nursing homes and retirement communities. Oh, wow. I have an album called Holy Smokes Ice Cream for Breakfast. That's all songs that came out of out of that project, all songs written uh with elders in nursing homes and retirement communities. And there's some great songs on there. I I think it's on Spotify and stuff. If it's not, it should be.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:22

We'll definitely check that out. But I like that title, Holy Smokes. That was one of the songs. I've often said that. Holy smokes, ice cream for breakfast.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:30

So uh moving uh back towards uh conversations with Al and uh or about the relationship that developed there, and uh from what I understand from your your presentation at uh Song Camp, um you were relentless.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:48

Yes. Well, yes and no. I mean it was a combination of how I met Al was a combination of preparedness, a little bit of relentlessness, a lot of like chutzpah or boldness, um and luck and timing. It was it was all all those things.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:05

As with a lot of things that uh create success in your life, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:09

Yeah. Usually it it's some combination of all those things. So the very short version is that um yes, I I wanted I wanted to meet him, but I I didn't actually go and like chase him down or figure out that he was living in LA and like camp outside of his house with a boom box and playing my music or something ridiculous. Instead, when I was uh in England, when I was going to school at Oxford for that year, um my and my parents were in London, um, I wound up going to see him for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall. And I went down to try to meet him earlier in the day, and I didn't wind up meeting him, as it turned out, but I did meet his guitar player at the time, wonderful Peter White, another one of my favorite guitarists in the world, um, who's a phenomenal player, m mostly known for smooth jazz at this point, but he got his start playing with Al. And I met Peter, and Peter was very kind. And even though I lied my way in to meet him, he didn't have me thrown out. Ten years later, I met Peter again after an Al Stewart show in San Francisco, and he remembered me from the Royal Albert Hall after ten years. After ten years. And he said, you know, see, sometimes you just have to be bold. And then I insanely asked if he would jam with me, which I, you know, was totally nuts. That's the Hutzpah part coming in, as well as lying my way in to meet him at the Royal Albert Hall. And again, I was very lucky because he was kind enough to say yes. And he sat down and played with me. And luckily for me, he liked what he heard enough and was impressed enough that he decided that unbeknownst to me, he was about to leave Al to go solo and do his own thing. He liked it enough that he was willing to recommend me for an audition. Wow. Yeah. So that's how I got the audition. Now you you jammed after the concert. After a concert in San Francisco. Yeah. He was signing autographs out in the in the lobby. In the lobby? In the actually in the in the main room where people were seated. He just had a table out there and he was signing autographs. And I got near him and he said, I remember you. And yeah. So thank you, Peter, for that for that amazing break. I didn't actually get the job right after that audition either. Oh really? No, because it's reality. It's not uh it's not a movie. Um no, I was their second choice, and they they picked um a another um guitarist who's an amazing, Lawrence Juber, uh, for the job, and and he got the job. But I I guess I was a close enough second that Al and I stayed in touch and I became kind of the sub. When Lawrence couldn't do it, they called me. And when Al moved up to San Rafael, um we just started to sort of hang out and and little by little we got to know each other. And so when eventually Lawrence stopped touring with Al, um I by that time I'd sort of gotten to know him more. Um I sort of worked my way into the the gig.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:58

Does Al still live in uh San Rafael? No, he's back he's back in LA. Oh, he's back. Okay. Yeah. All right. So you guys uh still uh visit with one another from time to time?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:08

Not really. We we we talk occasionally. Okay. Um yeah, he's he's actually back touring and and pretty busy. I think he's on the East Coast right now.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:15

So he's got this young band called the Empty Pockets that he's that he's touring with, and that seems to be going great. Um so I'm I'm happy that he's that he's doing that. I kind of stepped away from it in 207, 16, 17 because he was talking about possibly retiring, and that made me nervous because I wasn't ready, couldn't afford to retire. And um so and I also realized like I I kind of needed to focus on doing my own thing, um so that at some point I could really do that. And and so I didn't stop playing with them altogether, but I s I stopped kind of keeping my schedule clear for him. And and so over those couple of years we played less and less. And then he found this young band and they started playing with them more and more, and then by 2019 we really were pretty much just each doing our own thing. But I mean, uh they called me in what was it, 21 or 22, to come back and play. I mean, it was last summer, I think, to do one show with him in Saratoga. And you know, I'm certainly happy if they call me again if I'm not playing another thing myself. Um happy to come back and and play the occasional show if it if it works out.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:22

Being a family man at at at this point, um, what was it like touring? Um that had to be a challenge. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:29

Well, I was I was touring before I was a family man because I got my PhD in ninety seven, and and that's when I started touring in my own right. Then I sort of met Alan, started working with him around 2000, 2001, really started touring with him about the same time my daughter was born, 2002. But I was already touring a lot in my just on my own at that point, on a smaller scale, of course, but I was out there, I was gone a fair bit. So it wasn't anything for for my kids, it wasn't anything new. I was touring pretty much all of their lives as they were growing up. What's been new and kind of odd has been the last couple of years when I haven't been touring. My daughter uh left, she graduated high school in 2020, um, so right in the thick of the pandemic, um, got into very good school. She's at Wellesley now. Um but you can brag on her. I can brag on her. I'm super proud of her. She's she's amazing. And she's also very musical, too. Okay. Just a very different style than than my than my son. She's she's got a little less of the performer gene. She does perform and she's good, but she's less of a natural performer, a little more of an introvert, very analytic and and and super smart. And she um decided she didn't want to risk going off to school across the country and finding out that she had to come back and do it all online or whatever in her first year. So she did a gap year program up in Portland, which was great, working with some different nonprofits, doing some some good in the world. And um then she started her college year after that. So but she's been more or less out of the house for most of the pandemic, I guess, because of that. So I've been home, but she's been gone. Which is which is kind of turned. Which is kind yeah, it's uh it's kind of sad because like all the years she was growing up, I wasn't around much. And in these last years I have been around a lot, but she wasn't here for all of that. Um but I've been here for my son during his junior high years now and and some of his high school. Um and so yeah, it's been I mean, it is not an easy thing to combine touring with parenthood or any kind of family, really. Um and it hasn't, I mean, it hasn't been the easiest thing in terms of my marriage either. I mean, we've been married now since 1989. It's a long, long time. Um and you know, I think to some degree it worked pretty well because my wife is a bit of an introvert and she definitely likes having time to herself. She's an only child, and I grew up in a family with two brothers and a lot of people around, a lot of hubbub. And I think having me gone was not always the worst thing for her. Um having me home for three years is another matter. Um, I think you know, we've we've made it work. Hey, we're still together. It's it's it's all good, and and it's a constant we're constantly working on it because it's a it's always a work in progress.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:23

That's absolutely necessary.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:24

But I also realize that for some spouses, having somebody who's gone ha you know 40 percent, 50 percent of the time is kind of a deal deal breaker. Sure. And it wouldn't work for them at all. So I think it's it's been it's been a mixed mixed blessing, but you know, I think we each f kind of find our own path. And it's just it's the path that we that we found. It's hard for me to imagine bit things being any different.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:47

Yeah. Jen, if you're listening to this, please feel free to call me and we'll have a counterpoint interview. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:54

You can interview her on another occasion. Um, I'm I'm tremendously grateful that that she's put up with me for all these years. And I I it would have been, I mean, I'm trying to imagine like if we if we hadn't been together, especially with kids, how that all would have worked. Parenthood would have been really hard. So it's it yeah, it's been interesting. And I don't know going forward how I how I feel, because I I don't think I want to just go back to doing everything I was doing in the before times. Um I I I I don't see just oh, it's just all gonna go back to normal, whatever that was. My normal was probably most people's abnormal. But uh, you know, not that that was so bad, that was good, but I sort of feel like I'm maybe I'm in a different time in my life now. And it and that's not to say I don't want to perform or possibly tour or get out there and do things, but you know, maybe a little more selectively and maybe less frequently, and maybe you know, finding ways to prioritize family you know, in ways that I wasn't before.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:55

Sure. Well, in in in discussing our um our plan for a house concert in April, um your son's concert came up as a as an important issue. And I'm I'm glad we were able to work out you know something because you know the family is absolutely critical, and especially if you have a a performer in your family, they like to know that they're being supported the same way that your family supported you, right? So it's uh it's your turn.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:22

And I missed, you know, it's I mean, all those years of touring, I missed a lot of a lot of with both my kids. I missed performances and birthdays and other other things like that. And so I'm trying to as much as I can to accommodate that. And and and he he is a busy little fellow and and has a lot of performances and things, so I can't necessarily make everything. But but where where it's possible, and especially where I have nice people that I'm working with and putting together events and things like that, like yourself, who are willing to be flexible and understand, if I say, you know, I've got this thing and it would be nice if I could be there for my son. Absolutely. That's that's a great that's a great thing. And that is that is one of one of the um things that I that I've that I've enjoyed the most about not doing the Al Stewart touring anymore, as much as that was a wonderful time in my life, not having to sort of drop everything because they say, hey, we just got a a run-in for the East Coast and you need to have these dates free. You know, I had to miss a lot of stuff for that. And that's again, I don't regret that. That's all part of the the trade-off you make. But I do, I do very much appreciate now having the flexibility to kind of say, no, I'm not gonna do that then because we've got this family thing happening.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:32

It's good to be in a position to be able to do that as well. And uh and that's that's the life that you've created. So good for you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:40

Trying to, yeah. And and and you know, a lot of what's allowed that to happen has been the fact that I have the studio and that I'm able to work here without having to run all over the world.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:51

Yeah, or we're in the studio right now, and I gotta say, it's cool. It's got everything you could possibly need, and it's uh and it's it's it's minimalist uh and and it's perfection.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:01

It's not not not not not fancy and and most of what I do is in the box. You know, I I love I've recorded my own albums I've recorded elsewhere with with other producers and engineers, because I I don't like producing myself. I think having someone else with the objectivity adds so much in that collaborative process. Again, working with other musicians. Yes, I play bass, but I don't play bass like Taras Pradaniak, the guy who played on my last album, who you know, sort of Richard Thompson and sort of Wayland Jennings and people. I mean, you know, he he really plays bass. So it's if I can get people who are better than I am to elevate the game and have someone else on the other side of the glass sing, no, Dave, that was not it. Let's go for the 23rd take and try it again. Um that's gonna get results that are far better than anything that I could do myself. So it's it does seem ironic that even I even though I'm using the studio to produce other people, I'm not I'm not doing my own records here. Um there's a there's a good reason for it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:04

Are there local studios that you work with?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:08

There are not. Um I have in the past, a long time ago. Most most of the records I've the last three records I did were the first one was down in LA with my friend Ronan Murphy. And again, it's really largely a question of finding a producer, and often it's producer/slash engineer that I want to work with. So that was done in LA. Um the Spinoza's Dream album was done in Wales with Martin Levan. Wonderful. He was um Andrew Ludweber's sort of engineer and sound guy for years. He said, Yeah, no, he's he he's a cat. And again, it was a complete fluke that I managed to get him. No kidding. Because a very good friend of mine down in Southern California who's British went to college with him. And and and I was at his house once and he was saying, and he and his wife, they're good good friends of mine, um, Phil and Gene, and they've been involved in one way or another with the last three records I've done. And and they said, Oh yeah, we've got this friend Martin, he's got this amazing studio in Wales, and they were showing me pictures and telling me about it. And I was like, Well, that's great. I could never afford that, but boy, that would be amazing. And then when I found out that some of the musicians who'd worked with Al Stewart back in the day, like Tim Rennick, were willing to play on my record, and I'd I'd sort of uh, you know, in the film where they'd say attached an actor, you know, I'd sort of attach them to doing this project. I knew they weren't gonna come to the States to do it. So I had to record over there. So I reached out to my friend's friend Martin, and I said, you know, I know this is a long shot, but I'm a friend of Phil's and I want to do this record, and I've got these amazing musicians who are up for it, and I don't know if I can afford you, but here's what I want to do. Take a listen to my record and see if you think you'd be willing to work on it. And he was. Luckily, he said yes, and he worked it out, and and it was an amazing experience. And then I came back in whatever the I did the last record, it's it took a while to make, I think it was 2018 or so, Cerulean Sky. And that was done in LA. Again, kind of a fluke of a friend of mine that I'd met while I was working in a recording studio in New York back in the days, right after college. Um, he was just cutting his teeth as like an assistant engineer then. Um, we reconnected through Facebook. He's got the same birthday as my son, and I'd seen a post from him, and I noticed that, and I sent him a note, and then I found out that like he'd been working as an engineer at Capitol Records, and he'd been working with, I mean, he'd done stuff with Frank Sinatra. I mean huge, huge stuff. And we had this long conversation, just kind of caught up after all these years. And I was thinking about my next record, and I knew I wanted to use some musicians who were in LA, like Michael Jerome, the drummer from Richard Thompson's band and better than Ezra, amazing drummer, great guy too. And I knew I wanted to work with Michael and some people down there in LA. And so I called Bill Smith and I and we'd had this huge conversation. I said, I know this is crazy and I probably can't afford you, but would you consider producing a record for me? And he said yes. And um, he did an amazing, amazing job. Cerulean sky.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:54

So it's beautiful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:55

Yeah. So I've been I've been fortunate. So I don't know. I think I may think about another record, and I don't know where it's gonna be. It probably won't be around here, though. It'll probably be either Los Angeles or New York or maybe even Nashville, which I've never never tried before. Yeah. But it but I'm sort of thinking that just like these last few records where the universe kind of threw somebody in my path that was the right person, um, that will probably happen. Maybe, maybe I'll go back to one of those people, or maybe it'll be something something new that happens and I'll suddenly reconnect with somebody and go, oh my goodness, this is this is where it needs to happen.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:31

Yeah. Well, uh you know, being able to um take advantage of the technology uh makes it a little less daunting, I in my from what I understand, uh, you know, able to get the high quality uh from uh uh smaller spaces, uh people at distance and things like that. So do you find that being in the studio together uh has a better synergy overall, though?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:59

Yeah, and that's again, most of the work I do here, because as you can see, I don't really have a lot of room for drums and things like that. Um everything's kind of done in the box, and if I want real drums, I have to send files to a drummer and have them send the drums back and I mix the drums in. Um the records that I've done, certainly the last three records particularly, were all done with the rhythm section, the bass and the drums live in the studio um to really get that that live vibe. In fact, the Spinoza's Dream Record, we did most of that without a click track. Um because that's how they did it in the 70s, like when they did Year of the Cat. Um so there was no, yeah, we weren't on the grid, um, which led to some headaches later for Martin. But you know, on the other hand, it does have it's very human. It doesn't sound mechanical at all.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:46

Um so for those of us that uh don't know uh a lot of the jargon, what is a click track?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:51

Ah it's basically an electronic metronome.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:54

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:54

So you know how you play a set of metronome to 120 beats per minute or whatever, and you follow that. If you if you record to a click track, the good news is everything winds up kind of on the grid, and it's a lot easier to edit and move things around. Um also it just stays in time. Which I mean you can record to a click track, and with a good drummer, they can play a little ahead of the beat or behind the beat and things like that, but still they're really right around where where it goes. Um if you don't use a click track, if you have musicians who keep really good time, mm that that can be fine, but probably you're gonna wind up with the songs you know speeding up a little by the end, or maybe maybe more than a little. And again, some people would say, that's that's cool, that's just music.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:36

It's you know? Yeah. Well, I learned something new about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:41

So uh Whereas most most modern pop, if you listen to sort of the you know, the Lady Gaga or you know whoever you want to name in the sort of pop world, um almost all that stuff is done on the grid and it's done to click. And so it has it's very precise, but maybe it lacks that sort of human touch that comes from not being quite so precise. So it's it's it's a trade-off.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:05

Do you have um any of your own music that was recorded live?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:10

I have one album that was a live album. I don't think I had it at camp.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:14

Uh it's called Snapshots. Snapshots, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:16

And I'm not always a fan of live albums, but I like I like that one because it it was definitely a snapshot. It was a moment in time. It was a strange live album because I'd I'd only done one album before that, Candy Showers, the first album. Okay. And it was about a year and a half after that I decided to do a a live recording, and it was all new songs. So it wasn't like songs from the first album in live versions. It was songs that had never been recorded. And most of those songs for years were never recorded in the studio. They were only on that live album. So there only was a live version. So that's a collector's item, right? It kind of. But in re in recent years, and on the last couple of albums I've done, um I felt like some of the songs were good enough that they deserved like a studio treatment. So I revisited um I think Thing of Beauty was on Cerulean Sky, which which um was the last album that I released, and and that was only for a long time it was only on snapshots. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:10

Yeah, I I listened to that a lot of the others on Cerulean Sky. In fact, accident of birth. Can you tell me a little bit about that one?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:19

You know, it's just I kind of like to say it's a so it's sort of a tribute to my parents. Okay. It's it's really just about how um the first line is I won the parent lottery. Um and you know, that is kind of how I feel. Um it's really about how luck plays such a huge role in where we find ourselves in life and how sometimes people forget that and I think especially um politically for a number of years, there's kind of this narrative of, you know, if you're successful and wealthy, it must be because you deserved it. If you're uh poor and struggling, you must have done something to deserve that. And in fact, my firm belief is that that people don't always get what they deserve, and so much has to do with the time and the place where you're born and what you're and what circumstances you're born into. And that people don't get to control that. That's absolutely for better or for worse. And and if we're if we're fortunate enough to have been born into good circum to comfortable circumstances it behooves us to be aware of that and and and hopefully ha carry some gratitude that we're that our luck was was good. I mean, I feel lucky that I grew up in a in a time of of relative peace. That's not true for most of human history. I never had to go to war.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:42

I mean, uh that's it's the luck of the draw, you know, when you just happen to be born in the world.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:46

And where? And where? I mean, if you're born in Rwanda right before the time of the genocide, yeah, that's just terrible, terrible luck. If you're if you're born into a you know, royal family somewhere, yeah. Well, that can be challenging in its own ways, I guess. But but but I'm just saying, like whatever wherever you find yourself throughout the the whole history of humankind, this is pure luck. So I even have a line in the song, you know, I might have grown up living in a cave.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:16

Timing. Right. Yeah, timing is everything. And their song Grateful that follows that uh is almost like a continuation, you know, of that thought.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:26

Yeah, it's nice that those are actually I forgot that they're sort of uh together on the album, but but that's the Grateful's actually an old song, which was on the album I did with my brothers. It's on the Threads of Time album. Okay. So it was recorded back in 2000 whenever that was, four maybe. Um but I wasn't totally happy with that version, and I really want but it's a song that probably is more requested than any of my songs. Um it's been covered by a few people, it's t I've gotten amazing emails from people who told me that you know they listened to it while they were getting their cancer treatments, I mean all kinds of things. And so I really wanted to have a a really good recording of that song, and I'm so glad we finally got it produced by Bill Smith and and made a few little changes in it too. It's a slightly different version than the than the earlier one, but I think it's I think it's for the better.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:14

Aaron Powell How does that feel when somebody who's either been through or going through trauma in their life to say what you've done has helped me?

SPEAKER_02 1:27:23

Aaron Powell It's everything. I mean to me it's worth the all the Grammys in the world. If if if if a song f has like reached somebody and changed their life and made things a little better for them or made them feel like they're not alone or or you know, taught them about something they'd never thought about before. I mean, who knows? Now you're gonna go off and read Immanuel Kant or David Hume. And you know for sure. You may decide to go back and get another degree in philosophy, you know. Um and and all inspired by by discovering David Hume. Um you just feel like that that's amazing that that if something that that you create in your own head writing a song has That effect and and actually can help people for the better.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:04

You never know how far the ripple effect is going to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:07

Right. And I don't kid myself to think that I have some enormous reach or make such a difference, but you know, in a small way, if I can if I can make a difference here and there, it's that's well worth it. It hasn't been in vain.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:18

So in my own uh journey to learn how to to write and express myself through music, um the thing that uh puzzles me is why? Why do I want to do this? And so I I've asked uh I ask a lot of people that if if So let me ask you, you you've been doing this for all of your life for for the most part. I mean you're writing a song uh like fifty years probably, yeah. Fifty-eight.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:47

I started when I was yeah that's terrifying.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:50

Can can you put into words why uh you're driven to do this?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:56

I think it's probably because I think all songs are different and they're for a lot of different reasons. I think it's probably over it would be oversimplifying it to say it's always for one thing. I mean, I've I've written hundreds, if not maybe thousands of songs in in my life. Um you know, certainly when you start out, a lot of times it's just you, you know, you you think somebody's really cute and you want to have a relationship with them so you write a song, or somebody breaks your heart and so you write a song. So you're just kind of processing your emotions or or thinking you're going to impress somebody with a with a song. Um I think it for me it's partly just kind of how I communicate and and and maybe partly how I learn about myself, I guess, because sometimes the things that the bubble up for songs are the things that actually are in my subconscious and I wasn't necessarily explicitly thinking about them, but and of course I also I write and record custom songs, so that's one of the other things I've been doing since the pandemic hit to uh keep the lights on here at Knackville for uh all kinds of occasions, and that's been amazing, some really like actually very moving and powerful stuff, also some pretty fun stuff. I've got a song that I recently wrote that I've that I I may even record at some point just like on one of my own albums because I like it so much. Um it's a guy who has uh a bunch of dogs, hired me two times now to write a song for his dogs. And before that, yeah, he'd hired David Wilcox to write a song for his dogs. And and uh so the most recent one, yeah, I played it down at Songcase called Must Love Dogs. And and I just I I love it. I get a real kick out of it. Oh, it's absolutely it's very fun, it's touching and it's funny.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:38

Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:38

But it was it it was it started out as an assignment.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:46

A long time ago, I followed him home at the time my human was living alone. He took me in, we've been friends ever since. Sometimes he seems kind of sad. Over the years, I think it's grown more. Tingle in the leash, we charge out the dog. But a man needs a woman a dog. I would take out this time you could be shocked, you could be jumped, could be rich off.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:46

So um yeah, most of the songs I write, more often than not, tend to be for things like anniversaries and birthdays, are probably the big ones. Sometimes weddings. Uh I've written bar and butt mistress songs for nieces and nephews uh and my own kids. Um I certainly can handle that. Um pretty much at retirements, um, all kinds of things. And you know, I mostly I like it. Some sometimes it drives me crazy. It's it's challenging. It's like writing a a newspaper article or something. You're you're writing with a very specific goal. Um but I kind of like the challenge of that. Yeah. Have you ever uh been stumped? Oh, many times. Yeah. I mean sometimes sometimes I get really stuck and it's usually once I get it started, it's fine. But sometimes I just can't find a way in and I can't find an angle, and it's it's very frustrating sometimes.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:38

Aaron Powell Is there a uh a technique uh with writing songs that you've been commissioned to do um where the words come first or the melody is uh come first?

SPEAKER_02 1:32:50

Right. There's the old chicken and egg argument about which comes first, the melody or the lyrics or the chords or whatever. Commission work, I would imagine it's because of the way my mind works, uh it usually kind of all comes at once. I I don't often write lyrics without some sort of music in my head. There's usually a melody, and when I'm hearing the melody, I'm usually hearing chords behind it too. So it that it it it's almost like a package deal. And then I can go back and change one one part or the other. My focus, of course, in the commission songs usually is the lyrics, because that's the that's the brief. Um I don't worry as much about the music. Usually the music kind of takes care of itself and I can find something that works. Sometimes I have to write a few different drafts, but if I've got a set of lyrics ready and the client is happy with the lyrics, I'll send them, you know, a quick phone recording of the music, and if they don't like it, I'll just do a completely different form of music and I'll give them three or four. You know, here's the tango version, here's the country version. What do you like? Here's a reggae version. We can make it minor, yeah. It's put it and make it a wall. Um that's not a problem. It's it's really coming up with the words. And for that, I just have them send me lots and lots of stuff. And and I mean, if you peek over at the music stand, I would you know, can't share any of that, of course it's all private, but uh that's that's stuff that I printed out from a custom song client, and um you can see like he sent his notes on stuff, and then I had a phone conversation, a Zoom conversation, we s and I scribbled side notes on there, and now I've got to like carve out some time to sit down with that and just really like bang through it and try to brainstorm and see if I can find a theme and tie things together, and it'll all so you are available for custom songs.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:30

All right. Yeah. Although although my focus lately has been less on the custom songs and more on just producing people, either usually albums, but sometimes EPs or singles. Um and you know, usually it's original music, but it wouldn't have to be. It could be somebody who just loves to sing and wants to do you know, an album of their favorite cover songs.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:52

That sounds like a fun day. Yeah. And and it can be, and and again, if they're if they're local or semi-local, they could come and work with me here. I haven't the last couple of years I haven't really been doing that, but um I think I'm ready to start again having people come in. And um if they aren't local, that's fine too. I have clients in England and Germany and Canada, East Coast, and you know, all over the world, so it doesn't it doesn't have to be local.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:20

Well I was uh looking at a map from the host that uh that hosts this uh podcast and uh it's called Buzz Sprout. And uh the map they show you a map of where all the downloads are. Ah, right. And uh there's a boatload of them for whatever reason in Europe and um cool uh South America and um uh also the Far East. Wow. So uh anybody who's listening there, yeah, reach out to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:49

Just write write me a note, Dave at DaveNack.com.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:52

That's the best thing. Just send me an email. So um all of the information it will be in the show notes, uh so the hyperlinks for you know getting to your albums, your uh uh any place that uh uh might have them available. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:05

And uh and I have two websites, both of which have some information about custom songs, but the website that's more about the studio and basically I'm I'm trying to create a place where creativity can come to play. Oh, I like it. In all different ways. So that includes like the the online songwriting uh lessons that I do, the the studio, uh I teach at some songwriting retreats and camps and things, like the one that we met at, the Pacific songwriting camp. And you'll be in West Virginia soon, right? I will. We're doing a camp which is a combination of recording and um songwriting. So uh my my partner in that, Ronan Murphy, is an amazing producer and engineer, and he's been teaching recording boot camps for years. Okay. And so uh it's it's this is really his his baby in a way. Um I was kind of late to the party, but we started doing the songwriting thing as uh with that um a couple years ago, and and it's an amazing opportunity because people who are sort of home recorders who also write songs can come and they can do as much on either side as they want to. So you could come and just do songwriting, or you could come and just do recording engineering, or you could come and do workshops in both, in whatever uh blend you want to. So there are multiple tracks that can be available. Yeah, yeah. And and um Ronan's a wonderful teacher. And there's also going to be some other great mentors there as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:19

Okay, what's the name of that uh retreat?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:21

It's called the Song and Sound Retreat, but I think the website for it is just recordingretreat.com. Okay. Even though it's not just a recording retreat, it's a songwriting retreat. And anybody listening to this, if you sign up for it and you use the letters N-A-C-H, NAC, looks like Natch, uh in your subject line when you apply, you get a hundred dollar discount. Why not? Yeah, tell him I sent you.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:42

Dave sent you. Excellent. Thank you very much. So that's coming up in May. So yeah. Okay. And um, for those of you that are listening to this uh podcast in uh 2025, uh it's it's happened as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:54

It's already happened, but hopefully we'll do it again. That's right. Oh, and the and the and the website for um all things knackville related is just knackville.com. So it's N-A-C-H-V-I-L-L-E. And there is information on there about custom songs and the studio, and there's samples, there's some videos.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:11

And uh well that's where I listen to uh quite a few of the um uh live stream events that you've done with other with other sponsors for other causes and uh and we have one coming up here in March.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:26

Uh to benefit Animal Refuge in Portland, Maine.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:29

Well, I have a fan in the Portland area who is a big fan of the of the Animal Refuge League. And and last year uh I was out there, I guess in the fall, and she had me do a uh an actual concert, like kind of like a house concert, okay, which benefited the Animal Refuge League. And so we were talking a few weeks ago and I said, Yeah, I was thinking of doing a another live stream in March, but I haven't got a sponsor yet, and da da da da da. And she said, you know what, I'll I'll sponsor it. And then I said, Well, you know, we could make this a a benefit for the Animal Refuge League. And she's like, Really? Cool, why not? So 18% of the donations will go to the Animal Refuge League. I chose that because it's kind of a Jewish tradition to the Jewish the Hebrew letter high means life, and so it's also the number 18. And so 18 is considered a lucky number in kind of Jewish folklore. And so when we do donations and things like that, we have to do multiples of You gotta be kidding me.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:24

Well, uh it's funny, I was gonna ask you off. It's kind of an odd number, right? Why eighteen percent? Why not twice? Well, again, you've you've taught me many things during this conversation. I appreciate that very much. Um so what's next?

SPEAKER_02 1:39:40

Well, I believe I have a house concert coming up in real life in April. So I'm really super excited about that. Because I've I have not been really playing live gigs much at all. Um and I'm coming down to a really nice guy in Fremont. Um it's it's the last Sunday in April, is that right? That's correct. Yeah. It's coming up. Keep all these dates straight. Um, it's gonna be a private private event. But uh I am very much looking forward to that. And I'm hoping maybe, maybe to bring some of the musicians that I've been starting to play with from here, including my friend Martin, who I mentioned earlier, who played in the press gang in New York with me all those years ago. May see if I can drag him along to play guitar.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:21

Well, uh after talking about them all afternoon, now he's gotta get them. Yeah, exactly. Well, that would be wonderful. And uh for anybody who's listening here that uh knows me personally, please reach out if you're available for that uh for that concert, but you'll be seeing a lot of it on uh Facebook and other um uh social media being promoted. It's gonna be a fun day.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:41

What else? Well, I was I was gonna say um I am gonna be probably starting to tour this this this year a little more. So if people are interested, one of the things I really love doing is concerts that have a charitable component. So if there's a cause that's dear to your heart and you think you would like to use my music to help raise some money for that cause, there are lots of creative ways to to make that happen. Um and you know, it really doesn't matter where you are, if if we can figure it out, I'll I'll come to you. Um and it doesn't have to be this year, maybe it could be the next year. But I'm I'm starting to to to get my courage up to get back out again and and play. And if it's and if it's local, I'm I'm hoping to get this kind of little band together and uh be able to do some stuff, especially outdoor stuff that would be more in this in this region in Northern California. Well it's uh So that might be the next thing and and and I'm as I said, I'm I'm I'm starting to write some songs and thinking about another album. I had kind of a a long dry spell during the pandemic where I just wasn't writing at all. I just couldn't couldn't really do it, other than some custom songs for for other people. Um but I'm kind of getting over that and starting to to write again.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:57

So Well, the world will be a better place.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:01

Well, let's let's hope so. Maybe some little corner of it will. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:06

Well, Dave, this has been a great afternoon, and uh I want to thank you very much from the bottom of my heart for also for uh introducing me to uh a lot of different artists in your life. Uh but the music that uh that you put out there is uh it's it's lively, it's life-affirming, uh, it's melancholy. There's a whole range of music that you have created that takes you on a journey of your emotions. So if you have an afternoon that you just want to feel things, uh this is the kind of music you want to listen to.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:36

Well, I like to hope that it's a combination of of things that will make you feel things, but also maybe make you think. Yeah, the YouTube channel is a good place to start because if you go to youtube.com slash Dave Knack, D-A V E N A C H, there's a whole bunch of live streams I've done over these last couple years that are all backed up there. So if you're really bored, you can just watch one show after another. Uh but they're all different, they have different themes. They're all very different, yeah. Yeah, so it's worth it's worth checking out if you if you like that sort of thing. A couple of new artists too, just I you know, it's always fun to discover things and share them. Um two artists that I've discovered, kind of younger artists that that are fun. I mean, other than like Late for the Train, who I discovered at at camp, who are wonderful. But uh a couple other young artists that I that I've been listening to lately that are fun. It's a woman in Carcy Blanton. Um, she's playing pretty big venues, but she's out of uh Philly, and I think she lives in New Orleans, and she's very brutally honest, uh, Frank sort of stuff, but but fun too. So she's she's and I'm just a great singer. So she's cool. Carsi Blanton. And then there's a guy uh named Theo Katzman, who I just discovered, who was in the who is in the band Wolf Wolfpeck, who you might have heard of. They're kind of instrumental. Well, they were instrumental. Anyway, amazing singer, real high voice, great guitarist, and just incredible musician. Um great, great stuff. So Theo Katzman and Carsi Blanton are a couple of people you might not have heard of. You might want to check out.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:56

We will definitely listen to them on the way home. All right.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:00

Thank you so much for having me. This is this is great. This is my first first, but hopefully not last podcast. Maybe I'll get inspired and start doing a podcast myself. I was gonna say I listen to a lot of it. Clearly, anybody can do it. No, that's not true. That's not true. You're a you're a natural at this. This is good.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:16

Now we just need to get you a wider listenership. Yeah, there you go. Well, now that I have you uh promoting it, I'll help push it out there. You're listening to Gramps Just Make Shit Up. Great, thanks.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:37

We have full for my teachers, and I'm gonna sometimes stay. I'm grateful for this day. I'm grateful for this day, and I know that will be still getting to come. I'm grateful for this day. I'm grateful for this day. I'm grateful for this day.

unknown 1:47:58

I'm grateful for this day.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:04

Well, that cool intro jingle that you heard at the beginning of this episode, plus this outro music was written, recorded, produced by the ladles. Write that down. L-A-D-L-E-S. I met Lucia, who plays fiddle, Katie on the guitar, and Caroline on the banjo at the mud puddle. Now that's a local music venue here in Niles, California. Their harmonies were just mesmerizing, and I had to ask if they might consider doing a jingle for me. And here's what they said.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:31

You gotta be kidding me?

SPEAKER_03 1:48:33

I'm gonna share more about them on the next episode, so thanks for listening. I have to go now. It's time for my nap.