In 1997, Buffy Sainte-Marie founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. She has won recognition and numerous awards for both her music and her work in education and social activism. We spoke with Buffy about the release of her CD “Power in the Blood”.

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Introduction, Power in the Blood

Viv: It’s our great pleasure to be talking with Buffy Sainte-Marie today for Art of the Song. Buffy, thank you so much for joining us from Ottawa, Canada.

Buffy: Thanks a lot.

Viv: We’re celebrating your new release “Power in the Blood”. It’s a wonderful album, and as we’ve all come to expect and know and love about you, you deliver message and connection through just a rockin’ CD.

Buffy: Thanks. It kinda moves, doesn’t it?

Viv: It does. It really kicks. I’m fascinated by your association with A3, Alabama 3. 

Buffy: Oh, were you aware of Alabama 3?

Viv: I did some research on them so I was vaguely aware of them.

Buffy: Well, some people might not recognize their name, but if they ever watch The Sopranos, that great theme song, “Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun”, right? 

John: Of course.

Buffy: Whoa, they are just a powerful group of musicians. Although they’re very different from me stylistically (some people might be surprised about such a collaboration), we’re mutual fans and what I did was I re-wrote one of their songs which was pretty violent. Their song was saying, “When that comet comes, I’ll be ready for war and cut you limb from limb” and this stuff and I thought, “Oh, this would make a great peace song!”. So they thought that was pretty funny, but now that they’ve heard it, they’ve said, “Yes” and now they understand it. So we’re mutual fans.

Viv: You re-worked the songs–did you change up lyrics or did you just re-work the delivery?

Buffy: No both, I re-wrote it as a peace song. My song says “And when that comet comes, I will say ‘No, no no no no to war'”. Both versions, both their lyrics and mine, they’re both about the racketeering that’s kind of generalized in our world today. Everybody’s got some kind of racket going. In other words, real estate or war or GMO or whatever’s coming down. Their approach was to say, “I will be ready for war” and mine was about “I will say ‘No no no’ to war”. Mine says things like “No time for spin doctor’s medicine from corporation, government selling me some cover-up. Weaponizing pesticides, poisoning my groceries, everything a license you can buy and sell.” It’s basically their song “Power in the Blood” kind of updated and relocated to a lot of the issues that people are concerned about throughout the world including North America.

Viv: Is that a common practice–just to sort of grab somebody’s song and say, “This is exactly what I want to say, except I’m going to flip it over and do a 180 on it and do it this way?” Is that something that artists are usually fairly open to having done?

Buffy: You know, I don’t really know. I just know that they like me and I like them and when I heard that song, I asked them would they mind if I do that.

New Album Producers and Song Selection

Buffy: The other songs on my album “Power in the Blood”, all except that one [Power in the Blood] and one other, are originals with me that I wrote. When I was making the album, I knew that the album was, as usual for my albums, going to be real diverse. They were going to be love songs and issue songs and rockers and rockabilly. Kind of high-power everything, whatever it is, intense in whatever it is. I also asked the record company, whatever it is, I said, “There must be some great songs of meaning out there that people are writing. New ones, old ones, I don’t care.” So they sent me a few songs and I chose one other. There was a song that UB40 wrote during the Nelson Mandela Anti-Apartheid years in South Africa, became a huge anthem. It’s called “Sing Our Own Song”. I turned it into a Native American very contemporary version and I used a much-beloved pow wow group named Northern Cree and I used samples from one of their albums. Really, it makes it a brand-new approach to issues that are very contemporary. Again, I changed some of the lyrics to have them fit indigenous people in North America as opposed to South Africa. I hear they like it a lot too. But everything else is original with me.

John: I understand you used three different producers for this record. Explain how that happened and what the effect is. 

Buffy: When I made my last album “Running For the Drum”, I explained to my band that we were going on a two-year world tour and all of the sudden it’s year six of that tour, so we’re on the road all the time playing all types of great songs that audiences had not heard before, either because they were songs written before they were born or they were brand new. Anyway, they hadn’t heard them, so when True North came to me and said, “Do you want to record?” I was just ready. My band was ready, we had the songs ready and the record company said “Well who do you want to produce?” and I co-produced my previous four albums with Chris Birkett, who’s British, and I did want to work with Chris again, but I also wanted to see who else was out there. So, I got on some airplane rides and I flew around and auditioned a bunch of producers and I actually liked three. I told the record company, “Yeah, I like John Levine a lot”. I call him “The Divine John Levine”. He’s from Toronto, but he’s living in L.A. making hit records with Serena Ryder and all kinds of great artists. I also liked Michael Wojewoda, who’s also a Toronto guy. He’s more of a classical and jazz approach, although he did Barenaked Ladies. Anyway, I wound up working with all three producers. What I did was I had my demos that I had made in my own home studio. I played them all for each producer and I let them choose which ones they wanted to work on. So each producer was very enthusiastic and had a personal love for the songs that he chose. Then Michael Wojewoda mixed the final combination to make sure that everything’s at the right level and works well from track to track. It was a lot of fun. There’s a lot of variety in the album. We’re all real proud of it.

John: Are these songs that you wrote specifically for the album or are some of them older songs?

Buffy: Both, really. Like I said, I was on the road and we were doing most of the songs on the album. Most of them we were already doing live and audiences were loving them, so it was pretty easy. “Carry it On”, which I think is my favorite, is just one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written because it’s so positive. It’s about the issues but it’s so positive, it brings us up every night that we perform it. Audiences just love the words. It says, “Hold your head up. Lift the top of your mind. Put your eyes in the earth. Lift your heart to your own home planet. What do you see? What is your attitude? Are you here to improve or damn it? Look right now and you’ll see we’re only here right now by the skin of our teeth as it is. So take heart, and take care of your link with life. It ain’t money that makes the world go round. That’s only temporary confusion. It ain’t governments that make the people strong, it’s the opposite illusion. Look right now and you’ll see they’re only here by the skin of their teeth as it is. So take heart and take care of your link with life is beautiful if you’ve got the sense to take care of your source of perfection. Mother Nature, she’s the daughter of God and the source of all protection. Look right now and you see that she’s only here by the skin of her teeth as it is. So take heart, and take care of your link with life and carry it on. Carry it on. Keep playing. Keep praying. And carry it on.”

Activism, Music for Peace

Viv: Buffy, it sounds to me, it feels to me, like spiritual connection and staying positive like that can be actually one of the most radical forms of activism.

Buffy: Yeah, I think you’re right. A lot of us who came up through the ’60’s, we had the advantage of the student movement and the collective energy of just hundreds of thousands of students who weren’t going to go to the war. They just weren’t going to go. And we saw how public awareness can act as a cohesive connect-the-dots among people. There was tremendous diversity in the ’60’s. You could hear southern rural blues next to flamenco next to four hundred year old British folk songs next to contemporary songwriters. Then it all went away and got genre-fied for a very long time. But now, with the internet, I feel as though, there again, people have enough diverse information available to them, that they can connect their own dots and I think people are getting smarter again. The old rackets, the rackets that still bug people today, have been around for a very long time, probably since before the Old Testament. They’ve brought us some terrible, terrible things like the Inquisition and like the Roman Empire and like colonialism. Every now and then it seems as though the people will be forever defeated, but people do respond I think. And can respond in non-violent ways and make changes. I love Gandhi’s saying, I always think about it when I’m going to perform the song “Power in the Blood”. He said, “There are many causes that I would die for, but there is no cause that I would kill for.” With hair triggers and short tempers and a lot of money to be made in war, I think that every bit of common sense and good feeling and using your brain to figure out alternative ways to resolve conflicts, it’s all very worthwhile.

Viv: Do you think that music is a conduit for peace?

Buffy: I think it can be, sure, but it can also be a conduit for war. Every time that the war machine wants to get us stirred up and marching, those old marches come out. And there are some great marches too. But music is a form of communication and it can be used to communicate anything. I know a lot of Jewish people who won’t ever listen to Wagner because the Nazis used Wagner. They used to broadcast it over the back of trucks when they were doing terrible things to the Jews in Europe. But that wasn’t Wagner’s fault, that was Hitler’s fault. Music, I think, can be a great vehicle for change, including for peace. Yes it can.

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Album Aspirations, Writing past genres, Sesame Street

Viv: What is your hope for this album? Do you have a particular dream for what’s going to happen with it? Or are you simply walking your path and releasing music?

Buffy: Well, kind of both. I hope a whole lot of people get to hear it. Because everybody who’s here hears it, likes it. People are sometimes surprised though. I’ve had an interesting career as a songwriter and a singer in that people usually categorize me according to whatever they were listening to the first time they heard me. If they were in high school the first time that they heard “Universal Soldier”, that’s kind of how they think of me or, if the first thing that they ever heard from me was “Until It’s Time for You to Go” (which Elvis Presley and Barbara Streisand and everybody in the world recorded) or my Academy Award song in the ’80’s “Up Where We Belong”. So people think of “Classic Buffy” in different ways. I’m always surprised when they’re surprised at how diverse my albums are. Randy Bachman is a big fan of mine, and Alabama 3 and I found out Chris Isaacs, and Neko Case and people who come from all different kinds of music will respond to me as a songwriter through their own genres and it often surprises people who like a different kind of music. They’ll think, “I hope she doesn’t do any of those issue-oriented songs” and other people will say “I hope she does!” or “I hope she doesn’t do any rockers” and somebody else will say, “I hope she does”. 

Viv: “I hope she doesn’t sing any love songs!”

Buffy: “I hope she doesn’t sing any darn love songs!”

Viv: Totally stomp our buzz. That’s wonderful. How human to be so diverse and just unpeggable in that way. If you could talk a little bit about how that comes to you: the different sides, the different facets of you that come out musically that express and connect to all of these different genres. 

Buffy: Yeah, it’s more of a natural thing. I always say I’m kind of an overgrown 3 year old. I still write and perceive the world pretty much the same way I did when I was a kid. I’m a natural musician. I remember my friend, the late Chet Atkins; he told me one time somebody asked him, could he read music? And he said, “Not enough to hurt my playing.” So he was a natural musician too, which I think many, many songwriters and musicians are. I found out recently that I’m actually dyslexic in music because I’ve tried three times to learn how to be a site-reader and read notation. It’s funny, I can write for an orchestra but I can’t read it back the next day, so it’s not as though I don’t know how, it’s just that to read music for me is like trying to write with my left hand, why would I bother? So I play by ear and by heart and that greatly informs the emotional content of my music, I think. I never had somebody, the classic beating on your knuckles with a ruler when you’re taking piano; I never had to go through that. As a songwriter, it’s kind of like, if you go to sleep at night, you don’t know if you’re going to have a dream, let alone what a dream might be about. Songs pop into my head very often, just unbidden. They just show up and I’ll wake up at night, or I’m in an airplane, or I have an instrument or I don’t have an instrument, all of the sudden there’s a song in my head. I write in two different ways really. There’s that inspirational thing where the song pops into your head and it’s pretty much a helicopter vision of the song where you know what the emotion is, you know what the music sounds like, some of the words are already there. So that’s what I’ll call an inspirational kind of song. But then, there’s another kind of song that I write, I think, which has really been helped by the fact that when I was at the University of Massachusetts, I got two degrees. I got a teaching degree and a degree in Oriental Philosophy and World Religion, because that’s what I was interested in. I loved studying that intensely for four years. So some songs like “Universal Soldier” or the new words for “Power in the Blood” or “Generation”, which is also on the new album, these are songs that really take some crafting. The way I think about it is, it’s like I’m trying to write a thesis for a professor who doesn’t like me and doesn’t like my topic and I’m still determined to not only get an A+ but to convince the guy. As early as 1962, I guess, ’62 or ’63, I was writing things like “Universal Soldier” and “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone”. I really love the art of the 3 1/2 minute song and I wanted to inform the people in an engaging way. I wanted to not only give them the information, but I also wanted them to enjoy the experience. I’m a teacher and if you have a lesson to give, you want to make it charming, informative, and engaging. You don’t want to give the people the message in an enema. It’s not a matter of yelling and screaming. It’s a matter of having respect for your audience and giving them the information in a way that they’ll enjoy. There are some songwriter skills involved there. The next place that I went to, though, I had a hard time with the Johnson and Nixon administrations and where I went with my music and what I wanted to do with my brains in the world. I went Sesame Street and I went into movie scoring. So there was no way I was going to get any airplay during those two administrations, who did not want the public to say about either the Vietnam War or the theft of American Indian lands and oppression and poverty of American Indian people. They did not want that information on television. I had a big hit record. In 1964 I was named Billboard’s “Best New Artist” and that was the year the Beatles came to America. So I had a big career, lots of magazines and magazine covers and I got to go on the Tonight Show. I did a song called “Now the Buffalo’s Gone” when Harry Belafonte was substitute host for Johnny Carson. He invited me to sing that song. However, when I went back to the Tonight Show, after the Johnson administration had started their blacklisting phone calls, etc., I was asked to just stick to celebrity chat and not talk about the Vietnam War or native issues at all. So, when I went to Sesame Street, I was back in a 3 1/2 minute short attention: be engaging, be charming, and deliver a message that is really wonderful. Sesame Street was just a fantastic experience for me. I was never exploited, I was never stereotype. I wrote some of the scripts that we did. For instance, we did one on breastfeeding. I asked if they had ever done that, because I was breastfeeding my own baby and, sure enough, they did it and it’s still on YouTube. Somebody puts it up, somebody else takes it down. But there’s Big Bird looking over his nest and I’m sitting alongside of his nest nursing the baby and he says, “Watcha doing Buffy?” and I said, “Oh I’m feeding the baby”. He waits a minute then he says, “That’s a funny way to feed a baby.” So I explain to him that not all mothers feed their babies this way, but this is a good way and he gets everything he needs and I get to cuddle him. Then Big Bird does what the normal four year old would do. He goes back to playing. He says, “Oh that’s nice”. And it’s no big deal. So they were like an extension of songwriting for me, Sesame Street was.

BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE #5: Blacklisting, Cradleboard Teaching Project

Viv: Buffy, there’s a lot of things that have happened throughout your career, and it doesn’t feel to me like you have ever taken them as something to hold you back. It almost sounds like it’s been more of an impetus to move forward and find another way of getting your music and your message out.

Buffy: The whole blacklisting thing, I didn’t even know about it. It’s not as though they call you up and tell you, “Guess what? The FBI is doing a file on you.” I found out 20 years later that they had me under surveillance. What a waste of the taxpayer’s money. Here I am goody two-shoes. If you had written to the FBI and asked “Do they have a file on Buffy Sainte-Marie?”, they wouldn’t tell you what was in it, but they would let you know “Yes, we do. We have her under surveillance. We have a file on her.” When I finally did get my FBI files because I was on the radio in Toronto and a broadcaster let me know that he had participated in suppressing my music and had letters from the White House thanking him for suppressing my music, which, in their opinion, deserved to be suppressed. It’s not as though they passed an Act of Congress, it’s just nasty phone calls that a couple of guys make in the back room. They’re not the government; it’s just an administration. They’re only there for four years; they’re going to do whatever they want to do. In my case, they kind of drowned a career. At the time, they did not want people to know. For two years, there was no war in Vietnam. That’s what they were saying. Of course, there was a war in Vietnam and I was talking to soldiers who had been there. When you shoot your mouth off sometimes for a good cause, ok, you get shut up, but it doesn’t turn your brain off. So I just continued my concerts and touring in other countries. But I did continue to work in the U.S., just at a quieter level. Sesame Street was huge. I was basically delivering the same message: Indians exist and make love, not war. Sesame Street was shown in 73 countries over the world. Three times a day. It was a huge audience. Went into movie scoring too. It’s not as though just because I disappeared from the public perception in the U.S. It’s not as though I had quit. I kept on writing. I kept on performing. I kept on touring. I kept on developing my music, becoming a better guitar player. Writing more songs. Being involved in music in a different level and I was really happy about it. I didn’t know that I was being blacklisted in the U.S.

Viv: I just feel like your music and your message is unquenchable. It’s going to come out.

Buffy: Thank you, but it’s funny you’ll notice if you look through, for instance, in Albuquerque, I never did tours through Indian country. I wasn’t invited to do tours in those big theaters that Joni Mitchell may have played or some of my other contemporaries may have played. Because who was it who owned the theaters? Who owned the newspapers? Who owned the television and radio stations? The same people who were cronies of the resource companies who were stealing Indian land and making sure that we remained in poverty and gerrymandering and splitting the vote in Indian country. I wasn’t invited to tour in Indian country. In the U.S., most Native American people today would not know my name. They may have for a brief time in the ‘60s, but I was definitely put out of business in the U.S., especially in Indian Country.

Viv: Would you like to talk a little about Cradleboard? 

Buffy: Just a very little about Cradleboard. Cradleboard really is our classroom partnership program and is on hiatus at the moment. I’m personally working with a lot of universities to teach them how to do the Cradleboard Teaching Project. The Cradleboard Teaching Project was the main initiative of a scholarship foundation that I found in 1969 to put aboriginal people through college. They would graduate high school and not know how to negotiate the path to college. They just didn’t know how to get to a foundation. How to get funded to get to go to college. Even prouder than I am of my Academy Award, I’m so proud to have found out maybe 15 years ago, that two of my early scholarship recipients had gone on to become the founders of Tribal Colleges, the American Indian Tribal Colleges. So that was really nice, you never know you might do some little thing for somebody and they will take that gift and maximize it in ways that you never could have done yourself. So I went to being a scholarship foundation from answering a question that my son’s teacher, after we had finished Sesame Street (I was on Sesame Street for five and a half years with my little boy). So now he was in grade five and his teacher came and said, “I’m required by law to teach this Indian unit and I know it’s bologna, the resources that I have”. So I started helping her by writing a Native American studies unit for grade five, and it expanded into a big partnering program that I ran for over twenty years whereby kids and teachers and community members in a reservation community would be connected with a non-Indian school far away and they would become study-buddies and learning partners about Native American geography and social studies and government and science. Not primarily history, but other things. Core subjects. Now we’re not operating that partnering program but I’m working with a lot of university teacher-education programs teaching them how to do that in their own local communities so that they’ll be doing science through Cherokee eyes. Science through Navajo eyes. Government through Mohawk eyes. Etc. It’s really a great joy to be teaching the teachers of future teachers, who’s curriculum will finally trickle down to elementary, middle, and high school grades with proper, engaging, enriching, fun, multimedia curriculum.

Importance of finding your voice

Viv: Buffy, with all of the work that you’ve done in education and all of your music, and your work on Sesame Street, do you believe that it’s important that everyone find their creative voice and share it?

Buffy: Oh yeah, and what a great question that is, thanks. I told you I’m kind of like a three year old. The first time I saw a piano, I sat down and figured out what it could do, I didn’t want to get up ever again. It became my toy, my playmate. I never did learn how to play barbies. I’m not very good at sports. But, I tell you, music and art, and when I discovered my own creativity, life began for me. Of the hard things I’ve been through, the arts and creativity have been what connects me to the creator. What connects me to the creation?  You know that everybody is creative at age five. You take a bunch of five year olds to the beach and they’re all creative. They make up songs. They make up stories. They use their imaginations and make up dramas and different characters. They make pictures and they dance. Then they enter school and it all goes away. All of the sudden they’re working and it change. That’s why that song “Carry It On” it says “Keep on playing!”. I always tell grown-ups, “You know, that creative kid is still inside you! Go into a dark room with a big canvas and a bunch of paints and don’t even look. Just paint something without looking. See what you get! Or go into a room with a piano and just sit down when nobody’s around. Close your eyes. Don’t even look. Just make some noise and follow your instinct as to what you think is interesting. Creativity is really play. Even in the Bible where it says we are made in the image of the Creator. To me, that really stands out because it’s our green light for creativity. We’re supposed to create our worlds. We’re supposed to create our families. Our communities. Our works of art. Our music. Our songs. That playful sense of creativity is really sacred and inborn in every one of us, I believe. I was just lucky to have held onto it for a lifetime of sharing and continued learning with other musicians. 

John: Wow. This is really what our mission is all about is inspiring creativity so you just hit the nail on the head for our listeners.

Buffy: Oh good! Thank you. Thanks a lot.

John: Buffy Sainte-Marie, thank you so much for talking with us on Art of the Song. 

Buffy: My pleasure.

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Our guest on this episode of Art of the Song is Smokey Robinson. Smokey’s career spans over 4 decades, and he’s received numerous awards including the Grammy Living Legend Award, Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts Award from the President of the United States. He has also been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Smokey Robinson founded The Miracles while still in high school. The group was Berry Gordy’s first vocal group, and it was at Robinson’s suggestion that Gordy started the Motown Record label. We had the pleasure of talking with Smokey about the release of “Smokey and Friends,” an album of duets with some of his favorite singers.

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Viv: It’s our great honor and privilege and we’re just thrilled to be talking with Smokey Robinson today for Art of the Song. Smokey, thank you so much for joining us.

Smokey: Thank you Vivian, it’s a pleasure. You too John.

Viv: Smokey, would you tell us how you got started? We’ve all heard stories, but we’d love to hear them from you. How did you get started in music?

Smokey: If you’re going to go back to when I really got started, it was probably from the first time I knew I could hear as a baby because I can’t remember anything else that would have been my priority as to what I wanted to do with my life since I was exposed to music. There was music in my home. I had two older sisters, in between them and my mom we had music all day long of every day of all kinds that you could think of: the blues, gospel, jazz, classical, all of that was there. So that was probably when I got started with my idea of wanting to be in music. Now, professionally, I got started quite by chance. I was in the right place at the right time because Berry Gordy, who is the founder of Motown, and who is my best friend, was writing a lot of hit songs for Jackie Wilson, who was my #1 singing idol as a kid growing up. I had all of Jackie Wilson’s records. Whenever I buy records, even today, I look to see who wrote the songs. I always want to know that. Berry Gordy had written all the hit songs for Jackie Wilson up to that point. The group that I was with, we were called The Matadors at the time, we went to audition for Jackie Wilson’s managers and Berry just happened to be there that day. Now, he didn’t have to be there that day but he was. We didn’t have to go the day that he was going to be there, because he was turning in some new songs to Jackie, but we were. Like I said, I was in the right place at the right time. It was a God plan. 

Viv: It’s funny how those intersections get, I think, divinely guided.

Smokey: Absolutely. So we sang a few songs that I had written which impressed Barry. It didn’t impress Jackie Wilson’s managers because they didn’t like us at all. Anyway, Berry stopped me afterwards and asked me where’d I get the songs. I told him I wrote them. We struck up a conversation and we became really good friends. About a year or so, year and a half after that, he started Motown.

Viv: And brought you on board.

Smokey: Yes. 

Viv: Do you think that writing your own material so early on gave you a leg up, or was it a disadvantage?

Smokey: No, I think it was a leg up. Berry actually started to mentor me in songwriting when I met him because, like I said, I had at least a hundred songs in a loose leaf notebook from my school years that I had been writing songs, and probably three of them made sense all the way through. I usually had four or five songs in one song because they weren’t talking about the same thing throughout the song. But he started to mentor me and make me know that a song is a short book or a short movie or a short story that has a beginning and a middle and an ending that tie in together. When I met him he started to teach me and I started to learn how to write songs professionally at that point. 

John: What was it like writing back in the ’60’s? What were your inspirations and did you write by yourself or did you co-write with other people?

Smokey: Well, John, I co-wrote with other people but I write by myself also. And my inspiration back in the ’60’s was the same thing that it is in 2014. It hasn’t changed for me. My inspiration is life. And I write about life. And I’m not a moody songwriter where I’ve got to be sad and I can write some sad songs. Or today I’m going to be happy and going to write some happy songs. I can write a happy song when I’m sad. Or a sad song when I’m happy. Whatever inspires me at the moment, whatever I see or whatever touches me at the moment and I want to write a song about it, I’ll pursue that.

John: Do you still write songs today?

Smokey: Oh, all the time man. All the time.

John: Once you’re a songwriter it never goes away, right?

Smokey: Well, I hope not. I’ve gone through spells where it wasn’t happening as rapidly as it happens sometimes but, right now, it’s kind of flowing and I’m doing a lot of writing.

Viv: Let’s talk a little bit about the music business and the recording industry. Beginning your career as a songwriter, you got rocketed right into the music industry. How do you perceive that that has changed over the years?

Smokey: Oh gosh, the music business has done a total 360, Vivian. It’s not nearly what it was when I started. It’s a whole other world now. Right down to how records are being made. Most records are being made at home now and people are making them. There’s a computer (program) called Pro Tools and probably nine and a half out of ten songs that you hear on ten records that you hear have been recorded on Pro Tools. There’s so many home studios now and so many guys that are just doing it in their garages, in their bedrooms, wherever they feel like recording it. If they’re technologically adept in doing something like that with Pro Tools. There’s still a few recording studios but it’s nothing like it used to be. We used to have reel-to-reel tape. It’s very seldom that anyone uses reel-to-reel tape anymore. It’s just a whole other thing technologically. I could be right here right now, you guys are in Albuquerque, and I’m in Los Angeles, and we could record a record right now, together, the three of us. Just make a record right now and have it so that it sounds like we’re in the same place at the same time. So it’s really really really a different method right now. I think there’s a pro and a con to that. The pro is that you have so many choices as to what you can do with the technical aspect of it and you have so many tracks. You could put each string of the guitar on a separate track if you want to and blend it again later on. But there’s something missing from that for me because the last record that I recorded, before this one, in fact the last two, I recorded with the musicians in the studio at the same time I was singing. Because there’s a feeling that happens there. I think that that’s what’s missing from, or for me personally, that’s what’s missing if I record over a track.

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John: Tell us about the recording of Smokey and Friends. How did you do that?

Smokey: Well Smokey and Friends was recorded, basically, the new way. It was. Randy Jackson, who is like a really good friend, I’ve known Randy forever, and he’s a great music man, and Randy is like a musical almanac. He can tell you records that you’ve never even heard of that were recorded in 1950 or tell you something that’s going to be recorded in 2015. He’s so knowledgeable when it comes to music and records and stuff like that. So it was a joy working with him because he’s a good friend. He’s my brother and he’s a great music man. One of the greatest joys for me in working on this record was the fact that normally when I’m in the studio I’m involved with the production and seeing that the arrangements are right and blah blah blah and all the stuff like that. All I had to do on this record was go to the studio and sing. And it was such a comfort knowing that it was in good hands. And all I had to do was go and sing.

John: Wow. How about the guest artists? Did they come into the studio at the same time?

Smokey: No, no they didn’t. The closest I came to that was when John Legend recorded “A Quiet Storm”. He was leaving out of the studio as I was coming in. But I had heard John sing “A Quiet Storm”. About five years ago he was doing a live concert and I heard him sing it. I told him, I said, “John, you should record that man”. And he said, “Oh I’ll think about that Smokey”. It turns out that here, he and I are recording it together. But what Randy did was, Randy contacted these artists, and he said, “What is your favorite Smokey Robinson song?” It didn’t have to be one that I had sang. Just one that I had written. And they told him that. The songs that you hear them singing on is their favorite Smokey Robinson song.

Viv: You’ve affected so many songwriters and so many people through the years. What do you think it is about your music that touches people’s hearts so deeply?

Smokey: You know, Vivian, I don’t know. I’ve written a lot of songs in my life but, if I knew that, I probably would have written triple that amount. But I don’t know. I just try to write a song, honey. When I’m going to write a song, I’m going to write a song. I want to write a song. I want to write something that would have meant something fifty years ago or today or fifty years from now. That’s how I approach it. I want to write a song.

Viv: I’m just thinking about that relationship with the audience that we create as performers and that you have that special bond in a live performance. Can you talk about that a little bit? Surely you play your hits, you play some new songs, do you ever take into account the audience and what they’re feeling when you’re playing?

Smokey: You know something, Vivian? I am so very very very very blessed. I get a chance to earn a living doing what I absolutely love. I love the music world. I love writing songs. I love being in the studio. I love recording. I love playing with all the musicians and the singers and stuff. I love that. My favorite part of my work is performing. Is doing concerts. That’s why I still do concerts Vivian. Because I don’t get that anywhere else. There’s a magic that happens when you’re there with the audience and you’re there with your fans and they’re singing and you’re singing and we’re all having a good time together. You don’t get that…I don’t get that…anywhere else in life. So that’s why I still do it. 

John: Back in the ’60’s there was black music and white music. How has that changed over the years?

Smokey: Well, it’s changed a great deal. I must give the world credit. It’s changed a great deal. There’s not as much of that as there used to be. There’s probably still a little bit of that going on in the way an artist is viewed stature-wise. There’s still a bit of that going on, but not nearly what it used to be. So I’m happy, like I said, the world is making progress. And the world is making progress period. Not just in music, just in racial relationships period. I’ll be glad when we get to the point whereas people realize that we’re all just human beings and we’re all the same. If you skinned everybody alive you would not know who it was. All our organs are in the same place and everything. We all have red blood and there’s only four different types of it for us. When people get past the skin color, then we’re going to be in great shape.

John: Do you think music has played a part in improving race relations?

Smokey: Absolutely. Absolutely I think music has played a part in that.

John: How so?

Smokey: That’s one of my prides, that I’m proud about Motown. We broke down a whole lot of racial barriers when we came out. Prior to us coming out and making music that could be enjoyed by everyone, we’d go places in the south when we first started, especially in the south, where white people would be on one side, black people would be on the other side. White people would be upstairs, black people downstairs, or vice versa. And all this stuff was happening. After they caught onto the music, they had a common love. We’d go back and not only would they be dancing together, or sitting together, or being together, you’d see white boys with black girlfriends and black boys with white girlfriends. The music cut down and broke down a whole lot of barriers.

Viv: So it seems safe to say that music is a catalyst for a better world.

Smokey: I hope so. And I hope everybody starts listening. And fast. 

Viv: Yeah we need it, we need it so deeply.

Smokey: Look around the world and I hope they start listening fast. 

Viv: Smokey, in the world of music, life can get pretty crazy. It sort of fast lane. How do you stay centered?

Smokey: You know Vivian, I never forget my spiritual self. You see most people don’t realize that we are not just physical, we are spiritual beings, you see? And I’m a firm, firm believer in God, and I don’t think that this was an accident. They talk about the Big Bang and all that stuff like that. The Big Bang may have happened but if it did it was God’s will. The Big Bang happened when God said, “Let there be light”. You know what I’m saying? So I’m a firm believer in God, in his creation, and I never forget my spiritual self. And I don’t trip on Smokey Robinson. I don’t think, “Oh boy, I’m Smokey Robinson”. Forget all that. I’m just a man who is blessed enough to be able to live his life doing what he loves and making music, which is what I absolutely love. And so I got that job. God gave me that job so I’m not going to squander it. I’m not going to trip on myself and think I’m hot stuff and all that because it didn’t have to be. But it is. So I’m going to treasure it. 

Viv: Smokey, do you believe that everybody has a creative gift to share?

Smokey: I believe everybody gets a gift, Vivian. I believe everybody gets a gift. It doesn’t have to be music. It’s something. Everybody gets a gift. Some people never discover their gift. Some people never search for their gift. Some people just go along with life and whatever life presents to them, that’s what they accept. But I think everybody gets a gift of some sort. And if you find it, and if you develop it, then your life will be better.

Viv: Thank you so much. Tell us, what would you like us to know about this new record, “Smokey and Friends”?

Smokey: I’d like you to know that I’m really really really excited about it. And I’m so happy because I think that the treatment that has been given to it by Randy and the other artists have made these songs have new life and made them sound brand new to me. I listen to it and it sounds brand new to me. That’s wonderful for me.

Viv: That’s great. Smokey Robinson, thank you so much for joining us for Art of the Song today. We just want you to know how deeply we appreciate your time and your music.

Smokey: Well, thank you Vivian. Thank you John.

The post Smokey Robinson Interview appeared first on John Dillon & Viv Nesbitt.

This is John Dillon and I’m Viv Nesbitt. Welcome to Art of the Song Creativity Radio.

John: We all have a song to sing. 

Viv: At Art of the Song we use the word “song” as a metaphor for the unique gift each of us has to share with the world. 

John: Each week we bring you music and the stories of people who have discovered and share their creative gifts every day.

Viv: We all have a song to sing. We hope this program inspires you to sing yours.

“You have to make your musical statement. To take your risks that your audience is either going to go with you or not. No matter how much publicity and promo you do. You just have to make your musical statement and not really care too much about what anybody else things but know that you have to love it because that’s what matters. Because you have to look back on that and say, ‘I loved what I did. I meant it.’ And move forward.”

Diana Krall

Viv: We’ll start the show today with the opening track from Diana Krall’s 2014 release ‘Wallflower’. This is California Dreamin’.

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Viv: It’s our great honor and privilege to be talking with Diana Krall today. Thank you so much for joining us, Diana, for Art of the Song. 

Diana: Thank you. It’s a privilege to speak with you both.

Viv: Thank you. Diana, your career reads like everyone’s favorite fairy tale in terms of the names and the people and the places where you’ve played.

Diana: Oh yes, for sure. 

Viv: And I know that it came with a ton of hard work. Can you tell us how you got started?

Diana: Where do I? In the words of Alan & Marilyn Bergman, I guess I started at home. I was listening to a lot of music at home and everybody played piano. I discovered jazz when I was in high school jazz. I didn’t ‘discover’ jazz when I was in high school but I discovered that I could play jazz in about the eighth grade that I could improvise on a Joe Zawinul song “Mercy Mercy Mercy” that we were playing in my high school band for a competition and I lost the music to the song and just kept going and played the solo on the roads in the stage band and my band director said, “Just keep playing!” Then my band teacher phoned my mother and father and said, “I need to talk to you about your daughter.” And they asked what I had done. So then he started giving me Bryan Stovall, I just saw recently, he actually started giving me Bill Evans records, and Miles Davis records. And I had got with a teacher who showed me what 2-5-1 chords were and the jet patterns. I was about fifteen years old but I was improvising way before that and playing by ear and listening to Fats Waller and early American music from the 1920’s and ’30’s before that. But I didn’t really get into hearing ‘My Funny Valentine’ and getting into Miles Davis and Bill Evans and that era until I was about fifteen. Didn’t really answer your question, did I? And then, ‘turn the page’, chapter two. I know it’s a long, boring story.

Viv: Oh, hardly. What we’ve heard from folks is that it’s so helpful to know that everybody started somewhere. 

Diana: Well I did, I applied for grants. I was going to Berklee College of Music, but most important time, I think, was when I applied for Canadian Arts Council grant when I was nineteen and I had someone there. I was going to go back to New England Conservatory and I had the opportunity, I met Ray Brown in the summertime before I was supposed to go back to school through Jeff Hamilton, and they came up to my hometown to play with the L.A. Four and then I met Monty Alexander. They really encouraged me to come to L.A. and I wanted to study with this pianist who played with Billie Holiday named Jimmy Rowels. So, I drove down in my Toyota Tercel with my dad from Nanaimo, British Columbia to Whittier, California where I rented a room from a friend of a friend and started studying with Jimmy and Jeff and John. I was nineteen years old and I was very much like that character in Bridesmaids, that Kristen Wiig where I had my old broken down Tercel and I have to pull up to the fancy country club to play my three hour pre-wedding gig and pulling up smoking a cigarette wearing a Laura Ashley dress and spiky hair. So we all got to start somewhere. At the same time I was trying to play. I was hanging out at that age at Dantes and meeting other people and really listening to jazz musicians like Kenny Kirkland and getting a chance to hear the people that I only heard on record at that age. If I was a mom and my kid was nineteen going down there and doing that, I’d be freaking out, but I had a lot of people looking out for me. And still do. Jeff Hamilton and John Clayton still look out for me. How nice is that?

Viv: And now, you’ve been moving on through the great American songs, all the way through the great jazz and now, with ‘Wallflower’, you’re featuring songs of our age. So you’ve got, Elton John, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Eagles, Mamas and the Papas, how did you come to select the songs?

Diana: Well, I decided to work with David Foster. We both decided to work with each other after many years of knowing each other. I really made it clear to David that I didn’t want to do a jazz record. That I worked with Tommy LiPuma and I’ve done every record with him except for “Glad Rag Doll” which was with T-Bone Burnett. Let’s do something that is not a jazz record, I said to David, “Ok, you’re going to produce, be my producer, produce! Give me a song!” And he said, “No. No, you figure that out.” And I was like, what? Ok. So he said no and he was right because he said I think that you’ll choose songs that are more meaningful to you if you choose them. So I said, “Ok”. So we came in and started with ‘Desperado’ and he had it on the piano and it was the very first day and he said, “I’ll just play it and just sing it.” And I said, “Well, I know it from Linda Ronstadt”. I listened to a lot of Linda Ronstadt. And it just turned out fine. It just kept going from there, picking songs that I knew that I liked that I knew the lyrics to that meant something to me at that time. We just started working. Singing and playing, just happens kind of naturally. I kind of know very quickly whether something is not going to work for me. I don’t think I can really sing anything that I haven’t experienced or found something of myself in. I can’t really do that.

Viv: So that personal connection is tremendously important for you if you can’t just climb up and interpret a song. It has to have some kind of deep meaning.

Diana: Yeah. I’ve only had a couple songs in my time where I’ve felt that there was a misjudgment to do them. I think maybe one. One or two. I’m really a lousy liar. I can’t. It’s hard if I can’t feel it. And I think audiences know that too if you don’t. I’ve been actually on stage where I’ve passed having the feeling for something and the audience kind of laughs and I’m just like, “You know, I just can’t sing that line anymore, I just can’t do it!” And I try to make a joke out of it. Then I’ve gotten past it as well, but most things have pretty much stayed with me.

Viv: That was Diana Krall singing “Desperado” from her 2014 release ‘Wallflower’. This is Viv Nesbitt with John Dillon. You’re listening to Art of the Song Creativity Radio.

John: So you’re a great interpreter of songs. What’s the process like? You have a song that you’ve heard other versions of, how do you give it your own flavor or your own voice?

Diana: I have no idea. I don’t know. 

John: That’s a good answer.

Diana: I guess I’m passionate about a lot of things. I’m passionate about Nat Cole, and who he was as a jazz pianist and who he was as a jazz singer. But also as a popular singer. I guess I can use examples of something like ‘The Night We Called It a Day’ comes to mind or ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’. I think I relate it to always looked at Sinatra, to quote Bob Dylan, ‘Sinatra’s the mountain”. When I was working on ‘Look of Love’, Tommy LiPuma and I went through every record and just everything he’s saying you know he meant it like he wrote it. You know that he was going through his own. I just listened to ‘Angel Eyes’ lived at The Sounds and that just tells you everything. So that’s what I was listening to as a kid. I was listening to Frank live at the Sounds and listening to people like Irene Kral or Joni, Bob Dylan, just watch him sing ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Sort of says it all right there. It’s interesting to hear Bob’s version of these songs. I think he’s singing them like he wrote them. I think he’s singing them with the same amount of passion like he sang ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ or some of those things. Or ‘Stay’ if you listen to ‘Stay’, especially live. It’s incredible.

John: That was Diana Krall singing the Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic, “The Look of Love” from her 2001 release of the same name. 

Viv: That’s amazing. Sometimes it can be a risk for a musician to jump out of category. How does that feel to jump into a different interpretive role? Does it feel like a risk or it just another step along the way?

Diana: Is it a risk? I guess when I did ‘Girl in the Other Room’ is a perfect example of that. Where I went from ‘Look of Love’ to very sort of romantic bossa novas working with Claus Ogerman and Tommy LiPuma to go from that to songwriting with Elvis Costello about a particular time in my life that was very painful, when I lost my mother, was a huge risk. I don’t know if I’d do that now. I wouldn’t even ask myself the question, but I look back at it now and I sort of walked on the stage at Radio City Music Hall and was ready. And I wasn’t incorporating any other songs with it, I was just, “This is what I am doing right now. This is the show”. And I think somebody screamed out, “Show us your legs!” And I was like, “Oh, well, I will, but wait till ‘Glad Rag Doll’.” I was on tour with Neil Young this last year and he gave me such a great gift because I met him at the Bridge School Benefit and I was the first jazz musician to actually sing at a Bridge School Benefit as far as I know, and I was playing ‘Wallflower’ and I was looking over at Crosby, Stills, and Nash, all with their arms folded all sort of watching me because I was on at three in the afternoon and then Neil said, “Hey Diana, I’m going to go and do some gigs in Canada, you want to join me? You want to play?” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m in! Are you kidding??” So when the phone call came, that was like in October, and the phone call came in December, and I said, “Who else is doing it?” and they said, “Just you”. And I’m like, “Oh, you’re kidding me”. So we started at Massey Hall and I had been playing “Man Needs a Maid” and lots of Neil songs and Neil, I idolize him, and so I was like, “Just me, what do you mean just me?” So I remember that first gig and I wasn’t about to go out there in the middle of February and play an hour on start with “Peel Me a Grape”. So I really had to really dig deep. I had to really go, “Ok, what can you do? What are you going to do?” And, if I can walk out with my hiking boots on and my own flannel shirt in honor of Neil Young in front of a Calgary audience, on a protest tour where my name is on the T-shirt and start with “Every Grain of Sand”, that is a risk that is so worth taking and I managed to do it. Neil trusted that I could do it. I fell down a few times, but I got to sit side stage and watch him every night. I got to watch his solo show every night and be just blown away. And listen to Gordy Lightfoot and listen to all these people that mean something to me as well. I’m excited to tell you about that because I haven’t really talked about that time. And that basically, I guess, is the risk that I’m talking about. Is the risk to take yourself out of what you know and even though you’re shaking in your snow boots, you’re out there, and I said, “Well I thought I was supposed to wait thirty minutes” and they were like, “No, we want an hour”, and I was playing this with Neil’s broken piano. And I started opening up and playing more Tom Waits tunes and finding Buffy Sainte-Marie and it wasn’t the only time that I’ve done that but it was somebody giving me permission to take an hour to myself and play whatever I wanted but it was scary. But thank God they were Neil fans. That was a big risk. I think it’s important to do that as an artist if you feel it. Don’t just do it for the sake of doing it. That won’t work. My husband did that with North and got a hard time about it, but it was a very honest thing to do. So I think as an artist, you have to make your musical statement to take your risks that your audience is either going to go with you or not. No matter how much publicity and promo you do. You just have to make your musical statement and not really care too much about what anybody else thinks but know that you have to love it because that’s what matters. Because you got to look back on that say, “I loved what I did. I meant it”. And move forward. I thank God that I started later in my life. That I had years where I was struggling to pay my rent when I was in my thirties and then didn’t discover Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell till later. Because I was busy listening to Miles Davis and doing these things. And then when I discovered Joan, I remember discovering Blue quite later on in my life, and not really getting into and then all of the sudden really getting into Joni Mitchell music about fifteen years ago. And that just hit me like listening to Charlie Parker or something. It’s amazing.

Viv: It’s that musical exploration and just the curiosity on all walks of life but it’s that continuing to be so curious and so adventurous.

Diana: And to move back in time as well. To move back and, like for me, California Dreamin’ was something I had brought out when I was working on ‘Look of Love’ and I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. And so it took me twelve years, thirteen years, to finally go “Well, maybe we should try this again”. And the exquisite piece of the puzzle was that Graham Nash is singing on it. And also the Jim Croce song “Operator”, Steven Stills is playing and singing on it and Graham. I wanted Foster to turn my voice down as far as possible so I could hear those guys. And that was just a dream come true to me because as a kid I was listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Young. So you just have to keep moving forward, no matter is Kayne is going to make you famous or not. 

Viv: Welcome back to Art of the Song. Before we get back to our conversation with Diana Krall, we’ll hear this week’s Standing “O” Spotlight. This week we feature Jen & Scott Smith known together as Naked Blue with their song “The Match”.

John: That was this week’s Standing “O” Spotlight artist Naked Blue with “The Match”. You can learn more about Naked Blue and their music on our sister site standingoproject.com. Now we come back to our conversation with Diana Krall.

Viv: So would you say that that would be sage advice for somebody who was looking to find their creative voice? 

Diana: I think it’s a totally different time now. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to say now. I just think it’s a completely different time for young people who are in music. I don’t even want to think. I just think you have to find your voice. I don’t think it’s not a good time. I can’t put myself in a time where everything is instant and immediate and streamed. But I also think that I know a lot of people who are buying vinyl. So that’s not the only thing that’s going on. So they are experiencing dropping the needle on the record so to speak. I don’t know. I don’t know how you’d start. I’ve been asked that but I guess you just got to go on auditions. You just got to start somewhere. There’s clubs that still have live musicians. Thank God it’s a live music world. And I play live music.

Viv: So it’s just about diving in. What I take away from this conversation is just that you are such a student of the craft in terms of how these guys played it and why they played it and where it came from in their soul. And not just these guys, but these musicians. It sounds like you were really drawn into the reasons why people play.

Diana: Yeah, I was a nineteen year old kid and I’m not very technically, I’m limited technically in every way. I was born with a feeling for swing music and my dream in life was what it would feel like play with Jeff Hamilton, John Clayton, and Ray Brown. And thank God I got a chance to feel what that felt like. And Ray Brown too. I got a chance to play with Ray Brown. As a nineteen year old kid, those opportunities were available for me and I got a chance to play with Christian McBride and play with my heroes. I don’t know if I’m deserving of that because I’m certainly not of the musical level there, but I have deep feeling for things. And I think I sometimes have gotten by on just that because I’m not knowledgeable about the history of music or the origins of things. I only know that I went over to this jazz pianist’s house, his name was Jimmy Rolls, and he had emphysema and he was on an oxygen tank, still smoking cigarettes, and I’d sit in his front room and we’d listen to Ben Webster. And we’d just go, “Wow! What was that??” And he’d write things out for me and we’d talk and part of the hanging time is important and just sitting at the piano with him and watching him play. I just think it’s really important to feel that you’re not entitled. That you get to do things and that there are still people that are playing. When I met Sonny Rollins recently, I chased him like a rock star. He was going to his car in North Sea Jazz Festival and it was this guy carrying his saxophone, gig is over, he’s just walking by himself to his car, and I went, “Mr. Rollins, Mr. Rollins!” And then I hugged him and I started to cry. And he looked at me and he said, “Don’t do that!” I said, “Yes, I have to because, unapologetically, this is the first time I’ve ever met you and what else am I going to say? This is everything to me.” Same with Ray. I don’t apologize. I go to Forbidden Planet, I’m walking in there going, “Hey, you got any Adventure Time backpacks, man?” Is “Over the Garden Wall” in yet? I’m always into what’s interesting to me and who created it. The world is full of creative, interesting people that are still there for people to learn from. Just watch the extras on ParaNorman or Spy Kids. I feel life is just full. I’m certainly not looking back and saying, “I wish it was like the old days, God damnit!” I don’t feel that way. I can conjure up the old days on my own just fine, thank you very much. I like to see what’s going forward and what’s interesting and what’s creative. And I have two little boys who are pushing me forward too to pay attention to that. I don’t know. I’m probably talking too much but it’s really exciting for me to actually talk about all these things because then I’m not stuck in the past or I’m not lamenting about the way things were. Like I said, I can create that any time I want to in my own house. I just wind up my dad’s gramophone and put a ’78 record on and close my eyes and I can just go back there. It’s like Woody Allen except we’ve got antibiotics. I know everything to a fault is a movie reference, it’s terrible, it’s like I’ve just been locked in and I’ve learned everything like Peter Sellers. Everything I’ve learned is from watching old films. 

Viv: Yes, but unlike that you actually were there. 

Diana: Well, I knew all the Marx brothers’ lines pretty much and don’t challenge me on that but I know a good lot of them. But I didn’t live at that time but I have an affection for those things. I know there was a point to my story somewhere. 

Viv: And I guess the passion. It’s just the passion that you have for it in moving ahead. That’s what I’m hearing.

Diana: Yeah, I’m excited about it. I’ve had the best year of my life. Spent it with working with Paul McCartney. And then I got to sing with James Taylor. I got freaked out because I saw Prince in the corner. I guess the point is I’m still a little kid. I feel I was always taught, “You get to do this” and that’ s where I feel like I haven’t earned it. I don’t feel like I’ve earned anything that I have. I feel like I’ve been passionate about it, I’ve been lucky, ok, I’ve worked hard, and I’ve took risks, I think I have a lot of courage in just having the guts to do certain things, but I think I just love it so much. And I’m surrounded by incredibly good people and good musicians who can turn on a dime. And the people that are working with me now, I’ve got Anthony Wilson who is a great Jazz guitarist. I’ve got Kareem Wiggins who plays with everybody. Stuart Duncan, who is a bluegrass player who’s still playing Nat Cole tunes. And Patrick Warren is playing keyboards. It’s this group of people who, they’re not exactly Jazz musicians, but they’re not non-improvisers either so when you throw that all into the mix, it sounds amazing. It sounds like something unique.

John: Diana Krall with the crowded house tune, “Don’t Dream, It’s Over”.

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Viv: We cannot wait to see you live somewhere. I saw you’re playing in Toledo, which is where I grew up, so I’m even thinking of going to the Stranahan Theater in Toledo. 

Diana: That would be awesome. I’m working on it right now. After I talk to both of you I’m going to rehearsals and trying to figure out how to adopt this record to my band. It’s really fun to see how we’re doing that and how it’s working. We’re going to play songs from everything. Just like a butterfly to Nat Cole to California Dreamin’ to this. I’ll figure out how it’s all going to work together because I’m not going to go out and tour just one thing. I’m lucky that I have the musicians where I can do that. They can sort of turn on a dime. It’ll be interesting to see how we do it in rehearsals this week.

Viv: Diana Krall with the Paul McCartney song, “If I Take You Home Tonight”.

John: Diana Krall, thank you so much for talking with us today on Art of the Song. 

Diana: Thank you very much and I’m sorry to talk so much.

Viv: Oh heck no.

John: That’s what interviews are all about.

Diana: Well I love radio. Print I find it very very difficult. But radio I’ve adored since I was a kid when I first listened to Mary McPartland show and took the risk in actually phoning her and leaving a message on her answering machine. And she called me back all the way to Nanaimo and my dad freaked out because he said, “Mary McPartland called the house! What are you doing calling Mary McPartland?” And I said, “Well, she’s another woman, she’s playing jazz, I figured if I need to talk to somebody, she’s the person and her number was in the phonebook.” 

John: There you go!

Diana: And then it was Garrison Keillor and that was my life. And then I listened to, this is how terrible I am, I listened to radio shows of old radio shows. I think one of my favorite movies is ‘Radio Days’ but now I’ve actually gone too far and in my new screen backdrop I have a big old-fashioned radio so I can light the tubes and the dials. I have old hi-fis and radios at home. I just find that it’s a great big open sky that you can just ramble on it so you guys have to tell me to shut up and I’ll go. But I do love it.

Viv: We’ve been accused of letting people ramble and we’re like, “Well that’s what’s interesting.” If we come in with an agenda, it’s kind of a dead bore because it’s much more interesting the music of what happens. Hearing what actually comes up in the moment is far more interesting than anything we could ever plan out.

Diana: And I don’t even know if we’re talking about my record or anything. It’s fun to just talk about life and things that matter to you and why. So I appreciate you giving me the time to do that. I hope we can talk again and we can talk more about other fun stuff to talk about.

John: Oh that would be awesome.

Viv: Absolutely. Wonderful. We look forward to it. We come to New York quite often actually.

Diana: Oh do you?

Viv: My mom lives upstate and I have a solo show that I do at a festival there in the Fall.

Diana: What festival?

Viv: It’s called United Solo. It’s a theater festival.

Diana: Oh great.

Viv: And we’ll be back in November so hopefully we can connect sometime and continue this conversation.

Diana: That would be great. In person too. I’d be thrilled and even if you come to the show in Toledo we can talk too. It would be nice.

Viv: That would be wonderful.

Diana: I don’t know very many people in Toledo I don’t think.

Viv: I don’t either. The whole concept of going back to Toledo to hear you on this record, tour on this record, it would just be awesome.

Diana: Thank you Vivian. Thank you.

John: Well we’ll definitely be in touch when we’re in New York and hopefully our paths can cross in person.

Diana: Ok, great, thanks very much both of you. Take care.

Viv: Take care of your cold now.

Diana: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Viv: Bye.

Viv: We’ll close today with the title track from Diana Krall’s 2014 release, this is “Wallflower”.

John: Thanks for joining us for Art of the Song Creativity Radio. I’m John Dillon.

Viv: And this is Viv Nesbitt. Remember: we all have a song to sing.

John: We hope this program inspires you to sing yours.

John: Art of the Song is proud media partner with Michael Hearne’s Big Barn Dance Music Festival in Taos, New Mexico. This year’s festival will be held September 10-12 and featured Junior Brown, Michael Martin Murphey, Gary P. Nunn. Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines, Trout Fishing in America, and many more. More information at michaelhearne.com.

Viv: You may have heard about the pitifully small payments streaming services like P* and S* offers musicians. There is something you can do about it. The Standing “O” Project is an online community that helps musicians earn a living and keeps this program on the air. Joining for just $5 a month actually gives the artist a bigger paycheck than several thousand plays on S*. We called it Socially Responsible Streaming and you can learn more about it at standingoproject.com.

Viv: Our guest this week was Diana Krall. Special thanks to Joe Sivick and Missing Piece Group.

Tim: Art of the Song Creativity Radio is created and hosted by Vivian Nesbitt and John Dillon. And I’m Tim Nenninger: editor and producer. Our theme music is “Alton Air” by Darrell Scott, used here by permission from Famous Music and Chuck Wagon Gourmet Music. Program contents copyright 2015 Heliotrope Productions Incorporated. Individual songs may be protected by previous copyrights.

Viv: This week on Art of the Song we feature one of the world’s most beloved voices Diana Krall. A jazz musician who achieve crossover success with her unique blend of bop piano and soulful, sultry vocals, Diana is multiple award winner with over six million albums sold. She is fearless in her creative expression.

John: Diana talks with us about taking risks, passions, and her latest project ‘Wallflower’ where she interprets some of her favorite songs from her high school days.

Viv: It’s our great honor and privilege to be talking with Diana Krall today. Thank you so much for joining us, Diana, for Art of the Song. 

Diana: Thank you. It’s a privilege to speak with you both.

Viv: Thank you. Diana, your career reads like everyone’s favorite fairy tale in terms of the names and the people and the places where you’ve played.

Diana: Oh yes, for sure. 

Viv: And I know that it came with a ton of hard work. Can you tell us how you got started?

Diana: Where do I? In the words of Alan & Marilyn Bergman, I guess I started at home. I was listening to a lot of music at home and everybody played piano. I discovered jazz when I was in high school jazz. I didn’t ‘discover’ jazz when I was in high school but I discovered that I could play jazz in about the eighth grade that I could improvise on a Joe Zawinul song “Mercy Mercy Mercy” that we were playing in my high school band for a competition and I lost the music to the song and just kept going and played the solo on the roads in the stage band and my band director said, “Just keep playing!” Then my band teacher phoned my mother and father and said, “I need to talk to you about your daughter.” And they asked what I had done. So then he started giving me Bryan Stovall, I just saw recently, he actually started giving me Bill Evans records, and Miles Davis records. And I had got with a teacher who showed me what 2-5-1 chords were and the jet patterns. I was about fifteen years old but I was improvising way before that and playing by ear and listening to Fats Waller and early American music from the 1920’s and ’30’s before that. But I didn’t really get into hearing ‘My Funny Valentine’ and getting into Miles Davis and Bill Evans and that era until I was about fifteen. Didn’t really answer your question, did I? And then, ‘turn the page’, chapter two. I know it’s a long, boring story.

Viv: Oh, hardly. What we’ve heard from folks is that it’s so helpful to know that everybody started somewhere. 

Diana: Well I did, I applied for grants. I was going to Berklee College of Music, but most important time, I think, was when I applied for Canadian Arts Council grant when I was nineteen and I had someone there. I was going to go back to New England Conservatory and I had the opportunity, I met Ray Brown in the summertime before I was supposed to go back to school through Jeff Hamilton, and they came up to my hometown to play with the L.A. Four and then I met Monty Alexander. They really encouraged me to come to L.A. and I wanted to study with this pianist who played with Billie Holiday named Jimmy Rowels. So, I drove down in my Toyota Tercel with my dad from Nanaimo, British Columbia to Whittier, California where I rented a room from a friend of a friend and started studying with Jimmy and Jeff and John. I was nineteen years old and I was very much like that character in Bridesmaids, that Kristen Wiig where I had my old broken down Tercel and I have to pull up to the fancy country club to play my three hour pre-wedding gig and pulling up smoking a cigarette wearing a Laura Ashley dress and spiky hair. So we all got to start somewhere. At the same time I was trying to play. I was hanging out at that age at Dantes and meeting other people and really listening to jazz musicians like Kenny Kirkland and getting a chance to hear the people that I only heard on record at that age. If I was a mom and my kid was nineteen going down there and doing that, I’d be freaking out, but I had a lot of people looking out for me. And still do. Jeff Hamilton and John Clayton still look out for me. How nice is that?

Viv: And now, you’ve been moving on through the great American songs, all the way through the great jazz and now, with ‘Wallflower’, you’re featuring songs of our age. So you’ve got, Elton John, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Eagles, Mamas and the Papas, how did you come to select the songs?

Diana: Well, I decided to work with David Foster. We both decided to work with each other after many years of knowing each other. I really made it clear to David that I didn’t want to do a jazz record. That I worked with Tommy LiPuma and I’ve done every record with him except for “Glad Rag Doll” which was with T-Bone Burnett. Let’s do something that is not a jazz record, I said to David, “Ok, you’re going to produce, be my producer, produce! Give me a song!” And he said, “No. No, you figure that out.” And I was like, what? Ok. So he said no and he was right because he said I think that you’ll choose songs that are more meaningful to you if you choose them. So I said, “Ok”. So we came in and started with ‘Desperado’ and he had it on the piano and it was the very first day and he said, “I’ll just play it and just sing it.” And I said, “Well, I know it from Linda Ronstadt”. I listened to a lot of Linda Ronstadt. And it just turned out fine. It just kept going from there, picking songs that I knew that I liked that I knew the lyrics to that meant something to me at that time. We just started working. Singing and playing, just happens kind of naturally. I kind of know very quickly whether something is not going to work for me. I don’t think I can really sing anything that I haven’t experienced or found something of myself in. I can’t really do that.

Viv: So that personal connection is tremendously important for you if you can’t just climb up and interpret a song. It has to have some kind of deep meaning.

Diana: Yeah. I’ve only had a couple songs in my time where I’ve felt that there was a misjudgment to do them. I think maybe one. One or two. I’m really a lousy liar. I can’t. It’s hard if I can’t feel it. And I think audiences know that too if you don’t. I’ve been actually on stage where I’ve passed having the feeling for something and the audience kind of laughs and I’m just like, “You know, I just can’t sing that line anymore, I just can’t do it!” And I try to make a joke out of it. Then I’ve gotten past it as well, but most things have pretty much stayed with me.

John: So you’re a great interpreter of songs. What’s the process like? You have a song that you’ve heard other versions of, how do you give it your own flavor or your own voice?

Diana: I have no idea. I don’t know. 

John: That’s a good answer.

Diana: I guess I’m passionate about a lot of things. I’m passionate about Nat Cole, and who he was as a jazz pianist and who he was as a jazz singer. But also as a popular singer. I guess I can use examples of something like ‘The Night We Called It a Day’ comes to mind or ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’. I think I relate it to always looked at Sinatra, to quote Bob Dylan, ‘Sinatra’s the mountain”. When I was working on ‘Look of Love’, Tommy LiPuma and I went through every record and just everything he’s saying you know he meant it like he wrote it. You know that he was going through his own. I just listened to ‘Angel Eyes’ lived at The Sounds and that just tells you everything. So that’s what I was listening to as a kid. I was listening to Frank live at the Sounds and listening to people like Irene Kral or Joni, Bob Dylan, just watch him sing ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Sort of says it all right there. It’s interesting to hear Bob’s version of these songs. I think he’s singing them like he wrote them. I think he’s singing them with the same amount of passion like he sang ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ or some of those things. Or ‘Stay’ if you listen to ‘Stay’, especially live. It’s incredible.

John: That was Diana Krall singing the Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic, “The Look of Love” from her 2001 release of the same name. 

Viv: That’s amazing. Sometimes it can be a risk for a musician to jump out of category. How does that feel to jump into a different interpretive role? Does it feel like a risk or it just another step along the way?

Diana: Is it a risk? I guess when I did ‘Girl in the Other Room’ is a perfect example of that. Where I went from ‘Look of Love’ to very sort of romantic bossa novas working with Claus Ogerman and Tommy LiPuma to go from that to songwriting with Elvis Costello about a particular time in my life that was very painful, when I lost my mother, was a huge risk. I don’t know if I’d do that now. I wouldn’t even ask myself the question, but I look back at it now and I sort of walked on the stage at Radio City Music Hall and was ready. And I wasn’t incorporating any other songs with it, I was just, “This is what I am doing right now. This is the show”. And I think somebody screamed out, “Show us your legs!” And I was like, “Oh, well, I will, but wait till ‘Glad Rag Doll’.” I was on tour with Neil Young this last year and he gave me such a great gift because I met him at the Bridge School Benefit and I was the first jazz musician to actually sing at a Bridge School Benefit as far as I know, and I was playing ‘Wallflower’ and I was looking over at Crosby, Stills, and Nash, all with their arms folded all sort of watching me because I was on at three in the afternoon and then Neil said, “Hey Diana, I’m going to go and do some gigs in Canada, you want to join me? You want to play?” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m in! Are you kidding??” So when the phone call came, that was like in October, and the phone call came in December, and I said, “Who else is doing it?” and they said, “Just you”. And I’m like, “Oh, you’re kidding me”. So we started at Massey Hall and I had been playing “Man Needs a Maid” and lots of Neil songs and Neil, I idolize him, and so I was like, “Just me, what do you mean just me?” So I remember that first gig and I wasn’t about to go out there in the middle of February and play an hour on start with “Peel Me a Grape”. So I really had to really dig deep. I had to really go, “Ok, what can you do? What are you going to do?” And, if I can walk out with my hiking boots on and my own flannel shirt in honor of Neil Young in front of a Calgary audience, on a protest tour where my name is on the T-shirt and start with “Every Grain of Sand”, that is a risk that is so worth taking and I managed to do it. Neil trusted that I could do it. I fell down a few times, but I got to sit side stage and watch him every night. I got to watch his solo show every night and be just blown away. And listen to Gordy Lightfoot and listen to all these people that mean something to me as well. I’m excited to tell you about that because I haven’t really talked about that time. And that basically, I guess, is the risk that I’m talking about. Is the risk to take yourself out of what you know and even though you’re shaking in your snow boots, you’re out there, and I said, “Well I thought I was supposed to wait thirty minutes” and they were like, “No, we want an hour”, and I was playing this with Neil’s broken piano. And I started opening up and playing more Tom Waits tunes and finding Buffy Sainte-Marie and it wasn’t the only time that I’ve done that but it was somebody giving me permission to take an hour to myself and play whatever I wanted but it was scary. But thank God they were Neil fans. That was a big risk. I think it’s important to do that as an artist if you feel it. Don’t just do it for the sake of doing it. That won’t work. My husband did that with North and got a hard time about it, but it was a very honest thing to do. So I think as an artist, you have to make your musical statement to take your risks that your audience is either going to go with you or not. No matter how much publicity and promo you do. You just have to make your musical statement and not really care too much about what anybody else thinks but know that you have to love it because that’s what matters. Because you got to look back on that say, “I loved what I did. I meant it”. And move forward. I thank God that I started later in my life. That I had years where I was struggling to pay my rent when I was in my thirties and then didn’t discover Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell till later. Because I was busy listening to Miles Davis and doing these things. And then when I discovered Joan, I remember discovering Blue quite later on in my life, and not really getting into and then all of the sudden really getting into Joni Mitchell music about fifteen years ago. And that just hit me like listening to Charlie Parker or something. It’s amazing.

Viv: It’s that musical exploration and just the curiosity on all walks of life but it’s that continuing to be so curious and so adventurous.

Diana: And to move back in time as well. To move back and, like for me, California Dreamin’ was something I had brought out when I was working on ‘Look of Love’ and I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. And so it took me twelve years, thirteen years, to finally go “Well, maybe we should try this again”. And the exquisite piece of the puzzle was that Graham Nash is singing on it. And also the Jim Croce song “Operator”, Steven Stills is playing and singing on it and Graham. I wanted Foster to turn my voice down as far as possible so I could hear those guys. And that was just a dream come true to me because as a kid I was listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Young. So you just have to keep moving forward, no matter is Kayne is going to make you famous or not. 

Viv: So would you say that that would be sage advice for somebody who was looking to find their creative voice? 

Diana: I think it’s a totally different time now. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to say now. I just think it’s a completely different time for young people who are in music. I don’t even want to think. I just think you have to find your voice. I don’t think it’s not a good time. I can’t put myself in a time where everything is instant and immediate and streamed. But I also think that I know a lot of people who are buying vinyl. So that’s not the only thing that’s going on. So they are experiencing dropping the needle on the record so to speak. I don’t know. I don’t know how you’d start. I’ve been asked that but I guess you just got to go on auditions. You just got to start somewhere. There’s clubs that still have live musicians. Thank God it’s a live music world. And I play live music.

Viv: So it’s just about diving in. What I take away from this conversation is just that you are such a student of the craft in terms of how these guys played it and why they played it and where it came from in their soul. And not just these guys, but these musicians. It sounds like you were really drawn into the reasons why people play.

Diana: Yeah, I was a nineteen year old kid and I’m not very technically, I’m limited technically in every way. I was born with a feeling for swing music and my dream in life was what it would feel like play with Jeff Hamilton, John Clayton, and Ray Brown. And thank God I got a chance to feel what that felt like. And Ray Brown too. I got a chance to play with Ray Brown. As a nineteen year old kid, those opportunities were available for me and I got a chance to play with Christian McBride and play with my heroes. I don’t know if I’m deserving of that because I’m certainly not of the musical level there, but I have deep feeling for things. And I think I sometimes have gotten by on just that because I’m not knowledgeable about the history of music or the origins of things. I only know that I went over to this jazz pianist’s house, his name was Jimmy Rolls, and he had emphysema and he was on an oxygen tank, still smoking cigarettes, and I’d sit in his front room and we’d listen to Ben Webster. And we’d just go, “Wow! What was that??” And he’d write things out for me and we’d talk and part of the hanging time is important and just sitting at the piano with him and watching him play. I just think it’s really important to feel that you’re not entitled. That you get to do things and that there are still people that are playing. When I met Sonny Rollins recently, I chased him like a rock star. He was going to his car in North Sea Jazz Festival and it was this guy carrying his saxophone, gig is over, he’s just walking by himself to his car, and I went, “Mr. Rollins, Mr. Rollins!” And then I hugged him and I started to cry. And he looked at me and he said, “Don’t do that!” I said, “Yes, I have to because, unapologetically, this is the first time I’ve ever met you and what else am I going to say? This is everything to me.” Same with Ray. I don’t apologize. I go to Forbidden Planet, I’m walking in there going, “Hey, you got any Adventure Time backpacks, man?” Is “Over the Garden Wall” in yet? I’m always into what’s interesting to me and who created it. The world is full of creative, interesting people that are still there for people to learn from. Just watch the extras on ParaNorman or Spy Kids. I feel life is just full. I’m certainly not looking back and saying, “I wish it was like the old days, God damnit!” I don’t feel that way. I can conjure up the old days on my own just fine, thank you very much. I like to see what’s going forward and what’s interesting and what’s creative. And I have two little boys who are pushing me forward too to pay attention to that. I don’t know. I’m probably talking too much but it’s really exciting for me to actually talk about all these things because then I’m not stuck in the past or I’m not lamenting about the way things were. Like I said, I can create that any time I want to in my own house. I just wind up my dad’s gramophone and put a ’78 record on and close my eyes and I can just go back there. It’s like Woody Allen except we’ve got antibiotics. I know everything to a fault is a movie reference, it’s terrible, it’s like I’ve just been locked in and I’ve learned everything like Peter Sellers. Everything I’ve learned is from watching old films. 

Viv: Yes, but unlike that you actually were there. 

Diana: Well, I knew all the Marx brothers’ lines pretty much and don’t challenge me on that but I know a good lot of them. But I didn’t live at that time but I have an affection for those things. I know there was a point to my story somewhere. 

Viv: And I guess the passion. It’s just the passion that you have for it in moving ahead. That’s what I’m hearing.

Diana: Yeah, I’m excited about it. I’ve had the best year of my life. Spent it with working with Paul McCartney. And then I got to sing with James Taylor. I got freaked out because I saw Prince in the corner. I guess the point is I’m still a little kid. I feel I was always taught, “You get to do this” and that’ s where I feel like I haven’t earned it. I don’t feel like I’ve earned anything that I have. I feel like I’ve been passionate about it, I’ve been lucky, ok, I’ve worked hard, and I’ve took risks, I think I have a lot of courage in just having the guts to do certain things, but I think I just love it so much. And I’m surrounded by incredibly good people and good musicians who can turn on a dime. And the people that are working with me now, I’ve got Anthony Wilson who is a great Jazz guitarist. I’ve got Kareem Wiggins who plays with everybody. Stuart Duncan, who is a bluegrass player who’s still playing Nat Cole tunes. And Patrick Warren is playing keyboards. It’s this group of people who, they’re not exactly Jazz musicians, but they’re not non-improvisers either so when you throw that all into the mix, it sounds amazing. It sounds like something unique.

Viv: We cannot wait to see you live somewhere. I saw you’re playing in Toledo, which is where I grew up, so I’m even thinking of going to the Stranahan Theater in Toledo. 

Diana: That would be awesome. I’m working on it right now. After I talk to both of you I’m going to rehearsals and trying to figure out how to adopt this record to my band. It’s really fun to see how we’re doing that and how it’s working. We’re going to play songs from everything. Just like a butterfly to Nat Cole to California Dreamin’ to this. I’ll figure out how it’s all going to work together because I’m not going to go out and tour just one thing. I’m lucky that I have the musicians where I can do that. They can sort of turn on a dime. It’ll be interesting to see how we do it in rehearsals this week.

John: Diana Krall, thank you so much for talking with us today on Art of the Song. 

Diana: Thank you very much and I’m sorry to talk so much.

Viv: Oh heck no.

John: That’s what interviews are all about.

Diana: Well I love radio. Print I find it very very difficult. But radio I’ve adored since I was a kid when I first listened to Mary McPartland show and took the risk in actually phoning her and leaving a message on her answering machine. And she called me back all the way to Nanaimo and my dad freaked out because he said, “Mary McPartland called the house! What are you doing calling Mary McPartland?” And I said, “Well, she’s another woman, she’s playing jazz, I figured if I need to talk to somebody, she’s the person and her number was in the phonebook.” 

John: There you go!

Diana: And then it was Garrison Keillor and that was my life. And then I listened to, this is how terrible I am, I listened to radio shows of old radio shows. I think one of my favorite movies is ‘Radio Days’ but now I’ve actually gone too far and in my new screen backdrop I have a big old-fashioned radio so I can light the tubes and the dials. I have old hi-fis and radios at home. I just find that it’s a great big open sky that you can just ramble on it so you guys have to tell me to shut up and I’ll go. But I do love it.

Viv: We’ve been accused of letting people ramble and we’re like, “Well that’s what’s interesting.” If we come in with an agenda, it’s kind of a dead bore because it’s much more interesting the music of what happens. Hearing what actually comes up in the moment is far more interesting than anything we could ever plan out.

Diana: And I don’t even know if we’re talking about my record or anything. It’s fun to just talk about life and things that matter to you and why. So I appreciate you giving me the time to do that. I hope we can talk again and we can talk more about other fun stuff to talk about.

The post Diana Krall Interview appeared first on John Dillon & Viv Nesbitt.

We offer a tribute to the late Guy Clark with a rebroadcast of our 2003 interview.

“Write stuff that scares you to the bone. The, “I don’t want anybody to know that about me”, that’s what you write about. Just jump in, make it as hard as you can. It’ll be so much better. Don’t make shit up. Tell me what happened to you when you were thirteen. It’s a struggle every day and it’s never the same twice. There aren’t any rules. All those things are probably why I like it.”

– Guy Clark

Guy Clark: Nov 6, 1941 – May 17, 2016

I first met Guy Clark in the early 1990s when I was making my living as a guitar maker. I went to show my wares when he was touring with Townes Van Zandt at Godfrey Daniels Folk Club in Bethlehem, PA. Apparently impressed with my work as a luthier, he invited me to visit his shop next time I was in Nashville. We visited several times over the next few years talking shop and sharing tricks of the trade. He was gracious, welcoming, and I’m proud to have been able to call him a friend.

When Viv and I decided to start Art of the Song 12 years ago, Guy was one of the first songwriters we approached about an interview. We traveled to Nashville and were all set up to do several interviews in our hotel room at Shoney’s. About 15 minutes before the scheduled time, Guy called and said, “I just wanted to be sure you knew how to get to my house.” To which Viv said, “We’re all set up with the recording equipment here in our hotel room… can you come over here?” Guy then said, “I’m not sure that would be a good idea, I just smoked a fatty.” We told him no worries, we’d be over in a few minutes. We quickly tore down the microphones and recording equipment and dashed over to his house, albeit a few minutes late. He invited us into the guitar shop in the basement of his home where we had a relaxed and inspiring conversation. – John Dillon

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John: We’re here in the Guitar Shop studio of Guy Clark here in Nashville and it’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you for having us Guy.

Guy: Thank you so much John for being here. I’m just proud that you are here.

John: I understand that you grew up in Monahans, Texas, which we had the pleasure of driving past the exit on I-10 not too long ago. There’s nothing out there but mesquite and sagebrush, and…

Guy: Oil wells.

John: How did growing up in that sort of environment affect you as a songwriter?

Guy: I don’t know exactly how, but it was nothing but good because it’s so austere and I think it’s really beautiful. Monahans is kind of hard to get behind but West Texas is really pretty, and it really is flat there. Joe Ely or Butch Hancock, Joe, I heard it from Joe because he’s from out there, right around Lubbock and he said, “It’s so flat you can stand out there and turn in circle and see fifty miles anywhere you look. If you stand on a tuna fish can you can see a hundred.”

John: That’s a good way to put it.

Guy: I think that it certainly had some sort of effect the way I write because it takes a certain breed of people to live in that environment. I was born in 1941 and my grandmother and father lived out there during the depression in Monahans, Texas. She was running a hotel and bootlegging whiskey. That early environment, I’ve been able to draw just this wealth of stuff, some of which is extremely accurate and some of which has got a sort of poetic/theatrical license to it. It’s all pretty much real.

John: What are some of your early musical influences?

Guy: Neither of my parents played anything. Didn’t even have a record player till I got in high school and started getting records. At one point, I was about sixteen and my father took on a new young law partner right out of school. Her name was Lola Bonner and she played Mexican songs and was a fan of really good flamenco music and mariachi music and that style of guitar. So that was my first intro to it. Probably for the first year I didn’t know any songs in English, it was all Mexican songs, which has completely gone away from my life. Anyway, that’s how I got started and then realized I wasn’t going to be Sabicas and I really didn’t speak Spanish that good so got into traditional folk music and was involved in that until I started writing songs.

John: When did you write your first song?

Guy: I can’t remember the year I wrote the song, but it was ’65-’66, somewhere in there. I don’t know the exact. It’s in Houston. It’s that song Lyle did “Step Inside This House” and I’ve forgotten. Worked straight jobs and did that and then finally quit and went to try to make a serious go of it in ’70, something like that. Moved to California and subsequently moved here.

John: Did you do a lot of writing in California?

Guy: Yeah, evidently. Well, I wrote the first song I kept in California. It was “That Old Time Feeling”. That’s when I knew I could write songs. 

John: What about L.A. Freeway?

Guy: Actually I wrote down the thing from L.A. Freeway, I wrote it in the back of a car when I just looked up and said, “Man if I could just get off this L.A. freeway without getting killed or caught.” Lightbulb goes off, Susanna’s eyebrow pencil and a burger sack. Write it down and carry it in my wallet until after I got to Nashville and I was writing and ran across it.

Viv: I have to take this moment to thank you actually, from the bottom of my heart, for using the world “oxymoron” in a folk song. John had to pull the car over when we hear “Arizona Star” and that line jumped out, “She makes real an oxymoron” and I was like, “Who is this guy?!” 

Guy: Who is this girl? More to the point. That’s a very true song. As true as I could remember it. I had subsequently saw her in London. She came to the show. My guitar player’s girlfriend is the news anchor Channel 4 here and she makes documentaries, Demetria Kalodimos. She was so taken with that song she had no idea what it was about or who it was about but started looking for her and researching it and making a documentary and talking to people who knew her, because it was really outrageous street theater. It was pretty tame for some reason. I was an observer. Neither one of these George or Arizona Star remember me, and would have no reason to because I had just come to Nashville but I watched this scene and it was just the damndest thing I ever seen, and I’ve been to Fort Worth and two goat ropings. It was out there. 

Viv: When I listen to your songs, some of them are based from the character view, just ten seconds in a woman’s life to a broad stroke painting, like “Arizona Star” of the whole big picture. Then, in “The Dark”, you have a song that’s written from the perspective of the lover of this fiddle player. It’s a very theatrical experience for me to listen to your music.

Guy: I grew up reading really good poetry and I was always, just as a young person, soaking up stuff, man. Guys like Dylan Thomas, Stephen Vincent Benet, and of course Robert Service. I don’t know when the last time you read those Yukon poems of his was, but you need to go back. There’s so much going on, the inner rhymes, and it all is just flawless. There’s no “oh baby” for two lines, but it may not come out right. It’s amazing stuff. But anyway, it’s different every time.

John: Viv mentioned character studies that you do and I’m assuming that some are more real than others. Some are fictional.

Guy: That’s what I was saying before, I try to start with some semblance of the truth or something. I saw something I did, something somebody told me they did. There aren’t any real rules, but that’s just what I enjoy writing about in different voices like you were saying–whether it’s putting yourself in the girl’s head and she ain’t going nowhere. I don’t know where that came from, I wrote that song in forty-five minutes. It was just channeled through me. What that song does is what I always try to do in writing. It paints a picture for you, but it allows the listener to imagine that that they know that song is about them, not about them, but they can use their imagination and have that picture be in any color they want.

Guy: I like it in the first person, I like it in the second person, I like in the third person, I like it once-removed. I just like the nuts and bolts of writing and all of those things appeal to me. I’m still trying to figure what to leave out. Like good guitar players, it ain’t what they play, it’s the holes they leave. 

Viv: It’s what’s between the notes.

Guy: That’s right, and a lot of that applies to writing lyrics. To me, it does. It’s way too oblique for a lot of people.

Viv: If you were to offer any kind of wisdom to people who are hoping to bring more creativity to their lives….

Guy: Write stuff that scares you to the bone. The, “I don’t want anybody to know that about me”, that’s what you write about. Just jump in, make it as hard as you can. It’ll be so much better. Don’t make shit up. Tell me what happened to you when you were thirteen. It’s a struggle every day and it’s never the same twice. There aren’t any rules. All those things are probably why I like it.

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John: Let’s talk a little bit about inspiration. Do you sit down to write a song or does the idea hit you whenever? 

Guy: Different every time. That story I told you about L.A. freeway writing it down like that, that’s when I learned don’t ever think that you will remember something, some idea, some hot thing. “Wow, that’s so cool. I’ll never forget that!” If you don’t write it down right then, you will forget it because it’s out of context. That’s the one discipline I really employ. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. You wind up with a stack of bar napkins at the end of the day. Go back through it and see if anything makes any sense to you. That’s the way I do it. Sometimes it starts with a guitar lick, not as often. I’ve written whole songs and never picked up the guitar. Just because it’s the words mainly for me. Then, sometimes, the music comes first. Sometimes they happen at the same time. Most times they don’t happen. It’s hard work.

Viv: We’ve had a lot of people say they use other activities sometimes if they’re getting into a spot where they can’t write anymore or they get stuck. They’ll go for a drive in their truck.

Guy: This is the example of that. What I do: I sit here and look out a window and stare at a wall and try to make something up. And, in the same room, I can get up and walk over here and do this really nice hand art. It’s right-brain/left-brain, yin/yang–they feed off of one another. Before I started building guitars, I had a dartboard for a long time because that’s the same thing as this mindless thing of just standing there and throwing darts, which frees the other side up. Building guitars does the same thing. As does playing golf, it’s just hard to get out there and do it and then come back and sit down and write. It’s anything that uses that side of your brain. I built my layer, just to have a table where I spin around and work on and pick up my guitar and try to noodle something out. That’s the only thing I do consistently. It’s like, who was it, one of those great writers like Steinbeck or someone, he said, “I write in long-hand, with a pencil, No. 2 pencil on a yellow legal pad. The only bias I have is when you’re on fire about writing, man, it’s coming out so fast you can’t get it down. It’s like ‘wow!’ and you get to the end of a chorus or chapter and stop. Don’t keep going. So that, when you wake up in the morning, you can’t wait to get back to it. Rather than working yourself into a stupor and hitting brick walls.” He said that was a discipline that he learned to employ was “Quit when you’re on fire. If you feel yourself getting stuck. Stop. Get a drink. Go do something.”

Viv: That’s amazing, because most times you feel that you have to keep going because the muse is with you right now.

Guy: You have to be able to recognize when the muse leaves the room.

Viv: The chapter’s ended. She’s gone.

John: You wrote a song called “Boats to Build”. Were you really a boat builder?

Guy: In junior high and high school we lived down on the Texas coast in Rockport, Texas, about thirty miles north of Corpus Christi. It started in high school, my summer job was working in the shipyard, which built big wooden 80-foot shrimp boats. The last guys that built wooden work boats, because it was already turning into welded steel. So I got to be a carpenter’s helper with these guys who were building boats and they weren’t building pretty boats. They were building work boats. It just floored me, still. It was one of those life-changing experiences I ever saw just because, “Look at what that guy did, man!” Building boats is all square with the world. There’s no straight line on one, but everything has to be square with the world. I don’t know, it made a giant impression on me and still does. I still think about it. Richard Lee is a friend of ours and he’s a songwriter. Wrote “Don’t it make My Brown Eyes Blue” and he has this beautiful little hand-made wooden sloop gaff rig sloop. It’s called a friendship sloop from Maine he had built and brought down. Anyway, he’s a sailor. Well, Richard’s wife one year, for his birthday, gave him two weeks at the wooden boat-building school in Maine and Richard was gone and Verlon Thompson and I were going, “Man, I wonder how old Richard’s doing. God, I hope he’s having a good time. Let’s write him a song.” Then that’s how that came about. Then all that experience of mine came into that. Damn should people know what a fair curve is. That was just a culmination of stuff that falls together.

John: One other question about songwriting. Co-writing, working by yourself, do you have a preference?

Guy: Lately I’ve been co-writing mostly, just because I got tired of writing by myself. I really enjoy the interplay. It’s one thing to sit here and write brilliant songs on a piece of paper and just kind of mumble them to yourself, but when I have to say the words out loud to you, have an idea, write it down, say something out loud, then you cut to the chase a little bit. If it’s really stupid, you know it right away, you can’t fool yourself by just looking at it on paper and going, “Idiot! Maybe that works.” When you say it out loud, then it’s committed. So I enjoy that part of songwriting, which is not to say that writing by yourself isn’t the purest form of it, of course, I just don’t have that chip on my shoulder about it anymore. I used to. I wouldn’t write with anybody. But, you know, who cares.

Viv: Guy, thank you so much. We really appreciate your time.

Guy: Like I said, this is first time I’ve had a chance to sit down, relax all day. And thank y’all for coming by.

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