Lzzy Hale: Her Hits, Pat Benatar’s Advice And The Sleepover That Changed Everything

Nov 2, 2020 | 100 Years of Radio

The 100 Years of Radio – 100 Years of Hit Makers limited series podcast gives music fans a front-row seat for conversations with songwriters behind some of the biggest hits of yesterday and today. You’ll learn the stories behind the songs from the people who wrote them. Each episode will focus on one writer: sometimes, they’ll just talk about one song, other times, they’ll talk about a number of hits.

New episodes will be released each Monday through November of 2020.   

100 Years of Radio – 100 Years of Hit Makers special podcast series is produced in partnership with Beasley Media Group, XPERI (HD Radio), and BMI in celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the first commercial radio broadcast.

At the beginning of our semi-epic phone conversation, Lzzy Hale — frontwoman of hard rock band Halestorm — said, “If you thought I could ramble before, since this whole pandemic started, I’m like, ‘Oh, another person to talk to? Do you want to hear my whole life story? Great! I’ll start at the beginning.'” Lzzy Hale is a great storyteller, but she doesn’t exaggerate, and if you’re a rock fan — or if you enjoy having great conversations — you can’t ask for more than a Lzzy interview where there isn’t a time limit. She discussed everything from some of her biggest songs, to the influence of her parents and the music they played for her to her recent zoom jams with Linda Perry and past and current members of Guns N Roses. A subsequent feature from this same interview with cover some of her other projects.

When I heard that you were doing an interview show, Raise Your Horns, I thought, “She is the perfect person to be doing that.”

The show was Linda Perry’s idea. I’ve been trying to break this down for a second, but it’s about… expecting greatness of yourself. You don’t sit behind the wheel of a car and say, “Well, I hope I don’t crash!”  Pilots don’t fly a plane saying, “Well, we’ll see what happens!” They’re expecting to take off and land and not kill anybody! But I’ve done so many these things in my life, big and small. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve learned from them. I’ve done so many different things in my life that I never thought was even possible for a kid from a farm in Pennsylvania.

But in the past couple of years, I’ve just been sitting and almost forcing myself to look at myself the way that I should [look at myself], and not in a cocky way. Not: “Hey, look at me. I’m I’m so awesome.” I do consider myself to be an extremely humble person.

But when it comes down to the things that you love most and the things that you are talented at — which I can count on one hand —  the things that I can actually do well, I’m going to stick to those. But you have to sit down and tell yourself, “Look, I’m going to expect to write the best thing and it may not happen.” [Sometimes] I expected something great and it came out kind of subpar. That’s not my favorite thing in the world.

Even when that happens, you take those experiences to the next song, so nothing is wasted. One of my favorite documentaries ever is The History of the Eagles. And and I remember this one scene where they’re saying,”You gotta put the time in. You have to show up every single day.” That’s what I’m doing and continue to do: just show up and try to expect greatness of myself.

You’ve been doing this for a long time now. If you said, “Well, I’m not 21 anymore, so there’s no way I could do anything like what I did when I was younger…” that’d be dangerous. 

Oh, absolutely. And a lot of us can get trapped into that, especially my peers and the people that have kind of been on a major label for a long time. And you make that arc: when you’re a kid, you’re writing purely for the joy of writing. The whole world is unknown. You don’t even know how to write a hit for the radio. And then all of a sudden your passion and your hobby becomes your career. And there are pressures that come with that, of course. There always will be some people who are like, “Back in the day, this was your biggest song and we need more songs like that.”

But it’s a shame that the people that are writing songs in their 50s are not given that same outlet or even, dare I say, the same respect as people in their 20s. You know, music is not reserved for the youth. I love listening to Nick Cave [singing about] what’s going on in his life right now. I have an undying thirst for new and weird knowledge. These guys, they’ve lived more lifetimes than I have. I’m thirty-six now and I feel like I’ve lived a couple different lifetimes but I know that there’s so much more. And it’s inspiring to listen to songs by people who have been pushing through this business for so long, because not a whole lot of people are given the chance to get there. I have just a tremendous amount of respect for for those heritage artists.

I think about in my past: “I Miss the Misery” or “Love Bites” or “Here’s To Us” or, you know, even the earlier stuff like, “Familiar Taste of Poison” on our first record [2009’s Halestorm]… I wrote that when I was, like, 17. So it’s like there’s no way I could go back and relive that unless I’m talking from a perspective of being in my thirties and reflecting on the fact that I was 17. But, you know, you can’t necessarily go back to that and try to keep recreating that for the rest of your life. You have to always, as we say in the world of Halestorm, “rock forward.”

I was thinking about Chris Cornell: that last solo album, [2015’s] Higher Truth didn’t seem like he was listening to anybody who was telling him, “What you really need to do is sound like Badmotorfinger.” He was doing something that he was clearly comfortable with, it was obviously different than Soundgarden. I don’t imagine that any of the guys in the band would be like, “You should have saved those songs for us.” It was completely different. And even that last Soundgarden album [2012’s King Animal] was really good, but it just didn’t sound like what they had done before. It wasn’t radically different. It’s not Achtung Baby, but it just sounded like something older guys would write about. It didn’t sound like they were trying to recapture their youth. That makes it even more sad that he’s gone. But I really admired that about him. They were a rock band who grew up together, and that’s even harder than a solo artist growing up by him or herself.

Oh, absolutely. And you could say the same thing about Pearl Jam. I actually absorbed so much from ’70s and ’80s hard rock. I was late to the ’90s grunge era. Like all throughout the 90s, I was listening to like Alice Cooper and Dio and Van Halen and “Van Hagar.”

A lot of that was your parents’ music. 

Oh, absolutely. I first kind of caught the bug because of my dad’s music. When I was a kid, I remember really starting to get into music when I was about 11. And I remember we moved into this new place. My parents moved around Pennsylvania every so often. I was born on the outskirts of Philly. And then my parents decided on a whim to move to the Appalachian Trail in the mountains. For two years, the four of us — me, my brother and my parents — lived in this little log cabin in the woods with no neighbors for ten miles in any direction. There’s like one bedroom that we all shared. They’re kind of hippies in that respect, I guess. But then, you know, that got a little old and obviously I was getting a little older and needed, like, friends.

They moved to a 20-acre farm. And so it’s like a small farm, but we had sheep and chickens and the whole thing. I baled hay every summer. And we moved into a new place and some of the neighborhood kids invited me to a sleepover. I’ve told the story a million times. But it’s one of those weird benchmark times in my life. So they invited me to a sleepover and they’re like, “Hey, bring some of your favorite CDs.”

I know that you know where this is going. I brought Alice Cooper’s [1971 album] Love It To Death, Ronnie James Dio’s [1983 album] Holy Diver to the sleepover. And those girls looked at me like I was from a completely other planet. This was like, ’95 or ’96 and they all had TLC and Mariah Carey, the Backstreet Boys. So I’m in this bedroom of this new supposed friend of mine and I’m trying to convince them [Alice Cooper’s] “‘I’m 18’ is awesome! Listen to this song!”

I remember coming back from the sleepover and my dad being overjoyed that the other kids didn’t like my music. And I’m like, “Well, why is that such a good thing, Dad?” I’m 11. It’s like: “My life is over! No one’s going to like me!” But I can trace that moment forward to what has become my mission statement in my songwriting and in my life: let that freak flag fly! I remember my dad being like, “It’s a good thing: they love all that music because it’s popular. But you’re listening to your music just purely because you love it!” There was no outside influence, besides parents. So, yeah, it was a weird thing growing up with that.

It’s funny because I was just into like a lot of “dude music” growing up. And I remember when I was fifteen, my mom had kind of had enough of it… not enough of me listening to rock music. She was a rock fan herself. She’s one of those Beatlemania chicks back in the day, she wanted to marry Paul McCartney. My brother and I, our childhood movies growing up, even before I was into “hard” music, was the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night.

But anyway, when I was fifteen, my mom’s like, “All right, so if you’re going to definitely be into this rock thing, you should know that girls can do this, too.”

So she got me, for my birthday or Christmas or something, like 10 CDs: it was greatest hits from Joan Jett, Janis Joplin, a live record called The Road Home by Heart. I remember thinking, “Oh, so girls can actually sound like that.” Because up until then I think I was just kind of trying to emulate Dio or something. You know, I’d started writing my little songs before Halestorm started. But, you know, you just get into that and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, OK. That’s the thing.Wow. OK, cool. This changes everything!”

I do cite my parents as being huge influences. Even to this day, my dad still wears zebra pants, painted toenails and stuff is very proud [of that].

You recently recorded “Zoom” versions of “Come Together” and “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll” with some of the guys from Guns N’ Roses (former members Gilby Clarke and Matt Sorum, as well as Slash). 

That was so last minute. I literally got a call that day: “Hey, can you do a video and like record some stuff…” you don’t say no to that! I have a tremendous amount of of respect for the people that have come before me. These guys these are the reason that I got into this music. I watched the video after they released it, [laughing] and oh, my gosh, you can’t wipe that smile off my face. And I’m just cheesing it up. It was just one of those “pinch me” moments: “This is really cool.” Like regardless of what this does [as far as views], I like looking at myself, kind of in the third person being like, “Hey, look at you!” If you had told my 13-year-old self when we started the band that that’s what I would be doing [years later], I would’ve called you a liar. [laughs]

So, we’re supposed to be talking about your songs! Let’s talk about “Uncomfortable.” 

There are many ways to to write a song. And in the world of Halestorm, we use all of them, whether that means it’s myself sitting down and writing a song in its entirety and then showing it to the guys and then they help me [finish it]. Sometimes, the guys have written instrumentals that I’ll end up writing lyrics to. “Uncomfortable” was the first song that we really got excited about for our last record, Vicious. We had written probably close to, I want to say 20 to 40 demos, before we went into the studio. But we ended up throwing away a ton of them, practically everything, because up until then we were kind of writing in a different headspace. I felt like I was writing for, or about, everybody but myself. So I was writing for the fans or I was writing for radio or I was writing so that the A&R guy would approve it.

When I decided to throw all of that away, we were kind of left with this blank slate. And I was a little uneasy about it because I like to be prepared. And so we were in the studio and Nick Raskulinecz, our producer, suggested, “Hey, so when was the last time you guys just kind of jammed?” And I was like, “Man, it’s probably been a second because [a song] usually starts with one of us, and we all meet in the middle somewhere.”

So we took his advice and set up all of our equipment in this small room. It felt very similar to being in my parent’s living room. Small amps and all of that. And we jammed this song out. We originally just did it as an instrumental. We recorded it. And then I took it home and wrote about exactly what I was feeling at the moment, which was just: “I am sick of trying to make everybody happy but myself.” I truly wrote that from a place of joy. It’s funny, because I wasn’t intending for it to be that tempo. But the attitude was there and there was something special about it. I just think there’s something powerful that happens to you as a human once you finish [writing] a song. I think that you come out on the other side as a different person and you get to kind of look back and be like, “All right, cool.” I dealt with a small part of what was going on in my head.

Performance wise, it was something very different than what I had done before as well. I’m a big fan of Tom Petty. But on the other end [of the musical spectrum}, I’m a big fan of [songwriter] Desmond Child, “You Give Love a Bad Name” [Child co-wrote that song with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora]. I’m the “I’m in love with somebody and it’s not you” girl. I’m the “Love Bites (So Do I)” girl. You know, I’m the “I get off on you getting off on me” girl. So to write this song, and purely just let it be whatever happens when it falls out… what was interesting to me [was] it wasn’t the traditional chorus. It was literally a vocal riff that I could do just because of being a vocalist and training in that aspect. And for me, that’s what makes it song special.

The attitude definitely comes through. I remember when I first heard it and I thought it sounds like something Pat Benatar would done. 

That’s a huge compliment. I think that if I had grown up a generation before I did, I would definitely be like Pat Benatar.

She should have gotten into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, and you would have been the perfect person to present her. 

Oh, yeah. She and I had a conversation in 2012 right after “Love Bites” came out. We had this article, I think it was in Revolver, it was called “Rebel Meets Rebel.” It was funny because we had like a mediator on the phone with us, just in case I got annoying. But he ended up leaving [the call].

And we end up talking for like an hour and a half. And she literally told me that she would come and personally slap me if I gave up [on music] at any point. And she was telling me her theory, which is is that over the course of a career you have these three sections and the first one is: everybody’s excited for you because you’re new and you’re coming up in the scene. Everyone wants to support you. Everybody wants you to open for them, and they want to give you a chance.

And then there’s this whole middle period where nobody wants to hear any new music from you. [They make you feel like] you’re past your prime or whatever. And she’s like, you’ve just got to keep putting music out, and keep yourself out there on the top of the pile, keep yourself relevant. Because then you get to this other side. And she’s telling me that she was making spaghetti and drinking wine the entire time, while she was talking to me.

So she says, then you’re on the other side. And she was just talking about herself. She’s like, you’re in your big house. You’re drinking your big glass of wine. And she’s like: “That is the iconic s—.” And, she says, “I will personally come and slap you if you do not make it to this point.” Like, “Yes, Miss Benatar. You can totally slap me if you want to!” But, that’s the thing. That is the goal.

So, let’s talk about “Do Not Disturb.” I feel like you don’t hear women singing songs like that, but it would be normal for guys… it could be an AC/DC song. 

Thank you. This is the song that makes every  interviewer’s ears very red. From the time that we released that record, I felt bad because you could tell that some the interviewers didn’t necessarily want to ask me what the song was about. But their bosses had said, “Please ask this.”

I’m a very honest person, and I wouldn’t have written the song if I was not prepared to talk about it. So I think a lot of them were expecting me to be like, “Oh, well, that’s a private situation.” No! I’d be like, “I’ll tell you the story!” And the poor guys, or girls, would just be like [blushing], beet red.

I’ve always been a fan of songwriters that speak their truth, and you can tell that it’s not twelve people in a room writing a song that they think matches the image of the artist. [i like] when the artist is actually saying the things that they want to say.

And I always forget that there is that double standard between women that talk about sex, and guys that talk about sex. You mentioned AC/DC. But there’s Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, or any number of the dude bands. And I grew up on all those guys. And especially since I have a bunch of guys in my band, I do forget that there is that double-standard thing.

Like “Uncomfortable,” it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. You know, when when I’m speaking about those things and especially when it ends up being a true story and everybody wants to know about it. But I don’t know, I like talking about that stuff! And sex is just as much a part of my life as anybody else, or any dude that I’ve ever known. I’ve signed more boobs than all the guys [in Halestorm] put together. I like having fun with that. And that aspect of writing “Do Not Disturb” and literally recalling a night that I had in Holland a couple years ago and putting it into a song was exciting to to me and it was funny. And you say everything with a smile. The funniest thing about that is that I can never go into a hotel room and look at that “Do not disturb” sign in in the same way ever again. And neither can any of our fans.

When meet and greets were still happening, fans who had spent the night in a hotel room would bring to the meet and greet a “Do not disturb” sign, and I’d sign that. To be able to kind of put myself into other people’s lives in that way and show a little bit more about myself, that to me was empowering.

It’s weird because you would think by writing a song like that and being a girl, I would have gotten letters from parents or something like that, “Oh, you’re encouraging girls to act a certain way” or whatever. But I got the complete opposite. And in fact, at most of these meet and greets there would be parents saying, “I hope that my daughters are as confident about what they want out of sex, out of love, as you are.”

And I thought that was really interesting when that started happening. I just didn’t expect that. “OK, well, don’t encourage me because, we can go further!”

Let me just mention here that no one told me to ask about that song. I love that song, that’s a really empowering song. And, what’s wrong with a woman singing about exactly what she wants? AC/DC sang, “42/39/56, you could say she’s got it all!”  That’s pretty specific. Bon Scott might have been making the measurements up, but you feel like he’s talking about somebody he had an experience with, and nobody would ever be like, “Dude, don’t sing that. That’s too much!” It would be a complete double standard if anybody did have an issue with your song. When I heard it, I was like, “Lzzy is a rock star, she should be living like that!”

With all of the safety measures, obviously, and everything consensual… we were just listening to “All Night Long” by Rainbow and and I had to cover that one time here in Nashville. There’s an amazing rock and roll community here in Nashville, and everybody kind of gets up to jam… well, that was before the pandemic. But there was a last-minute jam: “Hey, do you know this Rainbow song?” I’m like, “I think so.” But I had never really dug into the lyrics. And I’m just like, “Oh, my gosh,” because, there are a lot of songs in the ’80s that are about the wrong type of sex. Like, under-age stuff and nonconsensual stuff.

But with “Do Not Disturb,” I felt like I was doing some people a favor because I think that more women should know exactly what they want in the bedroom and tell whoever their prospective partners are about it. Don’t it make make everybody guess. We’re trying to make life easier!

Tell me about “Amen.” 

“Amen” was actuually inspired by a family member of mine. I have a cousin and around the time that I was writing the song she had come out as gay. We all kind of knew, but she had finally admitted it to her mom. There’s a huge chunk of my extended family that are very religious based and they were not having any of it. And so she confided in me for a lot of that period of time. And I remember basically talking to her about it and just being like, “Hey, this is this is your life. As far as we know, we only got one trip around this one. It’s your life and you love who you want to love. You be who you want to be.”

[In the song] I’m talking about, and encouraging, my young cousin — she’s six years younger than I am — to be herself and to be out about being a lesbian and loving who she wants to love. But I’m also putting that religious twist on it as kind of a middle finger. But at the same time, a song is going mean whatever to whoever is listening to it. And I’ve gotten a lot of people that are that are very religious who thought that I was talking about my faith. So, you can take it that way if you want. I guess that’s the beauty of songwriting.

But that’s what I ended up writing it about, just kind of encouraging my cousin to be herself. And it’s so amazing because that’s one of those songs that I see a lot of fans tattooing certain lines on their skin and telling me these stories, and some people telling me their deepest, darkest secrets that even their parents don’t know. But that song got them through something.

It is important to write from that element of truth and and write about the things that you’re passionate about and write about the things that you think are important because they will be important to other people. If you don’t feel close to what you’re writing, how can you expect anybody else to feel close to what you’re writing?

Right before the pandemic, my cousin contacted me and she had gotten some of those lines tattooed on her. And that’s a whole other level: “We’re related and you have my lyrics tattooed on you!” I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, it’s borderline a little creepy [laughs] but I love you if you’re listening.

But I love the fact that for some reason, even in my personal life, in my family, something I’m doing in my professional life has been able to seep into their lives as well. They’re not just like, “OK, yeah, we’re proud of you.” It’s nice to have those family members that are deep into what you do.

I don’t think there are many hard rock songs that are like Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” that say, “it’s cool if you’re gay.” If you’re LGBT and in the hard rock community, that must be a cool messageto hear, and you did that with “Amen.” 

I think it’s important. And rock in itself has always stood on the side of the ignored, the downtrodden, the persecuted against, the outcast. It’s much better now than it was years and years ago. Everybody’s making progress. It’s good to know that if I’m going to put something out into the world, if it encourages somebody to be unapologetically themselves and know that they’re OK, then I’ve done my job.

So, let’s talk about “Love Bites (So Do I).” 

There’s an absolute cheesy bone in my body, and I blame Alice Cooper because I grew up listening to that double entendre stuff.  It’s interesting to have that influence because it does seep in there. So I had this kind of cheesy line, “Love bites, so do I.” We wrote the song just out of pure attitude. But but the the tempo and the music of the song was actually inspired by a cover that we did on on one of our cover EPs [2011’s ReAniMate: The CoVeRs eP], Skid Row’s “Slave To The Grind.”  Up until then we didn’t really have something in that tempo. And we had so much fun playing that song that I was just like, “OK, here’s the BPM: we’re writing a song like this.” And so that was like the main inspiration for the music.

I look back on “Love Bites (So Do I),” and lyrically, to me, it’s a complete and beautiful mess because on one hand, I feel like I’m being cocky and saying, “Oh, you think you’ve got it good? Well, I’m better than all of them.” I’m exploring my my attitude of who I am. But at the same time, I kind of wrote it as an encouragement to the guys in my band; I’m an ally to them. And I’ve seen girls come in and girls come out and ex-girlfriends who I’m trying to relate to and who can only talk about hair for some reason.

Not not to knock any of their ex-girlfriends! But I’ve kind of been the fly on the wall for that. And so a lot of that song was me kind of being on the side of the dudes and being like, “Hey, man, don’t listen to these stupid things that these girls are saying to you when they say that you’re not enough, or you got to quit music or whatever.” Which made it even more surprising when it was nominated, and then won, a Grammy. Because for me, when we recorded the song — and this shows how much I know about what’s going to hit with people or not, and why you always gotta just write for yourself — we all looked each other like, “That’s going to be fun to play live, that’s just gonna be like one of those ‘fan favorite,’ album tracks that we’re gonna really enjoy playing live.”

And then all of a sudden, we’re at this show in Wisconsin and we got a text from our front of house [sound] guy who texted one of our guitar techs saying that we were nominated for a Grammy. So, I have a moment in the set where I’ll just kind of sit down at the piano and play a couple of songs. So I’m talking to the audience and all of sudden my guitar player, Joe [Hottinger], runs out on stage — that’s not like him — and he whispers in my ear, “We just got nominated for a Grammy.” I didn’t even know we were on their radar, you know? And I turned to the audience, “Well, apparently we just got nominated for a Grammy for ‘Love Bites.'” And the audience was like: their home team scored a touchdown. It was just awesome.

Let me ask you about one more song: “Freak Like Me.”

“Freak Like Me,” this is the song that I can trace back to that moment where I was an 11 year old and found out I was not cool, that I was not like the other girls. Like I said, I’m loving Alice Cooper and Dio and Black Sabbath. And not necessarily relating to the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears generation that apparently I’m part of.

It’s interesting because when you’re a kid, you think that’s a bad thing, because everybody wants to belong. And there came a poignant point in time, and this was shortly before we started the band, but the band kind of solidified that for me… I started using those feelings as my “superpower.” Even beyond liking different music. Dressing differently than everybody. If there is something on trend, you go the complete opposite way. When we started the band, I would get “interventions” from my teachers in middle school. And I was a good kid, I was an A or B student. I did my work.

But everybody seemed to be wanting to pull me in a different direction and drag me off of the path that I was carving. And I took that as encouragement as well. “OK, this not only is something that none of my friends are doing, something that nobody but me can really relate to, but even my teachers think it’s a bad idea. So I should absolutely do it!” And I was very lucky to have parents that were very encouraging of that.

My parents have always been weird and have always had this childish reckless abandon approach to parenting. If you really want to laugh, some of our earliest videos that end up popping up on YouTube were from 1999. And we we had made our own pyro and we built this rotating upside down and drum kit for my little brother drummer [Arejay Hale].

In recent years, I’ve asked my mom, “Why did you guys allow us to do that?” And they recently admitted to me that they were terrified. And they’re like, “We saw in your eyes that you were gonna do it anyway. So we were gonna be supportive and we were gonna be there with you and we were going to go to the bars with you and be in the audience and make sure that the stuff was running right. And make sure you’re not getting screwed over and that you’re getting paid for the gig and all of that.”

I was very lucky to have parents that understood my weirdness. But getting back to the song, I really wanted to have a song that depicted all of that, but did it in a very celebratory way. I’m not talking about, “Nobody understood me” [in a negative way]. I flipped the script: “Nobody understood me: that’s awesome!” I felt like it’s just such a part of who I am and a part of my history, and it has become my mission statement: “Let let your freak fly!” And also to encourage other people and just kind of being that person saying, “I didn’t know anybody in the business. Everybody said not to do this. And I did this anyway. And if I can stand up here on this stage, absolutely, so can you. And you can do whatever you want. If you want to be a rodeo clown, go do it. Yeah. No matter how many people think it’s ridiculous. Nothing is impossible.”

I gotta tell you, man, I love playing that song live. It has become such an amazing anthem for our community. The fans took it upon themselves to change their branding. They used to call themselves “Storm Chasers” in the beginning years of Halestorm. And since that song was released, they’d started calling themselves “Freaks.” And now there’s the “Freak Family” on Twitter. And all these people that are just doing this, they did this all on their own. So it’s really neat to kind of sit back and and see that.

Jesse Frasure: The Stories Behind ‘One Thing Right,’ ‘Life Changes’ and More

Nov 2, 2020 | 100 Years of Radio

The 100 Years of Radio – 100 Years of Hit Makers limited series podcast gives music fans a front-row seat for conversations with songwriters behind some of the biggest hits of yesterday and today. You’ll learn the stories behind the songs from the people who wrote them. Each episode will focus on one writer: sometimes, they’ll just talk about one song, other times, they’ll talk about a number of hits.

New episodes will be released each Monday through November of 2020.   

100 Years of Radio – 100 Years of Hit Makers special podcast series is produced in partnership with Beasley Media Group, XPERI (HD Radio), and BMI in celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the first commercial radio broadcast.

Jesse Frasure is a country songwriter who appreciates all of country music – from the earliest legends to the newest hitmakers. He gives the stories behind some of his biggest songs here, and also talks about his one-time songwriting partner Chris Stapleton and Stapleton’s surprising hobby.

Let’s start out with “One Thing Right,” which was an unusual and very successful collaboration by Kane Brown with Marshmello. 

Yeah, it’s been crazy over the last probably three to five years. We’ve been seeing a lot of the EDM collaborations with country music kind of across the board. But that song came from a writing trip for Kane. We were actually at his label head’s lake house, and he had a bunch of songwriters there. And he was kind of wanting to do something in a direction of like a Khalid vibe, but for country music. So we made that song and it was kind of stripped down and it never quite fit his album at the time. I think it was probably a little bit too pop leaning for that current album that he was putting together. So we shot it over to Marshmello and they flipped out over it. So it was really cool seeing that whole thing come together and then, you know, obviously did pretty well on the pop charts. The cool thing about the EDM world is they you know, they reach a lot of playlists that are genre and country doesn’t touch internationally. So it’s amazing to kind of see the outreach in that the amount of streams that come from all these different playlists. And it’s really healthy, I think, right now to see these collaborations between country and EDM.

I’m sure every 10 years —  you could call it a generation in country music — the older people are like, “I don’t like what they’re doing today.” You know, I remember even when Garth was getting huge, it’s like, “Why is he flying over the arena and why is he doing all this rock stuff?” But it was it felt really different when you guys did that song and Maren Morris collaborated with Zedd. What do you think changed that made it OK to work with, you know, EDM artists now, when that wouldn’t have happened even maybe five years earlier? 

I think it’s a two part thing. You know, it’s funny, we were watching that Ken Burns documentary on country music, the amount of haters that there’s always been. You know, when country music moved from just a bluegrass style in general, there was people that kind of hated on it, people thought that that was too progressive. And not so throughout the history of any style of music, whether it’s Bob Dylan picking up an electric guitar or whatever, you know, people get attached to what they think something should be. But country music’s never been one thing, you know, it’s never been one sound throughout the history of it. So to me, what I love most about Nashville is the this creative… it’s like a safety net around the whole city for people just to come and make great music. The thing that’s kind of changed in the last three to five years as far as the collaborations go… I don’t know necessarily that our artists weren’t into it. It was more just the stigma. I think that, you know, there’s a stigma from L.A. to Nashville at times that even though there’s been a lot of collaboration among the [song]creators, but maybe the artists didn’t think it was cool to collaborate with a country artist.

Probably what really change things is people like Florida Georgia Line doing the collaboration with Alesso and Hailee Steinfeld. And then, you know, even before that, “Cruise” kind of opening the door to a different sound. Guys like the Chainsmokers doing collaborations with FGL and Kelsea [Ballerini] and then slowly and surely then you start. Obviously, the Zedd [with Maren Morris] thing, like you mentioned, was a huge smash. And that was a song that several pop artists had tried. And they ended up picking Maren’s vocal, you know. So a lot of it is a combination of the artists and the creators, like myself, in town were raised on lots of styles of music. You know, we’re not raised in one genre anymore. We grew up listening to music all over the place.

And combined with the simple fact that, like I said, all of the sudden it’s cool. You got Diplo and a cowboy hat now. So I mean it’s just a different time and different style. And like you said, there’s a cyclical thing. Things come around, people get more open-minded. And we have a very, very loyal fan base. Regardless of what goes down, the country audience is kind of unwavering. And when they’re passionate about something, they stick with that artist a long time.

Somebody like Nelly who hasn’t come up through country music, probably appreciates the loyalty that he sees from country music artists get because he’s done shows with McGraw. He’s done shows with FGL and now he has a remix with Kane. Maybe when he first came out in 2001 or whatever, he wouldn’t have thought about doing a country song. But now he probably sees that while most other genres leave their older artists in the dust country fans stick forever. 

That’s a great point. And I mean, in in going back to FGL as kind of trailblazers… on their baseball stadium tour, they brought me out to DJ. That was my first time writing with them. And I wrote “Sun Daze” on that trip. That was my first number one. That was the same tour where Nelly — this ginormous hip hop star from our childhood — is opening their show. It was crazy.

But like I said earlier, there’s always going to be the kind of issues with someone thinking that something’s not country or this is too pop. Our format tells stories better than anybody. And that’s the common thread. I feel like the common thread between a Kane Brown, Chris Stapleton and Kacey Musgraves and Luke Combs is Americana subject matter. So that to me is what makes country music, “country.” The stories, the small town culture, the love, the loss, the [idea that you] can’t fix the world but we can smile about on Friday night. Those are the things that have been in the genre for years. And Glen Campbell sounded very different than Merle Haggard. And, you know, Patsy Cline sounds very different than Raelynn, but they’re all kind of doing the same thing, you know?

So I want to ask about your huge run of great singles with Thomas Rhett. Talk about “Life Changes.” 

It’s weird when you you do such an autobiographical song. It’s one thing to be like, “Here is the story about how we met.” But that song is literally so specific to his story. I mean, we have Uganda in a country song and then production wise to have tubas and piccolo and marching band vibes. So we really were nervous about that song. I was like the last song we wrote for the Life Changes record and we wrote it at his farm. It was like a snowy blizzard day. I don’t think we could leave the farm. We got stuck there for two, three days, and we kind of were a little bit nervous to put it out as a single just because it felt like it was gonna be a little too specific. But it translated so well. It did great on radio and it really goes off great live. I just love that song. I think it’s kind of one of those almost rap-esqe verse phrases, you know, that’s easy to see and hookey and really kind of resonated with the teenage girls and that is an amazing fan base to get because they really are consumers, like true consumers, whether it’s T-shirts to sweaters, to music. So it really kind of just resonated across the board. It’s pretty it’s funny when you look back over the ones that where you were like, “Oh my gosh, is this [song] going to work?”

As you’re going into it, you’re pretty scared because every step of the way with Thomas, there’s been a couple risky moves. You know, whether that was going from the first album into “Crash and Burn,” that was a very nerve racking thing for him. But along the way, putting songs out like “Life Changes,” that’s there’s not a guarantee past that country radio is going to play you. So the fact that they did and it worked so well, that’s just that was an awesome story.

I think people have been really invested in his story and he shared the story of, like him and his wife wanting to have kids and then adopting a kid. And like you said, the Uganda thing is like that’s pretty specific to him. What country singer, or any singer, really could sing that particular line truthfully. So how do you do it when you’re writing a song with him like that? Are you writing lyric that come from his life and he’s approving it? Or are you laying down chords?

Thomas is a stronger artist-writer than most. I mean, if his artist career goes away, he’d be a very, very successful songwriter. He has had a lot of commercial placements with other artists as just a writer. So his viewpoints are always pretty strong. He usually has people around him that are editors or collaborators in the sense that: we’ll play him tracks or music that we like and then it’s just sort of trying to get out what he’s saying.

With that song, we started with some chord changes and built a groove around that. He was just going through a lot, he had a lot of his mind. It was basically like, he had two kids very quickly. So that was a heavy presence on his mind.

But, you know, for someone that is so used to telling his story is a love story, putting his family first and all kinds of songs and talking about them. It still was a nerve-wracking aspect even for him: “Man, this might be a little too inside,” you know. So, yeah, that was pretty cool that that worked out.

Talk about “Crash and Burn.”

“Crash and Burn” is a song I wrote with Chris Stapleton. My wife introduced me to Chris years ago. They worked at the same publishing company together. He was a writer there and she was a song plugger. And he wasn’t really getting a ton of attention as an artist at the time. I mean he was getting cuts as a writer, but he couldn’t really get the artist thing going. And so I would get together at night with him. I was a a song plugger. I hadn’t really gotten many cuts at the time and I was just running a publishing company. So in the evenings after work, he’d come over. I’m from Detroit and I love his voice and he loved soul music as much as I do. So we would just make these songs like we’d call him like sad songs for dance floors, we were like, “Maybe we’ll pitch these to Bruno Mars or something.”

And we did like a four or five of them and the CD was kind of floating around town of this stuff and it was like, “Oh my gosh, have you heard Stapleton singing this kind of Motown-esque stuff?” And I think it was Thomas’ business manager who gave him a copy of the CD. I think Chris and Thomas shared the same business manager at the time. And Thomas heard this and reached out to us. And I think at the time, Gary Allan was also pretty interested in the song. And I was a huge Gary Allan fan and I didn’t know too much about Thomas and what I did know about Thomas was from the first album. I just didn’t really understand why he was into “Crash and Burn.” It didn’t make any sense to me because he was kind of more into the Cole Swindell. Dustin Lynch kind of lane at the time and I couldn’t picture it, but he called me up one day and says, “Man, obviously, I’m a little bit nervous that I’m going to pull this off after hearing Stapleton’s voice [on the demo]. But I love this song. I think I want to try something different to stand out on this next album and I’d love you to produce this with me and Dan Huff.”

So that was the kickoff point. So I think to this day, it’s probably my favorite song just because of the story, the fact that we wrote it, not trying to get a country cut. We just wrote a song that we loved and obviously, Chris is such an amazing singer and writer as well. So it’s so fun to work with him. And the fact that that song kind of just found its way. That whole era — “Crash and Burn,” then leading into “Die a Happy Man,” what a changing point for Thomas Rhett’s career. And a huge changing point for my career. 

Chris Stapleton is an artist who, if I can’t get a free ticket, I’ll pay for my ticket and go. I’ll pay $75 or $100 to see that guy play. But there was that joke at the ACMs one year where all these big country stars are standing up in the audience saying, “I discovered Chris Stapleton.” “No, I put him on the map!” Because almost everybody has done a song by him. But I’m dying to hear what his demos sound like? It must be pretty intimidating for artists, because it’s like, “I have to do a better job than that.” 

Oh, man. It’s it’s intense. He’s a bad ass and he can sing any genre of music. And most people have never heard him sing anything but his style of country music. But, you know, he had a classic rock group called the Jompson Brothers.

And the Steeldrivers like that. 

Adele even covered a Steeldrivers song [“If It Hadn’t Been For Love”]. But the stuff we did was very much in a kind of almost like a modern Motown vibe. It’s so funny to think that his career was just flatlined as an artist. Nothing was happening. So much so that, like I said, he just would come and try to get some stress out, writing in different styles of music with me. Pretty wild!

Do you guys still write together? Are you still in touch?

We still talk all the time. I’m a crazy sneaker collector, and you wouldn’t know this at all about him. but he actually is a crazy fan of Jordans himself, so he loves sneakers. So we’re always kind of talking about new drops that come out. He collects sneakers and pocket knives. He’s got a lot more kids since then. And he’s a lot more famous since then.

There’s much more to our interview with Jesse Frasure; to hear the entire thing, download the podcast (scroll up). 

John Oates: The Stories Behind Hall And Oates’ Classics

Oct 26, 2020 | 100 Years of Radio

The 100 Years of Radio – 100 Years of Hit Makers limited series podcast gives music fans a front-row seat for conversations with songwriters behind some of the biggest hits of yesterday and today. You’ll learn the stories behind the songs from the people who wrote them. Each episode will focus on one writer: sometimes, they’ll just talk about one song, other times, they’ll talk about a number of hits.

New episodes will be released each Monday through November of 2020.   

100 Years of Radio – 100 Years of Hit Makers special podcast series is produced in partnership with Beasley Media Group, XPERI (HD Radio), and BMI in celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the first commercial radio broadcast.

“If someone would’ve told me back in ’72 that we would be selling out giant arenas and things like that in 2020, I really wouldn’t have believed it,” John Oates told us. “And there were moments throughout the ’90s and early 2000s where I certainly wouldn’t have believed it either.” After racking up hit after hit after hit in the ’70s and ’80s, Daryl Hall and John Oates didn’t know where they fit in, in the alternative-rock dominated early ’90s. But, of course, good songs never go out of style, and the duo, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, have recently headlined arenas. If it hadn’t been for the pandemic, they would have played ampitheaters across this country in the summer of 2020. John Oates spoke to us about a lot of the hits that got them to this point.

Let’s start by talking about “She’s Gone” from 1973.

Well, that song came about in a very unusual way. I had met a gal. We had an encounter at about 3:00 a.m. in a 24 hour soul food restaurant in Greenwich Village. She was a very interesting girl and it was the middle of winter. And she was wearing a tutu and cowboy boots. And it was kind of fun, let’s just put it that way. I asked her out on New Year’s Eve. This was probably December when I first met her and I thought maybe we’d get together on New Year’s Eve. I was sitting in the apartment in New York and she never showed up. And so there I was: sitting by myself and I picked up my guitar and I wrote, “She’s gone. Oh, she’s gone.” Kind of this folky little lament. And I didn’t really think much of it, to be honest with you.

And a few days later, Daryl came back to the apartment. I played it for him and he said, “Hey, that’s cool.” He sat down at the piano and began to play the riff that you hear in the beginning of the song as the intro and the piano riff. And we literally wrote that song in about an hour and a half. We just blew blew through it, just kind of using everyday images and things that are very, very mundane, but kind of represented loss in a way. And then, of course, when it got into the hands of Arif Mardin, our producer at Atlantic Records, and with the amazing studio musicians and the arrangement that he created, the song really became… I called it “my perfect storm of creativity.” We had the raw material in the actual song itself. But the way it was produced and the players and the way they played it, and everything about it just really took it to another level.

Everybody knows that you and Daryl both love R&B. What did you think when you heard Tavares’ version?

Well, our song had been released prior to Tavares’ version. And it wasn’t a big hit. Our version did reasonably well, but it didn’t set the world on fire. And then Tavares did their version. And it became a number one R&B song. Considering Daryl and my roots and our Philadelphia upbringing and the kind of music that we listened to as kids, it didn’t surprise us at all that it became an R&B hit. Then, of course, Atlantic re-released it, and then years later they re-released it yet a third time, after we had success with “Sara Smile.”

They finally made it happen. That was back in the Ahmet Ertegun era; if a record label was really behind something, they would make it happen. I don’t think songs or artists get that many opportunities like that these days. 

I think it would be very unusual for a song to be released [as a single] three times in a space of about five years [today].

So talk about “Sara Smile,” because that was another one of your huge hits from that era. 

I have to give full credit to Darryl on that. It’s really kind of his song. He and I co-wrote the lyrics, but honestly, he was driving the bus on that one. It’s kind of a postcard to his girlfriend, Sara [Allen], who was a co-writer on a lot of our songs. The unique thing about “Sara Smile” was that it was never considered by either us, or the record company, to be a hit record. It was just an album track to us. And I believe we had released two or three singles from the “Silver Album” [1975’s Daryl Hall & John Oates] prior to “Sara Smile,” and they all went into the top 30 or top 20. But we didn’t really have a big hit. And then we were on tour in Europe and a DJ in Ohio at an R&B station began to play “Sara Smile,” just purely as an album track. And, as they used to say in the old days, the phones lit up. There was an amazing response. “Who’s that?” “Who’s singing?” “Where’d you get that song?” And the report made it’s way back to RCA Records. That was our new label at the time. And they said, “Hey, well, let’s give it a shot.” And they released it as a single and you know the rest.

Sara co-wrote “You Make My Dreams” with you guys. Tell me about that one.

That was a Darryl piano groove. Just a cool, simple piano groove. And I think it was kind of funny about that one, too… the story with that is: after we we wrote it, we played it for our manager at the time, and he kind of dismissed it, I remember, because of the lyrics and the verse. For some reason, he thought it was too “poetic.” I don’t think he quite  got it.

That song has an interesting history, because when it was released it went into the top five. But it wasn’t considered a huge smash. It wasn’t setting the world on fire. People weren’t gravitating to that song. And now, 30 years, 40 years later, that song is the gift that keeps giving. I mean, people just can’t get enough of it. It’s being used in movies, television commercials. People are dancing to it on the Internet. It’s just taken on a life of its own.

I feel like a lot of your songs are like that. I know a lot of people got into “I Can’t Go For That” because De La Soul sampled it in their 1989 song “Say No Go.” Talk about writing that song. 

That song was really not not a planned thing at all. We were in the studio recording at the end of a recording day. The band went home and it was just Daryl, myself and the engineer. We were probably doing some kind of work on the tracks or whatever. Quiet evening. And Daryl just went out to kill some time and sat at the keyboard. And he turned on the little drum machine that we used to use. And he hit the first preset, which was “Rock 1.” And he began to play the bass line with his left hand. It was like magic.

And then he said, “Hey, John, grab your guitar.” And he had an idea for this guitar part, which is the the plucky kind of syncopated guitar part that I play. And that was it. The only things on that song are me, Daryl and Charlie DeChant. Daryl put some little synths on it. It’s got my guitar part. We did the background vocals. Charlie played the sax solo. And we and we sang it. That was it.

When De La Soul incorporated it into their song. hip-hop was not brand new; it had been around maybe 10 years. But clearly, they didn’t have people checking for samples and maybe getting permission for stuff the way they have to do today. How did you first hear that they were using it? When did you first hear their song?

We had done a project with Nile Rogers for a movie called Earth Girls Are Easy [they covered the O’Jays’ “Love Train”]. Pretty silly movie. And we were doing a music video out in Long Island in a park. We had a bunch of kids in the audience of the music video. And during one of the breaks in the video, there was a girl in the front row and she came up, and she goes, “Have you heard this yet?” And she handed me a cassette. Handwritten on it, it said, “‘Say No Go,’ De La Soul.”

And we went back and listened to it and we were like, “Wow, what is this?” As you said, it was the early days of sampling. I wasn’t as aware of what was happening in the hip-hop world. And we thought it was really cool. There’s nothing wrong with sampling as long as the original composers get credit and get their due. I love when people sample and take things to another level. You know, we made our own song the way we wanted to make it. And they took a tour to a whole other place. And I think that’s really cool.

I just think back then, there weren’t even rules about sampling in hip-hop records. 

It was the Wild West. You know, you just took whatever you wanted. And to be honest with you, it’s really the same today. It’s not much different. The only difference is there are more people being a little more attentive to making sure that the writers get credited.

If someone asks to sample one of your songs, you could say, “I don’t like that. You can’t do it.”

Well, we can. If there’s a major sample going on, BMI will contact us and say, “Hey, listen, these guys want to do this. What do you think?” And for the most part, I think we pretty much greenlight most of the things unless it’s really offensive or something like that.

So for me and a lot of my generation, “Maneater” was a big deal: we’d heard your music on the radio all the time. But “Maneater” was the first time we really saw you; MTV played that video a lot. So talk about writing that song.

I was in a restaurant in Greenwich Village where we used to go for late-night hangouts, and it was a very hip ’80s place to gather with musicians and actors, models and the groovy ’80s Wall Street tycoons. Just watch Wolf of Wall Street and you can kind of imagine what it was like. I’ll leave it at that. But anyway, I was sitting at a table with some friends and this gal came into the room and she was just breathtakingly gorgeous. And she sat down at our table and began to tell these dirty jokes. She had this incredible, beautiful, beautiful, incredibly beautiful face, an incredibly foul mouth, which I thought was really kind of cool. And I thought to myself, “Man, she’d chew you up and spit you out.” That was my first thought.

And as I was walking home that night, because I lived nearby in the Village in New York, I just started singing. “She’ll chew you up and spit you out. She’s a maneater.” And I just thought, “Oh, wait a minute, I think I’ve got something here.” And I went back to the house and I wrote a reggae chorus because I had just recently come back from Jamaica and I was into reggae at the time and I played it over and over again. And it was just very simple and with a reggae style. And I got with Daryl and he really dug it. He said, “Man, that’s really cool. But I don’t know about the reggae feel. Let’s try some different feels.” And he came up with the Motown feel, which is the one you hear on the record. It’s funny because today when I play it solo, I go back and play it in the reggae style, which is always a lot of fun. But that’s how that song happened.

Tell me about “Out Of Touch.” 

Well, “Out Of Touch” came about in a very unusual way as well. And these songs all have interesting anecdotes. It was around the time in the mid-’80s when digital technology was just coming available to the public. And we had been experimenting with some very sophisticated early digital sampling keyboards and things like that. And I had purchased this small little cassette deck that allowed you to overdub. You could do four tracks on a cassette and you could bounce tracks and, you could do things that were totally not available at home prior to that. And so I had that at the house. I had a new synthesizer, which I didn’t really play, I didn’t know what it was capable of.

And one night I was just messing around and I hit the synthesizer button that said “arpeggiated.” And I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. And so when I hit the keys, you know, it went, “donk donk donk donk donk.” And so I started playing a melody based on that. That’s that sound. And I just went [sings], “Donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk donk.”

And I thought, “Hey, that’s cool.” I put some bells on it. And then I did this whole background vocal part. Once I created this chorus, I didn’t have a verse and it was super late at night and I just recorded the chorus that I had and I went into the studio the following day. We were working with a guy named Arthur Baker at the time. And Arthur was producing the Stylistics. And I came in and I said, “Hey, Arthur, I think I might have a cool song for the Stylistics. Kind of sounds like a Philly chorus.”

I played it for him and he said, “Are you nuts? That’s a smash for you and Daryl, you’ve got to record it!” I played it for Darryl, of course. And he and I wrote the verse and and we cut it.

You sang Hall & Oates’ cover of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” As a singer and as a songwriter, how do you approach singing such an iconic song? 

With a with no limitations. That’s how you approach it. That song was an afterthought, a total afterthought. We had recorded the [1980] Voices album and we thought we were finished. And in those days, we would have what we called a “listening party” because we never allowed the record company, or any of the “suits,” so to speak, into the studio while we were recording. That’s something that is completely impossible to do nowadays. But in those days, that’s how we did it.

So we had this great listening party. Everybody’s in the studio grooving to the stuff that we had recorded and everybody was very high and and just saying, “Oh, this is great. Sounds great. Sounds great.” And right after the listening party, Darryl and I, with some friends, walked out. We were recording at Electric Lady down in the Village. And we walked out onto the street and we said, “Let’s get a get a slice of pizza.” So we went to the local pizza place, which was half a block away. We sat down and we’re talking and we’re waiting for our food. And on the jukebox came, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”

And both Daryl and I kind of just knew that there was something missing from the album. We didn’t know what it was. And we just looked at each other and said, “Hey, let’s record that.” And so the next day we called the band, went into the studio and we cut it live. We just played it and we came up with that middle section, which is different, with very ’80s sounds. We sang it and we did the whole song in a few hours. And, of course, it became a hit for us.

This wasn’t a single, but I wanted to ask you about the title track to [1990’s] Change of Season.

Well, the Change Of Season album was made at an unusual time in my life. We had been with Atlantic initially then RCA for many years through all the big ’80s hits. And then, you know, we kind of backed off in the late ’80s but we still had a commitment to our contract,  which was transferred to Arista Records. We still had a commitment to them to deliver an album. I was going through a divorce. Our manager had left. There was a lot of, you know, upheaval… in at least in my life. I’m not going to speak for Darryl. And I just I wrote that song. I came up with the idea that I needed a new way forward, a new breath of life. And I didn’t know what it was. And the idea of changing seasons just seemed to to epitomize the way I was feeling. I wanted to have a cool R&B feel to it. I actually got together with our keyboard player,. Bobby Mayo, who’s a very, very well-known player. He played on Frampton Comes Alive, and he also played with Foreigner, among other people. I gave him the idea. He came over the house and I played him the idea. I said, “Man, I really want this to sound like an old Otis Redding record.” And then he came up with some really cool chords. And so he and I wrote that together.

I’ve interviewed you before and I remember you mentioned to me that, after that record, things were changing in pop culture. And you weren’t sure where you guys fit anymore. I feel like the Change Of Season album was a good “period” at the end of a long sentence, of at least that phase of your career. 

Yeah, it was. There were big changes in my personal life and there were changes in our career. You know, it was the rise of the garage band movement out of Seattle and all that. It wasn’t a melodic time. It was more of a period of angst and kind of aggression. I don’t think our style really jibed with the moment. There’s always an element of that with any kind of music that becomes popular. I mean, not only does it have to be good and catchy and and get people’s attention, but it has to be somehow in sync with the times and we didn’t feel we were in sync with the times. And so we actually voluntarily stepped back and said, “You know, let’s wait and see what happens.” And we waited until ’96 before we recorded again.

You guys recently headlined Madison Square Garden. It’s been really extraordinary to watch this reemergence of your popularity.

Yeah, it has been amazing. And I’ll tell you, I’m very, very appreciative and blessed. If someone would’ve told me back in ’72 that we would be selling out giant arenas and things like that in 2020, I really wouldn’t have believed it, to be honest with you. And there were moments in the ’90s and early 2000s where I certainly wouldn’t have believed it either.

I think that the songs have stood the test of time and the songs seem to resonate through through generations. And there’s a quality to the songwriting and the type of records we’ve made that seem to appeal across the generations, and that’s what’s really propelled our reemergence.

Not to compare you guys too much to Motown… but I just feel like Smokey Robinson’s songs will never really be out of style. All of those songs are always going to work for me. John and Paul’s Beatle songs are always going to work for me.

I think it’s all about the songs. It really is. I use this example, and I don’t want to be morbid or anything like that. But, you know, take the Eagles, for instance. Glen Frey passes away. He was amazing guy, and founder of the band. And they go out and they carry on with Glen’s son [Deacon] and hire Vince Gill, who’s just a genius. And they sound as good, if not better than they ever sounded. It’s the same thing with Journey. Steve Perry stops singing and they find Arnel Pineda. But it’s the songs that kids are hearing. They’re not really paying that much attention to the actual personnel necessarily. So it’s really all about the songs.

I read an interview with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and he’s doing the Dead & Company thing [former Dead members Weir and drummers Billy Kreutzmann and Micky Hart play Grateful Dead songs with John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti]. And Bob Weir said that he fully expects that one day he, Hart and Kreutzmann are gonna be done. And they actually want the other three guys to continue playing their songs. I thought, “Wow.” Most bands wouldn’t say that. 

That’s very, very much in keeping with the history of music. I mean, Bach and Mozart aren’t out there conducting orchestras. There are orchestras playing their music all over the world. George Gershwin’s not sitting at the piano and playing his classics. But yet those songs are timeless. And that’s the magic and the beauty of being a songwriter.

Have you ever been in a situation, at a party, at a restaurant, even at a store where one of your songs is playing and people are enjoying it and they don’t realize that it’s you right next to them? 

Oh, yeah. It happens a lot. Sometimes I wonder, when I go into a restaurant or someplace like that and I hear a song [by us], I wonder if they see me come in and they’re actually putting it on. It’s funny because that’s the only time I hear our music, when I just hear by accident, like walking into a store or a shop or airport. I very seldom play our own songs at home.

The course that you’ve taken with your own career has been so interesting. I think if somebody said in the ’70s or ’80s that what John Oates would be doing in the 2010s, or in 2020, is playing with really great bluegrass musicians in Nashville… that wouldn’t be what people would have expected. But you’ve really committed yourself to doing this. Talk about the live album [Live In Nashville] and the commitment you’ve put into this part of your career.

Luckily, I had recorded Live In Nashville on January 9th of this year, right before everything shut down. And the reason I recorded it was because I had been on tour with the Good Road Band for about two years. And, you know, when you play live, the band just keeps getting better and better. And the songs evolve and the arrangements get better. And I wanted to capture this magic of this incredible group of players from Nashville while we were still kind of hot, because I was expecting that I’d be going out on tour with Daryl this year. I thought, “Well, let’s let’s mix this thing and put it out.”

When I moved to Nashville, I found myself being kind of welcomed into the Americana music movement and meeting a bunch of players and writers who were part of that world. And it really rekindled my earliest musical influences from [the days] before I met Daryl Hall, that kind of stuff that I was into. I was playing a lot of folk music. I was playing a lot of blues and bluegrass. I was not really wanting to go back in time, but to use my earliest musical DNA to create something new and unique, but still honor the past. And that’s what this music is all about.

The band seems pretty tight. 

Well, it’s the result of two years of touring, and that’s that’s exactly why I wanted to capture it. The band is just so damn good. And it’s just amazing to see them play. A lot of what’s happening in the performances seems like these are all well-honed arrangements. But honestly, they’re just guys who are great musicians listening to each other and reacting to each other. And that’s what I love about it. It’s spontaneous, but really well crafted.

When I last spoke to you, you commented that Hall and Oates  are attached to the hits and you can’t play too many deep cuts at your concerts… and what a good “problem” that is to have. But now that you’ve been doing your solo thing in this incarnation for so long, it seems to me that the two things complement each other. You could go to a big arena — obviously, when the world goes back to normal — and play some of the biggest hits of all time with the guy you’ve been doing it with for 40-something years, and rock a crowd of 30,000. But you could also go to City Winery and do something else without the expectation of playing 10 songs that you do every night with Darryl. 

That’s exactly why I do my solo projects, because it’s a it’s a complete 180 from what I do with Daryl and it gives me a chance to express myself in any way I want. And fortunately for me, the commercial success of Hall and Oates over the years has given me that platform and that ability to be totally free musically. And that’s an amazing place to be when you’re a creative person. The ultimate goal is to have total creative freedom. And I have that. So I want to make sure I don’t squander it. You know, I want to I want to make the most of it.