Everybody’s Feelin’ Real

(2015)

“On this album, I felt I was coming into my own.”

“The keyboard player on this is the late, great ‘Razor Sharp’ Johnson, who was one of the original keyboard players in Bootsy’s Rubber Band, and toured with George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic for many years. On the drums were Chip Wilson and Ken ‘Bamn’ Smith, both of who’d toured with Bootsy, so we had a real tight core.

“We experimented with lots of bass tones; on this album the bass has become very central. Some songs are just bass and drums, with Razor maybe doubling the bass-line on keyboards.

“Duane Lundy has produced a couple of my albums, and on this one he ran my bass through weird speaker configurations, as well as running the drums through all kinds of stuff. We really spent time on production.

“Writing songs is like playing an instrument – hopefully you get better at it as you go along. On this album I really felt I was starting to come into my own in terms of knowing what I was doing. The sax player Skerik came in to play on ‘Mama’s Like A Cowboy’, on top of just bass and drums, and it sounded so full that it dictated the mood of the song.

“That also means lyrically

– the way I approached the performance of the rhythm and cadence of my vocal part.”