Pendulum swings back to soulful McDonald
With a few exceptions, anybody who sticks around in popular music long enough will see his standing rise and fall like an EKG readout. Such is the case with Michael McDonald.
In the late-1970s and early-1980s, he was omnipresent, appearing as a singer and keyboardist on Steely Dan albums and tours, joining the Doobie Brothers and scooping up Grammys for songs he wrote, such as “Yah Mo B There.”
Then came the punchline years, which peaked around 2005, when McDonald became a target for laughs in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and the mockumentary series “Yacht Rock.”
But if you tuned into “The Tonight Show” last week, there was the silver-haired soul singer with his old collaborator Kenny Loggins on stage with Stephen Bruner, a hip, innovative young act whose contemporary music under the name Thundercat melds R&B, hip-hop, jazz and more experimental sounds.
“I don’t have any interest in the way we compartmentalize music,” Bruner told the Chronicle earlier this year. “People call those two guys yacht rock, soft rock. It’s the same thing that occurred with soft jazz. Those sorts of labels just play to people with short attention spans. The goal should be music. Good music. And I think Michael McDonald has created some remarkable music.”
Once upon a time, McDonald wrote a hit for Van Halen. Decades later, he contributes a vocal to the oddball indie-pop act Grizzly Bear and joins Solange to run through his Doobies hit “What a Fool Believes.”
What’s funny: For all the trends that have come and gone around him, McDonald hasn’t really changed. His new album, “Wide Open,” isn’t a reinvention or a daring new direction. It’s instead a meticulously produced album of adult contemporary R&B, with McDonald’s unmistakable voice at the center, sounding undimmed by the years.
Paul Rudd’s beleaguered electronics-store employee in “Virgin” may still prefer to watch “Beautician and the Beast” or “listen to Fran Drescher for eight hours than listen to Michael McDonald.” But at least now there are a dozen new songs he could play instead of “Yah Mo B There.”
On a tour with Boz Scaggs that comes Monday to the Smart Financial Centre in Sugar Land, McDonald, 65, talked about the ups and downs in his four-decade career.
Q: One of the first lines on the new album is, “Does the sound of my voice still carry any kind of message?” That’s easy to read more than one way.
A: Yeah, I guess it’s kind of a metaphor for me personally more than it is a love song. Being this age and hoping … I mean, not specifically that I’d be making records. But we all get to this age that we realize we weren’t sure we’d reach. And you start renegotiating with yourself, thinking maybe you can try to run into the end zone one more time. (Laughs.) You can surprise yourself. I used to think being 65, that meant you were happy to sit on the couch and watch soap operas the rest of your life. I’m finding now that’s not the case.
Q: Where did you go right with your voice? Because your higher register isn’t gone like many of your peers. Did you get away from the smoking and drinking thing earlier?
A: Well, I did all that at certain points in my life. I drank too much, I smoked too much. But gosh, I’m going on … I guess I quit smoking in ’79. And in 1986, I stopped the rest of it. So yes, I think it’s done wonders for my voice. And it’s done a lot for my life in general.
Q: Your voice is such that you could do a minimalist album, piano and singing. But the new songs are pretty meticulously constructed. They’re long, and the instrumentation is carefully layered.
A: I appreciate you saying that. That’s the thing, you’re always trying to find new ways to do the same thing. And it can be a challenge to find that sweet spot where you feel like you put enough into a song and make it all it needs to be without overdoing it. I think as I get older, I’ve noticed I don’t know what’s good or bad in the scheme of things anymore. What’s classic or trendy. Those things seem to have blurred. I only know what I like. So I try to follow that. …
But even back then, I found the only thing that keeps me at this is the preservation of the thing, that feeling before I even got a chance to make a first record. The anticipation that something might happen creatively, and you don’t even know what it could be. If I went into the studio with a definite idea of what I wanted to do, it would go terribly awry. That’s been my experience with life in general. The best-laid plans are generally not what happens at all. Just accept what is happening.
Q: You mentioned changing trends. Kids buck against their parents’ music, which seemed to happen with you. Are you bemused by these younger artists interested in your work? Flattered? The old genre and style distinctions that used to create such battle lines have largely gone away since the music industry crashed.
A: Oh, it’s definitely flattering. I’m a big fan of Stephen Bruner (Thundercat). He’s just an amazing talent, and one of those guys who redefined his instrument. He’s a bass player, but he’s also something very special. You can hear the influence of so many great musicians who came before him: Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke, Jaco (Pastorius). By osmosis, he seems aware of the tradition of bass, but he has a unique ability to take it somewhere else.
When I first met him, I was amazed how most of his demos were just bass and drum machine. He basically covered this great harmonic range on his bass guitar. And he doesn’t just work the high register and go back later and put the lower information in there. He covers it all as it goes down. His style of recording also intrigued me. He can pull out a computer at the bus stop and lay something down. It’s invigorating. Nothing I could ever accomplish. But it was exciting to watch.
Q: He doesn’t limit himself stylistically. Which I wanted to ask you about. You titled an album “Soul Speak,” which has certain stylistic implications. But then you covered Burt Bacharach, Stevie Wonder, Leonard Cohen and Eddy Arnold on the record, which suggests a very inclusive definition of “soul.”
A: That’s true. It’s funny, I was at this show last night. My daughter and I went to see Ryan Adams. And it struck me what a soulful singer he is. Not a soul singer in any kind of urban radio format or in the traditional form. But it was really refreshing to hear him sing, which is so soulful and bluesy at times. He’s one of those guys who redeems Americana. Somebody who isn’t just working the same three chords, devil in the lyrics, the soundbite kind of music. I love Americana, but with any style you quickly get some generic music, too. But guys like Ryan Adams and Buddy Miller, they bring something different to the genre. They move the tradition along.
And I was amazed at how excellent his songs really are when you hear them live. There’s something about the validity of hearing music played live that I love. There are moments on record that may not work live. But hearing a song live really cements your belief in it as a composition or entity. That show convinced me how great some of his songs are.
Q: You’re so closely associated with California. But what does coming from St. Louis mean to you? You have a lot of music history in that town.
A: Yes, California for me is where everything happened on a personal level. But I must say St. Louis was where all the formulating occurred about what I should be as a musician. Of course, I fall short compared to so many because I wasn’t formally trained. It’s like a conversation with a historian about history; I’m the guy, all I know is what I read in the paper that day. So I feel like I’m on the outside looking in to a certain degree.
Q: Even now?
A: Sure. And it’s been good and bad in different ways. But in St. Louis, I learned on this idea of how different people operated bands. Ike Turner, Benny Sharp, Oliver Sain. When I was a little kid, I had the occasion to experience those bands.
And I also grew up; the better part of my early years were spent in saloons with my dad who sang with myriad piano players. That taught me a lot early on, just being able to sit behind them on a windowsill. That encompassed my musical experience growing up. Lots of watching and listening and getting away by myself, playing on my grandmother’s piano and experimenting with things. Coming up with my version of what I thought I’d heard. Which is to say, not a lot of instruction, if you know what I mean. And that’s a good and bad thing.
I’ll forever be that piano player who makes a million mistakes when I’m playing. I’m not like the guys I play with, who learn quickly and have enough facility in their training that they don’t flub things as much as I do.
‘WideNew isn’t album Open’a daring new direction. It’s a meticulously produced album of adult contemporary R&B, with McDonald’s unmistakable voice at the center.