WHAT COOL BELIEVES
Michael McDonald is having a moment. Again.
Just about any musician who sticks around long enough will endure some sort of lull in renown. And those lulls can be cruel, because, well, culture can be nastily dismissive of young stars in the spring of life who age into Dukes of September, a phrase used to describe a tour McDonald did with Boz Scaggs and Donald Fagen just a few years ago.
But that name proved prescient. Dukes have a certain regality, and the choice of September implied a nearing the end of something but not necessarily the cold finality of winter. And just about any musician who sticks around long enough will enjoy some sort of return of renown. Because our culture is sentimentally cyclical with old stars who remind its venerable population of times when it was younger.
So it is Michael McDonald comes to the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion Friday as a guy who was parodied in the online video series “Yacht Rock” and nastily ridiculed in the film “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” And just a short turn later, he found himself singing on an album by the progressive electronic musician Thundercat and performing on stage with Solange, two artists who weren’t even born when he worked with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.
“It’s encouraging,” McDonald says. He pauses and laughs. “And also inspiring.
“Look, you hate to be the oldest guy standing out here. Nobody wants to be that guy. But I do find myself inspired by artists who are still kicking who are older than I am. And I’m also inspired by younger people and what they’re doing today: Anderson.Paak. Stephen Bruner (Thundercat), Solange. This is one of the most fertile times in music I can remember in a long time. They’re doing a great job reinventing music in a way that’s unique to their generation.”
Into the great ‘Wide Open’
McDonald has been a regular touring presence for his entire career. But more recently he’s been promoting “Wide Open,” an album he released in 2017. The album is notable for all manner of reasons. For one, it’s McDonald’s first set of new, original songs in 17 years. For another, it was his first album of any sort in nearly a decade, since he’d become a sort of totemic figure in film and web video.
“Wide Open” is also notable for the way it avoids the bend toward trend. Though McDonald is enjoying a revived renown, he didn’t make a hyper-modern electronic R&B record. Instead, he did what he knew — built a record around a dozen songs about people who do a poor job communicating with one another. Also intriguing is that McDonald didn’t yield to brevity in an age of shrinking attention spans. One of the 12 tracks comes in under five minutes, and four of them top six minutes. He opens with “Hail Mary,” which nearly tips 7 minutes.
Having left St. Louis for Los Angeles nearly 50 years ago to become a musician, McDonald is comfortable letting the song dictate its path.
“What I do now is pretty much the same as what I did then,” he says. “The singular reason for me doing what I do is to make people feel good and understood, with this method of communication. Sometimes music has the ability to speak beyond what a conversation can say. We get bogged down in semantics, and a song can cut through that. That’s what I’ve always tried to do. Not to complain about politics or what I see around me. To remind people that love is probably the most basic energy.
“Einstein said something about it, that of all the theories and whatnot, before anything that we know happened, one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang, love had to be there. How else do you get a universe from absolutely nothing? That idea that love is the ultimate scientific theory. It’s what we operate on. What we live and die for. If music can tap into that, to me, I’m for it.”
Unique voice
That’s been McDonald’s path for a long, long time.
Years ago, an artist like McDonald might’ve been tossed out with the bathwater, but an old-school rockcrit snobbery about some permutations of popular vocal music has faded as an antiquated practice.
As Bruner told me about McDonald: “The goal should be music. Good music. And I think Michael McDonald has created some remarkable music.”
McDonald came of age at something of a crossroads for American music: He was born in St. Louis and raised in a suburb of the city that produced Chuck Berry and provided a home for ragtime pioneer Scott Joplin. It doesn’t have the definitive connection to soul like Memphis or the blues like the Mississippi Delta or jazz like New Orleans or mountain music like Appalachia. But St. Louis has a rich musical history that has contributed to all sorts of American music styles. Born in 1952, with a father who sang around town, McDonald would’ve soaked up all of those styles.
Which explains his sound. Not his voice — that purring, growling thing — but the sound he affixed his voice to, which would be soul sometimes, rock others, jazz, R&B. He came along at a time that allowed him to absorb early rock ’n’ roll but not be handcuffed to it.
“My career really resulted from a lot of random events in my life,” he says. “It was never really self-engineered, by any means. I just kept finding myself in the company of other musicians who had a keen effect on me.”
After his arrival in Los Angeles, he fell in with Steely Dan in the ’70s, as a touring member of a band and playing on a few of the band’s albums. Listen to the backing vocal tracks to “Peg” and his scruffy voice rises to the surface. At that point he’d already been recruited as a temporary fill-in with the Doobie Brothers, though that turned into a full-time gig for years, where the band’s sound migrated toward his soulful sensibility. He started recording albums on his own in 1982. Even there, he found success, putting “I Keep Forgetting” at No. 4 on the pop charts in 1982 and hitting No. 19 two years later with James Ingram thanks to “Yah Mo B There.”
Going Motown
He’d hit the Top 40 three more times in the ’90s. And then McDonald — a guy making adult music even when he was young — slowly and subtly slid into the role of elder statesman. His two Motown albums are both great. But Motown albums in the 2000s aren’t about turning the kids into Motown fans.
Still, he has always maintained an intriguing definition of what can constitute soulful music. His “Soul Speak” record included his takes on songs by Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Van Morrison, Cindy Walker and Leonard Cohen.
While he was making the two Motown records and “Soul Speak” he was writing new songs. He just didn’t find the time to get around to turning them into a record.
McDonald finally set some studio time in 2016 and liked the demos he’d made.
“All these years, even back with the Doobies, it was always about trying to beat the demo,” he says. “Sometimes a demo would have a certain kind of abandon that made the song feel more personal somehow. You’d get in with the band and try to come up with an arrangement, but sometimes you felt like you were losing something in the process. And as a writer, you hate that. That you’re not capturing the feeling of the demo. So with this record, sometimes I’d try to rerecord things. But if I didn’t like it as much, I’d go back to the original.”
“Hail Mary” opens the album by working a theme that often appears in a McDonald song: a couple struggling to connect. “Does the sound of my voice still carry … any kind of message to you,” he sings.
He insists that the song is about its narrative. But it’s hard not to hear it as some sort of allegory for a singer who enjoyed great success for years and then faded from view a bit as trends changed.
“But,” he says, “you may be onto something because to me it’s about personal insecurity as you get older. So the song is about a guy making one last pass at communicating with someone. And here I am, 67 and still making records and touring …”
The album’s timing was perfect. Earlier that year, McDonald and Kenny Loggins sang on “Show You the Way,” a song on Thundercat’s “Drunk” record.
And McDonald in 2017 was playing a festival with Solange Knowles, and she joined him for “What a Fool Believes,” a song he co-wrote with Loggins and recorded with the Doobie Brothers in 1979. It became a No. 1 pop hit and won a record of the year Grammy.
“I was a fan already,” McDonald says. “Both her work and her sister’s. So when we met, it was a thrill. Look, she’s unique. She has a very ethereal and beautiful approach to making music. And obviously, she’s not looking to emulate anyone else. That makes her a great and interesting artist.”
And collaborations with artists who weren’t born before the Doobie Brothers first split, well, they’ve had the effect of getting McDonald heard again by fans who weren’t born before the Doobie Brothers first split.
“Stick with something long enough, right?” McDonald says. “You have these dormant periods. But if the interest was genuine at the outset, there will be these resurgences of pure interest. People will remember you. But also people will find you. So you go with that for a little while, until you wear that one out. And then you wait again.”