“You just try to pick the songs
that are most meaningful to you,” says five time Grammy-winner Michael McDonald
about the inspiration for his new album, Soul
Speak. “These songs span my life—they’re the ones where I can remember
where I was when I first heard them, the ones that made me interested in
becoming a recording artist, the songs I’d always imagined myself singing.”
Soul
Speak is the natural follow-up to McDonald’s two smash explorations of the
Motown Records songbook—the platinum-selling Motown from 2003, which was nominated for two Grammy awards, and
the next year’s gold-selling Motown Two.
But this time, McDonald didn’t restrict himself to any one style or record
label or decade; he wanted to interpret songs that he loved, regardless of
genre. So while some of the selections—“For Once in My Life,” “Walk on By,” or
the album’s first single, “Love TKO”—fall squarely within the blue-eyed soul
territory that we associate with Michael McDonald, others, like Leonard Cohen’s
“Hallelujah” or Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” are a bit more surprising.
The creator of such hits as “I Keep
Forgettin’," the Grammy-winning “Yah Mo B There," and the Number One
pop single “On My Own," McDonald isn’t afraid to challenge expectations..
“Everybody always wants you to keep doing what you did last time,” he says.
“You’re always met with, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that, you’ll lose your fan
base.’ But I’ve found that whenever I got back on the radio, it was with
something completely different than what I’d done before.”
Besides, he adds, his own
responsibility to a song doesn’t change just because its sound does. “I
approach them all the same way—can I find that place in me where I feel I’m
being sincere with the song?”
McDonald, 56, has been a fixture in
American pop music for over three decades. After emerging out of the local
scene in his hometown of St. Louis, he first came into the spotlight as part of
Steely Dan’s touring band in the early 1970s. He contributed vocals and
keyboards to the band’s classic albums Katy
Lied, The Royal Scam, Aja, and Gaucho. While working with Steely Dan, McDonald also joined the
Doobie Brothers, where his voice became the group’s focal point on such songs
as “Takin’ It to the Streets,” “Minute by Minute,” and, unforgettably, the
Number One single “What a Fool Believes,” which won the 1980 Grammy as Song of
the Year.
McDonald’s distinctive, instantly
recognizable voice may be his signature, but on Soul Speak, he wanted to push himself to match the songs rather
than the other way around. “A lot of these songs call on me to step up to the
plate as a vocalist even more than the songs I write,” he says. “But if I’m
going to do a record that’s well known, I won’t lower the key. That’s part of
the ingredients of respecting the original—whether it’s in the most comfortable
key for me or not.”
That same traditional philosophy
determined the way in which Soul Speak
was recorded. “On the Motown
records,” says McDonald, “we built the tracks on computers and then brought in
the musicians. But this time was really more old-school, done live in a couple
of takes. Other than things like the horns, these tracks were all done pretty
much as you hear ‘em.”
This approach allowed McDonald to
try out many more songs than he was able to use, and to be more spontaneous in
the studio. For instance, he was working on a version of “Hallelujah” for a
Leonard Cohen tribute concert at UCLA. “I came up with something a little
different, a little more blues/R&B version,” he says. “Fifteen minutes before
the session, we made the decision to try to cut it. Those are the moments that
make recording a really rewarding experience.”
The selection on Soul Speak that may be most special to
McDonald, and which he confesses intimidated him the most, is “Redemption
Song,” with its simple folk melody and classic Bob Marley lyric. “I love the
song, but it’s so personal to Bob Marley, to a culture, I thought, how do I
sing this lyric? Is it presumptuous?,” he says. “But I think it says so much
about what all the other songs are about, looking for redemption in a person or
a place, and staying humane in the process. That lyric just says it as it
is—that there’s victory out there, but it’s never going to come in the form or
the time you expect it to.”
Soul
Speak also includes three original songs by McDonald, a reminder that he
has a significant history as a writer as well as an interpreter. “We actually
went back and forth choosing the originals,” he says. “’Only God Can Help Me
Now’ and ‘Getting Over You’ are kind of retro feeling, so they fit pretty
easily. ‘Enemy Within’ stands on its own, but (producer Simon Climie) thought
it added a little bit of a turn that the album needed, so it wasn’t just a
collection of oldies.”
McDonald expects that his next
project will be more focused on his own songwriting, but notes that his busy
touring schedule makes it difficult. “More and more, if I’m not careful, I find
that I’m out working all the time, and I have to search for any time to be able
to woodshed and write.”
But of course, the key to a project
like Soul Speak is that even if most
of these songs weren’t written in Michael McDonald’s own words, that doesn’t
make them any less personal. The album is the story of a musical life, of the
thoughts and sounds and influences that helped shape a legendary career. Not
that these fourteen songs are the beginning and end of that tale.
“The only frustrating thing,” says
McDonald, “is that the deeper into the list of songs you go, the more you
realize that it’s inexhaustible. The more you think about it, it just seems to
get longer, and the more impossible it becomes.”