In Conversation With Colin: Steve Forbert

In June 1976, singer-songwriter Steve Forbert at a mere 21 years of age boarded an Amtrak train from his native Meridian, Mississippi with his Martin guitar and harmonica. His destination was New York City, and his goal was to begin his career in music.

It may be long ago and far away but with his vibrant performance style and clever lyrics the astonishing 1978 debut album, Alive On Arrival had critics proclaiming him as The New Dylan, an accolade that has cursed countless talents.

Speaking to ‘The Rock Vault’ on Newport City Radio I caught up with Steve from his home in Asbury Park, New Jersey for a chat about his music and his recent album release. He’s a genuinely thoughtful and engaging interviewee, not only convivial but also perceptive and charming. It takes a while to realise that all these traits combine remarkably well to keep nosy inquisitors like me at bay.

I thought I should begin by offering Forbert the opportunity to reveal how he regards his debut album now. “Everything came together in a real good way” he declares. “It kind of had a life of its own, Steve Burgh who produced that album selected perfect musicians, we had the perfect engineer with Glenn Berger and of course I still do some of the songs from it live on stage, it’s an album I hold dear to my heart and it always has been”.

Forbert’s songs have always captured through words the images of life’s everyday moments in transition – they still do. His new recording, Daylight Savings Time is the latest piece of evidence to corroborate the evidence. Sure enough, there’s cozy retirement (‘Sound Existence’) and the juxtaposition between blues and pop (‘The Blues’) but it’s the likes of ‘Guilt Tripper’, ‘Simon Says’, ‘One Lone Leaf’ and ‘Dixie Miles’ that really exemplify the Forbert template, if such a thing even exists. Appearing to be an optimistic album title at first glance, the expression could be interpreted as a metaphor for time running out and the ageing process.

“Well that’s true, if you listen to the song Dixie Miles it gets pretty specific and explicit” says Steve as he starts quoting the song’s lyrics to me over the phone…“I’m a Grandad now three times over/still I swear I’m forty-five/I don’t need no off-road Land Rover, and then it goes on to say something even more serious…as far as I’m concerned now the sun’s still way up in a kind of blue sky/I got lots of years left to run still. I hope

that’s not shall we say over optimistic, we don’t know the answer to these things and that’s really kind of an arrogant statement and it’s certainly rather presumptuous”.

Steve is on a roll, he starts quoting more song lyrics to me and I find myself reciting them back to him in perfect unison, it’s the closest we’ll ever get to performing a duet together. “Why get freaked and fret/summer’s not done yet/have another hit/make the most of it, that’s all about summer and that time span of daylight savings time”. Steve chuckles and thanks me for being so up to speed with the lyrics. “I’m looking right now at an advert for what we call PBS over here in the States, I’m sure you are familiar with public television, and the ad says ‘summer is winding down but you can keep the summer spirit going all year long with THIRTEEN’, that’s the PBS channel” explains Steve. “They want you to become a monthly subscriber you see, but what I’m trying to tell you is you never hear anybody saying you can keep that winter spirit going all year round, hell no, nobody says that. So the way you started this conversation was right, it’s optimistic and it’s about that golden very useful pleasant time”.

Noting the nod to golden times, when pressed to expand on other songs from the album he offers the song ‘One Lone Leaf’, where an event as simple as a leaf falling from a tree became the inspiration for a song. “That’s exactly it, that’s literally what it was. In this case one lone leaf came drifting down and found me, its back on that subject we were on a minute ago, so to answer your question I would expand the inspiration and pick up on it lyrically and then I would try to put a melody to it. I used a cassette for decades, but its undeniable the convenience of these smart phones and I found that it contained a recorder of good quality and there it was with me in the woods, and there it was when I was back home and was trying to flesh out the song”.

I push on, quietly hoping for the chance of another duet. I quiz Steve regarding the motivation behind ‘Sound Existence’. “I think a lot of people feel they reach an overload of the news, it’s a funny thing but bad news travels like wild fire and good news travels slow. As they say, if a dog bites a man it’s not news but if a man bites a dog it’s news. You know we’re not talking about yachts that are sailing out there near Greece doing fine today, we’re talking about a 180 foot super-yacht that sank. So in that song I’m writing about a person that’s older than me, I must clarify that, it’s a portrait of that person and their sound existence and so that last verse is just simply it’s all going to keep you happy if they don’t turn on the news and if getting by is the new successful who needs lots to lose”.

I tentatively ask Steve if the song ‘Simon Says’ is a euphomism for what Buddhist’s call the jabbering monkey, the voice that’s always talking in your head. Steve chortles down the phone at me, “I’ll go with that, it’s the voice of reason if you will, it’s a little bit like the best is yet to come but you can still get by just fine. I wouldn’t make too much of the song because it’s really as much about that Slim Harpo ‘Hip Shake’ that the Rolling Stones covered in that song, I’m sure you know it, it’s about that boogie beat as it is any lyrical message”.

Steve Forbert albums have always shown consistency with their high production values, in the past top notch mastering engineers have been drafted in such as George Marino of Sterling Sound for the 1979 album Jackrabbit Slim. On Daylight Savings Time Steve called on the services of long-time collaborator Ted Jensen. So presumably sound quality is an important factor, with Steve getting involved with the process albeit from afar. “I’m extremely involved in it, Ted mastered Alive On Arrival forty six years ago, he also mastered The American In Me and I’ve had good results with Ted and have found him reliable through the years. Ted also mastered Evergreen Boy as I recall, in fact I’m sure of it. The new album was mastered in Nashville but I wasn’t down there, we send everything remote these days as you might guess”.

Such an unaffected and trusting view of technical wizardry prompts an inquiry into the recording process and recruitment of musicians.

“Steve Greenwell who produced the new album was down in Nashville working on a record for a guy named Gavin DeGraw and Byron House was hired for those sessions, and Steve told me how good Byron is as a bass player and I said ‘ok let’s try and contact him’, and so that recording was done long distance. I wanted to work some more with Gurf Morlix and that was done long distance too. We had a core of drums and Rob Clores on keys who works with me on my regular shows as a duo, we just did four dates up North in Rochester, Ottawa, Toronto and Buffalo. Once we had that happening we added the guitar and bass right away too, all remotely. I’ve never met Byron House, I’m going to mail him a copy of the compact disc today”. This no nonsense, no frills approach to recording has served Forbert well. It’s all about the songs – they stand or they fall without any extravagant production.

“I don’t have an abundance of songs anymore, life just gets busier as you get older, and I might even be completing songs along the way, I think the last one finished on this record was Dixie Miles. I don’t road test them because a lot of times I’m working on them and still changing verses in the studio, and you can’t road test songs as easily anymore because everybody’s got a film camera in the venue. So if I want to try

something out it may be in the wrong key etcetera but you’ve got people recording it so that bugs me, and that’s the drawback. If I try out a new song and it’s not even finished I want to be free to fall flat on my face the first few times I try it to see how it’s progressing, so it bugs me that I’m no longer at liberty to do that discreetly. I don’t mind the people with the phones and all the filming I gave up on that, you can resist and resist but you’re not going to change that as long as they’re not rude about it and filming the whole damn show.

“I work on lyrics every day because it’s kind of like that jabbering monkey” Steve laughs. “I can’t make it stop, it’s just a natural inclination and then I go back and see how the lyrics are progressing but I don’t have a writing schedule, I don’t think you can force the things we’re talking about”.

“You have to put the work into it, make no mistake, it’s alright to get the inspiration but the rest of the song is not going to happen unless you put the work into it, and it can drive you crazy especially working on the lyrics. But you’ve got to make that commitment to work on it until you think it’s good enough, if you’re a good songwriter you’re judgement of it when it’s finished and if it’s good enough should be a reasonable accurate judgement”.

COLIN PALMER