Recipes from the Songbook of Dave Stewart
Recipes from the Songbook of Dave Stewart
by Ino Hillert / www.ethrill.net – The Eurythmics Fanweb
07.08.2008
When I talked to Dave Stewart (the one of Eurythmics, who never met Barbara Gaskin or „the other Dave Stewart“ as he told me), he had just released The Dave Stewart Songbook Vol.1, an album of 21 songs, and phoned me from New York where he was finalizing the 300 pages coffee table book telling the stories behind the songs (to be released end of August 2008). 21 songs some of which he wrote all by himself, many of them together with other artists who recorded them and made them hit singles. How did he manage to make all those very different songs „his own“?
„That’s why I actually decided to have orchestration to be the thread or the glue that runs through it. I knew I was gonna play live with an orchestra, and I chose a song when I thought ‘Oh, that would be really great with strings and an orchestration’. Then I didn’t for instance just try to replace Annie with one voice – I’ve got three or four different girl singers – and when I sing songs myself, like a Bryan Ferry song, I change it slightly. When I loved the track the way it was, e.g. Here Comes The Rain Again, there might be just the beat slightly different, but when I thought to make a song completely different, like Ordinary Miracle, I decided e.g. to do it just with a piano and my voice. But one thing I kept the same all the way through is this appearance of strings and the orchestration“, he said, agreeing to my impression that it’s like a frame holding the album together.
Seems that it takes a lot of thoughts, care and precision but it’s not a big thing for Dave Stewart, even if it’s one of the songs he recorded and performed before only with Annie Lennox, as Eurythmics: „No, not really, I just looked at every song and knowing that I’m gonna play it live, I imagined myself being in the audience and hearing the song and when for instance thinking ‘I always loved the strings on Here Comes The Rain Again’ - why change them?“
Composing a song might be a challenge but composing an album of the many pieces is a different one, comparable to … composing a meal?: „When you are making an album and you’ve got 21 songs to record, at one point in the middle you have all these songs bits there, … it’s like making a meal and you suddenly realize all your kitchen is covered with sliced bits of cucumber and tomatos and so on and you ‘Oh, my god, I’ve got to get it all together into one dish!’“ Even considering the way it was cooked, in the case of the Songbook it tastes very good in the end.
Obviously not all great compositions by Dave Stewart were able to make it onto Volume 1, but with This Little Town a course is especially missed: ‘I was out there with the Beatles and the Cranks / Trying to make some money and not to fall into the ranks of suburbia / With Richard Toomey, a visionary ghost …’ . At least finally I was able to unravel the secret who Richard Toomey is – a visionary ghost or more?: „I mixed two names together to hide the names“, explained Dave,“there’s one half of a drummer called Jim Toomey and the other one was a friend of mine called Sunderland Richard.“
Looking for a moment at The Dave Stewart Songbook Vol. 1 as a cover album, on which Dave, as he agrees, is in a way covering himself, made me think of the album Medusa, cooked by Annie Lennox in 1995 with cover versions of lots of her favourite songs. Since Dave is – as we know at least since Platinum Weird – a fan of passed on legends I wanted to know if he remembers having said about Annie’s “meal“ back then something like what a German music paper quoted: ‘Medusa sounds like a recording by a housewife made at home on a cheap keyboard - but if that housewife would be Annie Lennox she could even sell jingles a million times’. Hearing that he bursted into laughter: „Hahahahaha, … well, … not exactly … . It sounds like a strange translation. You know, … I gave her that song No More I Love You’s, written by a friend of mine [David Freeman with Joseph Hughes of The Lover Speaks, 1985, the debut album made possible by Dave Stewart] and I think they did a brilliant version of that.“
Wondering what on the other side Annie Lennox thinks of Dave’s solo music we remembered an interview in the 1990s in which she confessed that she didn’t listen to his albums, so how might it be about his new songs and versions of Eurythmics tracks with other singers?: „I’m sure she does know the new versions, … because she goes on the web now. In the 90s, even though I gave her her first laptop, an Apple, and taught her how to use it, she wasn’t really interested in the whole thing.“ Yet she’s not shown a reaction from her to the songs, but why bother: „She’s been going around playing Eurythmics songs for the past 12 years“!
„That tour was hell,“ said Stewart Copeland in an interview published on the day I spoke with Dave, referring to the recent re-union concerts of The Police. Since Dave Stewart is going to do a US tour starting at the end of August 2008 we were talking about how much many musicians hate touring but love being on stage and how one could make it a better time: „I enjoy it because I surround myself with people whose company I enjoy and I always take a little recording machine with me and do things like writing and taking photographs on tour so I never get bored. A lot of people say ‘You get paid a lot of money for playing that gig, but I say, I don’t get paid for playing the gig – I get paid for all the waiting in between’!“
Speaking of money and its value, Dave explained what he’s expecting to get from the tour on which, e.g. at Cerritos (CA) people pay $ 22 for the cheapest tickets and get a copy of the Songbook album for free which is $ 25 at the regular price (Amazon): „I won’t get any money at the end – break even. I’m doing it just to play live. When you are on stage, people are singing and an orchestra is playing and you are communicating with an audience, …there isn’t a greater moment than that.“ Yet money becomes a factor when one has to decide to tranport the huge Songbook tour to other continents: “I’d love to play major cities in different countries in Europe but we have to make sure it works here first, it would be a lot more expensive, 2 to 3 three times“. After discussing vividly various aspects, styles and ideas of a Songbook video document, Dave agreed that if maybe not in person, at least bringing the Songbook project and tour to other countries on dvd, would be a good idea.
Another good idea was to start with Dave’s help an initiative called „Greenpeace Works“ to make the Olympic games starting this week in China a bit greener. With horrible smog reports from Beijing going around the world each day now, one might ask what Greenpeace and Dave Stewart achieved: „One thing we did get to happen was that Coca-Cola agreed to make their thousands and thousands of Coke machines to zero carbon emissions. It’s a hell of a job to get China polution free, but each time a little bit helps.“
Dave Stewart’s next project is going to be a hell of a band – after the Songbook tour he’s going to meet and play with some of his friends to form a supergroup like The Travelling Wilburys! Trying to say as little as possible he revealed at least a few details: The band is going to consist of famous musicians he has worked with before but it’s not a Rolling Stone and one of the Beatles (he’s close friend with Mick Jagger and Ringo Starr): „I wouldn’t form a band like that, playing with a band like that I would just worry about the front line! It’s meant to be a band for fun“.
Another band, Dave told me, he is part of is the Stewart family. When his teenage sons Django and Sam, who both play in their own bands, his sweet, little daughter Kaya, whom you might have luck hearing doing background vocals on a rare recording by Carina Round, meet with their father, it often comes to family music. Then the house is filled with the sound of them singing and playing traditionals, blues songs or their own songs. Who wouldn’t like to see a homestory about that?
At the end Dave gave a little idea of what he is cooking for the time after the tour and his first photo exhibition (opening September 17 in New York) and the recording session with his mysterious friends: he’s doing some things for Nokia in his function as their ‘change agent’ and he’ll „probably release these 11, 12 new songs in a very unusual way, which is going to be a mixture of strange ways nobody would ever imagine!“. If that isn’t setting a fire in the kitchen and the imaginations of his fans!
Thank you for this interview, Dave.
Ino Hillert / http://www.ethrill.net - The Eurythmics Fanweb
