INTERVIEW

Brad Brooks - "I truly believe that there is a semi conscious state that the best songs come from..."

Brad Brooks-I truly believe that there is a semi conscious state that the best songs come from...

After 8-years hiatus your new album "God Save The City" finally hit the shelves. Let me guess, it feels good to be back, right?

It's almost a miracle in itself because I never plan to take that long between records but sometimes theres a certain amount of living that you need to do in order to make it real and tangible to the truth of whats going on in your head, in your life, and in the world. I'm excited that it's getting out and it's the type of record that is a blast to play out and of course all musicians are waiting for that. I call it a "Soul & Roll" record. You can shake & scream to it while your contemplating what the fuck is going on!

From its first to the last song this album sounds like a statement - the celebration of life and joy of making music. Was it hard for you to find this energy again?

It wasn't hard to find the energy but it was difficult to put into words what I was feeling because of my throat cancer diagnosis and how I was processing that, along with the fears that I had about never being able to sing again which is also my profession. With the type of cancer that I had (HPV related head & neck cancer) I felt confident about the 90% success rate of getting through it, but I wasn't sure what shape my voice was gonna be in after the surgery (head & neck dissection 86 lymph nodes taken out and the 30 days of radiation) so you just never know with any type of cancer how it's gonna go. It's kind of always in the back of your mind no matter how long its been. So it was with this hanging over me that we went into the studio to start this record and when you also add to it the volatile cocktail of a US President (who had just gotten into office) who doesn't give a fuck about anybody else but himself, who also inflames and celebrates racial tensions and discrimination, add to that the police out right shooting black people out of fear and the color of their skin, so it just became a record that had to be immediate and NOW because of what I was seeing and hearing. I think this record really speaks to trying to exercising and overcoming fear in all its ugly forms. The personal fears about my cancer journey and the fear that the US has exploited, antagonized and propagated. The one thing that I do want to say is that your right it is a celebration of getting through all of that and coming out the other side stronger and with more perspective and gratitude for being able to do what I've been blessed and lucky enough to do. Lord knows it's hard to get people to listen to new artists but I think if folks listen to this record that they will hopefully be inspired to get through any difficult times that they might be having.

"God Save The City" is also your personal victory. Cancer didn't kill your spirit. What is the source of your strength? The source of this need to create despite all these problems around you?

I think the strength to get through something like that comes from first wanting to stay around and be a father & husband for your family, but also the feeling that you haven't said or written all of things that need to be said. I don't think of it in terms of a personal victory at all because I feel like as an artist your always thinking about the next thing that you want to create and the next thing that you want to make better. There is an obsession to creating and there's nothing like writing a new song and that feeling that you did create something essentially out of the air, or from your heart. I'm always trying to push myself to write or say something unique or to write a type of song that I've never written before and thats what excites me about song writing. Whether it's a different sound or with a different instrument or style. I don't limit myself and I think that sometimes the listener can't always pin down what style that I am as whole. I'm not trying to do that on purpose but songs kind of decide where they want to land. I just want it to be a great song no matter what style it is. This whole Spotify algorithm, "the computer pics your song" bullshit is so limiting. It's "do you like the song or not"? The people that I admire who you can't pin down are the ones that I've grown up with my whole life like Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, MC5, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush, Todd Rundgren. I will say that a big part of the strength that it took to get through my cancer journey was also getting so much support from friends & family and staying positive throughout the ordeal. It's a mental challenge as well as a physical one and when the physical part hopefully gets healed, the mental part can take a little longer to process.

One of my favorite songs from your newest album is "Why Do You Hurt" co-written by legendary Robert Tepper. Well, I know you are a very good friends but I wonder who was the initiator of this project? Where this idea came from?

So Robert and I met in Tucson Arizona when he was working on his second record after his hit "No Easy Way Out" and I knocked on his door because I was his bottled water delivery guy. Imagine that bit of luck! We met and hit if off almost immediately and we started talking about music and it took awhile to figure who he was, but he was so cool and then I just started giving him cassettes and playing him things that I'd been working on and he was extremely supportive. He kept telling me "your a great singer" and at that time in my musical development no one had ever instilled in me that confidence. I ended up being the lead singer in a Punk/Funk band in Tucson called "Pollo Elastico" and things really started to happen with the band and he always was a mentor to me through the process of dealing with labels & lawyers. In fact during that time I met Stan Diamond, who Robert had also met years earlier, as he was Bowie's lawyer for a number of years. So it's around this time that Robert and I talked about writing together and I had the lyrics to a song called "Why Do You Hurt The People You Love" which was a break up song, and he and I just sat at his keyboard with a little drum machine and amazingly knocked it out in a short time. Robert wrote the chords and started the melody. When you write with someone that has such great instincts and writes with these fantastic hooks, it can come easy, and that lucky day it did. We both were into Todd Rundgren/Hall & Oates at the time and it had this blue eyed soul vibe. The funny part of the story is that we recorded it to 4 track cassette and we both always loved the song, but it wasn't as heavy or hard rock as what I was doing in the band, so it kinda just sat there in my mind... So the cassette sat in a box, and every now and then I'd pull it out and go, "I still like this song, I wonder if anyone will ever hear it". Fast forward many years later and I'm sitting in a room with the producer of "God Save The City", Adam Rossi, as well as the band and we're working on something else for the new record and I start singing this song and they go "Why aren't we playing that?". I didn't have an answer. I go home and look everywhere for this damn cassette and can't find it, but what I did find was a chord chart on the back of some other song lyrics and also the lyrics in some other pile of ideas from the past. The band gets together, and comes up with some cool parts and take it in another direction. Maybe more of an Al Green type of feel, we work it up, play it out live a few times, see that its working, and recorded it when I start the beginning of my cancer battle. The song which was personal to me when the lyrics were written, takes on a whole different meaning with time, and the state of our world. The icing on the cake to this tale is that we ended up getting the wonderful Ralph Carney (who unfortunately passed away in 2017) to put his horn magic on it... Oh and I finally found that cassette tape last year!

Speaking about your songs, what is the main message of your music? How would you define it to someone who have never heard it before?

I would like to think that the main message especially of this record is perseverance under extreme times. Getting past the darkness and dancing into the light so to speak. It's like a Saturday night record, the creeps into Sunday morning. But also a shot across the bow to people who can't see beyond themselves.

And what would you say if I would ask you to imagine yourself as a listener of your music? What would you like to hear on Brad Brooks new record?

When you say "imagine yourself as the listener" that makes me think that I need to try and figure out what I think people want to hear and that seems like a trap to me. I have a hard time doing that. I know that's not what your saying though. The thing that I battle with is that for the most part I'm a Rock n Roll Soul singer, but when I write on guitar & especially piano, things take these unexpected turns and veer into mysterious ways which is always exciting. What I'm hoping to do after this record comes out is to write things that are concise but also have weirder elements to them sonically. There's a song that I wrote after finishing "God Save The City" that came out earlier this year called "Don't Snatch The Mail" and it was a song about Roky Erickson from the 13th Floor Elevators and his obsession with stealing his neighbors mail, tacking it up on his wall and keeping it because he thought that he was protecting them. It's a very sparse song with just 12 string guitar, a lot of vocals, and my friends James Deprado & Jerry Becker doing these simple but also really trippy layered parts and it's the type of song that I'd never written before, so I can definitely see myself heading more in that direction.

I recall the words of Tolstoy who once said that music is a shorthand of emotion. What kind of emotions you have inside of you while working on your songs?

That's a brilliant quote and I do believe that. One of my favorite quotes is one by Ray Davies from the Kinks that said "my subconscious is smarter than I am" and I truly believe that there is a semi conscious state that the best songs come from. Whether its dreams or just free form lyric writing where your just writing words and images as fast you can and not really trying to edit them but letting your subconscious take over and then later figuring out what your feeling, and in that way your figuring out emotions that your not even aware of that your having. For "God Save The City" as I mentioned some of the songs were about dealing with the mental aspect after you've gone through cancer treatment. Theres a song near the end of the record called "Burn It Off" which is about going through radiation and the dark place that it takes you as you become disfigured. It was a very cathartic song for me in that it helped me get past a dark period of self loathing and pity, which doesn't do anyone any good. Also the last song "Scared I Was" is about the fears that I personally had about having cancer as well as the state of where I thought the world was heading. Hopefully at least in the US that will be changing in a few weeks.

What about the critisicism of your work, aren't you affraid to hear that something you created isn't that good as you thought?

I think as time goes on you get more of a thicker skin about criticisms and believe me I've written my share of shitty songs that no one will hear, but criticism is part of the game, and not all writers or critics are going to like what you do. The audience choses what they like and I know that I'm not for everyone. There have been things that have been written about my music that I didn't like, and there were some reviewers that wrote things that I didn't like, that in hindsight I agree with now. Hopefully I've learned to let it go and just get better at the craft. What I will say is that I think that some critics tend to try to figure out the influences more than they listen to what the song is about, or what it's saying.

Well, I won't be your critic and I will say that your previous album "Harmony of Passing Light" was probably the best you have ever recorded. If you were to name three differences between that record and "God Save The City", what would they be?

Well I really do appreciate you saying that and in some ways I consider that to be my very first record (It's the 3rd) as I feel like its the first time that I got something right all the way through. With "God Save The City" it's different in that it's less orchestrated in terms of the instrumentation and more immediate with a band playing all together in the room with only a few takes of each song and just capturing that immediacy and rawness. There weren't a lot of overdubs. "Harmony Of Passing Light" is a very lush record with some incredible players stretching out and creating textures. "God Save" has less strings and more gospel type background vocals. I was really trying to make a Frankie Miller record at first, or a Keith Richards solo record type of vibe. Just soulful & rockin! Also the members of the band changed between records and these guys really compliment each others playing, which is no knock to the amazing musicians on "Harmony" but I didn't want to recreate that record and frankly I couldn't. Also adding someone like Vicki Randle who sings & plays percussion, along with her deep resume, really steered the direction and took it to a place that was always inside of me but hadn't been distilled. She plays with such infectious joy and that is gift not a lot folks can say. Also I was able to co-write a few things with my friend Jerry Becker who is also an incredible writer and another one of those people who likes to write fast and we had a blast. My amazing band and I co-wrote more of the rock tunes, and I think this record also has shorter songs, and as much as its hard for me to stick to a certain style, there is a thread that ties it all together. If I were to break it into a simpler form "Harmony" was more a Beatles record, and this one is more of a Stones record.

As we said at the beginning, it's always good to be back but future is something unknown. Where do you see yourself in five years from now?

I've never had a five year plan and it's really just year to year as I think a lot of musicians have that same thought process because we're all so gig oriented. Or at least we were before Covid. Ya know, "How many gigs do I have this year" or "I need more gigs." So this record is meant to be performed live and hopefully within that 5 year time time frame I can see myself out Poland and playing for the people. That would be amazing!

Are you satified with your life so far?

I'm satisfied in the sense that I'm alive and I still get to do the thing that I was meant to do, and with what I went through, my gratitude for being able to still do it is immense. I never take singing for granted and I never take performing or trying to write the best songs for granted. My kids and family are extremely important and I'm also incredibly lucky in that way and the support that I get from them is huge. I think that the life part is satisfying, but the musical part in my opinion is one that if you feel satisfied, then your not pushing yourself creatively, so I don't ever think that I'm satisfied musically.

So if you were to travel back in time to give your younger self one life advice, what would you tell him?

I would have told myself to pick up an and instrument sooner than I did. When I started performing and playing I was always a lead singer that wrote lyrics to other peoples music and although I had an influence in particular directions, I wish that I had learned to write my own songs a lot sooner by picking up a guitar and learning piano, because when I started going down that path it opened up a whole other world. As for "life" advice I would say "don't be afraid to fuck up".
 

Journalist: Kamil Mrozinski

 

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