Glenn Frey is back with his new solo album After Hours, his first solo record 1995, and he covers some of his favourite love songs.
I caught up with him to talk about the new album, what inspired him to tackle these songs and what lies ahead.
- You are about to release your new album After Hours so what can we expect from the new record?
Well it’s a very romantic record as it is chalked full of love songs and songs that have liked for a long long time.
It’s beautifully played, beautifully orchestrated and it is a bit of a throw back, an homage, to some of the great love songs that I have enjoyed over the years.
- Well you have touched on my next question really the album is very much influenced by the sound of Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole so where did you love of this kind of music come from?
I heard it growing up but I didn’t really identify with it but when I got out to California and started writing songs I started to appreciate the work of other song-writers - that meant not just song-writers from my own generation but from previous.
I use to run into Hoagy Carmichael all the time on Sunset Boulevard, he had an office not from where The Eagles management building was, and we would always say ‘Hi Hoagy how are you doing?’ And he was like ‘How are you doing boys?’ So I always liked him. Then my friend J.D Souther, he is a songwriter, he use to be a big jazz fan and he turned me onto a lot of Jazz music - he was liked Frank Sinatra a lot.
And then I started listening to more of this music the longer I stayed out in California and I loved the records that Linda Ronstadt made with Nelson Riddle back in the eighties, she made three albums with him, and they were just nearly perfect record.
Linda was a long time friend and I played in her band and then she helped me and Don find the other guys to play in The Eagles, so for three or four years we were very close. So I followed her career and she departed from making pop records and did some things that I thought were very brave and art driven but the Nelson Riddle records she really got me into those songs again.
And then there was another time when I was a partner in a restaurant in Aspen, Colorado and the guy who owned it wanted to have a big Martini sophisticated restaurant and he asked me to do the music. So I put together ten hours of music and I went out and bought everyone that I like so I bought Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday and Diana Washington and I made these CD’s to play at the restaurant.
The restaurant closed after the first season but I was left with this great music and I listen to it all the time. So I have kind of been working up to this but it has been a slow process.
I remember around the year 2000 I was playing in the golf tournament up a Peddle Beach and Clint Eastwood is the main guy up there and they would ask all the singers to come and sing s a couple of songs at the after party and Clint would insist that you sing one song from the 1940’s - so I started to singing Tony Bennett songs.
So I started getting familiar with that material and got use to singing it. Then another thing that happened up a Pebble Beach was Michael Bolton came over to me at a Friday night dinner party we were both at and said ‘Glenn I forgot to tell you, you sounded great singing that stuff the over night have you ever thought about making a record?’ And so I said to Michael ‘yeah I have, thank you’ and he said ‘yeah you should’.
So then I thought ‘I have to do this’ as both my parents are still alive and I think they would really enjoy it if I made a record with some of these songs. So I went back down to LA and went into studio to make some demos, they sounded good so me and my two keyboard playing partners Michael Thompson and Richard Davis started recording more and more songs. Eventually it started sounded like an album to us.
- I read that you called the recording of this album 'a new adventure for you as a vocalist' so what was the major challenge for you?
Well it is a different kind of singing, it’s piano singing as opposed to guitar singing which is what I would say is more what a rock and roll band does. But this was a little more sophisticated and a little more polished so it was a little trickier.
I always felt like my voice was suited to this material so I was always comfortable with how I sounded but it was just interesting to learn the songs and practice the songs and come to understand how good the people were who wrote them and sang them in the beginning.
- There are classic songs such as For Sentimental Reasons and My Buddy on there so how did you decide what records made the album?
We would basically decide… it was sort of how did I sound singing the song? Is this a good match for my voice? Am I able to step up centre stage and handle the piece of material? So that was basically how we did and I would sit around with my two buddies and I would say ‘well what about this song?’
Maybe we would listen to a recorded version of it or something and then we would go over to the piano and one of my piano playing guys would start playing the accompaniment and I would start singing and we would say ‘well that sounds pretty good’ - if we felt like that when we were messing around then we would go out and record it.
We recorded it with just piano and voice then we would live with it for a bit and see what we thought. So that was the process; if I sounded good singing it and it was a piano voice song then that was out criteria.
- How difficult was it for you to put your own stamp on these well known records?
I think the way to do that is to not do that too much (laughs). I believe in respect for the material and I think you should stick pretty close to the intended melody that the song-writer had, he wrote that melody for a reason.
Then learn so that you knew it in your sleep so that when you had to get up you could really perform the song and be confident in what I doing.
- You have mentioned Richard Davis and Michael Thompson already and they are two people that you know really well but how did you find working with them as producers?
Richard and I had done a lot of work on The Long Road Out Of Eden, the Eagles double CD that come out back in 2005, so I was very comfortable working together with both of these guys because we spent so much time together in The Eagles.
And then of course I have a lot of respect for them and I have a lot of trust in their opinions, especially doing a record like this where it is not familiar territory; I am not just turning up with song that I wrote saying ‘ok you play this and you play that’, it’s different process.
I was in good hands with good friends. The most important thing is you have to be able to talk honestly about stuff and not be afraid to offend people - so you have to be able to take a bit of criticism and we have a good working relationship in that way.
- This is your first solo album since 1995 so why did you decide that now was the right time to make this album?
Well The Eagles got back together in 1994 and then I got married and started a family three years before that so two really big things happened (laughs) and I didn’t really feel the need or the desire to go and make solo records.
I thought well we have The Eagles back together so let’s see how that works and how we can keep that going and them marriage and a family is a big commitment - that is the real world.
Fortunately for me I had experienced a lot of success in my profession and so it afforded me the opportunity when I started my family a little later in life to be able to devote more energy to it - so it has worked out well.
- You have enjoyed a career that has spanned over forty years so what is the secret to your endurance?
I think it is good songs and I think that is what the Eagles are still playing shows and playing shows in big venues - we are still drawing lots of people all over the world - and I think it’s the songs. A good song will take you a lot further than a bad song (laughs).
- As you say the band are still enjoying huge success so how would you sum up your time in the band when you look back on it now?
Oh it was time well spent. It is interesting as we have a 2 DVD history of The Eagles project that is going to be completed by the end of the year and will hopefully be release in 2013 so I have been spending a little bit of time looking back through the past.
One of the things that I discovered was how much fun I had, I started looking at old film of The Eagles performing and super 8 film from 1974 and I saw a bunch of young guys who were living their dream and having a lot of fun and enjoying performing with each other.
So it has been a great experience and it has been a great life.
- During your years in the music industry how have you seen it change and has it changed for the better?
That’s is hard to say and I don’t want to be one of those people that says ‘oh it was so much better in the good old days’ as that wouldn’t be what I would say.
We don’t see as many long careers anymore and I think part of the reason is because you can become overexposed and then people aren’t interested in you anymore because they know everything about you - so you have to be a little bit careful about letting yourself get overexposed.
And the other thing that is totally different now is that television and the internet have taken the place of radio; when you put records out in the seventies you would take them to the record stations and you did a few interviews and that was about it but now it is a more complex system. The best way to sell records now is to sell television.
- Finally what's coming up for you?
This is kind of a quiet year. I am going to go back home and take a little time off in July and August and then in September I will be heading for Australia and hopefully I will come back to Europe - I hope this record will take seed and give me an excuse to come back and play some shows with orchestras; which is what I have been doing in the U.S. for the last month.
I have just played in New York with the NYU Concert Symphony Orchestra and I just played in LA with Santa Monica High School Orchestra so I have been playing with musicians between the age of fifteen and twenty three.
So I would like to do some more shows related to After Hours and would like to get back to Europe and play England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Holland, that would be a nice little tour for me to do. So we are trying to see if I can do something like that in the Fall.
Glenn Frey’s new album After Hours is out now
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in The Eagles Glenn Frey