AS HEARD ON...
PAUL SHAFFER
For the full interview, listen to the May 3,
2017 episode
CM: After decades leading David Letterman’s band,
how quickly did you to decide to get the band back
together and make an album after Letterman retired?
Shaffer: Not so quickly. I spent a year trying to figure out
what I’m supposed to do now after 33 years with Letter-
man. Slow down? No, that’s not what I want to do. Keep
playing the piano? Yes, and then I got a call from Seymour
[Stein of Warner Bros. Records], “Do you want to get back in
the music business and make a record?” It was like a god-
send because once I got in the studio, I cheered up and realized that this is what I like.
CM: You’ve said you’re a studio musician at heart. What would you say are key traits
for a professional studio musician?
Paul Shaffer with Canadian Musician’s
Michael Raine
Shaffer: First of all, you’ve got to be realistic about the times that we’re in now. It’s not
like it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s when there was a studio scene in New York and Toronto
and you could get a band from an answering service and make a great record. Comput-
ers are making the records today, fortunately or unfortunately. So the studio is not what
it was, but certainly you know you’ve got to be enthusiastic and you’ve got to love the
music. There’s no reason to come in if you don’t really love the music, because that is
what’s going to show up on the record.
Brenley MacEachern of
MADISON VIOLET COLTER WALL
For the full interview, listen to the May 24, 2017 episode For the full interview, listen to the June 14, 2017 episode
CM: Your record, The Knight Sessions, was born of tragedy as
you both experienced the death of a sibling, and there were
health scares and other matters in a remarkable string of bad
luck on a personal level. How did that affect the music and
how did the music help deal with the tragedy? CM: Steve Earle called you “the best songwriter I’ve seen in
20 years,” and other heavyweights like Lucinda Williams and
Rick Rubin have also sung your praises. Being only 21 years
old and releasing your self-titled debut LP and a teenager
when your first EP came out, how did you develop your song-
writing skills so young?
Brenley MacEachearn: I think the only way Lisa [MacIsaac] and
I know how to keep pushing forward through all these tragedies
is to recognize that there is a sort of creative transformation we
go through when the terrible things happen, and then we sit
down and we write about it or we paint or whatever it is that we
do, some kind of a creative outlet. If we’re not working through
it somehow, you can’t get by it and then all the days are low
moments and just sadness.
I know at the end of tours, when we land back in Toronto, we’ll
be in the taxi going back into the city and sometimes one of us will
just completely break down. But it’s a needed release, in the same
way that writing new material is a release. I don’t know how we’d
continue moving forward and touring the world if we didn’t have
a chance to sort of memorialize the people that we’ve lost. Just six
months ago I lost another family member, my 20-year-old niece,
and I’ve been writing a whole lot since then. I hate to say that it’s
almost become a bit of the muse. It’s terrible, and I really hope
that’s not the future of our records.
Colter Wall: Well, I guess firstly I just tried to just listen to the
right stuff – really dive in and study the records with songs that
get that reaction out of me that I was talking about, that stop
you dead in your tracks and that really mean something. Finding
those records and listening to them over and over again and
studying them and figuring out why it is they do that and how
it is they do that. I think that is sort of the first step, and I’d been
writing songs for a long time before I ever kept one. There were
a lot of crumpled up notes and papers that just ended up in the
garbage because I wasn’t quite proud enough of what I was
doing yet to put it out.
Eventually, I started writing some of the songs that ended up
on my EP that I made about two years ago and those were the first
songs I really felt proud enough about to play to people and put
out into the world and get into people’s ears.
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