|
Editor's note: Normally, we'd put a bio about the interviewee here. This interview is so good we didn't want to edit much out to create space for Jeffrey's incredibly long and impressive bio. To see it, please go to his site: www.jeffreysteele.net/about/
Jeffrey: Good morning [said to the audience]! What are you all doing up so early? You're songwriters, aren't you? You're supposed to be in bed!
You grew up here in the Valley, right?
I grew up in Van Nuys and North Hollywood. My dad was a songwriter. Well, he wanted to be a songwriter. He worked at a machine shop in North Hollywood off of Sherman Way in the Valley. My brothers and I grew up working there. We had a band in the early days. We played together, and my dad was trying to get us going. He always wanted to be a songwriter; so back in those days we were doing anything we could to figure out how to get a song somewhere. There really wasn't anywhere to go, you know, if you didn't know anybody.
There was no TAXI.
There was no TAXI, for sure.
Did you ever have a day gig? Did you ever work at a McDonald's or...?
Yeah, I worked at a nursery school, cleaning toilets. I used to work there at night, and one night they had this big cookie, this pizza-size cookie on the counter, so I figured they had a party that day, some kind of a birthday party. So, while I was working, I ate some of the cookie, not realizing that it was for the next day. And I got fired the next day. Then I went to work for my old man after that. You know when you're first starting out and you're trying to figure out how to get money for diapers and things and new guitars and all that stuff, I would get any road gig I could get and go out for a couple months, and I'd come home and my dad would let me work every now and then in his shop. And I had various shipping company jobs where I'd load up trucks, or whatever.
I've known you now for probably 10 or 12 years, and I've always perceived you as one of those guys who was just born with so much talent that success came easily. So you actually had to have jobs and work at it...
Well, yeah, and, obviously, talent will take you a long way, but you still have to learn how to do what you want to do. One of the things that I always say is that you have to—especially with songwriting—you have to learn the craft and learn the rules so you can break the rules and make your own rules and things that work for you. It's so important to study your heroes and what's out there right now and always be embedded in that all the time. I was always the kind of guy that would steal all my brothers' and sisters' records. I was the youngest of five, so it was the Beach Boys, the Beatles and Credence and the Eagles. It was Smokey Robinson; it was everybody. And then I had my era of the stuff I listened to when I was coming up as a teenager and all that. And I always have been just overwhelmed by songs and the production of songs and how they sound when they hit you, and why certain chords work on certain words, and vice-versa. It's all about the word saying the right thing when it hits the right chord. You know, the emotion that comes out of that, whether it's happy or sad, so I was always intrigued by that, and a kid I didn't know what those sounds were. I wasn't really a musician yet. I just knew that when I heard it, it sounded cool. It was like, "How do they do that? Where do those words come from?" And then I just started doin' it. I was just so into it as a kid; I just started writing words down.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
“The very thing I was doing wrong has become my thing.”
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
When you started adding music to the words, did you start studying things like chord voicings and realize that a G voiced one way would create a different emotion with a word than a G voiced another way?
Well, I probably did without knowing it. My brother got piano lessons. We used to have an old piano out in the garage at our house. My mom put it out there because she got sick of hearing us pounding on it all the time I think. But my brother took lessons, so he was learning chords, and when he would play I would go out there and watch him. I would watch where his hands were on the keys. And so, then, when he would leave, I'd go out there and I'd mimic where he was and I'd play a chord. I didn't know what the chord was at the time, but I'd play it and go, "Hey, cool." Then I'd go over here and go, "Hey, cool. Wow. Cool. Ooh, that's bad." And I just started singing to that stuff and making up my own songs as a young kid. I used to go back in my room and draw up album covers and put all these songs on them—like I had my own album. You know, I had two pages and I'd staple... I don't know if anybody... You guys know what an album is, right?
Look at the average age of the audience!
But you know how it was such a cool thing to look at an album. So I would draw all these elaborate covers, then on the back I would have all the credits, "written by me," "produced by me." I had a pretty crazy imagination. I would go sit down at the piano in the garage and I'd get a thing of iced tea. I'd sit the iced tea down, then I'd put my album cover up on the music stand and I'd play all the songs on my album. [laughter]
Is it easier for you to write it or sing it?
Probably to sing it. I mean, you guys know when you write, you're never happy with it. It's never done. You have to at some point let the song go. It took me a lot of years to realize that you have to just write the song. What I do, too, is, if I get stuck on a song and I can't find the second verse-which happens to a lot of people I know—I just put it away and start another song and come back to it later with fresh ears and see if something hits me. But I never try to force myself into a corner where I have to rhyme a word, because then it's like you're doing math. You're trying to make the song look really neat and you want it all to be perfect, when you're not really writing the song that you're trying to write. You know what I mean by that? You're not really writin' that song; you've got to get back in that headspace where it's your subconscious kind of controlling you.
How do you balance the perfectionism you have to deliver in Nashville with that moment of writing where you need to let go of the perfectionism and get back to just feeling it? Do you just feel it?
Well, it's not really a plan. I just keep writing songs. A lot of times you get in your head that this is the song, this is the one that God sent down to me, and this is gonna be the one. I'll write a thousand bad ones to get one great one.
Even you?
Yeah, you have to. It's like throwin' a baseball. You've got to be ready to go in and pitch when they call you in to pitch. You've got to have your arm ready; you've got to have all those tricks. Sometimes those tricks will get you a song, which is great. But sometimes when you get that lightening in a bottle inspiration that comes—and you don't know where it came from—you've got all these tricks to guide you now through that song that you can rely on when you get to those stuck places.
You don't even have to think about it, that "this is a trick that I have to pull it out of my bag." It's just there?
You instinctively know, and it's also really important, to me, anyway, to keep learning other formats and genres. And it's all about the words to me, and, obviously, I'm in a lot of different formats now with my music—but in the Country world, I mean, that story is the king. And I knew that growing up some of my musical influences were pretty scattered all over the place, but those musical influences really made me feel what was inside of me. Like sometimes most guys will go to Nashville and they're gonna write what everybody else is writing. They want to get into that system. And I did it for a while, but at some point I got back to just music that really made me feel something, that made a word come out. And I started writing more like that. I started chasing those things and forgetting about what everybody else was doing.
Back in the mid-'90s in Nashville a lot of female artists were really coming to the forefront, like Shania Twain and Faith Hill, and I was writing all these songs that were really southern rock-influenced that didn't make any sense at the time. And every time I'd turn one in, they'd go, "Man, Jeff, dude. You can't get this stuff cut. No one's gonna cut this."
I was having this conversation with Danny Wells last night. He's here somewhere. He's written some songs with Jeff. Some that have been very successful. And I said, "Jeffrey makes it look so easy," and he goes, "No, you gotta know, man. After Boy Howdy, the boy worked his ass off on his craft." I was shocked by that, frankly, because you've always made it look so easy, so when we ask you guys [in the audience] to work harder, reach higher...
Well, you know, when I was in that band and had a record deal and had a bunch of buses and did the deal—eight or 10 years on the road, whatever it was. Then when we lost our record deal, and when I came to Nashville, I was the bass player in that band. That's who I was. I wrote all the hit songs the band had, but when I came to Nashville, I was just that bass player/singer from that band. That's who I was, so when I got to town with a bunch of hits under my belt, nobody could care less, so I did what I knew how to do: I got a gig at a bar on a Monday night down on Broadway. And I remember people coming in and going, "That's that guy from that band Boy Howdy. Man, he's had some hard times." [laughter] Lost his record deal; now he's playin' Monday nights in a bar. I was singing demos, which I had done out here in L.A. For years and years I was the demo king out here. But I went back to what I knew and started singing demos for some of the bigger songwriters at that time in the early '90s. I just started doing that. And I came to a time when I lost my voice for a while. There was a chance that I could never sing again, and you know I love to sing and do my thing. I had to struggle with that; I had to struggle with maybe letting that go, and maybe having to have surgery, knowing that I couldn't perform the way I once performed, so there were two years in there where I really had to... I was scared, not only because of the health of it, having to have surgery and all that stuff, which I didn't do. I ended up finding a way around that. I retrained myself how to sing and I got better. In all that time all I could do was write, so I just kept writing and writing and writing. It was obnoxious how much I wrote.
How many songs did you write a week then?
40, 50.
Wow.
And a lot of 'em sucked, I promise you. [laughter] But I tell you what—sometimes I'd write a line in a song that I thought was really cool, and the song wasn't really that great. And then I went back and looked at that line and thought, 'Man, that's a pretty good title for a song; I should just write that," you know. It's like everything you write you're writing your life; you're getting your stuff out there, so all that stuff you're writing, it's not like, OK, somebody didn't cut your song so throw it away, you've got to go get a new one now. All that stuff is valid. You're writing your life. You can go back to that; it's like your well. You don't have to go, "OK, I can't use that now because I already wrote that." Uh-uh. And I know a lot of us get like that, because I've been known to get like that, like, "Now I'm rippin' myself off." [laughter]
Well, at least you robbed the right bank!
That's your style—that becomes your style. Those quirks and things, all those things that you think suck about you, that's probably your million dollars right there. See what I mean? Honest to God. Shut me up when you need to shut me up.
You're actually answering every question I've already written, so I'm just sittin' here thinking, "I'm gonna let him go."
When I was in high school, I had a guitar class, and we had a finger-picking exercise and I always played with a pick. I couldn't finger-pick, my dexterity wasn't that great and I failed the test because I used a pick. And my mom is like, "You failed a guitar class?" [laughter]
Guess you showed her.
And you know what, you guys? How long ago was that, 20, 30 years ago? Lord have mercy; we're gettin' old, man. So 30 years later I've had about 25, 30, 40 songs that have been hit songs that have that finger-picking thing that I did with my pick. The very thing I was doing wrong has become my thing... for me.
You're the master of like four-syllable hooks—"What Hurts the Most," "This Is My Town," "These Days," "My Wish." Did you have to teach yourself to take a complex thought and squish it down and figure out what the essence of the thought was, and then which words describe that essence, and then make it lyrical? Or is it something that just came naturally just by doing it all the time?
I mean, yeah. I did have to learn that, but a lot of it... That's a hard question to answer. It's a lot of everything. It's weird when someone asks you something when I don't really think about it, you know?
That's the innate-talent part.
And that's probably the deal, too. You don't over think it too much. But I look for it. I look for the pockets and the windows and the doors in the music, you know what I mean? To me, it's in the music. To me, the music opens that door. Can I tell a really fast little story?
You can tell a long one. Go for it.
I wrote "What Hurts the Most" with Steve Robson, who lives in London. I had written "These Days" with Danny Wells and Steve, and I'd never met Steve. It was just kind of a thing that they sent to me to write the lyric to the track, which I'd never done before. I'd never just written a lyric to somebody's music before. Then we had this big #1 hit, and I'd never even met Steve, but they sent me over there to write with Steve, and I was really intrigued by writing a lyric to somebody's music, because usually I'm playing—doing my thing playing piano or whatever. But when I got there, he had the track of what was gonna be "What Hurts the Most" already laid out. And I kept listening to the track, and I was just sitting there listening to it, really getting into it. It was really just great. And I said, "God, this is so good. What is this song about?" You know, I'm just thinkin', and all my thoughts and life and stuff are going through my head. Then what happened was—it was a light-bulb moment for me—there was a part in it in the channel [he sings the part], it kept repeating that, and I latched on to that. And opposed to starting with the first verse, or having a line that I wrote down for the chorus, I had nothing. But that music, the way it was bouncing. I'm sittin' there listening to it, and I start going, [he sings] "Afraid to cry, every once in a while, even though, going on..." And to me it was just mumbo-jumbo. I wasn't trying to write a lyric, I was just trying to get a pattern with what he was playing. Then I looked at it and I went, "Hey, that's all right." [laughter] It occasionally rhymes, you know? And then it went back to the verse and I started writing the verse. So the channel was like the first thing I wrote. Then when I got to the chorus, I had basically written the chorus, and the title was "What Means the Most." That was kind of the title. And I went and sang the vocal. This is the crazy way a song keeps evolving. You can't ever say that it's over. That's why it's so hard for us to let go. But he made the whole track up, so I had nothing to do with the music. I was just writing the melody and the lyric. But the whole time I was there I was just noodling around with my guitar playing a little lick [he sings] because I'm bored. And he's like, "Man, you've been playing that lick all day. What is it?" I said, "I don't know. Just playing into the first chord on your track." And he goes, "Well, let's put it on the track," and it became the hook. Stupid stuff. It's stupid stuff. This is a stupid gig when you think about it. How did we get this gig? And they pay us for it! [laughter] I mean really, it's crazy. But I think you have to open yourself up to that stuff, you know what I mean? You really do.
Don't miss Part Two in next month's issue!
=========================================================================
|
