A Very Candid Conversation with Kevin Godley

 

Kevin Godley (year unknown)

 

A drummer, singer, songwriter, and music video director. Kevin Godley has done them all and with great success. From 1964 to 1972, Kevin played in various bands with Lol Creme, Graham Gouldman, and Eric Stewart. In 1972, the four formed the rock band 10cc, and Kevin sang and played drums. The band was a unique creation: Eric and Graham were pop focused, while Kevin and Lol were more experimental and daring. 10cc had success with three Top 10 UK albums and nine Top 40 singles. In 1975, one of 10cc’s singles, “I’m Not In Love,” reached number 1 in England, Canada, and Ireland, and number 2 in America. The song was a perfect combination of Eric and Graham’s pop styling with Kevin and Lol’s adventurous side. Like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this involved a lot of work in the recording studio to make an incredible original sound.

Despite 10cc’s success, Kevin and Lol found themselves at a musical crossroads with Eric and Graham. In 1977, Kevin and Lol split from 10cc and formed the duo Godley & Creme. Godley & Creme had a very experimental music sound and a wide spectrum. (Listen to “I Pity Inanimate Objects” and “H.E.A.V.E.N / A Little Piece of Heaven”.) They made a music video for their single “An Englishman in New York” and enjoyed the creative process. This began their career as music video directors. Some of the artists they directed were the Police, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Peter Gabriel, and George Harrison. Godley & Creme's 1985 single “Cry” showcases their culmination as both music video directors and musical pioneers. In the music video, they used an imaginative technique that showed different faces morphing into each other as they sang the song lyrics. (Michael Jackson used a similar technique in his “Black or White” video in 1991.)

During his time with Godley & Creme, Kevin got to do several solo projects on his own. In 1985, he was asked to film Fashion Aid, the UK fashion industry’s version of Live Aid.  Then in 1988, Godley & Creme both felt it was time to take a break from each other and so they parted ways. Kevin continued in film and shot a short film with actress Dawn French called Mother Earth for Ark, an environmental group that Kevin belonged to. In 1990, Kevin was behind the One World One Voice project. Kevin created a musical track and sent it to multiple artists around the world who put their own contribution to the track. The project was intended to raise awareness for the environment.

Kevin had a successful career directing music videos for a variety of artists including U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Phil Collins, and Eric Clapton. In 2020, Kevin released his first solo album, Muscle Memory. For the album, Kevin publicly invited musicians to send him pieces of music, and then Kevin added lyrics and melodies to the music pieces. Many musicians who have been around as long as Kevin may have long reached the end of their musical inspiration, but Kevin remains as musically inspired as he was in his earlier years. Recently, Cherry Red Records came across material that Kevin recorded with Lol Creme in 1969 as a duo under the alias Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon. The duo’s material, recorded before they joined 10cc, will be released to the public in June 2022.

In this candid conversation, we cover this long journey from Kevin’s beginning days with Lol Creme, 10cc, Godley & Creme (both their music and music videos) and Kevin’s life after splitting with Lol. I want to thank Billy James from Glass Onyon PR for setting up this interview, but most of all, I want to thank Kevin for telling his story to a huge fan such as myself

Jeff Cramer: Okay, Kevin, what began your interest in music?

Kevin Godley: That's a big question. I imagine like most kids and teenagers are today, you tap into what other people are doing, and what looks like an interesting thing to do when you're not at school. And at that time, it was being in a band. Obviously, there was no internet or video games, so people wanted to be in a band, and I attempted to do that.

My first instinct was to try to play the guitar. But I was bloody awful at guitar, even though I ended up in a very small local band playing bass using a six-string guitar. But I was even worse at that. It was only when my next-door neighbor got a drum set. He let me sit down behind it and that was when I discovered I was in fact a drummer. And everything changed from that point.

JC: I understand there is something you did with Lol Creme, I believe before 10cc. Can you talk about that?

KG: Yeah, I haven't got the list of tracks in front of me, but if I remember correctly, I think it was a combination of demos that we cut. This was toward the end of the 1960s, probably over at Graham Gouldman's house, and a few tracks that were produced by Giorgio Gomelsky. After, we did a track for Marmalade, which was his label, I sang a song called “Fly Away,” which is one of Godley & Creme's first songs. [To hear “Fly Away,” click here.]

He signed us up to do an album and called us Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon. Bit of a mouthful, isn't it? We were hauled down to London to do some sessions for a proposed album that never materialized. I think Marmalade just fell to pieces financially at some point for whatever reason. The record was never actually released.

A little bit of archaeology took place at Cherry Red Records, and they discovered the existence of all this stuff and asked if we wouldn't mind if they put it out as an album, which is cool after all these years.

 

Frabjous Days album cover (2022) (Kevin left)

JC: Since this was before 10cc, how was Graham involved?

 KG: Yeah, I mean, the Manchester music scene was pretty small. Back in those days, Graham was a friend. He'd already been very successful as a songwriter, and he was mentoring us. We were art students at the time, and we started writing songs. Graham said, "Okay, come over to my parents’ house and we'll record them," which we did on numerous occasions. There were no real studios in Manchester at that time at all. Our knowledge of recording procedures was actually nil, and we were being guided by Graham. It was fun, and it was more enjoyable than studying for graphic design, which was what we both did.

JC: From 10cc’s first album to your most recent album, there's a lot of imagination there. All these original ideas, where do they come from?

KG: Where do they come from? I have no idea. Like anything else if you're doing something and you're keen on it, I guess you magnetize them toward you. If there's an innate talent, in your capability, it gradually blossoms over the years. And the more you enjoy writing, and the more you enjoy singing or playing, it's a series of small steps, one after the other, but mixing with musicians.

JC: The first 10cc album has doo-wop. Could you talk about that?

KG: Yeah, I think when you're young, you're starting off and writing and recording stuff, you don't really have much of a clue who you are. You've probably not found your own voice yet. Out of necessity to a degree, you are aping your heroes because you think that's what good music sounds like.

We were influenced by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Simon & Garfunkel, and all the really great writers and performers of that era. I think it made good sense for us to imitate them, because we didn't have that many reference points with regard to what was to come.

But of course, when you do that, you record it, and you listen back, you slowly begin to realize it doesn't really sound like the Beatles, or the Beach Boys or Simon & Garfunkel. It sounds like something else and it's beginning to sound like you. So, one doesn't want to become too self-conscious about that. It's a matter of just letting it happen.

But I think the big turning point was when we recorded our first album. We didn't have a great deal of time to do it. I think we had about three or four weeks, both to write and record songs, so we just did it. There was no time to pause and say, "Oh, does that sound like what I think music should sound like?" We just wrote it, recorded it, moved on to the next shot, and wrote something and recorded it without thinking too much. Which turned out to be an incredibly valuable thing because when the album was finished, again, we listened back and we thought it sure didn’t sound like anything else. It was a revelation, it was like, "Oh, that's us. That's not them, it’s us."

 

10cc, 1974( Kevin standing in middle)

JC: Of course, “I'm Not in Love,” 10cc’s hugest hit, not only doesn’t sound like anyone else, but I've never heard anybody else attempt what you guys did with “I'm Not in Love.”

KG: We'd already recorded the track once, and not very well. We recorded it as a cheesy bossa nova—it was terrible so we shelved it. But we knew that the song was good; we just felt that the treatment was a bit shit. At a certain point, during the recording of the album, we came back to it and we were talking about how we should approach it.

And I think I said, probably out of desperation, “Why don't we do it all with voices?” And that seemed to strike a chord with everybody, and all we had to really do was figure out how to do the voices. I think all of them suggested that we use tape loops. And we tried that. It took quite a while to do, as you can imagine. I think it was Lol, Graham, and myself went in the studio and went through the scales, just singing notes. And then they were turned into tape loops and fed back onto the 16 track or 24 track tape machine. And then each of those notes was routed through to the multitrack desk and to the channel. We ended up playing the console, playing the desk as one would play a keyboard, although they were faders instead of notes, faders instead of keys. 

And still we had no idea if this was going to work or not. But once we'd figured out that was the only way we could do it—and we actually did it—it began to take on the shape that you're familiar with.

JC: I understand part of your drumming on that song was meant to stimulate a heartbeat. Is that correct?

KG: We put down a piano and we put down the drum that you were talking about, which is like a heartbeat. It's actually a monophonic Moog [a Moog is a synthesizer].

No drums at all. We decided to record the basic backing track in the control room, not in the live area, just so we could all be next to each other and feel it. And it was incredible. Once we'd done our first pass of vocals using that technique, we felt that we had something special. And remarkably, every other session to do with that particular song yielded something that made the track better. That doesn't happen very often.

Often you record something and you call something good. And the next thing we try may not work and something else is a bit crappy, so you try something else. But with this particular one, everything that we tried made it sound better. And better. And better. And when it was finished, it was like we knew we had something very, very strong and very, very strange. It was quite long. I think it was about six-and-a-half minutes long.

We didn't really think of it as a single initially, which is why “Life Is a Minestrone” was the first single off The Original Soundtrack. But it had to be a single . . . it just had to be a single. We didn't edit it. It came out as a long segment. And the rest is history. It was a magical phase. [To hear the classic “I’m Not in Love,” click here.]

JC: Very shortly after that, you left 10cc, and formed Godley & Creme. Can you talk about that?

KG: Yeah, Lol and I invented this device that we nicknamed “the Gizmo” even before 10cc existed because we liked the sound of an orchestra. But hiring an orchestra and arranger was a really big number and an expensive one. We figured because a guitar is a stringed instrument that maybe there's a way of playing it that gets it to sound like an orchestra. Hence our early experiments with an electric drilled piece of rubber on the end of it to try and get it to sound like strings. And we eventually found ourselves at the Manchester College of Science and Technology with a guy called John McConnell who built us a prototype of the Gizmo, but we never really got to play with it that much in the context of 10cc.

At a certain point, there was a hiatus between albums, so Lol and I thought, “Well, let's book a couple of weeks to experiment to see what this thing can actually do.” Which is pretty much what we did. And we had a lot of fun doing it. I think around about that time, it was becoming a little bit more obvious that Eric and Graham's work and Lol and I's were kind of different.

We were making music from two different perspectives. Lol and I were art students, who have more of an experimental frame of mind, whereas Graham and Eric were more of a sort of classic songwriter frame of mind. Our thrills would gain by breaking new ground whenever we could. Whereas I think their thrills was more about making something perfect and continuing what we already knew worked. It’s a little black and white, but that's what it was like.

Those couple of weeks at Strawberry studios was the first time we had a chance to try stuff on our own. And we were getting off on it so much so me and Lol suggested, "Listen, guys, let's just take a break from 10cc—just give us a few months, two or three months and let us do this. Let's put it out as a single album, and then we'll come back together and do 10cc."

But it didn't work out because we had a road crew, and we had to record an album for the label. It wasn't practical for the business of 10cc at that time, unfortunately. And I don't think we were mature enough as individuals to understand that sometimes you need to step away to try different things so you can learn different things and then bring them back to the table.

That was not on the cards, unfortunately. We were young, and so we decided to bail. Actually, I know it's sad, it needn’t be like that, but it was.

 

Godley & Creme (year unknown) (Kevin on right) 

JC: In addition to recording your own music, you and Lol wore a new hat as well: you became music video directors. What began the whole interest in being a music video director?

KG: Certainly, we were art students, which is a great environment to be in prior to 10cc, etc. And one thing that we both bought into while we were in art college and what we learned was to challenge yourself. Don't stop when you do something good because you know it's good. Always look further, always go further. We enjoyed being in art college—it was a buzz, it was a very creative environment with a lot, and we were good at what we did.

Also Godley & Creme, the artists, weren't touring. We weren't playing live at all. But we made an album for our record label Polydor. One of the tracks called “An Englishman in New York” was about to be released as a single. We figured perhaps we could make a little film to go with it because maybe that was one practical way of promoting it, and maybe some programs in Europe or the UK may show it.

But it was all we could think of at the time. We approached the label with an idea for the film. And, surprisingly, they said yes, and to go ahead and make it, but they didn't allow us to direct it. Because we'd never directed anything before, they hired a proper director to direct it. During the process, we were performing—essentially enjoying the process—and a light bulb went off over our heads.

It joined the dots between art school and music. It was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” We could do this. We knew inherently we could do it. I think we must have been a total pain in the ass. Derek Burbidge was the director—he directed a few clips for the Police—but we kept insisting “Can we try this? Can we do this?” and we showed up at the edit room and asked him to “Press this button, push this lever.” I mean, as I said, we must have been a total pain, but during shooting and editing we assimilated enough to know that we could do this. And what happened next was we essentially got the credit for that even though that particular piece of work is not 100 percent ours. But we did influence the finished thing. [To watch “An Englishman in New York” video, click here.]

Steve Strange had formed Visage and they had signed with Polydor at that time. Now, we knew Steve from the clubs in London. When he joined Polydor and they were discussing making a video, he wanted us to direct the video. In fact, he insisted that we directed the video, which was “Fade to Grey.” That was our first professional engagement as video directors. It turned out to be quite an influential piece of film. [To watch the “Fade to Grey” video, click here.]

And suddenly, we were professional video directors as well as artists. We didn't know 100 percent what we were doing, but rather like when we were making the first 10cc album, there's that sense of “Well, that's okay.” We didn’t want to know everything about what we were doing because then it's a foregone conclusion what we’d end up with. You've got these two experimental minds coming up with ideas for this new medium, pretty much called “music video.”

That was at the time a very open and free industry. It’s not that it wasn't a proper industry yet, but nobody really knew what a music video was. It came to people like us to do what we wanted to do, which was brilliant.

JC: And actually, as a young kid watching MTV, that was the first time I heard of you because you were directing a lot of videos that people on MTV would mention you and Lol’s name. When you guys did “Cry,” I was like, “Wow, I didn't know these guys were musicians.”

Then I saw the “Cry” video and it left an impression. It must have left an impression with Michael Jackson because he used the faces changing in his “Black and White” video.

KG: Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The funny thing is the faces-changing idea wasn't the first idea we had for the “Cry” video. Our first idea for “Cry” was to get two very popular ice skaters, Torvill and Dean, to ice skate to the track. Because Lol and I weren't pop stars, we didn't look like pop stars particularly. And we weren't that keen of being in it really. 

But unfortunately, Torvill and Dean weren't around when the film was needed. We couldn’t find a time when they were available, so we had to come up with something else fast. We realized it was a song that anyone could sing and feel. We thought, “Well, why don't we do that? Why don't we just pick a lot of faces out of a casting book and every one of them can lip sync to the song, film it and see what we can knock about that?”

It's a funny thing, but I think most people when they make any form of film, financially speaking and practically speaking, it probably has to be as nailed down as possible. But Lol and I still always insist on there being an area of exploration. And the edit process, because it's more like making music where there has to be room for the God-given mistake.

And that's what happened here. We put everyone in front of the camera, and they all sang it. Then we went into the editing and started cutting between the faces, and it was okay. And then we started mixing between the faces. And that was okay. I mean, if you’ll notice that maybe the first 45 seconds or so, it's very simple.

We're just going from face to face. It was only after that amount of time when we discovered that if we used this very simple device called a wipe, we can open out from the middle of the picture or come down from the top or up from the bottom, or go from side to side. We did that, and you get a new face on the way from face A to face B, which was like, “Whoa, that person doesn't exist except for that moment in time.” And that was a magical moment. We took it forward from that place, and it made the record a hit, I'm convinced. [To see the “Cry” video, click here.]

JC: Yeah, one of the things when you said everyone could sing the song, that was true back then and true today. Although when you did “Cry,” the term “ghost” hadn’t existed yet in the dating world. Yet whenever I got ghosted or someone I knew got ghosted, the lyric in “Cry” comes to mind: “You don't even know how to say goodbye.” And I feel that lyric really describes why being ghosted really hurts. In today’s dating world, there's new technology, but still the emotions are the same.

KG: Yeah, that's interesting. The song itself took 15 years to write. We had the first two or three lines, way back. It was only when we met Trevor Horn, our producer, when the song started. We played what we had, which must have been about 30 seconds worth. He said, "Well, let's go work on that."

Horn was working with J. J. Jeczalik of the Art of Noise, who put together a kind of a backing track and mood. And then I went in the studio and started singing to it with what we had, and improvised a lot of the track. Bit by bit we tried things that sounded good and then moved on to the next bit. And it was extraordinary—it came together relatively quickly. But it wasn't written as a complete song ever.

It was 30 seconds that existed and the rest was put together in a recording studio with one of the finest producers in the business, Trevor Horn. The line you mentioned—I think was one of the lines that just seemed to scan about. And funny how things actually work . . . they don't always work the way you think they work.

JC: Now, you and Lol would eventually split up and go your separate paths.

KG: In total, I think we've worked together for about 27 years. For the majority of that time, it was absolutely brilliant. But I think it got to a point where we knew what each of us was thinking. And we knew where things would go when we started it. That element of surprise was withering a little bit. I'd been asked to do a number of projects on my own. In 1985, I was asked to film the Fashion Aid—the UK fashion industry's version of Live Aid—at the Royal Albert Hall because I mixed in fashion circles in those days.

That wasn't something that Lol was remotely interested in, so I got to do that on my own. And I enjoyed it. It was the first thing I'd done on my own. And, subsequently, I joined or helped found along with Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, my wife and numerous other people very early an environmental pressure group called Ark. In 1988, I made a short film for them starring Dawn French called Mother Earth. [To watch the film, click here.] It was on my own again, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of not having to answer to anybody.

I think that those two experiences probably more than anything else contributed to us breaking up. At the same time, we were due to do a movie. We were about to go into pre-production and it didn't happen. It was such a shame, and had it have happened, our story may have been different. But unfortunately, it didn't happen and that was a little bit of a blow. It made sense for us to part ways at that point, but it was tricky. I was so used to asking Lol, “What do you think about this?” I  had enough confidence to move forward from that point. And I think I've read a couple of times that Lol in interviews agrees, that it was probably the right thing to do at the time.

JC: I mean, along with the Mother Earth video and Fashion Aid, what have you done since on your own?

KG: Well, I did One World One Voice. Essentially, it was a musical chain letter. And every artist from around the world showed up to play with this idea. We started a piece of music in New York staying with a film crew, and we took up pieces of music around the world to different cities and had other people contribute to it. We filmed them doing so. You should check it out, it's interesting. [To watch the film One World One Voice, click here.]

I also filmed U2 live—I forgot what country it was—but it was for the Zoo TV tour. And I've done lots of music videos, including for U2, and many other artists. I've written a couple of screenplays, I would like to do direct, so I've been a busy boy.

JC: What encouraged you to decide this time to do your solo album Muscle Memory? How did that all come together?

KG: I just felt like making music again. What happened was a couple of people who I didn't know got in touch with me out of the blue and sent me two pieces of music, and said, "Would you be interested in turning this piece of music into a song? Write top line and write a melody and write some lyrics. "And I've never done that before. I tried it and it worked very well. I enjoyed doing it.

I'd only played drums, which isn't the ideal instrument to write songs to. And I missed the process of creating music. I figured that if I were to ask people to send me pieces of instrumental music online that they thought that could become songs, I would choose a bunch of them and turn them into songs, and share the copyright of that particular piece of work with the person assembling the music.

And that's the bottom line. I received probably about 296 pieces of music, which shocked me. I was expecting about maybe 20 or 50 or something. I had to go through every piece of music and try ideas out, which was difficult at first, but I eventually discovered an intuitive process again—what was going to work for me, and worked on the tracks I felt that I could contribute something interesting. It wasn't enormously different to sitting opposite someone with a guitar or keyboard or writing songs. It just meant that I didn't have to get up and make coffee every half hour. And I would put something down in GarageBand [a music studio software], mix it roughly, and then send it off to them while waiting for comments and take it from there. It reminded me of the first 10cc album, and I found my own voice through doing this. And there was all sorts of shit going on while doing this. I remember that terrible incident that took place in Charlottesville.

I was working on a track at the time, and I kept stopping and watching the TV. It really affected me, and that song became the track, “All Bones are White.” I don't know, I jumped into the mood of the time with the lyrical side of things. [To hear “All Bones are White,” click here.]

 

Muscle Memory album cover (2020)

 

JC: Well, one of the tracks on the album was “Song of Hate.” The song lyrics indicate hate all right, but the music accompanying it is upbeat.

KG: Yeah, I know, that is funny. If you think about it—and I always go back to this example—I know people who have played the Police's, “Every Breath You Take” at weddings because it sounds great. But when you analyze the words, it's about mistrust, it’s about surveillance, and it's quite fucking dark.

It just doesn't quite make sense. And you are right, “Song of Hate” has a sort of a Motown swing. I'm not into genres. I'm into mixing things up a little so that didn't bother me. And that was the one people asked me about. [To hear called “Song of Hate,” click here.] Another one was called “Five Minutes Alone.”

JC: Oh, yes, I know that track.

KG: What did the lyric mean to you? What does it say to you?

JC: I guess it says to me what someone could, given the limited amount of time I have, this is what I can do in this type of time. I mean, that's just my guess. But then again, I thought the lyrics “I’m Not In Love” were literal that the singer wasn’t really in love and of course, he really is.

KG: Yeah. I guess that's what most people say. But the inspiration for it was a horrible idea. I mean, a lot of the stuff on the album I was gazing into the future a bit, but not that far into the future. I have this despicable image in my mind of a consortium of global prison officers who have this site on the dark web where you could book time to spend five minutes alone with a prisoner of your choice. And in this case, the song was a prisoner who kidnapped and murdered somebody that the singer loves as a child. The singer is taking advantage of the opportunity for him and his friend of having five minutes alone to do what they will with this particular prisoner. It’s pretty a vile thought, and it's not that obvious in the lyrics. But now I've told you, listen to it again. It's funny . . . some people I know have a great deal of difficulty writing lyrics. And it's the part I like least about songwriting process. But I believe if you're going to use words, make them count. [To hear “Five Minutes Alone,” click here.]

JC: I understand you recently did a music video as well as the solo album.

KG: Have you heard of the English band the Charlatans?

JC: I've heard of them. I can't say I've listened to them, but I've heard the name.

KG: Okay, so I've worked with the Charlatans a while ago. I was approached by the singer Tim Burgess. Tim’s a very talented guy who asked if I'd do a video for this track he was about to release. I thought, “Yeah, it'd be fun to actually commit something to film again.” The song is called, “Here Comes the Weekend,” by Tim Burgess.

I had this idea about using projections—a digital laser projector—but using it in a different way. I wanted to film performance, but not everybody at the same time. What we just filmed onto a big, white background and then have the rest of the band perform live in front of it—that was essentially the idea. The finished thing would be a mixture of projected images, and live images, the thought being that you wouldn't always necessarily understand which was which.

It was a great shoot. Again, it was one of those situations where I had a good team of people. I had the tools that I needed, and I'd given myself the freedom to be able to try things that I had written down. In other words, if some idea came up on the day, I'd give it a shot. And everyone's great. Tim gave a me great performance stuff and understood inherently what I was trying to achieve.

I got some of the stuff I also edited it myself. I'm trying to become more adept for the technical side as opposed to just being the guy who sits in the chair bossing everybody about and I thoroughly enjoy it. It's exhausting, but I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. It was great fun. It turned out extremely well. It's very simple, but it's just got something about it.

Probably because Tim and his band were great in performance and they look great on camera, and we just captured something special with a very simple idea. No postproduction effects whatsoever. The outcome was lovely and it was a great day. You should check it out. {To watch “Here Comes the Weekend” video, click here.]

JC: There are talented people who have been at it long as you, but they’re tapped out creatively. But with your recent stuff—the album Muscle Memory and your recent music video—you are far from tapping out. It sounds like you have a lot still to say. Well, how do you feel about that?

KG: Yes, I would agree with you. I have a number of projects I’d love to get out there. Doing this is what drives me. It’s what gets me up in the morning. I don't rest on my laurels, if I've got any, I get a thrill. It's always been the same. I guess it's all about coming up with an idea. And it's selfish in a way—it's an idea that I want to see exist or hear exist.

If I feel strongly enough about it, I will go to the ends of the earth to make that happen. And if I can't, what tends to happen every now and again is that an opportunity will arise that will allow me to make it happen within a different context. And that happens quite a lot. But I get a thrill out of making something that I think is a good idea, but I'm also aware that I don't know exactly how it's going to turn out.

 And that little element of jeopardy is the thing that drives me. I want to see what this guy does with it. I mean, they make the best out of the idea, and 85 to 90 percent I’m usually on the money and it usually comes out pretty well. And I love it. It gets me up in the morning. What else am I going to do?

 

Kevin (2021)

 

 

A Very Candid Conversation with Holly Montgomery

Holly (year unknown)

Holly Montgomery’s musical career has gone on for three decades. In the nineties she moved to Los Angeles and sang and played bass for various cover bands, as well as bands as Big Planet and the Mustangs (an all-female country band), and she also had a solo career.  By the early 2000s, she put her music career on hold for eight years when she adopted three teenage orphans from Kazakhstan

During the time when Holly was on a hiatus,  she left LA and moved to the East Coast. Around 2009, she  started her musical career again with her own band, Holly, and also her solo career. Several of the albums include I’m Only Human (2009), Uncanny Valley (2011), and Leaving Eden (2016). The latter album was in the first-round ballot and up for consideration for a Grammy Award. While Holly was in LA celebrating at Grammy parties, she contacted the Mustangs [Now known as the Mustangs of the West] and met up with guitarist, Sherry Barnett. From that meeting emerged the reformation of the Mustangs. The Mustangs got a record deal with Blue Élan Records in which they release an album called Time(2020). They also got a tour deal including a ticket on the South by Southwest Music festival, but COVID put a halt to their tour plans. 

During COVID, Kirk Pasich, the head of Blue Élan Records, was so impressed with Holly’s solo stuff and  encouraged her to work on her solo career. She recorded Sorry for Nothing (2022) during the COVID pandemic. Sorry for Nothing was produced by her guitarist Buddy Speir and Grammy-nominated producer Dave Darling. It was released on May 6, 2022. Holly plans to tour behind it, as well as continue playing with the Mustangs.

In this candid conversation, we go through Holly’s life, whether it was starting out in LA, becoming a mother, and her recent career with the Mustangs and her solo stuff. Special thanks to Nichole Peters from Jensen Communications for setting up the interview, but most of all, I want to thank Holly for providing me the opportunity to tell her story.

Jeff Cramer: So what got you interested in music? 

Holly Montgomery: Oh, gosh. Well, both my parents were musicians, and I had a ton of brothers and sisters in the house growing up. And to us, music was just cool, you know? We listened to a lot of music. I played keyboards in a band in my teens with my brother, Bucky. It was a prog metal band. My other siblings loved music too. We all dreamed about being in a band and doing all of that kind of stuff. I just never [chuckling] got over it, you know?

JC: Okay. Now, from what I've read, your career goes back about three decades ago.

HM: Oh. You know . . . career is a tough word as a musician, [chuckling]. Well, do you mean when I got paid for it, or when I actually started doing it in front of people? I guess that would be the band I was in with my brother, Bucky, when I was 14. I played trombone in the school band, and all my friends were into jazz. And then I played classical music in concert band in high school and college, and somewhere along the line I had my epiphany about playing bass. And I started playing bass, and that was it.

JC: Was this what you were doing in the ’90s? ’Cause I read that your career started three decades ago.

HM: No. In the ’90s, I moved to LA. At first, I went to Musicians Institute. I worked for Mike Tobias at Tobias Guitars, and I was just trying to figure out how to not be homeless and play music. And I started playing around, you know? I played with Suzanne Morrisette, a drummer who I'm actually playing with now, again, in a different band. We played in a lot of cover bands—we did five nights a week for a couple of years just to make some money playing music. Then Suzanne and I got in a band called Big Planet with Bill White Acre, and that was a great band. I mean, we made an album that the world never heard, and they really should have because it was a really great album. That was in ’92, I think. When Big Planet disbanded, I started doing a duo with Dan Bern, and so he was a huge influence on me as a songwriter. So I did that for a year or two, until it was like, "Eh, you know what? I'm a bass player. I'm a rocker chick, and I wanna play rock." So I spent basically the rest of the 90s and into the early 2000s trying to make that work.

 

Holly (year unknown)

JC: Now, I understand that you put your music career on hold to become a mom of three teenage orphans?

HM: I did, yeah.

JC: Could you discuss what happened there?

HM: When I started doing my band in the mid-nineties, it was just dealing with the music industry, and I heard, "You're too fat,” or, “You're too rock,” or “You're not rock enough" . . . whatever it was. It was just the constant barrage of negativity and people not doing what they say they're gonna do. A million people have written a million songs about having to deal with that [laughter]. And there was a certain point at which I wanted to have a real life. I didn’t want to be doing this so long that I woke up one day and say, " Wow, I never bothered to have a normal human existence." I never wanted to play music to replace real life—I kind of fell into it. I know that seems naïve to say, but I wanted to do something useful in the world, so I started volunteering for an organization called Kidsave International.

Kidsave might still be the only— I don't know—but at the time it was really the only nonprofit that was dedicated to finding older children to give them some sort of permanence in their life. You know, there's lots of adoption agencies for babies, and Kidsave wasn't an adoption agency; they're an advocacy organization. But really, nobody was advocating for older kids, and I just thought that was an incredible focus, so I started volunteering for them.

I hosted kids a couple of times and tried to help them find permanent families. And then one day, out of the pages of a binder that had a bunch of possible kids for a program, I saw a picture of my son, Ari, and I was like, "Oh, wow. Who is that kid? That's an intense look on his face." I got him into the program, and that's kind of the way I met him. I couldn't live without him, and then that changed the course of my life for the infinite better.

JC: So how long did you put your music career on hold?

HM: For about eight or nine years, I didn't do anything. I moved to the East Coast. Basically, it was kind of starting from scratch, which I still feel like I'm doing. I’m living there with the LA scars and  I was nine years older than when they told me I was too old for this. So, I just kind of started playing around town, and I came to find out that this area around DC has a pretty solid working musician culture.

I mean, it's not perfect, but I don't really know that many places like it other than a few oddball places, you know? You get paid for your gig. You don't always get paid enough, but it's not like LA or Nashville or New York, where people will get paid nothing. I got the meaning out of my life, and what's real in life. Now I'm doing it just for the love of music, so I don't care about the other stuff that much anymore.

So, I just started playing. The gigs I do range from the ridiculous to the sublime. I mean, one night I will be sitting in the back of a wine bar with nobody paying any attention to me at all, singing my songs. And the next day, I'll be in front of a thousand people at a venue. That's kind of fun sometimes.

At a certain point, I was like, "Oh, I wanna make a record!" And I made my Uncanny Valley record. I was just trying to put together a band to work around town, and I kept going through band members. So I finally settled on a great group of guys, and when I started playing with them, I got inspired to keep writing. That's kind of how I ended up where I am.

JC: I also understand you were in another band, the Mustangs of the West? Could you tell me a little bit about that?

HM: Sure. I was in the Mustangs in the '90s, kind of simultaneously with Big Planet and Dan Bern. So about that same time, I was doing shows with the Mustangs. The Mustangs were an all-female country band, and I didn't know anything about country music; I still kind of don't. I just have never listened to it at length. I'm not saying that I don't hear some country song and not like it, but it's not where my interests naturally go. But I really loved the songwriter in that band, Suzanna Spring, and they were fun to hang around with.

So we had a few years of doing some stuff and doing some touring. We got a publishing deal in Nashville. You know, people's lives change, and so the band disbanded. I mean, it was just one of those unbelievable things that you can't believe actually happened.

But in 2016, I put out an album called Leaving Eden. And I still never figured out quite how this happened or how it works, but it got onto the first-round ballot for a Grammy. And I was like, "What?" I didn't even know what it was. I mean, I've since learned what it means and what it doesn't mean, to be on the first-round ballot. I didn't know at the time because I wasn't a member of the Academy—and I’m still not—so I didn't nominate myself.

I was like, "You know what? There's very little chance that anybody's gonna listen to anything else from me, but I'm gonna go to LA and go to some Grammy parties, so what the heck." So I called up Sherry Barnett, the lead guitarist in the Mustangs, and also a very world-famous concert photographer. I said, "Hey, this thing happened—I'm on the first-round ballot. I'm gonna make myself feel a lot more important than I actually am, and I'm gonna go to LA, and I'm gonna hit a Grammy party or two."

And she was like, "[gasp] Suzie's gonna be in town! We should do a Mustangs reunion!" And I said, "What? But I'm only gonna be there a few days. I'm gonna be really busy." And of course, almost the whole trip ended up being Mustangs. But what we got out of that was a new-formed band. We added a fiddle player, Aubrey Richmond—which was always something that the band would've loved. Aubrey's just so great. And then, to my delight, we got Suzanne Morrissette to play drums—you know, Suzanne and I played in so many bands in the ’90s together. Suzanne and I play really great together, and so I was like, "Yes, okay."

And we did this video and this album. Sherry, the famous photographer/guitarist, had already been shooting photos for Blue Élan. So she took the video and the song that we made that day  and basically pestered Kirk Pasich [the head of Blue Élan Records] [chuckling] to take us. In fact, when Kirk signed the Mustangs, he said, "I don't care how much you weigh or how old you are, but I do want you to make good music." I was like, "All right. I can work with this guy. Let's do it." And so that's kind of what happened and the band got back together.

             The Mustangs (2020) (Holly is second from right)

But the Mustangs took a major blow because of COVID. We spent more than two years getting the Mustangs record done, and all the promo in place, and touring. We had a show at the South by Southwest festival booked, with Soul Asylum. We were getting ready to do all this stuff. Our tour was supposed to start on March 21, 2020, but the week before, South by Southwest got canceled, and everything got canceled. It's tough for the Mustangs because I live on the East Coast. LA is nowhere to live unless you have a lot of money. I'm able to do what I do because I can live below my means. The Mustangs just did an album in January of this year [2022], so we're hoping for a late ’22 release for that. [To hear the recent Mustangs’ single, “Crooked Road,” click here.]

JC: How did your new solo album, Sorry for Nothing come about?

HM: I started recording that album in 2017. I had gotten a couple of tracks into it, trying to figure out, "Okay, what is this album gonna be about?" and then all the stuff with the Mustangs happened. So me being able to stay concentrated on my album really kind of slowed down when I was trying to get the Mustangs record done and all of that. What I do as a writer and as a singer is very different than the Mustangs, but that's fine ’cause I'm the bass player of the Mustangs. So Kirk Pasich of Blue Élan told me, "You know, you should send down some of the stuff you're doing, and we'll see if we can at least license it."

I'm like, "Heck, yeah. That'd be great." So I sent it over to him, and he was like, "This is not for licensing. This is for an artist deal." And I was like, "What? What? Are you insane? Really?" Right before COVID happened, he told me "I wanna sign you to an artist deal. Let's do it." And then COVID happened, so it took forever to get the artist deal happening. But with COVID, we had the time now, and during COVID, we were able to do the record.

Now, the thing is, over the years of working with my own band that I'm in now, the guitarist in my band, Buddy Speir, is so fantastic. I had already self-produced the first two cuts for a record, but the truth is he's just so good, and he has such a unique stamp that he puts on everything he does. I was like, "You know what? You need to produce the rest of this record." And so finally I talked him into doing that, and he did a fantastic job.

We were able to do the rest of the record over the first year of COVID. And in that time, which I find to be amazing and awesome, and I'll never forget it, Kirk had passed on some of my music to Dave Darling. I don't know if you know who he is, but he's like— 

JC: I understand he produced six Grammy-nominated records.

HM: Yeah, he's a producer in how own right, and a great guitarist. He was in Boxing Ghandis in the ’90s, and he's producing a lot of really great people these days. He listened to this stuff and just became an über fan of what we were doing. He was like, "You gotta finish this record. Send me the stuff and let's do it." And so I would send the song, and he really helped us to focus on a direction for the album. Because as an indie person, who doesn't have to care about whatever her label thinks, if I wanna do one song that's like soft and pretty and then the next song is kick-you-in-the-teeth rock, it's my business. But Dave was like, "Well, if you want your next record to go further, let's keep it focused.” [laughter]. And of course, he was right about everything. So once we figured out the direction for the album, we said, “Okay, this is the formula that works. Some days after finishing, we were listening to what we did, we were just like, “Wow. This stuff is really good.”

                                              

Sorry for Nothing album cover(2022)

                      

JC: The first one I want to talk about is the single “All for Nothing.”  What was the idea behind that?

HM: I was going through a really, really rough patch. So, I actually really felt that way when I wrote the song. I mean, it was like I just could not find any light in that day at all. And at the same, my friend, Dan Chadburn, who is this incredible classical/new age piano player, and he does this incredible thing. He’s an improvisational composer, so you can tell him B-flat minor with a waltz feel, and he'll sit and concentrate for about 30 seconds, and then play ten minutes of music.I've always been so impressed by that. I was like, "You know what? I feel like such utter crap today that I'm gonna sit here, and I'm gonna be like Dan Chadburn, and I'm going to write the first thing that comes into my head, and I'm gonna take my time about it, and I'm not gonna beat myself up." And I wrote that song in one take. I didn't change one single word or anything. That's it. I finished it and was like, "Okay, well, I don't know that anybody's gonna wanna hear this song, but it sure does feel good to have written it.” It just so happened that in the writing of that song, for me personally, I felt like I completely and perfectly captured the feeling of that moment, which was, "I'm fighting off some despair right now." And then I wrote the song; I felt better.

The title "All for Nothing" is a euphemism for depression and despair. If you ever have struggled with any of that kind of thing, or even if it’s situationally depressed, which I certainly was at that time. I was just feeling like I put the vast majority of money and time and love and my life into things that not only haven't paid off, but are actively not good for me. And here I am, at my age, going, "Wow, okay. What has my life even been worth?" You know?

I mean, that's what you feel like in those moments. It's not something that I sit around and feel all the time, but I certainly feel it sometimes. I mean, I think every musician does because you can't live a life where what you do is perpetually undervalued. Even if you're not so great a musician, you're still undervalued [laughter]. And that's just the way that the world works in these days of instant downloading. So yeah, that's really what it was. Trying to scrape together that last bit of defiance that you feel before you just give in to giving up.

That's what the song was, actually. I haven't put it that way before, but that's what it was. It was like the person in the song, that's their one last little attempt to hang onto any shred of something. "Okay, I'm not gonna just utterly give in and disappear," you know? That's what it was about. [To hear a live version of “All for Nothing,” click here.]

JC: There's another song, "Looking for Lancelot." Excalibur is one of my favorite films, and so I certainly know the whole story of King Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere.

HM: Well, you know what? Okay, great. When the single got posted last month, a guy or two said to me, "Oh, I'd be your Lancelot." And I'm like, "Oh, dude. You don't know the story, then. You don't wanna be anybody's Lancelot. That's not the way that the story goes.”

JC: I certainly know how that story goes.

HM: With “Looking for Lancelot,” I had joined a songwriters’ group, and the guy who moderated the group made some comment about Daddy issues being "in" with female songwriters. At first, I was like, "Eh, dude, whatever." And then I'm thinking to myself, "Right, I've got Daddy issues. I'll write a dang song about Daddy issues. You want that? I got that."

I mean, my father died when I was seven, so there's always this thing hanging over my life of what would it have been like if he had stayed alive, and would I have felt more secure in the world, and would I have had better luck in relationships? There's a lot of things like that you just have to ask yourself. So it was a combination of that guy saying that, and a lot of women I know who have those kind of issues, like, “Dad yelled at me too much,” or, "Dad left us when he was young," or, "Dad was an alcoholic," or whatever it is that people individually have had to deal with in their life when they have a difficult relationship with their fathers. So I just kind of drew on my own experience and the experience of other people I knew who had those same kind of issues.

And I'm a huge history and literature nerd. I love all that stuff. I will travel thousands of miles. In October 2019, I went to England just because I wanted to put my index finger on Hadrian's Wall. And I did that. So, you know, I mean, I'll do anything. So I know all the various Arthur and Lancelot stories, from the medieval to the Saxon one. I mean, I know all of the differences. But, you know, the whole mythology around Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot, and the downfall of the woman because she went with her passion instead of her duty. I think they're really great fodder for songs. [To hear a live version of “Looking for Lancelot,” click here.]

HM: One of your songs "For My Son”—was that one autobiographical? Was it about one of the three kids you adopted?

HM: Toward the end of my son Ari’s bachelor's degree, he was just kind of going through a hard time. He was just trying to figure out, "Wow, when I get out, how am I gonna pay my student loans?" All of that kind of stuff. Just regular hard-times stuff. And I just remember sitting and thinking. You know, you get so helpless when you wanna help, especially when you're a parent, and especially a single mother.

There's only so many things you can say that are gonna get listened to. Your kid knows that you love them more than anything, so when you tell them it's gonna be all right, they think that you're just saying that. You know what I mean? So there's all kinds of things like that—that as a parent, you feel impotent to be able to effect any sort of comfort, or change, or hope, or anything. And so it was just basically in that moment of going, "Okay, right now, I'd like to say some stuff to him.But he's not gonna be able to hear it right now, and so that would not be useful, so I just won't. I'll just write the song." So that's what I did. [To hear a live version of “For My Son,” click here.]

JC: It’s a bit jarring that the next song that follows “For My Son” is "Cunning Woman.”  "For My Son" sounds very uplifting but "Cunning Woman" sounds like it's telling a hard tale.

HM: Yeah. "Cunning Woman" came to me almost all at once, the whole idea for that song. So "Cunning Woman” is another archetype song. It's like the archetype of a woman/female/girl growing up and not fitting into the culture or family that you're raised in, and trying to figure out the world when you don't feel like you have a place in society where you are inextricably intertwined.

What do you do, as a woman, to go out into the world and find your power when you're not gonna be able to get it at home? This is something that I've thought a lot about in my life. And one obvious thing that women tend to do when they feel like that is the  use of their sexuality, which can take on many different looks. So this is just a song about somebody who figured out young that their body is their vehicle, and that they can do what the hell they want with it, and they can think what the hell that they want.

Do you know that term, ‘cunning woman’?

JC: No.

HM: So historically, cunning women were what they called the local witch. Those were the women who got blamed for being witches, or the ones who had special powers that everybody was afraid of because they spoke their mind and they didn't conform. So I mean, that's kind of what the song is about. About being an atypical female growing up in a place where you don't feel like you fit in at all.[To hear “Cunning Woman,” click here.]

JC: Any touring plans for Sorry for Nothing?

HM: Yeah, I'm working on the touring part of it now, trying to get a few things in place. I'm gonna go on and play as much as I can. I'm pushing as I have the energy to do, to solidify a couple of tour options that I have, just to be able to tour and see what people think. I mean, I have to give it to Kirk Pasich, you know, having the balls to find women who are, again, not your typical 23-year-old blonde, thin female. He's willing to do it.

So, yeah. I mean, I wanna tour. I wanna get out there; I wanna play it. And we have a lot of radio promo that's ramping up and getting into place. And I've got a bunch of radio interviews coming up while trying to figure out, "Okay, how can we make the music business work where the artist also gets paid along with everybody else?"

Holly on tour (2018)

JC: So what would you say that this whole journey you've taken—from playing in bands, becoming a mom, and now having two careers: your solo and the Mustangs—what would be your own reflection on all that's come? 

HM: I guess I would probably say that one of the blessings of bowing out of the music industry before I felt sullied by it was that I had an epiphany. Nobody is responsible for creating my adventures in my life. I can create my own adventures. I can record my own albums. Yes, they're probably not as polished as if there was more money behind it. But that doesn't mean that I can't live my own adventure.

So my words are that even though artists, musicians, photographers, visual artists, whatever, are grossly undervalued in terms of livelihoods, I still feel like the world needs it more than almost anything. I tell people all the time, "Even if you don't wanna play music professionally, just do it because the world is the better for it." Do it. It's the essence of everything that's human. We wanna make the world the best of what humanity is. It's like, in all the sci-fi movies, whenever we're trying to convince the aliens why they shouldn't wipe out humans, the warring human species, you know? Because there's this greatness in the art world of music and musicians that makes the world a better place. And so I hope that in my very small way I've contributed to that worldview. That's it.