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FEBRUARY 2010 TAXI Road Rally 2009 Jeffrey Steele — Road Rally Keynote Interview Interviewed by Michael Laskow 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. http://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. Jeffrey Steele (left) being interviewed before a standing room only audience at the Road Rally. 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. 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 Continued on page 43

http://www.jeffreysteele.net/about/

Recording - February 2010

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