I always thought of myself as a band guy. When I stopped playing in bands 30 years ago I moved toward recording and songwriting but always in an ensemble style. And because my albums always featured ensemble arrangements I didn’t see how I could perform them solo.
Over a 20-year span I fronted one band as the singer and was a member of two bands in which I shared lead vocals. I love nothing better than singing with other singers. Singing solo in front of a band was fine, but the idea of just my voice and guitar, well, I wasn’t so keen on that.
The notion of becoming a solo singer-songwriter didn’t occur to me when I released my most recent album, Roots and Branches, even as I was becoming one. The only time in my career that I was seriously, professionally, a solo singer-songwriter was exactly 50 years ago, in New Orleans. I left college, headed to NOLA and landed a near-daily gig at the Wrong Place Saloon on Rampart Street, a gig that initially began at 1 a.m. I rose up the ranks until I was headlining primetime on weekends.
I left New Orleans about a year later because a big gig went bad, really, really bad, in Florida. That’s a story for another time. I left for Montreal to go to McGill University and formed Harlequin with Joel Zifkin and that was the end of my solo career for 30 years. Twenty years ago I tried my had at it briefly in Minneapolis to promote my album, Vanishing Point, but it didn’t take. So I dropped it.
Fast forward to May 2019, three months after laying down the final guitar tracks for Roots and Branches, completing the instrumental “Travellin’.” On the opening weekend at my lake place in Northern Wisconsin, I slipped on a slippery slope of oak leaves that the winter snow had packed and polished to an ice-like finish, and did a reverse header while carrying an Adirondack chair over my head. I landed with my left index finger pinned between the chair and a smooth, round rock, inches from my head.
The impact shattered my finger. I took one look and knew it was toast.
Two surgeries later (the first inserted three screws at the mid-joint), in November of 2019, I started a grueling rehab, a process that more or less worked. By January 2020, I began to learn to play guitar again, almost from scratch. Those first weeks I was playing at about 10%. So when Covid arrived two months later, I had a ready-made project on my hands–to learn to play the damned guitar again.
To beat back boredom I began to flirt with a few of my songs and some trusted covers.
And that’s when a second revelation kicked in. My consulting practice tanked on day 1 of Covid. My wife Barri was working remotely, more than full-time. We had moved to the lake house, giving our daughter Lenne Klingaman and Mark Christine our place in Minneapolis. In this situation I could move through a day up to 6p.m. without saying a word to anybody.
Knowing that vocal ability is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition, I set up a daily practice regimen playing and singing the few songs I could manage on guitar. I started by singing about a half-hour a day, seven days a week.
Slowly, impossibly so, my guitar skills returned, in part, then substantially. Ironically, the folk-style first position C chord that is nearly every new player’s first chord is the one that is almost unusable in my hands, causing many first positions folk songs to exit my repertoire.
In 2021, I wrote my first solo-style song in many years, “Don’t Walk Away,” a simple tune that favored Nick Lowe’s recent solo work. And so it began.
My Voice Deserts Me
By March 2021, I had about 20 songs in my repertoire. Half were covers and half were back-catalogue originals. A number of that group of 20 ended up on the cutting room floor. Being somewhat Type A, I was still rehearsing 30 – 40 minutes a day, seven days a week. Then all of a sudden I lost the top three notes in my vocal range. (And I had already discovered that as opposed to my vocal peak at 39, I had already lost four whole-step notes.) So off the to the vocal cord doc I went. I was put on an extremely restricted diet (no caffeine, no citrus, no a-bunch-of-other stuff, no alcohol) and told not to sing for four months. During that time, I dutifully played through my repertoire on guitar alone, which is excruciatingly boring given that those guitar arrangements are designed to be accompaniments.
Mark Christine, my de facto vocal coach, guided my slow ramp-up to singing again. I had lost a lot of momentum, about eight months worth. It was a slog.
As I came back, I wrote a few more songs and reclaimed and reworked others from my albums and my unrecorded back catalogue. The tenor of the sets began to skew more original.
By 2022 I was full-swing back to rehearsing. I had enough material for a gig but made only half-hearted attempts at getting one. I wasn’t that confident that my act would work in the Northwoods, where audiences skew older and more conservative.
So in 2023, with my 70th birthday on the calendar in August, I decided I wanted to throw a mini-house concert to test the waters as a solo singer-songwriter. Mark and Lenne were in town and so were able to back me up on a couple of songs and while I overcame my nerves and enjoyed performing solo, my guests enjoyed it even more. It went so well Barri threw another house concert in September.
Just as encouraging, after my birthday I fell into the most prolific song-writing cycle of my life. Catalyzed by some finished lyrics I had on hand, the lyrics fell into their musical settings. Before I knew it, I had eight new songs in my set lists and there you have it–singer-songwriter, fait accompli.
Through the efforts of a couple of close friends I scored multiple gigs at Gather, a wine-bar kind of lounge with a knack for musical curation. To quote the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip it’s been. I do love it. I want to expand the perimeter and see where it leads.
That’s my pandemic transformation. I am fascinated by how the pandemic forcibly transformed our lives. I think we should cultivate and share those stories. We’re all rocked by the changes wrought by Covid. I think sharing stories helps us to appreciate how we got where we are today.