On The Record: John Oates on guitars, GarageBand and Daryl Hall

John Oates, a musician, discusses his new single "Too Late to Break Your Fall" and the inspiration behind it. He talks about his preference for chord playing over using tabs and his use of Ultimate Guitar for reference. He also discusses the musicians involved in the recording of the song, including guitar players Nia and Shane Terrio. Oates mentions his 58 Strat guitar and his new James Troussard guitar, which he believes could be a replacement for the Strat. He shares his songwriting process, starting with the guitar and using GarageBand to create demos. He discusses the benefits of bringing his demos to the studio and the use of stock plugins. Oates reflects on the release of singles and the possibility of releasing a physical album in the future. Hello, everybody. My name is Justin Beckner. I'm here from UltimateGuitar.com, and I'm here with the great John Oates. John, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks, man. Nice to meet you. First of all, are you familiar with Ultimate Guitar? Do you use tabs at all? I'm not a tab guy. I'm a real chord guy, but no, no. I frequently or infrequently check it out because every once in a while I'm looking for changes and things like that, making sure I'm playing the right stuff. It's a good resource, for sure. We wanted to talk to you about the new single Too Late to Break Your Fall. I got a chance to check it out. What a great song. It's got a little bit of old school swing. It's kind of, yeah, I don't know where the heck I came up with this. I know the meaning behind the song. I know where the lyrics and the idea for the message came from, which came from working with someone who I will remain nameless. I think we all know people who kind of sometimes can't get out of their own way. They ask for advice, but they really aren't listening. It was kind of one of those moments. I just thought, every time I try to help, it doesn't seem to work. They kept coming back and asking me for advice and help. I'm thinking, why are you asking me for help if you really don't want it? That's the gist of the song. Musically, the music sounds great. The guitar specifically sounds fantastic. Did you record the guitars on this? Well, there's two guitar players on this. This is Nia and Shane Terrio. I don't know if you know Shane, but Shane's a monster. I'm playing, actually, I'm playing this guitar right here, which is badass, I have to say. It's a 66 ES-125 with a P90. This is the guitar I'm playing on that track. It was like, you know. It sounds a little better when it's plugged in, but that's the gist of the song. I was actually finger-picking on this one. I played it finger-styling. That was the vibe on this song. Yeah, I had a great band. I mean, that band is, the band on that track is Greg Morrow on drums, he's one of my favorite Nashville drummers. Steve Mackey on bass, he plays with me live. Shane Terrio played electric. I can't remember who played keyboards on that one. But a guy named, a great saxophone player who, here again in Nashville, I use as a gym rock, played saxophone. Yeah, and it's just, that song is funny. I recorded that song 12 years ago, maybe. And I did it kind of acoustically. I did it with like an acoustic, almost like a delta blues swing. And it was pretty good. But then I just thought I'd revisit it. And the song sounded like it needed to be a little more sophisticated. So I went with a full rhythm section, electric guitar, you know, all that sort of thing. That's a bit of a departure in the, tonally, from your 58 Strat that I know is a guitar that you've used in the past, in recording. Well, my 58 Strat is my go-to electric guitar. You know, I've been playing that guitar since 1974, or 73. And yeah, it's an amazing guitar. And I kind of try to retire it from touring. And I keep bringing it back. I can't replace it. But I actually just got a new guitar. So I'm going to guitar nerd out a little bit. And this is the guitar I'm playing now. And it is really amazing. This is a James Troussard. I don't know if you know him. He makes the Steelcaster and a bunch of those ones. This is a chambered Tele. So it's hollowed out, it's chambered. This is metal. You know, he's metal, metal thing that he likes. It's got one of his custom humbuckers, two Tele pickups. And it's a really cool guitar. And one of the reasons I gravitated to it, I just got it just recently, is because the 58 Strat that you mentioned is technically chambered. And the reason I say that is because over the years, the pickguard was removed when originally when the Strat pickup setup was taken out and replaced with humbuckers. The guy who did it routed it out on the inside with a Dremel. And he literally just tore it apart. And so there's a giant hole under here. I'm talking about the 58 Strat. And so in a sense, it's part of the reason that 58 Strat sounds the way it does. And so when I was talking to James, and he told me about a chambered Strat, I went, Whoa, wait a minute. It's kind of like what I like, because of, you know, and believe it or not, this thing really, it kind of sounds like the 58 Strat. It's got a much better whammy bar, which stays in tune. But anyway, so that so I recently got that guitar just because I thought, well, you know what, that's, it might be a replacement for that 58 Strat. And I think it is. It's pretty cool. I haven't played it live yet. How often does a song start with a guitar? Is that where songwriting starts for you? Or is it a melody? Is it piano? Where do you gravitate towards when you're starting that songwriting process? I mean, I definitely gravitate. I mean, it's always guitar first. I can, I'm a rudimentary keyboard player. Yeah, you know, they do two different things. You know, if I play something on a keyboard, rhythmically, I'm definitely in a different world. Whereas the guitar, I tend to be more percussive and more rhythmic on the guitar because, and it has to do with my ability to play really, because I'm just not a very good keyboard player. But no, you know, it could be a lyric. It could be an emotional feeling. It could be a title. It could be, it could be a chord progression. It could be a drum groove. You know, it could be almost anything. I record on GarageBand. I'm a GarageBand guy. I love GarageBand. You know, a lot of people bust on me about it, but it is, it's the quickest way to a song. That's what I call it. I'm very, very good at it. I've been, I've been on GarageBand since it ever, since it was invented, since Mack offered it. And I've actually been involved in some, some improvements and some technical tweaks on GarageBand as well. And sometimes I'll pull up a sample out of GarageBand, you know, it's just some, some standard thing that might be a drum groove or a beat, you know, and a lot of times the song doesn't end up with that same sample or that same beat, but it was a place to get started. You know, it was like a kick in the ass to kind of get the song going. And the other thing I found that's really good with my songwriting is like when I, when I flesh out a song and I've written something, I flesh it out at home on a home demo on GarageBand. When I take it into the studio, because I love live players and I love to play with live players in the studio. But I take it in, I take that, that home demo in and all of a sudden, you know, already, you know, the guys I'm working with, rather than me trying to explain things to them, I just say, here, look, this is what I did. This is kind of the vibe I'm looking for. And then, then we, then we make it real and we make it live and we, we get the input of the real players. But, but there's already, you know, instead of starting way down here, we're starting up here in terms of the development of the arrangement, the song, the vibe, you know, the style. So it really saves a lot of time. And I'm not a slave to it. You know, I don't say, oh, it's got to sound like the demo. You know, that's the, that's the worst thing you can do. You know, when you get, you know, demo loves, you know, when you fall in love with your demo and you can't beat it. So I try not to, to, to get, to take it that far. But, but some of the songs that I've not, not on, on this most recent one, because that was totally live. I just played it. I played the guitar for the guys and said, here's, this is, let's go. But on some of the other ones, I don't know if you heard the earlier ones like Disconnected and Pushing a Rock. There's a lot of my GarageBand tracks on those songs. My original GarageBand tracks, because it was during the pandemic that I wrote those. And because I had a lot of time on my hands, I just, I just kept recording and I did a more refined, complicated recording on those songs. So when I brought those into the studio, we, we transferred a lot of my original GarageBand stems to O2. And there's a lot of original demo tracks on those songs. That's awesome to hear. I love it because I use it as well. I would imagine you're using the stock plugins. Yeah, I am. I don't, I, I've downloaded a few plugins, but not many. I went to Logic, you know, and I thought, oh yeah, it's like, you know, GarageBand is like Logic Lite. And I went to Logic and I said, why? I said, why do I need all this stuff? I don't need it. I mean, I'm a shitty engineer. So why bother? And you've been releasing these singles about once a month. Do you feel that's kind of the way forward for the industry these days with streaming, how it is? Yeah. I mean, I'm catching up, you know, I'm old school catching up kind of guy. It was, it's, it's really, it was an experiment for me. I've never, this is the first time I've ever done a recording that had no physical components. So I thought, you know, let me try it and see what happens. Because, you know, in general, I mean, I have an older audience, I think, at least the Hall & Oates fans, the hardcore Hall & Oates fans are, by and large, an older audience. There's plenty of young ones, right? But I wasn't sure whether they're going to, you know, want to stream and want to download, you know, and, and there's been a little bit of pushback from some of the older, older fans who said, you know, how come you're not putting on a CD or how come you're not putting out vinyl or whatever? So yeah, a little bit of that, but by and large, people have been liking it. And so it was a good way for me to get my toes in the water of the new reality. But now that I've done it, and I have, I still have a backlog of songs that I haven't released. I've got some songs from the soundtrack for a movie that just came out. And I was trying to figure out what to do. So I think this fall, what I may do is put out an album, a physical album, maybe it might be vinyl or CD, whatever it might be. It'll be digital as well, of course, but, and I think what I'll do is I'll put out all the songs that I released digitally, these initial five or six, whatever it was, plus all the backlog of songs. And, you know, probably a double album, because there's a lot of material. But I'll do that in the fall, I think. What else do you have on the docket for 2023? Is this going to kind of continue releasing singles up to the release of that double album? Do you have some other projects in the works? I think I'm going to stop after this one for a little bit, because I've got tons of live shows. Starting in July, I'm super busy. I'm going to go out on the road. First thing I'm doing, July 14th, I'm playing a festival with kind of the Good Road Band. The Good Road Band is all my guys from Nashville, a few different guys that I'm plugging and playing. But I haven't played a band show in a long, long time. I've been doing acoustic singer-songwriter type shows with Guthrie Trapp on a second guitar and or a percussionist. I did Europe last year with Beth Hart, with just me and a percussionist. And I really enjoyed that because it was very freeing. I could do pretty much whatever I wanted with a great percussionist. So I'm doing that here in the States. A couple shows with Guthrie, we're doing the Newport Folk Festival in late July with Guthrie, and then doing a bunch of shows without him with the percussionist. And he's a guy I've been playing with for over 20 years. So that's fun because I just get to play different stuff. And as I said, with a great percussionist, you can really just play anything you want, and you don't have to worry about people knowing the changes and everything like that, take requests. So it was much more kind of a loosey-goosey, freewheeling kind of type show where I tell a lot of stories and things like that. So I'll be doing that through July into August, into September. And yeah, there's a lot of shows. I'm all over the place. So if you go on the website, you'll see where the tour is. Is there a song in your career that you're most proud of writing? Yeah. I mean, I'll always go back to the very beginning. She's Gone is probably the benchmark song for Daryl and I, because for a number of reasons. One, it was the first one that really made a mark in the world that people listened to. It put us on the map, so to speak. And it's one of those songs that just has a timeless quality. And it has to do, you know, I like to think of that song as the perfect storm. First of all, we wrote a really good song. But then when we got in the studio, we were working with Arif Martin, one of the greatest producers of all time. And he surrounded us with some of the greatest studio musicians in New York at that moment, in 1973. And, you know, Bernard Purdy on drums. I mean, just, you know, just the cream of the crop. And so with the core of a good song, and then these amazing musicians, and then with Arif's production sensibilities, and his amazing string arrangement that he wrote, it was really just, everything was perfect. It's just one of those moments where it all just went like this. I'm really proud of, especially Pushing a Rock and Disconnected. Those two songs really, they came together during the pandemic when I wasn't sure what was going to happen. And it was a, they were a labor of love, where I felt like I really could, I could step back from like traveling, I could step back from a lot of things that were swirling around, and just focus on those songs and making them as good as I could. I think Disconnected is really the, you know, to me, is the ultimate expression of the pandemic. Because, you know, it's a simple title, obviously. But in that one word, it seems to sum up everything that I was feeling. And from what I understand from other people, they agree. You know, we were all disconnected spiritually, physically, emotionally, psychologically, you know. So it was just one of those things where that word popped out, and I thought, okay, it seems almost too good to be true, too simple to be perfect, but it was perfect. And I mean, you've navigated a lot of perils through the history of music and over several decades being in the music industry. A lot of our readers or listeners are aspiring musicians. Do you have some advice to those budding musicians on navigating the business end of the music business? Yeah. As a famous actor once said, get a good lawyer. I say that tongue-in-cheek, but I actually say it in truth. It actually does help. Well, you know, one thing I will say is that the younger generation, the newer generation of musicians is certainly a lot more savvy on the pitfalls and the ins and outs of how the music business works, which is great. I, on the other hand, made huge mistakes by just not paying enough attention to the business side of things and trusting that certain people would take care of that for me on my behalf, allowing people to run your business without any checks and balances. It can be a very dangerous thing. I think the thing to do is, as a young musician, when it comes to business, be as knowledgeable as you can, especially in the field of publishing, which is a very, very complex and Byzantine thing. I'd say just be as knowledgeable. The kids are coming out of places like Belmont and Juilliard, not Juilliard so much, but of course, Juilliard, you know, up in Boston, Berkeley, you know, they take courses in the business side, which is fantastic. So they come out with a much more comprehensive knowledge of what they're getting into. It doesn't mean you can't take advantage of it, because you will. You have to almost accept that. At this stage of your career, how do you define success as a musician, and is it the same way that you defined success earlier on in your career? I think, I don't know, I think the needle or the bar of success moves. It's always different. When you're first starting out, and I'll just speak for myself, I was first starting out, you know, the holy grail of success was an album deal back in the early days. If you got an album deal with a major record label, which was the only record labels there were, you know, if they signed you, that meant it was kind of a stamp of approval that you had, you know, made it to some extent. So that was the first, you know, bar. Then, you know, of course, the bar keeps moving, you know, then are you going to have a hit, you know? Are you going to have your first hit? Are you going to have your second hit? Are you going to be able to stay in the music business? Are you going to keep your contract? Are you going to fold, you know? So the bar just constantly moves, you know? And then on the side of, you know, on the live performance side, you know, you're always setting the bar, you know? Getting a band together, playing better, learning your craft, playing your instruments better, singing better, writing a better song. And, you know, when you're playing live, where are you playing? Oh, you're going to play at the club. Which club are you playing? You're playing the hot club. Oh, yeah? I'm going to play that club. Now we're moving up to the theater. Oh, we're in the theater. Hey, how about Madison Square Garden? Hey, now we're headlining Live Aid, you know? So, I mean, the bar just keeps moving. Do you feel there's any mountains left for you to climb musically? Are there any goals that you hope to reach yet? Not really. I don't have any like ultimate goal. I've got to do this. I've got to do that. I've done so much. What I want to do is, my goal now is to stay healthy, because I'm old, you know? I mean, I'm up there. I want to stay healthy enough to be able to enjoy the future of my labor, so to speak. You know, I have some issues with my fingers now, which never happened before. I'm constantly stretching my fingers. They're getting stiff. So, you know, the little things like that are creeping up on me. And, you know, I can kind of see the horizon in a sense, but I don't want to accept it. So, I'm doing everything I can to keep it out there in the distance, you know? So, I mean, as you said, you're very focused on your solo work right now. You got big plans with that. Are there plans for another Hall & Oates record any time in the future? I doubt it. I mean, I've never said never to anything, but I doubt it. I think Daryl and I have moved beyond it. You know, I think we've, I really do. The future of Hall & Oates is in its past. We have a body of work that is so big and so deep. And it's never even been tapped, to be honest with you, because the hits overshadow, the big hits, which is great, believe me. I'm very appreciative of it. But those big hits overshadow the body of work that we've done. We have 300 songs. And the general, only the hardcore Hall & Oates fans know about it. But I think that one thing I'm very proud of in the Hall & Oates history is that we put as much time and care into every song on every album. The songs that became hits, they became hits after the fact. They weren't like, oh, this is Maneater. We're going to spend more time on Maneater because we know it's going to be a big record. So we'll just, you know, and the rest of them, we'll just knock them out. Far be it from the truth. We've never done that. I think that's something to be proud of. There's so much music in that history. Yeah, it's a 50-year history. I mean, that's kind of crazy when you think about it. So yeah, I mean, who knows, you know, documentary films, Broadway musicals. There's so many ways to take advantage of the great legacy of Hall & Oates that I personally am not interested in trying to do more. For the Ultimate Guitar community, a lot of our, you know, a lot of our readers are younger kids who maybe just bought their first guitar. For that kid who just bought his first guitar and is trying to write original songs, do you have any advice for them as far as songwriting or musicianship? Study the masters. Study the people you think are the people that you like. Figure out why you like them. What is it about their music that reaches you, that touches you? What is it about their music that inspires you to want to play? If you kind of analyze and break apart the music of the people you respect, you'll get an insight into who they are and how they think musically. And that insight, if you're creative, can be a stepping stone to unlock the creativity in yourself. That's really the key. You know, that's what I did. That's what so many people do. And I hear people doing it today. I hear people, you know, I hear modern pop, you know, using certain Hall & Oates type, you know, references. When I was, you know, when I was growing up, I wanted to sing and play like Curtis Mayfield and Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt. So I learned all their songs. I learned their songs note for note, tried to emulate them as best I could. And in doing so, now I use, now I have this frame of reference. I have a musical frame of reference that I can tap back into. And then I tweak it and turn it into something else. But in the back of my mind, a lot of times, I think I'm playing Curtis Mayfield. You know, that's what I hear in my head, but it doesn't come out like that. But it's, you know, I say that's the way to do it. Well, I thank you for that advice. And I thank you for all the music you put out in the world. I'm excited for the next crop of music that you're going to bring out into the world. All this stuff is really great. Thank you so much for putting it out. Well, I'm having a good time. So when you have a good time, and you're making records that usually translate, something about the vibe always translates to the speakers. Well, I'm gonna let you get back to recording, because we're anxious to hear what you're coming up with. All right. Well, it's boring right now, but it might be good later on.