The rhythm section was part of a fuck-fusion group from Bakersfield, California [Mother Funk Conspiracy]. The keyboardist, bassist and drummer were good friends with the violinist who started working with the guitarist/co-producer [Jesse Siebenberg] and I. There's a lot of progeny in the band. The guitarist's father was the drummer in Supertramp [Bob Siebenberg], and his uncle is Scott Gorham of Thin Lizzy; the violinist's uncle was the bassist in Oingo Boingo and all these kinds of associations. There is a whole click of us that very randomly started hanging out together.
We released a bunch of other small EP's under different band names in previous years, then released my record and then all went our separate ways immediately after. Now everybody is working for somebody else. We've come back together, in limited capacity, to work out material for this Jive Record deal that I'm working on now.
That's right, the grand prize for winning MTV's Rock the Cradle was a record deal. Are they going to be your band on the new album?
They may or may not be the same backing band for this next record. Some of them are more successful than I am, and I can't even afford them. Which is no bad-blood whatsoever, it's a huge pat on the back, I'm thrilled for them. But the core of the band, which is Jesse Siebenberg and I, the violinist Paul Cartwright and the keyboardist Dennis Hamm, are working on some stuff to turn into the label.
Tell me more about your current album We All Go Home.
We All Go Home is a collection of my earlier material. It's a few songs that were co-written with the band, in a writing session right before the first track of the album got recorded. The majority of it is original material that I've had for some time. Basically the whole concept for We All Go Home was... when we were making the record we were into a few different things, stylisticly, not one specific thing. We wanted to try and incorporate all those different things into what we were doing. It's sort of like the iPod being on shuffle, we never felt like we had to stick to any one thing all the time. So it shuffles around from rap to rock to funk to jazz, there are some R&B-ish moments, all under this singer-songwriter umbrella, and we tie it altogether with strong instrumentalists. I wanted to create a synergy that could carry on and expand into a live context. That was kind of the goal of the record.
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