...from the Winkster
Notes About My "Sweet Spot" CD
Sweet Spot, indeed! This whole CD was more fun to make than eating a red velvet cupcake - well, almost. By the way, the Tootsie Pop I’m eating on the cover is only 60 calories! Who said there isn’t a God in this world?
The impetus for this record was to take the material I’d been singing live for the last year or so and to record it. Eli Brueggemann, Tim Emmons and Steve Barnes have just been a fantastic group to play with, so I wanted them to be part of the record, too - very organic and “family”. My assistant, Andrew Abaria, said the nicest thing while I was making the CD: “The musicians you have playing with you - not only play fantastically, but they really support you” - and I couldn’t agree with that more. It’s taken me a lot of years and experience to be of the consciousness to demand this from the people I work with - thank heaven I’m old and smart enough to finally know it.
Also, I had a great team in place for this CD. I had done a CD last year with Dolores Scozzesi, a wonderful "one of a kind" singer, called A Special Taste and it not only came out aces, it was also a pleasure to make! So, when I was thinking of doing this CD, I thought - why don’t I just keep the team in place and just move myself to the singer’s seat? I did - and it worked out great. So, a big thanks to Dolores for being so astute and strong in steering me to do my very best vocals at all times.
The Songs
LIKE YOUNG - I've always loved this song. I first heard it as an instrumental with Andre Previn on piano. Later, it was the theme song for that demented series with Hugh Hefner Playboy After Dark - where he’d stand around in his pajamas in this fake living room set - surrounded by “bunnies” while his friends dropped by. But what “friends” he had: Duke Ellington, Ella, Sammy...wow! And then later I heard this hip version by an Australian singer named Vince Jones. I’d actually recorded it once before with guitarist Anthony Wilson - but when Eli Brueggemann did this arrangement last year for my West Coast Cool show with Cheryl Bentyne, I fell in love with it all over again. I just love those faux beatnick lyrics by Paul Francis Webster - and the melody is perfect for my voice. It was actually the first tune we recorded for the new CD.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN - I wrote this song with the wonderful Eli Brueggemann (Eli arranged most of the new CD). It was originally an instrumental he gave me, and it sat around for about four months before I figured out what to do with it. I was traveling to Las Vegas to do a gig, and in the middle of the desert out popped “I ride a train, I fly a plane…” - Maybe Dino sent them from The Sands on high. Anyway, once I knew it was about this devil may care lover it was pretty easy to write. It has a distinctly 1964 vibe - very “Man From U.N.C.L.E.” - “Matt Helms”. I imagine myself singing the whole song to a young Ann Margret (was there anything better?) in Technicolor. Hey, just a note - I’m crazy about Bob Sheppard’s solo on this - totally bonkers! He is one of the precious few musicians who listens to lyrics - and then he takes off from there. This turned out to be one of my favorite songs on the disc.
BUT NOT FOR ME - I've always loved the melody to this song. I was about 9 years old when I first heard it, and I played it over and over - I was an obsessive kid. Then about 5 years ago I heard Georgie Fame do a version of the song (very similar to mine) and I loved the vocalise he composed to Chet Baker’s trumpet solo on the tune - and I decided to learn it. I love Steve Barnes on this - he can swing!
SWEET SPOT - From the minute I wrote this song with the Sultan of Swanktown, Geoffrey Leigh Tozer, I knew we had something special. I’ve written loads of tunes - but sometimes one just comes out a little prettier and smarter than the other kids - this is one of them. It was an act of divine intervention to get the fantastic Barbara Morrison to sing this with me. Woah, Baby - can she sing! I really had to up my game to compete. If I was a sports guy I’d throw in LeBron James and make a clever analogy - but all I can say is that it was a blast. Grant Geissman, my old friend, does a stellar funk job on this!
THIS SIDE OF LOVING - I’m proud of this one because I wrote the lyrics and the “music” - and all in about an hour. It just poured out of me. I was watching one of my favorite film noirs “Mildred Pierce” and Joan Crawford was just being questioned for the murder of her lover, when her ex-husband walks in. The detective expects her to make an ex-husband crack - but she looks at the dope, heaves those huge shoulders and says: “He was one of the good guys..Guess I was wrong…" What a wonderful “razor blade kind of thought” - that you make a choice in love and it’s the wrong choice - and every lonely night you pay the piper. Shout out to Billy Childs and the gang for the beautiful track . Recording it on a rainy night in March was one of my favorite experiences of the whole record.
SOMEWHERE IN BRAZIL - I’ve been writing this song for 30 years...as long as I’ve been singing live. It never fails to amaze me how when you’re singing a ballad live, the couple at the front table get into it, or the Piña Colada machine goes off…etc. But the direct testimony for the lyric came from the very talented Jazz singer Diane Hubka - who basically recounted this story to me before another singer’s gig. I took artistic license by making the singer in my song a whole lot less talented than Diane, but that made the song a whole lot funnier. Plus, you may notice I have two versions on the CD - well actually I’m up to about 5 versions - I have Las Vegas, San Francisco and London, too. It’s a real crowd pleaser live and I’m glad to finally commit it to record. I love Bob Sheppard’s zany flute flourishes - they’re a whole show in themselves.
AFTER HOURS- Well, this one stays in the club - the camera just pans from the “singer” to this poor schlub waiting for his girlfriend to show up. No luck, buddy! Love the Hammond B3 and the trombone solo by Bob McChesney. This is a fun one!
ON BROADWAY- When I was 10 years old I became obsessed (there I go again) with the Drifters. Wow, weren’t they great? And this was my favorite song of theirs - Ben E. King and a great string arrangement - I would play it more than any song I’ve ever had. So, I’ve always wanted to do it - and then one day I had a flash of inspiration: I’ll do it with a “Killer Joe” groove - and then I wrote a little vocalese. It’s neat. I love Nolan Shaheed’s trumpet on this - so happy and uplifting! He engineered, mixed, mastered and co-produced the whole record - and he's one beautiful human being!
JAZZ IS A SPECIAL TASTE - This is a song from my musical PLAY IT COOL which is set to open Off-Broadway (get the tie in with the previous track) in the fall. It’s a song where the lead character Mary, a Lesbian jazz singer who runs an underground gay jazz club in 1950s Los Angeles, teaches this young whippersnapper Will about jazz and reveals quite a bit about herself in the process. Thank you Eli for the poignant piano - and thank you Phil Swann for the lovely melody.
SOME OTHER SUNSET - This is a lyric of mine written to a lovely David Benoit melody (are there any other kind?). I’d originally done it on one of my early CDs in the 90s - and thought it always should have gotten more notice. So, I’ve decided to bring it back - a whole lot more acoustic and wistful…and I’ve ditched the mullet.
THEIR HEARTS WERE FULL OF SPRING - This is a lovely song by my fave, Bobby Troup, that I didn’t get around to on my CD “Mark Winkler sings Bobby Troup”. It’s a totally sublime song about love and the power of a lasting relationship. Doing this vocal was just a magical moment for me - it was another rainy day - and I kind of thought of these two people as “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” meet my partner for 30 years, Richard and me. Pass the handkerchiefs. Lovely playing by Anthony Wilson.
Mark Winkler - July 2011
Notes About My "Till I Get It Right" CD
I thought it would be fun to go on a bit about the songs on my new CD, so if you buy the CD and bring it on home, they just won't be some faceless tunes on another piece of shiny plastic. The truth is, every song has a story - as Rod Stewart or somebody with a mullet and some tight pants used to say. And definitely, because I write the lyrics for most of mine - every one of my songs has a tale to tell.
TILL I GET IT RIGHT
This one started out as a jazz instrumental by one of my long standing piano accompanists, the wonderful Stuart Elster. It was actually the title of his last CD-only he entitled it 'Get It Right". The minute I heard it in the front seat of my Honda Civic in front of Stuart's house - I loved the tune. It reminded me of a 60s kind of Mose/Ramsey/Horace kind of thing. It really cooked - and the melody was so simple and insinuating. Anyway, the only problem was that it was only A A A in form - for a vocal tune I thought it needed a B section or a bridge.
So, when I told Stuart my plans for writing lyrics for his little gem, he immediately dashed off a nifty bridge. The lyrics came pretty fast and I once again played a character quite unlike myself in the tune. The guy singing the songs is "desperate for love" and would do anything till he got it right for his beloved. I found his desperation funny - and definitely he was much younger and stupider than I was, but winning in a way. Who doesn't like a guy who puts it on the line for love.When it came to demo-ing the tune, Stuart got this wonderful veteran jazz singer, Sherwood Sledge, to sing it - and the truth is, I've stolen most of the phrasing I use in the song from him. You see the song is very - let's just say it - repetitive (but in a good way) and Sherwood's back phrasing and playing with the rhythms really broke it up and blew me away. Right on Sherwood!
The session was pretty easy, with Jamieson putting some very tasty Hammond B3 licks on the tune. By the way, I put in the little vocal section where I elongate "Do you-wanna"- building to a little climax - that's Michael Konik's favorite part and I'm taking full credit for it.
HOW CAN THAT MAKE YOU FAT?
This song is another lyric I put to a finished melody. It was written especially for me by the very talented pianist, composer and singer Eli Brueggerman - after he played with me at the very lamented Tasty Tuesday's at Catalina's. When I first heard it, the song had this 60s boogaloo groove happening, which put me in mind of Archie Bell and the Drells - very hip. For some reason I immediately thought of food (hell, I'm always thinking of food) and rather quickly wrote a laundry list song (think Cole Porter - and all his songs like "You're The Top" and "S'Wonderful") - basically a list of things culminating in the title. I loved the title - and the rest was history. When Jamieson Trotter who was arranging the songs on my CD heard it his nose crinkled and I knew something was wrong. I said, "Hey, don't you like the tune?" and he said, "No, I like the tune - but it's the wrong rhythm for Mark Winkler." First of all, I love it when people talk about me in the third person, and second of all, he was right. What was right for Archie Bell was not right for me. He sat down at the piano and played this fucking-fantastic groove - and I started singing, well, like Mark Winkler.
But truth be told I do sound a little like Randy Newman on it, too....and that's very cool, because he's a big influence on me - and this is my homage to him. I spent whole years devouring his songs - and "I Think It's Going To Rain Today" is definitely one of my desert island songs - the man has a catalogue of unbelievable depth. So I stole my feel from Randy - it's true.
COOL
I got a lovely review in Jazz Times Magazine for my last CD "Mark Winkler Sings Bobby Troup" and the writer, Christopher Loudon, started riffing at the end of the blurb..."Mark Winkler is cool, swimming pool cool, Dave Frishberg cool..." etc.
Very nice...and I immediately thought that would be a fun premise for a song. A laundry list song (I'm a little obsessed with them at the moment) sung by this guy to his girlfriend basically saying how "cool" she is - and then vice versa - where the girl sings to him, saying how "cool" she thinks he is. Well I came up with the lyric first and Marilyn Harris, a fantastic composer and singer, wrote the insinuating (I love that word) melody. A few years ago Marilyn sang a great version of this song with Bob Dorough (man, do I love him!) with a boss Big Band arrangement by Mark Wolfram on her CD "Round Trip. So, when I decided to do it I knew I had to have a completely different take on it. Once again Jamieson Trotter came to the rescue with this very "beat" arrangement.
The most fun of all was singing with Cheryl Bentyne. Actually having lunch with her and then singing the song at my office to the track was the best - just a ray of white light (in a non spiritual sense). Cheryl brought this 50s kind of vibe to the party. Cheryl's vocal on the CD is actually her first take - wow!! The one you hear of me is my 47th take - but we all work at our own pace!
SPRING IS WHERE YOU ARE
I have my producer, Barbara Brighton, to thank for finding this lovely Steve Allen tune. She first heard it on one of her favorite Mark Murphy albums, "September Ballads". She has literally been telling me to record this song for 10 years - and I've always been going "Yah, I like it, but..." Well, once again, the Babster was right.
We both thought just having Anthony Wilson on acoustic would be the ticket. There's something that happens to me when I sing with Anthony. His amazing creativity and musicianship takes me to a another place - and, as on my Bobby Troup CD, we were right. I especially remember going to Anthony's lovely house and rehearsing. The house is filled with the greatest art and he has his own small wine cellar and the place is decorated beautifully - it was lovely. Sometimes when you go to a Musician's pad it has brown shag carpeting, Gary Larsen "Far Side" books on the table and Unicorns playing musical notes on the wall. This was the total opposite. So, thank you Anthony for the music and the taste.
LOWERCASEOne of the things I love to do is to write lyrics to jazz instrumentals. I've already done that once on this CD with "Till I Get It Right". Case in point, I really love this one CD of Joshua Redman's called "Beyond" and I and my very talented bud, Lori Barth, wrote lyrics to three different tracks on the CD. I love writing to Jazz instrumentals because by nature the form is a little unorthodox, and that takes you to different places than you'd normally go as a lyricist. Joshua's song "Lop Sided Lullabye" (the tune "Lowercase" is based on) has a very unusual time signature, and a sort of unsettling feeling - so I got into a very black-and-white-foreign-film-in-the-60s feel. It's about a guy reading a goodbye note from his love while he walks along a barren landscape in a black turtleneck, and a long stylish black coat smoking unfiltered French cigarettes. Listen, I get into these things.
This was one of the more challenging tunes for the band to play and they came up aces. Steve Haas really locked the groove and Bob Sheppard just played beautifully. Bravo Guys!
SISSIES
I really loved the Phillip Seymour Hoffman movie "Capote", and was once again struck by what a fascinating character Truman Capote was. I admired his fearlessness, his talent, but most of all his utter lack of trying to be anybody but who he was. Then, about a year later another movie came out, covering the same terrain as "Capote" called "Infamous", with another fantastic performance by a British actor who really was a doppelganger for Capote, Toby Hooper. After I saw this movie I wrote the first draft of "Sissies". I must say, it's one of my faves on the record. I think this song says a lot about being Gay without hitting people over the head with it - and also brings in this whole notion of "macho" versus "sissy" - in quite a natural and lovely way.
When I was looking around for someone to write the music for it, the only person crazy enough to do this was my musical director from "Play It Cool", Louis Durra, who is a very "unique" and utterly original character in his own right. He's also straight - but he got the song perfectly. There's so many musical touches I love on the record - but my fave has to be the melodic line played by Bob Sheppard on soprano sax on the intro of the tune. It conjures up all that 50s New York swank to me. I always want a Martini by the second note. I also love the latin coda, too.
IN A LONELY PLACE
This is just a beautiful melody by Marilyn Harris. It's such a pleasure to sing it - and there are so many ways to do it. This is another song which Marilyn covered quite beautifully on her CD "Future Street" - so I knew I had to have a little different approach.
The gestation for my interpretation of the tune started at a Mark Murphy (my favorite singer) Master Singing class. I sang "In a Lonely Place" at the class - secretly hoping Mark would tell me to step aside so he could finish the song. Instead, he told me I was "singing" it too much - that it was a very intimate, almost painful thing to be telling someone - that you never really loved them, that you only needed to be in love - and theatrics had no place in that conversation. Of course, he was right - and Jamieson Trotter once again caught the pain and the intimacy in his beautfiful arrangement. Dig the Ron Blake trumpet solo.
By the way, I wrote this lyric after seeing the great film noir movie "In a Lonely Place" with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham. I missed the theme song assignment by just 54 years - maybe they could add it as a DVD extra??
FUTURE STREET
Another wonderful Marilyn Harris melody. This song always reminds me of "Sunny Side of the Street". I guess the metaphor and optimism of the tune are the same as that great Jimmy McHugh, Dorothy Fields classic. I've actually had the title and planned to write a song called "Future Street" for 30 years. I pilfered the title in my youth from my friend, Steve Sanzo. His rock song (now long forgotten) had the same title. So, thanks Steve - wherever you are! This is one of my favorite lyrics - it's so hard to be positive without being corny - and I think this song manages it.
EVOLUTION
What a great lyric by Brock Walsh - so true on so many levels. Plus the whole idiotic debate in our country over Intelligent Design (if ever there was a misnomer) and Evolution during the last 8 years under Bush gave the song even more meaning to me.
HOW TO PACK A SUITCASE
Once again, this song started out as a jazz instrumental by my crazy pal Louis Durra. He played it for me, and I just loved it. It was sleepy and sexy and very melodic! When I asked him the title, he said, "How To Pack a Suitcase" - and at that moment I thanked him for already writing about 90% of the tune - because when you've got a great title like that you can't go wrong. It tells you everything you need to know - or so I tell my lyric writing students. I immediately thought of so many musicians I know who lived on the road, lovin' and leavin' them in each city. Hey, it's why they became musicians. The guy in the song isn't the most likeable person I've written about, but he is clear eyed and honest. I especially like how "travelin' light" is the metaphor for his whole life.
This is one of my favorite arrangements on the CD - very Leon Redbone meets John Cale. I love the celeste Jamieson is playing - and my favorite part is how the whole band breaks down on the 3rd verse, with just Steve Hass dragging what sounds like tire chains underneath my vocal. This was the easiest vocal for me to do - outside of "How Can That Make You Fat?". Hey, one note about the celeste; it belongs to the engineer of this record, the wonderful Geoff Gillette, who had stored it for a couple of years at the studio where we were recording. Serendipity.
IN THE MOMENT
I love Barbra Streisand. If she'd record one of my songs, I'd be one "happy songwriter". Here's my list of people I want to record my songs, who haven't Mark Murphy, Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Pink, Michael Buble and Al Jarreau. Back to reality. Anyway, about 2 years ago Babs was on INSIDE THE ACTOR'S STUDIO and said the phrase "In the Moment" 19 times to James Lipton. I know because I'm a Streisand fanatic and I counted when I replayed the show. I got the idea to write a song using this phrase she so obviously loves - and I put in a little of her bio, too. It seems she's finally found true love in James Brolin, so why not use it? I wrote the lyric and showed it to Mike Melvoin (who has played for Streisand, as well as everybody else in the world) and he really liked the lyrics and wrote this very lovely melody to it. Well, the upshot is as of yet, no Streisand Recording...but it did make it on to a Winkler recording. I sort of channeled the ghosts of Marilyn and Alan Bergman - well, there not dead, but you get the idea.
YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE
You have reached my favorite song on the CD - for many reasons. For one, it's been trouble almost from the minute Marilyn Harris came up with the Dorothy Parker title and inspired lyric - well a few lines - which I promptly finished. I remember quite clearly it was my birthday and I was getting over a terrible cold - and feeling philosophical. I loved the lyric a lot - and remember that night when I went out for Chinese dinner with my friends and family. I felt very satisfied. That's the great thing about songwriting - writing a lyric can change your life. I felt that the lines in this song filled in the blanks in my life a little more for me. The trouble started when Marilyn, who is a great songwriter, wrote a tune for the lyric I didn't like - no big deal... but Marilyn just couldn't get past it - and the song languished for quite a while before I convinced her to give it to a fine writer friend of mine to put a melody to. Well, when I got his melody it was good, but there was something that wasn't working. I told you the song was trouble. I kept listening to his version over and over trying to figure out how to fix it. Well, on Christmas of 2006 I finally told him I was taking the lyric back. Ugly---- nobody likes their melody rejected, but he was cool and we're still friends. Then I read it to my friend Lorraine Feather, telling her how much I loved the lyric and how much trouble I was having and she said something wise; she said that while the lyric was great, it was too depressing and it needed a turn around - a little surprise - to lift the listener up, so they wouldn't want to use those Dorothy Parker razor blades at the end of it. She was right! I wrote a nice little turn around and felt much better about the lyric.
Then I brought it to Dan Siegel (who had written "Another Night") and he almost immediately wrote the tune you hear today - which I loved immediately. I loved it so much I got into a fender bender listening to it. I told you the song was trouble!
Well, when we approached the making of this record I played it for my producer, Barbara Brighton, who wasn't knocked out by it, but I promised I'd have Jamieson Trotter do a great arrangement that would knock her out. Well, we got to the rehearsal of the band and we played the arrangement of "You Might As Well Live" and it didn't rock any of our worlds. I guess it was just trouble - and that rhymes with "p" and that stands for - almost not making it on the record. Barbara started to tell me her dismay about the song when I got all dramatic and said, "Give it one more chance, if it doesn't go well in the session we'll drop it." Immediately Jamieson said he thought he knew what was wrong and he'd change the arrangement.The day of the session things were going swimmingly, I have the greatest musicians on this record (take a bow guys) and each song was done as if in a dream. But the song with trouble attached to it was coming up. Yep, Jamieson had a new arrangement, but I never heard it till we did it. Now, we recorded this record like the old Frank Sinatra records - with all the musicians and the singer playing at once. So, here I was in the vocal booth - hearing it for the first - or maybe last time. Well, there is a God, because Obama got elected and "You Might As Well Live", my trouble child for over two years, started - and from the first chords it was magic! I couldn't believe it. It built, I was "emotional"- I was taken back to the first day of writing the lyric and the heavens opened and I flew on golden...Get off of it Winkler - the song worked! Hope you like it.
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