Audio version available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN2OqWZLg3w (ratnik@aol.com for a copy of the audio file.)
Native New Yorker, Louie Fleck has been writing songs and making music for over 45 years. From singer-songwriter folk-pop to musical theatre to reggae in numerous groups and recordings he has been churning out regular releases from his Brooklyn studio. His 2023 album, EPIPHANY MACHINE feature new songs written and recorded during the pandemic, in a quirky dense reggae style. The album even includes a guest spot from his brother, banjo legend, Béla Fleck. Robert Jackson Wood is a Brooklyn-based writer, political organizer, and musician.
Robert Wood (00:00): Your new album Epiphany Machine is a reggae record. Like most of your records.. this is not the most common genre for a white Jew who grew up on the Upper West Side. So, tell us how you discovered reggae.
Louie Fleck (00:12): When I was in high school, I used to go to the movies with this crowd of friends of mine... You know where the Joyce Theater is? That used to be the Elgin Movie Theater. And every weekend on Friday and Saturday nights, they would've midnight shows. And we would go there, smoke pot and watch whatever the midnight shows were. They would often run four movies in a row starting at midnight. It was nuts. And then at a certain point, they just changed the whole schedule and all they showed was the movie of The Harder They Come. And so, we went to see that and at first, it was this very strange movie. It was actually the first feature movie to come from Jamaica. And it had Jimmy Cliff and all these now classic reggae acts.
(00:57): And I kept seeing this movie over and over again. And I didn't think much of it at the time, but it penetrated. And then years later when I thought, oh, let's do this as a reggae song, you know, I guess I must have had some kind of idea of how it went. We tried to play it, but it wasn't really reggae and the band wasn't really into it. Then I became friends with some other musicians. There was a studio that we rehearsed at, it was owned and run by a woman that had an all-woman reggae band called Steppin' Razor (named after the Perter Tosh song). I said, look, if you ever need a guitar player to come and play, I'd love to do it. And she said, okay. I came over there and she was, “you're doing it all wrong. You basically suck.”
(01:39): And she said, you should do is go buy some reggae records. Usually on the flip side would be these versions, just play along with them. So, I went and did that. I bought a whole bunch of different reggae records. Instead of taking this very dismissive attitude towards reggae and going, oh well it's just easy… it's just these little chords and playing this very simple thing. I actually listened closely and I had this revelation where I saw the structure of the music as these gears turning. And they were little gears and big gears and each of the instruments was a gear. The sound was really structural, for me a completely different way of looking at music. Because when I played in the rock band, I was wholly instinctual, just kind of slamming away on the guitar and not really thinking about it.
(02:30): And here was this music that was supposedly so simple; it was the first time I was really disciplined. I started to try and play it and we'd meet other people and I'd ask them to play, you know, can we play some reggae? And I eventually met other people and they would tell me, well, you know, do it this way or try this, or whatever. And I learned some discipline. Then after the rock band broke up, I started the Reggae jam in my apartment on seventh Avenue. It was ridiculous. I think at one point I even had 10 or 12 people playing in this little living room very quietly, as quietly as we could. And I just became addicted to it. And I was wrestling with it. So, how does a white kid from the Upper West Side play reggae music or justify it?
(03:23): That I think was a real issue for me because I love the music, but when I wrote songs, I felt it would be insincere to sing about Jah or the issues that were typical in reggae music. I tried to write stuff like that and I found it to be insincere. When I heard the band Sublime, there was an epiphany. They came out with their big hit, What I Got, I just fell in love with them. They were three-piece band, you know, they had gotten rid of the whole excess of the big instrumental ensemble thing and just sang about what they knew, which was, in their case, living in Long Beach and having a dog or whatever, very honest and very natural. And that at that moment I said, fuck this. I'm just going to write about what I write about whatever that is. Which of course was some distillation of The Beatles and Dylan and you know, everything else that I was listening to and influenced by.
Robert Wood (04:25): I want to go back to the Reggae Jam, which she started in 1983, is that right?
Louie Fleck (04:30): It probably started in 1982.
Robert Wood (04:31): So, that's a very long time to host anything much less, a musical jam with a bunch of people coming and going every week. I think I read that you had as many as 60 different musicians over the years.
Louie Fleck (04:45): Maybe more…
Robert Wood (04:46): Which is remarkable.
Louie Fleck (04:48): First, I just called on friends of mine to come and play. I want you to try to do this. And all we played was Bob Marley. One or two originals I had written that we're horrible, Bob Marley songs, or the songs from The Harder They Come. That fairly quickly became a Bob Marley cover band that was called The Plankwalkers <laugh>. And we played one gig. Oh, there was one other thing that influenced the reggae. When I first felt this drive to record, I had seen an ad in the Village Voice saying we had a free recording contract or something like that. And I called them up and they said, oh yeah, come on down. And there was a recording studio on 48th Street. Basically, they were just trying to get me to spend money.
(05:33): And I said, well, I don't have any money. Do you have a job? Maybe I could trade some time. You know, do some work. And the owner of the studio, his name is James Cannings, it was called Cannings Recording Studio. He said, well actually yeah, I need some help. Like maybe you could come and watch the studio when we have rehearsals. And so, I said, absolutely be happy to do that. And he said, and then you could also try and sell some recording time. I said, sure, I'll, so I ended up working at this recording studio for nothing, you know, $5 an hour or something like that. And the band that was rehearsing there was a really interesting band. It was, it was called the Eric Gale Band. And Eric Gale was an R&B guitar player who decided that he liked playing reggae music.
(06:16): And he made a band out of people from Kid Creole in the Coconuts. There was a drummer in the band, this guy named Winston Grennan. Winston Grennan was actually a major reggae drummer who came from Jamaica and came to New York, the keyboard player. And the guitar player from Kid Creole in the Coconuts also were part of this group. So, he kind of built this jazz reggae group. Well, he added a couple of other people and then they would play every weekend at this club on the Upper West Side called Mikell's. And they would basically just play these instrumental jazz things. But there I was listening to them and hanging out with them at this recording studio. And I became really good friends with their percussionist, who was a Trinidadian guy named Nasser. Nasser Nasser is what he told me to call him. We became really good friends.
(07:05): And so when I started this reggae jam, I invited him to come and he lived in the village a couple blocks away from me. And he came and the two of us were just always hanging out together doing the things that people did in the eighties. He was much older than me, I guess I was in my late twenties and he was in his fifties or sixties. And he was really important because I ended up moving to Los Angeles in 1984 and he gave me a telephone number of somebody to call. When I got there, I called this person up and I ultimately ended up in her band there. There was a kind of world beat reggae scene in LA that I just kind of fell into, you know, in a really minor way. But I was in a whole bunch of bands there as well.
Robert Wood (07:51): So, you go to L.A., you eventually end up back in New York. Talk about how the jam evolved. Who were some of these people coming through? What was the structure of the Jams like?
Louie Fleck (08:04): Well, all of this has to do with why I came back to New York when I was in L.A. My landlord in New York found out I was subletting. I had to decide whether I was going to come back to save my apartment. And also while I was in LA my best friend at the time was this Jamaican guy named Linley. And we were actually had played in several bands together in LA even though he was originally born Jamaican, his home was New York as well. So, we would sometimes come back to New York together while we were in L.A. He also took me to see some of his friends, which included a keyboard player named Larry Webb, who was the keyboard player for a band called The Meditations that that band was contemporary of Bob Marley. I'm in L.A, I've contacted a lawyer, the lawyer says, you gotta get back in that apartment.
(08:55): That's the first thing. Get back in the apartment if you want to save that apartment. And I'm trying to decide. And then a friend of mine who I'd worked with in a restaurant with said, I broke my leg. Why don't you come back to New York and run my recording studio? I was like, what? I came back to New York basically to work in this recording studio, which was called Noise New York. It was on 34th Street between seventh and eighth Avenue. It was a crappy one inch, 16 track studio. He said he wanted me to help him run the studio, but he didn't. He just wanted me to come in every day and smoke pot with him. And he was Kramer, Mark Kramer and he became pretty well known for a bunch of bands that he was in. And as a producer, the other thing attractive about the studio was that I got as much free recording time as I wanted, as long as it was between midnight and 10 in the morning. <laugh> I came back, I lived in the apartment to establish my tenant-ship and then I would work in this recording studio, learning how to record. I was blown speakers and breaking machines and all kinds of stuff. Watching the studio hanging out and recording when I could. Of course, I brought in my friends whenever I could either to rehearse or to jam or to record. And that led to the evolution of the Reggae Jam.
Robert Wood (10:18): Was the jam actually in the recording space?
Louie Fleck (10:21): Maybe one or two times a couple of times. I might've called a bunch of people together and said, you know, the studio's free tonight. You know, that was always it, like, when is the studio free? And I would get people to come in. It was a very cheap recording studio and there was a lot of activity At the same time, I had made friends with someone else that owned a recording studio in the exact same format, one inch 16 track, which was very important at the time because that meant that I could take tapes that I started at this studio and bring 'em to the other studio. And the other studio was empty most of the time. And I ended up assisting at that studio and having all this free time. And that's really where the jam took off.
(11:02): And my friend Linley was back in New York and he started introducing me to people and I started playing in a band with him. Since there was so much free time, we would just invite people over and have these sessions at this studio. And it really became a weekly scheduled thing. When I moved in 1995, I had an apartment down in Tribeca and I was able to make a band room where the drums and the bass and the amps and everything were set up. And so we would have a regular weekly session. What floor was it on? It was on the second floor. What Your neighbors hate you? Um, some of my neighbors hated me. The restaurant downstairs was not terribly happy, but I soundproofed as best as I could and there were neighbors in the building that didn't care. They liked it and there were, that were, you know, so we, we set some limits, like we would stop at 10 o'clock and things like that.
(12:00): But that's when it got going full force. One of the main people at that time was Larry Webb. He and I just became best buddies and he worked downtown. Sometimes it was just me and him, I'd just be playing bass and he would be playing drums. He was a keyboard player and a singer, but he loved playing drums. All these musicians at the time were looking for studios to play in where they didn't have to pay anything. Basically, that was the racket. It was trying to find free studio time because studio time was so expensive back then, even rehearsal studio time, there were bands, but the bands very often were just reorganization of the same people. Marcia Davis was one of the people that came to the jam and she ended up saying, okay, well I have a band and I want you to be in it and I want you to be in it.
(12:51): And she would organize this band based on the people that she knew. Some from the Reggae Jam, some from other places. And then we would start rehearsing. And then Larry said, I want a band. And so, he would put together a band in his way. I always ended up being the rhythm guitar player because I was happy to play rhythm guitar pretty much. And I was getting acceptable at it. So, there were all these different bands that that happened. Sometimes it was just for one gig. It's kind of the way the reggae scene works in general is that bands are hired musician by musician for a particular situation, whether it's a tour or a gig. That's kind of how it worked. Having a formal band, like a rock band, where everybody is always in the band, you know, it wasn't an equal voting situation.
(13:40): It was, I want you, you, you and you. If you want to do it, great. You know, it was always some little amount of money at the gig or something like that. And that's, and that was how it worked. It was kind of the style. And at a certain point we created a band that was called The Motives and that was people from this scene. But then we also went out and auditioned some people. We needed a lead singer and we found, we actually found two lead singers, a woman and a and a guy. The guy was from Barbados and the woman was from Iowa. And so it was a really strange band, uh, playing reggae music, a little bit of sky. And we ended up playing a lot of gigs at this place that was on West Third Street called the Baggot Inn. We did New Year's Eve there a couple of times because I guess we were one of the most consistent bands that were there.
(14:30): As always happened, the band fell apart in one way and then it just kind of morphed into another thing and the jam kept going. That was kind of a regular thing. It would happen every week, you'd have to adapt to whatever the situation was because sometimes it would be like a bunch of complete amateurs where you're trying to teach somebody how to play. I don't know how to play anything. And then we just put 'em on the piano and try and get them to play like the chords in time. And other times there'd be pro musicians would just walk in and just be mind-blowingly great.
Robert Wood (15:04): So, this was not a private jam. This was something that people started hearing about knowing about and strangers were showing up,
Louie Fleck (15:10): Not strangers, it was word of mouth. You had to be invited because it was in my apartment. Sometimes it was horrible. And sometimes there were jams where I would be, I don't ever want to do this again. That was absolutely horrible, because either somebody was rude or somebody was, there were some pretty strange situations that happened. One thing that we always did was have a New Year's Eve party and the New Year's Eve party we'd end up playing for six to eight hours, you know, nonstop. And there were a couple of those where out of the blues somebody would be invited and it would just be spectacular. It was all the, the New Year's Eve parties were always pretty amazing, the quality… because at that point we were a little more organized. We'd say, let's do these songs. We weren't just improvising.
Robert Wood (16:05): What is the relationship between the jam and your albums? Does a lot of the material end up getting rehearsed in a jam setting? Or do you try to keep those worlds really, really separate?
Louie Fleck (16:18): Well, it really depends on when it happened because each album has a story of its own in a way. After the motives broke up, I tried to make an album of our songs. I ended up using drum samples and, and then built the songs from scratch. So, they really weren't the band. So, that was kind of a conceptual album, if you will. It was, that's why it was called The Motives Project rather than just The Motives. And I got most of the members to come in, I got the lead singers to sing their parts and, but I ended up adding lots of parts of my own for better or for worse. And then after that I did an album, which was called First Taste Is Free. And on that one I played most of the parts. I had written all these songs and I was recording them and I felt I should put out another album now.
(17:06): And I just kind of slammed through it and put it out. Reggae Therapy and Magical REALISM, those two albums, I really wanted to use the best Musicians from the Jam and I had all this material, the material just kept coming and I just had so much of it. I talked to the people that I wanted to record and said, are you interested in doing this? And they said yeah. And we figured out a way to do it. At that point I had the recording studio pretty well tricked out so that I knew how to record in it. I made arrangements with drummers, bass players and keyboard players and would do a rehearsal, one rehearsal, give them charts, give them demos, and then literally record as many songs as possible in a day as basic tracks. I would record multiple takes of the songs recorded to a click track. And then I would comb through them and take the best parts on those two albums. For the most part, I would edit the drums to get the, the best drum parts for the song, the keyboard parts and the bass parts and, and then build the rest of the arrangements afterwards I would redo the vocals because I had scratch vocals. I would get friends to come in and do the background vocals. So, each record was done in, in a kind of a different way.
Robert Wood (18:26): Magical REALISM was your, your 2020 record. Right. And I'm, guessing that that was mostly in the can by the time lockdown happened. So, that really makes EPIPHANY MACHINE your pandemic record. You can hear it. I mean there are, there are songs like The New Normal that make pretty explicit references to it and then there are more metaphorical references to it throughout. So, how is making this record different from your last record?
Louie Fleck (18:51): The last record was kind of an extravaganza. I had great musicians and I was using outside musicians wherever possible.
Robert Wood (19:00): And when you say outside musicians, you mean?
Louie Fleck (19:02): I meant I had, I had a, a drummer, I had two bass players, I had a keyboard player, I had all these different vocalists and I had horn players. I had all these musicians that were not me. <laugh>. What happened was I had this horrible flood and my mixing board got flooded. It was a mess. And I was trying to figure out how to deal with it. And I found this company that said they could fix the mixing board. So, I brought the mixing board to them and, and they were, they're a company that built recording studios and they did a valiant job, but they did not fix it completely. I discussed with them how could I make my studio work better? And they said, well, why don't you think about a studio that doesn't use a mixing board? Why don't you have a studio that just does what's called the summing mixer, where all the tracks would be summed together in a, in a device. And I wouldn't be playing with faders and EQs. That would be all done within the computer. So, I like that idea, especially because what it meant was that I could have a mix and if I needed to come back later and adjust the mix, I could do that because the levels were all in the computer. Instead of being something that I have to reset on the mixing board, I talked to them about it and hired them basically to help me redesign my studio.
Robert Wood (20:24): So, give a sense of when this happened relative to lockdown and, and all of that.
Louie Fleck (20:29): The, the flooding had happened before that. There were building problems in my building and the water damage happened. And so, I had the mixing board with them. They were in the process of repairing it. I couldn't do anything really because I didn't have the mixing board so I couldn't record. I could record, but I couldn't, it was a mess. So, I also realized that I had not been taking care of my equipment and the studio itself was actually a mess. It had this antiquated patchbay system. I didn't know what things were plugged into. I had keyboards and sound modules and all kinds of things that were damaged over time and had just needed maintenance or replacement. And so basically, I just undertook a total rebuilding of my studio. I went through every single piece of equipment and got rid of pieces that were broken, repaired pieces that needed repairing and replaced the mixing board with the summing mixer, upgraded the computer, all these things that just brought me closer to what I thought I wanted in the studio.
(21:37): And it's actually turned out to work really well. And when the pandemic hit, it was basically done. So now I had this recording studio, like I was all dressed up with no place to go! So, I figured, well I better test the studio, let me do something. So, I ended up writing… I figured, oh, I'll just make up some tune. I found some drum tracks, I added 'em in, I played some chord changes, I added some other parts, I added some guitar and then all of a sudden I wrote some lyrics and then a melody and then I had a song and, oh, that's kind of cool. And then I just kept doing that.
Robert Wood (22:18): And as you said, this is kind of a return to the way you did things on your first record. So, it's kind of a DIY.
Louie Fleck (22:24): Yeah, and a lot had changed technologically in that time. Back then, I would have to take a drum sample, I would have to put it into a sampler… it was kind of a clunky system. And then I'd have to adjust the tempos and do all this stuff and all this new stuff had come onto the market in terms of drum samples. So, I was able to find these drum sample libraries where first of all, there were some really good players making these libraries. The tempos were accurate so I could actually move things around and they would sound natural. And in addition to that, there were these synthesizers now that were inside the computer that had sequencer parts where you could play a note and it would play some sort of sequence that would be in time with the song. I started playing around with that. It was kind of a more modern sound. It had this electronic edge to it that was, on one hand I was lazy and it was easy, but it wasn't actually that easy because I had to find things that worked. And I, I hated most of the synth sounds, but I realized that part of my sound was just finding sounds that were close or that worked and then making them my own.
Robert Wood (23:40): So, is the opening of 7:57 an example of that?
Louie Fleck (23:44): Yeah, on that one, I think I started with a full drumbeat and a full bass-line and I had added all these keyboard parts and then I just said, okay, let's take away the drums in the bass and see what it sounds like. And I was… okay, that's different. And the other thing I liked about that one was that it was more, it's probably the most up-tempo song on the record. And when the drums and bass kick in, it's grooving. Whereas the others were more, you know, just a slower type of beat.
Robert Wood (24:14): Also, in the context of the pandemic, because you make a reference to, it's kind of a post-apocalyptic set of imagery and you're talking about zombies and you're talking about rations and then you mentioned bunkers. And it, and it made me wonder is your studio your pandemic bunker?
Louie Fleck (24:32): Absolutely it is. But the, but the unfortunately <laugh>, I actually wrote that song 15 years ago. So…
Robert Wood (24:40): No, see, you don't have to, you don't have to admit that!
Louie Fleck (24:42): No, but I modified it to fit. What happened was, is I wrote that song and it never worked. It was with this new musical style that I was able to develop the song. You know, I always loved science fiction movies and stuff like that. And so it was, what is it called, The Omega Man, like a Charlton Heston end of the world, he was the last man on earth and all the zombies or vampires were there. And I used that story and put myself into it. But then I modified it further to reflect the pandemic. Of course…
Robert Wood (25:16): Of course. You're just foreshadowing <laugh>.
Louie Fleck (25:19): It was inevitable. I knew it was coming!
Robert Wood (25:22): Things have been apocalyptic for a while now and obviously it's got to be really amazing in lots of ways. Having a studio in your apartment. On the other hand, I can also see it being something of a hindrance or something that can kind of be a negative thing because it enables you to tinker all the time in a way that you might not be able to otherwise. If you were paying by the hour or if it was geographically distant, what are the ways that having a studio in your actual apartment affects your creative process?
Louie Fleck (25:54): I'm not the greatest musician in the world. I don't have the discipline and I never had the discipline. I just wanted the results, whatever it is in my nature, I always found it easier to work on the technology than to practice. That was always how I solved things. From assisting in a recording studio and learning how to record to having my own recording studios and tweaking… I didn't know anything about harmony until I started to play with it myself. I studied a little bit of music, but to actually hear the difference, like when I started to write horn parts, it was easy to come up with the first part, but to come up with the harmony was difficult for me. But when I had a program, a computer, a way to make the notes perfect, if you will, then I was able to start learning about harmony and what I liked and what I didn't like or what I thought sounded okay and what didn't. And that has continued over the years. So, I've always taken a long time to record because I don't play that well. But I have worked on making it go faster, either making my techniques better and faster, or being happy with something I came up with, saying, oh, this is okay, or that is what I meant. And trusting my intuition more.
Robert Wood (27:18): It sounds like that's another place where the ability to keep tweaking could be a nightmare there. So, it's just a, a matter of kind of when to say, okay, enough is enough, which is actually something that you address in some of your lyrics.
Louie Fleck (27:32): You know, sometimes I would come down, I'd be working on a song and I would come down here and all I would do is listen to the song and maybe play a five note keyboard part and then walk away. That would be my work for the day. And, and then I'd come back the next day and I'd go, oh, was that any good or not? You know, which with a keyboard part is very easy because I could just throw it away or come back to it. But when it came to a guitar part or a bassline, then I would spend a lot more time on it. And I would, very often what I would do is I would write a bassline on the keyboard and then if I decided I liked it, I would listen to it and check it out. And very often find out that I played something that wasn't in the chords or something like that. And then I would come back and then I would learn the entire basesline sometimes one note at a time and record it and play it on bass. So, on this record I'm playing every bass note and every guitar part.
Robert Wood (28:32): So, you're essentially teaching yourself a wealth of material while you're producing the record?
Louie Fleck (28:37): On the last two albums, on Reggae Therapy and on Magical REALISM, I didn't play the bass parts on most of the songs. There's this thing in reggae called the shadow guitar part. Basically the guitar is playing the bass-line or playing some kind of little counterpoint to the bassline or rhythmical variation on the bassline. So, for every one of those songs where someone else played the bass, I would go and learn the bassline and play it with them. Before I added any other guitar parts, I wouldn't copy and paste. I would play every note that the bass player played before I started coming up with new parts. So, I had internalized a song, wasn't there some jazz musician that said like, you know, if you really want to learn how to play or you want to learn arranging, you should listen to a song, but only listen to one instrument and then listen to the song again, listen to another instrument, then listen to the song again until you've listened to every instrument. And that was sort of what I was doing. I was doing that mainly with the bass. I was learning the bass part internally, then figuring out how to play it.
Robert Wood (29:45): I want to go back to what you said about harmony, because it, it surprises me in a sense because your, your songs are definitely not simple by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, there's really complicated stuff going on in your bridge sections often and your, you know, transitions. And do you feel a lot of that is just instinct at this point? Or do you feel like you still lean on the technology a lot? Because it certainly sounds like these are are very natural changes that are happening in all of your songs and they're very rich and interesting.
Louie Fleck (30:17): I think it is instinctual and I think I've begun to trust myself more in terms of coming up with parts. When I'm writing a song, I'm always hoping to come up with, I don't want to repeat myself, which of course sounds ridiculous because I'm forcing myself into this genre. But within that, I'm still trying to be different. I'm still trying to come up with a new take while I can't tell you what I'm doing. I suspect I've become maybe instinctually connected to kinds of modes that are allowing me to write more sophisticated melodies or parts or harmonies. But I can't tell you what it is that I'm doing. It is, it is really instinctual.
Robert Wood (31:01): Something you said about not wanting to repeat yourself made me think about something else about your music that always sticks out, which is just the density of just sonic information that's happening in a good way. There's just this, these are reggae records, right? So, you've got your hooks and you've got your groove, but interspersed throughout your music are these little details or riffs or effects. Very rarely do they repeat the same way and it's a real reward for the listener. Yeah, I wanted to know if you could just talk about that a little bit and, and that type of texture and, and that kind of commitment to avoiding repetition on our, you know, even a second to second level, with things like hooks and whatnot.
Louie Fleck (31:41): Well, I've always aspired to the records that I loved, you know, whether they were Beatle records or Steely Dan records where it just felt like every time you listen to it, there was something that I hadn't heard before. You know, it's kind of calculated. I don't want to copy and paste. I want it to feel fresh. I'm trying to hide variations in it. Even if you've heard the song a bunch of times, you expect something and it's, and it isn't there because it happened the first time, not the second time.
Robert Wood (32:12): Do you ever struggle with throwing ideas away? Writers talk about this idea of killing their babies, killing their darlings. Does that ever come into play when you've, you've laid something down and it's taken a long time and then comes the moment where you have to decide something's gotta go and then there's this impulse to maybe put it somewhere,
Louie Fleck (32:32): I just killed the bad babies. <laugh>. No, of course there is. But fortunately, I rarely regret anything I've ever thrown away. It's a very common criticism I've gotten from my friends and other musicians that I just put too much shit in there. There's too much crap and I've got to strip it away and pull it back when I'm in the mixing phase. A lot of it is just taking away, taking away, taking away as much as possible. As much as I'm willing to give up at any point, I pretty much don't bring things back when I start taking them away.
Robert Wood (33:10): I mean, one thing I, I guess that helps this is having digital workstations and just being able to kind of drag and drop and having this wealth of choices. What do you use? So the gear-head listeners know…
Louie Fleck (33:22): I was having a lot of technical issues before the studio was rebuilt. I finally just made a decision and committed to Pro Tools. And even though Pro Tools doesn't have really good MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) editing, I was trying to play the instruments. I was playing the guitars, I was playing the bass, I was playing some keyboard parts live and percussion. I decided to rely less on the MIDI. So, I just kind of committed to pro tools and that's basically the way I've been doing it.
Robert Wood (33:50): What's your strategy for horn writing in particular?
Louie Fleck (33:53): When I first started doing horn parts, I was literally writing them all in MIDI and playing on MIDI instruments and then figuring out how to print out notation and giving them to horn players and saying, does that work? And, can you do it? It was like everything was in the key of C. I started working with, Travis Calvert (sax) and Doug Fisher (trombone). We developed a really interesting way of working together. They were willing to come into the studio and figure out parts together. And it was kind of like we each had a specialty, there was a space for each of us. It was a very safe space where anybody could suggest anything and anybody could also say, oh, that's not so great, or whatever. And we just found this balance that I'm addicted to. I love working with these guys. It's a very slow process.
(34:43): Just like the rest of me when I'm recording, Travis brings a real rock and roll spirit to the recording. Like he calls bullshit when something is becoming too esoteric or too intellectual, Doug brings a real sense of harmony, understanding of harmony. And he'll suggest something very often where, to me it'll sound like it's a wrong note, but then a week later it's my favorite part whenever anybody says, I don't know, what should we do here? I guess I just have the guts to say, well, why don't we do this? You know, I just use my instinct and it reminds me of this story I heard about somebody asking George Gershwin, where does your music come from? Do you have to work hard at it? And he said something like, oh no, not at all. The notes are always there. I just have to pluck them out of the air.
(35:34): And that to me, that was so inspirational because it was saying writing comes from a place of great wealth, not from poverty. There is no such thing as writer's block. That was a very freeing moment. Instead of going, oh, I have to do this thing… it made it a joy. So, I feel like that working with those horn guys as well, there's never a shortage of material. There's never a shortage of something to come up with. And if I come up with something that's crappy, they're going to tell me too. They're going to just say, no, that sounds like something you've already done, or whatever.
Robert Wood (36:07): Another way that this album keeps listeners on their toes is through your use of instruments that aren't usually found on reggae albums. And I'm thinking of the banjo and The Usual Suspects played by bluegrass luminary, who also happens to be your brother, and the mandolin played by Andy Statman, who's another bluegrass great. Tell us more about that inspired choice.
Louie Fleck (36:32): Well, that song is The Usual Suspects, and that is a song I wrote quite a while back and tried recording several different times and finally decided it should go on the last record. Actually, I liked the way that the rhythm parts came out. I felt like it still needed something, it needed something to contribute to the mood. And my original idea was, uh, to maybe get an accordion on it. And then I got fixated on a mandolin, and so I finally felt like, oh, I really want to get this done. So, I asked my brother if he would do it, and he said, yeah, he's done a lot of stuff for me in the past and I've helped him as well with providing a recording studio when he is needed it for some situation. So, it's been pretty good. But of course, he's a genius and I'm, you know, a schmuck! I don't see myself in the same league, but I am certainly lucky enough. I'm certainly going to take advantage of having the access to an amazing musician.
(37:30): So, I asked him if he could try to record a part for it, but do it in a different way than what he would normally do. And so he said, well, I have this gut stringing banjo. So, he played it on a different kind of banjo. If you listen to the tone, it's not the typical Béla Fleck sound. And I liked what he did, in fact very much. But, I felt he was basically playing the single line parts, which were cool, but I still didn't get that. I was fixated on a mandolin and I wanted that kind of swirly tremolo that mandolin players do. And one day I saw Andy performing in a reunion of that amazing band Breakfast special. I ended up contacting him and asking him, what would it take to hire you? And he was very easygoing about it.
(38:22): And we set up a time and he came over and he was done in like 15 minutes. It was so fast. And he kept saying, well, don't you want something else? Don't you know, I could do this thing or that thing? And Andy's famous for playing these really complex solos that venture into a tonality or modality in a, in a, in a really unique and incredible way. And he's saying, don't you want me to do some of this? You know, it's kind of like the thing he's famous for, I said no, I just love this texture and I just wanted to feel soulful. And he did it and he did it so quickly. It was just wonderful to work with him. I hope I can do some more with him.
Robert Wood (39:06): So, I want to go back for a second and talk about your lyrics more, because we started talking a little about how this is a pandemic record and you make a lot of references on the record to the kind of monotony and the claustrophobia that a lot of us were dealing with and the kind of day-to-day drudgery. But this is really a theme that you've been exploring for a long time on your records. And I'm thinking in particular about a song like The Next Big Thing from your last record, which kind of mocks the giddy anticipation that we're supposed to have for new trends and whatnot. And this sentiment is really everywhere on this new record. I think we mentioned the new Normal already. I think you have a lyric that says the same old story with the new punchline, which picks up of themes of the usual suspect whole, that whole idea. And then you've got the song 7:57, which we already mentioned, which has a lyric, uh, quote, today's a new beginning, just like the day before. I'm curious, is Louis Fleck a Nihilist?
Louie Fleck (40:07): Uh, I don't know what I am <laugh>. I always liked a turn of phrase that reversed it or put it inside out in some way. And whether it was Dylan or whether it was Robert Hunter or Elvis Costello, there was something I liked about that, but I also realized that I wanted the lyric to actually mean something there. There were some times where I'd listen to an Elvis Costello song and it sounded cool, but what did it mean? It meant nothing. And so, I was always looking for it to have some kind of truth for me, some kind of truth, which I felt was there a lot in Dylan's stuff especially that would be kind of the measure of whether a lyric made it. And I also felt that a lyric could be rewritten until the last possible moment. Like not to just accept it.
(41:06): And if, if I felt I was true to me, that would work. There were times when I had friends of mine go, what, what does that mean? Or what, you know, I don't really understand what that's about. I would have to question it myself and go, well, do I understand what it's about? And then if I did, I would keep it. But if I didn't, then I would try to look for more and I would try to write many more lyrics than I needed in order to have a lot to work with. The thing that was unique to this album was I wrote the music first for most of the songs. So I'm sitting there with these songs and then I would be just listening and maybe I'd pull out my lyric book and I'd say I'd have something that was there, maybe it was a seed one line, and I would go, well, maybe that's okay.
(41:55): And I would just sing it over and over again and then see if it sparked anything. And I was lucky most of the songs on this record were written to the music. And then I would labor over the lyrics for weeks and weeks. I might have the song and go, okay, I've got something there. I think there's a melody. I might sing the melody first and then with some nonsense lyric. And then I would find the one thing that was the hook or the part that I could work with. And then I would try and generate as many verses as I could, let it go, come back to it. I guess very typical process for lyric writers, I would think.
Robert Wood (42:33): So, what you were just saying reminds me of the song, What’s Wrong With You, where you have this line and the opening about how you appeared from the outskirts and the melody actually outlines this. It's a pretty wide range of notes, and it's almost as if the melody is kind of reinforcing what the lyrics are talking about. Is that intentional? It feels like a very intentional marriage of lyrics and melody to me.
Louie Fleck (43:00): I have no idea. That song was the result of a fight I had with my wife. You know, when you're in a relationship and you know, there's conflict in a relationship and you say things maybe without thinking, and one of the things you might say is what's wrong with you? Which of course is just completely belittling and condescending. I just thought that was a great idea for a song, especially when the result is, it's really ends up being about myself. It's just what's wrong with me, not what's wrong with you.
Robert Wood (43:34): So that's actually a really great segue to just talking about the theme of relationships, which is another one of the album's biggest themes. You got married for the first time in April of 2019 at the age of 60 or 61, right?
Louie Fleck (43:49): Sounds right.
Robert Wood (43:49): A lot of the material on the record seems to stem directly from that. So you've got this song, If Not Now, Then When, which is kind of looking at this calculus that you have to make when you're waiting for these signs to know that someone is the perfect person and you kind of have those signs, but you know, you're getting older and eventually, you realize you've gotta go for it. Then you kind of flip the script and the song What’s Wrong With You and kind of ask yourself why someone would ever commit to you. And you know, it, it's this kind of self-deprecating song where you're talking about how damaged you are and and so forth. So, to what degree does the album relate to your recent marriage? And to what degree is it, is it more kind of a assumed back look at relationships in general?
Louie Fleck (44:37): All of my songs I think are about relationships. I always remember, I guess when The Beatles, were interviewed, “how do you write a song?” And they said, well, we always try and keep it simple. It's always, you, me, I, and I was like, oh, okay... That's the trick. I'll just write about what I feel. But of course, over time that becomes more complicated and more vague. What I've been trying to do is just capture those feelings, the duality of, I don't know-ality or whatever reality it is, of what it is to be in a relationship. You can hate someone and love them at the same time. Why not try to write about it? Why not try to communicate that? There can be parts that are very clear, but there are parts that are very fuzzy. Why not try to capture that in some way and still be true? Still be honest about it. Now in this album, of course the two of us are here all the time and she inspired a lot of the writing. You know, our relationship inspired a lot of the writing and very specifically the lyric, Did You Miss Me, is kind of a joke that we have. She would constantly be asking if I missed her when <laugh>, you know, we were just apart for five minutes or something. And that was… oh my God!, that's a perfect song, perfect lyric.
Robert Wood (46:04): You make a reference at one point to yourself as a stubborn donkey. And Les Donkees, of course is the name of your rock band that is featured in your 2014 release. So, what's the special attraction to the donkey?
Louie Fleck (46:20): I always liked those bands in the sixties that were named after animals that just always seemed really cool, but nobody seemed to name a band after the donkey. Real donkeys are just so beautiful, and the variations are spectacular. And, also the donkey is a beast of burden. The donkey is like the proletariat. And, and I love that about it. So, whenever I have an opportunity to put in a donkey reference, I do. And I was very lucky to come together with a group of people and have a band Les Donkees. That was yet another blessing.
Robert Wood (47:00): There are scholars right now who are writing on animals as class, like animals as in the framework of the working class.
Louie Fleck (47:09): It’s so obvious.
Robert Wood (47:10): That's really cool. Yeah. So another theme that you've mentioned in connection to this record is the war in Ukraine might seem completely unrelated to the theme we were just talking about with relationships, but it's not because your wife is actually from Uzbekistan, which was, uh, former Soviet Republic. So can you say a little bit about the place of Ukraine on the record?
Louie Fleck (47:33): I was working on the record and, and my friend Linley, who I mentioned earlier, came out of the woodwork. I hadn't spoken to him in a couple of years, and he said, oh, Louie, can you help me write the song? So, he sent me a track with just music, a kind of dance beat with chord changes. I figured it out and I had that lyric for Miss Me, in a very embryonic stage. I ended up writing a lyric for this music that he sent me. And that was when the war had broken out. And, it was all over the place. It was a situation which a character could exist in where they went away to the war and they wondered if they were missed. It was a question about the relationship.
(48:19): Was the relationship a good relationship now that I'm back? Did you miss me? And so I started playing around with that and I sent it to him and he said, “oh, I like the hook, but there's too much stuff about the war.” So I ended up writing something with less of those types of details, and then I decided that I wanted to record it myself. I redid it as a reggae song, and then I started to throw myself into the character even more and, well what is the situation and how could we find other meanings for Miss Me? Like, did you miss me? What does that mean? And I noticed that after the record was done and I was looking at all the lyrics, I was going, oh wow, I'm actually referring to war in a bunch of different places here. And that it, it, it does seem to be a recurring thing that I'm thinking about, whether it's the war of guns and ammunition and bombs, or whether it's the war of classism and economic war that seems so obviously happening here and now.
Robert Wood (49:25): Maybe also like the tyranny of the day-to-day that you tend to talk about a lot too.
Louie Fleck (49:30): Yeah. Well, everybody can relate to what it means. It's easy to understand what you're talking about when you talk about that.
Robert Wood (49:37): I want to pivot to talking about your voice for a second because you've expressed a bit of self-consciousness about your singing, and yet it's something that I think really contributes to the uniqueness of your sound, particularly in a reggae context because you know, there's already so much you're doing with this music that's kind of unexpected and I think your voice really lends a certain authenticity and approachability to the sound. How do you approach your voice and working with your voice and singing in the studio?
Louie Fleck (50:08): You're absolutely right. I'm totally insecure about my voice and it's been something that I've dealt with from the very beginning of trying to write music bands have broken up because of it. And I, for many years didn't do any singing because I felt so insecure about my voice. But I did have encouragement from friends that said, yeah, it is, it's, it's who you are, do who you are again. It was just that moment where I felt it was okay to write about whatever I felt like writing about was the same thing with the voice. It was, if I can get it in tune and enough and be authentic, then it's okay. And that's where I'm at. You know, I work hard on singing in tune, but I also hopefully am very sincere. And I know one thing that I've been told is that my phrasing is unique, which of course to me it's not unique at all because I can't see it.
(51:03): It's the invisible wall. It's kind of a problem solver. I want the lyric to scan correctly. I don't want to have the em-fa-sis on the wrong sill-ah-bel. I want the lyric to make sense. So hopefully that would explain some of the phrasing, because to me it seems like that's what's natural. When I've worked with other people to sing my melodies, sometimes they will say that my melodies are hard because they're, they're just not common, they're not typical. I have taken refuge in using harmony and looking for effects, and I'll use every trick in the book to process my vocals in order to make it sound weird or in tune or harmonized or anything at all. Nothing is sacred there.
Robert Wood (51:53): Yeah, I've noticed you, you harmonize with yourself, which makes sense in a lot of ways because you're pairing a vocal type that's like yours with yours, <laugh> in the most direct way possible.
Louie Fleck (52:06): And the miracle of modern technology makes it possible. <laugh>,
Robert Wood (52:11): I mean, and obviously, you know, there's a long history of of singers who have been told that they don't have traditional, traditionally great voices who have been some of the best musicians we have. So, do you have any, any models that you look to as any kind of inspiration there?
Louie Fleck (52:27): Oh yeah, I mean the fact that there are singers that have been criticized that that's the refuge of the insane, you know, <laugh>. I mean I, yeah, but what choice do I have? It's either do it or get someone else to do it. And during the pandemic, but also at other times, at a certain point… life is short, you might as well do it. I'm not hurting anybody, hopefully by singing <laugh>.
Robert Wood (52:55): Have you ever considered having someone else sing your songs?
Louie Fleck (52:58): Well, yeah, in fact, The Motives were other people singing mostly my songs. And also NYC Reggae Collective was an album of all my songs being sung by other people, part of the Reggae Jam. That was another thing that came out of the Reggae Jam. If people don't like my voice then maybe they'll give the second half of the record a chance because that is all of these dub mixes where I am playing around with the studio as an instrument and trying to get as trippy and as psychedelic as possible with the tracks that I am singing over. For me that's a joy to do at the end of a record. And I just hope people will listen to that and like it,
Robert Wood (53:44): And many of your other records have had that structure where the first half is, the regular (vocal) versions and the second half is instrumentals.
Louie Fleck (53:53): Right. I've done that on a lot of the records. I mean, just on a practical level, I've found situations where people can use the backup tracks for some project, even if my vocal version is not appropriate, that it is possible to use the music in either a commercial or a film or something like that. And that is really great when that happens.
Robert Wood (54:16): Well, in conclusion, what's next musically for Louie Fleck after we get this out?
Louie Fleck (54:23): I was thinking of doing a project, an instrumental project, like an album of all instrumentals. And since I have so much fun working with Travis and Doug, I was thinking of doing a record where we all wrote in a way together. So, I, I have a couple of ideas on how that could happen, but we'll have to see. The problem is, is once I write an instrumental, since I've been writing lyrics and ending up with songs as a result, it's kind of like, wow, if I can make a song out of it, it's not going to be an instrumental. I was thinking of playing not all reggae, like maybe still groove oriented music, but maybe with other grooves.
Robert Wood (55:06): Can't wait to hear it.
Louie Fleck (55:07): Well, well maybe you'll play on it <laugh>.
Robert Wood (55:11): I would love to.
Louie Fleck (55:12): Okay.
Robert Wood (55:13): Well, thanks so much Louie, for taking the time to talk about this record. Can't wait for it to come out. And best of luck in whatever your next project is.
Louie Fleck (55:22): Thank you for having me, <laugh>. All right, that's enough.