I’ve been listening to singer/songwriter/guitarist/actor/all-around great guy James Lee Stanley since 1988, when his Freelance Human Being album knocked me out. I believe he’s one of the most talented songwriters around, have become friends with him, and neither he nor I don’t know why he isn’t recognized along with the all-time greats. We’re not the only ones who think so – just read the reviews he’s garnered over the course of six decades of performing, and listen to some of his more than 35 albums.
His latest, The Day Today, offers 17 songs that mix poignant observations about live, love, and living in, well, today’s world, laced with James’s wry sense of humor. James Lee Stanley played most of the instruments on the album, with the help of some very able friends, and
James wrote most of the songs (with co-writers on a few of them), and arranged, performed, produced, recorded, and engineered The Day Today. The production is lush at times, sparse in other spots, with gorgeously layered, masterfully-played acoustic and electric guitars, background vocals, and other instruments, and some very excellent electric bass playing.
I caught up with James on the eve of his embarking on a series of performances. At 78, he shows no signs of slowing down.
Frank Doris: I’ll ask the obvious rookie interviewer question: why is the CD called The Day Today?
James Lee Stanley: I like the three-word phrase, “the day today.” And then I've written so many songs that are addressing the current political situation that I figured it was actually the day today I was talking about.
FD: You played most of the instruments and did all the recording, but also had some great-sounding guest musicians.
JLS: I played all the acoustic guitars, except on the very first cut, “Wake the Flock Up,” where Lawrence Juber [a brilliant musician who played in Paul McCartney’s Wings and has had quite a solo career – Ed.] played some electric guitar, and then he said, “you want some acoustic guitar?” And I said, “sure!” I'm playing some of the bass. I did all the drum programming. I'm playing any keyboards that are on there. I think I did all the vocals. And I hired Chad Watson, who's my favorite bass player in the world. He played bass on 14 of the cuts.
James Lee Stanley, The Day Today, album cover.
FD: The bass playing really stands out on this record. I mean, from 10 seconds on, it’s like, “wow, listen to that bass. Who's playing that?”
JLS: Chad Watson. He's magnificent. He's played with Delaney and Bonnie, with Janis Ian, with everybody, man. And he’s one of my dear friends.
FD: Let’s talk about the songs.
JLS: I co-wrote “Hard Lesson to Learn” with a friend of mine who died before the record came out. But I did burn him a copy of the record and got it over to him in hospice, so he got to hear [it] before he died.
FD: Well, we're all getting older, and you certainly address that, and then there’s the political aspects of some of the songs, but you approach things artfully and not hit people over the head.
JLS: I'm glad you brought that up, because my feeling is that if you write a harsh protest song, the only people that are going to listen to it are people who already believe [what you’re saying]. So, what's the point? What I tried to do was to write songs that were provocative and not accusatory, [that express] what I think. What do you think I see happening [in the world]? Does this [situation] work for you? Like in the Ukraine?
FD: There's definitely an undercurrent of mortality and getting older and appreciating what you have in these songs. You survived throat cancer a few years ago, so this might be a ridiculous question, but has your songwriting outlook changed over the decades?
JLS: Yeah. You definitely can't get around that, particularly when friends of yours are dying all around you. I'm 78, Frank, so all of my friends are roughly my age, and many of them are younger and have passed, and some are older. So yeah, I'm constantly reminded of that. But in terms of my attitude, when I had the throat cancer, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be back a hundred percent. I never believed anything else. And in the hospital, the nurses said I was the lowest-maintenance patient they'd ever had, because I thought nurses are magnificent. I tried to make as little work for them as possible, and I just planned to get well.
And then 18 months later, I fell off the roof and broke my back. Did you hear about that?
FD: No!
JLS: I broke nine ribs, two vertebrae, and had a concussion, and they had to fly me out in a helicopter. They put a 12-inch titanium rod in my back. And I did a concert two weeks later in a back brace.
FD: Oh my god.
JLS: When I had the cancer they said I wouldn't sing for a year. I did a concert less than two months later.
FD: Well, I have to say, your voice sounds terrific. You'd never know. Geek question: what kind of mic did you use to record your voice? On the album, you really sound so present and upfront and clear, and I had to remind myself that you had the surgery.
JLS: I've got a pretty good mic locker, but the two mics I mostly use mostly are the AKG 414 and the Dachman Audio [DA87 model]. It's supposed to be the closest thing to a [Neumann] U87 that isn't a U87. I just didn't want to spend five grand on a mic.
FD: Did you deliberately think, I want to make an album that has a really full production, as opposed to say just you and your guitar? Or did it kind of evolve that way?
JLS: I did whatever I thought would serve the song. But also, Frank, I started [working on the album] when I did a concert on a Thursday in March [2020]. I came home Friday and it was lockdown. And so I spent the next two years at home. So, I wrote and recorded all these songs. Some of them I recorded three different times and at different tempos and in different keys.
Do you know Gregory Corso’s work?
FD: No.
JLS: He was a beat poet from San Francisco in the Fifties and Sixties, and he liked to combine words that didn't normally combine and use them in his poems. An example of his poetry would be like “Christmas teeth,” where he just takes two words that shouldn't go together, and he puts ’em together. And so, I had been messing around with that, and I had a long list of about 30 things that were all just nonsensical combinations. I looked at them, and that's where I got that [line about] “carrot skirts waving in the breeze.” “There's a window in the clouds.” Those are all just little phrases are strung together.
FD: Some of the songs are, well, I don't want to just call them love songs, but the more personal songs…
JLS: They are love songs. I mean, yeah.
FD: Let’s talk about the opening song, “Wake the Flock Up.” You have that combination of humor, social commentary, and wordplay. You say that everyone's connected, but everyone's alone, and they take no blame and there aren't any rules. I mean, what a perfect description of seeing people glued to their phones…
JLS: Absolutely. Think about Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Everybody that was anybody in art was there, all the impressionist painters were there, all the musicians were there. Debussy. They were all there at the same time. So there was this incredible confluence of genius, and I think that we had that again in the Sixties with music where the West Coast became this mecca for all these incredible musicians I know. And the internet completely [changed that]. It's a cyber diaspora [now], you know what I mean? Instead of being connected in a confluence, everybody's by themselves somewhere.
FD: Good way to put it. Well, I'm 69, so I grew up during the Sixties, and I really feel like we lived through a great time, we were very lucky.
JLS: Are you kidding? [Said as emphatic agreement]
FD: “The Best We Can” is a quintessential “James Lee Stanley” song. Those beautiful chords that you play with voicings that don't sound like anybody else.
JLS: It's kind of a condemnation of our culture when I go, “we do the best we can,” implying that this sh*t storm we're living in is the best we can do.
But I also wanted to weave in [the idea]…I read a thing about honeybees doing this little flying dance in front of the hive to tell the other bees where the flowers are. And I thought that was beautiful. And I wake up every morning, I live on top of a mountain, to all the birds singing, greeting the day. And then I thought I would weave in a little bit of mythology with the idea that there's some golden spider in the sky. I wanted to go from the mundane to the sublime.
FD: “Cold Ukrainian Night”…I could almost see that becoming a classic.
JLS: It sure feels like an anthem.
FD: “Hearts in Amber.” That's one of my favorites.
JLS: I love that song. I love that song.
FD: The ambiguity of it. Is she chained or is she free? Is she trapped in her own feelings? And then you shift from saying she is trapped in amber to we are trapped in amber.
JLS: [It’s the] fact that we all hide our hearts. We try to look like, yeah, we're here and available, but in fact all of us have a protective shield around ourselves.
FD: “Time and the River,” when you say there's no slowing either one down…and the less time you have, the faster it seems to go.
JLS: It was eternity from June 12th when school was out until September after Labor Day. A canyon of eternity stretched in front of you all summer long. I know. And now summer goes by while you get up and go to the bathroom and take a shower.
I wrote that song as a gift to my in-laws for their 50th wedding anniversary.
FD: The song “Mobius Trip.” It feels to me like it's about somebody in particular. They left Las Vegas and wound up coming back to the edge of the city.
JLS: Well, certainly could be anybody, but it was inspired by a friend of mine who just couldn't let go of the gambling thing. To me, gambling is not even the least bit alluring. Here’s my perception of gambling: okay, I have this money. I'm going to give it to you, and there's a slight chance you will give it back to me. Just look at those hotels, and decide what your odds of winning are.
FD: “Too Much to Dream” is a tragic song about substance abuse. I don't know if it's autobiographical.
JLS: Yeah, it's about an alcoholic friend of mine.
FD: I have someone close to me who lied to themselves about it and after a while you just get tired of the lies.
JLS: When I first wrote it, [the line was], “I had too much to drink,” and I thought, that's too clumsy. So that's when I changed “drink” to “dream.” What they're doing is they're hiding from reality in their own little fantasy thing there. When they're drinking, they're blocking out reality.
FD: “For the Last Time” sounds like it could have been a 1960s girl group hit for somebody like Dusty Springfield.
JLS: That's so funny. You know why I wrote it? That's an older song that I wrote for Peter Tork [formerly of the Monkees – Ed.] When Peter Tork was alive, the Monkees were going to do their last album. And he said, do you have any songs? I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. And then I carefully wrote a song! I wrote that one for the Monkees in the hopes that they would record it, but they didn't.
FD: Well, just a couple more questions. In the song, “How Many Days, How Many Hours,” you say the line, “how could you turn and go without even goodbye”…and then it ends on this unresolved chord and it's a little disquieting.
JLS: That was obviously on purpose because [the relationship ended and] it was unresolved.
FD: “Tumblin’ Down These Stairs.” Boy, you like major sevenths as much as I do. It's just such a beautiful chord.
JLS: Yeah, I like rich chords. I like sevenths. I like ninths. I like elevenths. You want to hear a funny little thing about major seventh chords? There was a guy named Jeffrey Comanor who [once] came to me and said, “what's that chord you're playing, man?” And I said, “oh, that's a major seventh, an F major seventh. You play an F [chord] and then just leave the high E open and you get this richer tone” He said, “oh, man, that's so beautiful.” So, he literally went home and wrote, “We'll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again,” which is all major seventh chords, that John Ford Coley recorded and [which] made him a million bucks.
FD: Did you actually fall down the stairs?
JLS: it was after I fell off the roof. I was lying in bed, and I said “I should be rolling down the highway instead of tumbling down these stairs.” I think I said it out loud, and I thought, that's kind of a song you could do.
FD: The Day Today closes with a kind of bluesy song, “Brick at a Time.”
JLS: It’s just a simple song, and I thought I'd like to end the album with one of those things. So, I [recorded it], and then Corky Siegel, a harmonica player genius [who came to prominence in the 1960s with the Siegel-Schwall Band – Ed.] contacted me and said, “I put some harmonica on that Brooklyn Bridge tune,” which actually was a poem. I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge back into Manhattan with my friend Patty. And I said to her, “look at that. It's incredible. This entire city was built one brick at a time.” And I thought, “ooh, that's a good phrase.”
FD: And it has the phrase, “we built this city,” which is the title of the Starship song that people put on their lists of the worst songs of all time. Now you have it in a good song! On the other hand, I can’t look down on people who manage to have success in the music business.
JLS: Anybody that makes it in this business deserves it, man.
FD: I agree.
JLS: Because it's not easy. You've got to bust your ass to make it, and you have to want it more than anything. And I think that actually is an insight into my particular place in the hierarchy, because I've always wanted to just get better at what I did. I still practice. I still take lessons. I'm always trying to get better, and that's really all I’ve cared about.
I did naively assume that once you got good enough, you just become famous. And then once I got into the business I realized, no, in fact, you have to want it. You have to go after stardom. You have to want that. And I must admit that I never wanted that. Plus, to tell you the truth, I always felt like a star. I never needed any corroboration to feel that way.
We all have an artistic signature. Sometimes it takes longer to find it. When I write something, it sounds like I wrote it. When I play the guitar, it sounds like me playing the guitar. And that's when I thought, well, I guess I'm an artist. I sound like me. I don't sound like anybody else.
The joy is in the doing it. Everything else is gravy.
All images courtesy of James Lee Stanley.
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