INTERVIEW: Jules Shear
- Joe Silva
Despite the fact that his tunes have bolstered a few careers, or that he spearheaded a mini acoustic revolution by coming up with the concept for MTV's Unplugged program, Jules Shear's name may still only draw recognition from pop purists and breatheren songwriters. After a considerable gap between solo projects (his last LP, Healing Bones, was released in 1994), Jules has returned with an album of 15 original songs all recorded as duets called Between Us (High Street). Born partially out of the "Writers in the Round" shows he co-hosted with Richard Barone in New York City, these latest outings feature a similar vibe - sympathetic voices and song craftsmen joining forces to take material to new levels. Included among the many vocal talents contributing to this album are Ron Sexsmith, Paula Cole, Roseanne Cash, Angie Hart of Frente!, and the legendary Carole King. Between mixing sessions for a new James Brown tribute record that Shear was contributing a track to, Jules spoke to Consumable.
Consumable Online: With so many different people contributing in the studio for this record, have you come up with a way to take this on the road?
Jules Shear: Well we're a few weeks on a few days off. I'm going to do it with a singer named Jenifer Jackson who is a New York singer/songwriter. We sound really good together and she can cover a lot of the female duetists that are on the record. I think we're going to do it really stripped down and it'll just be me and her singing songs.
C.O.: Considering your lengthy history, doing solo work, being in a band, and acting as a songwriter for someone else, do you consider this project what you've been working towards? Is it an ideal situation for you?
J.S.: There are so many things I like to do that is was ideal at the time that I did it and it's ideal for me now to be going out and playing these songs, but I wasn't really thinking about this as the ultimate record that I could make in my life. I don't really do that. But for the time period when it was conceived, it seemed like the perfect thing. Then again, doing this James Brown thing for the last couple of days has been ideal as well. That's been fun too. But it's a different kind of fun having fifteen different vocalists traipse into the studio and you have to deal with every one on a different level. So that presented it's own set of challenges, which I totally enjoyed. We got amazingly good performances out of everybody that came in. We didn't have anyone where we thought 'Well, they really didn't do it good enough.' Everyone who showed up is on the record.
C.O.: Does this project have a similar resonance for you as the finales you used to do when you hosted Unplugged, where the guests from that particular show would get together and sing.
J.S.: It's definitely got some of that to it. That's something I enjoyed doing. Because when you're not in a band, or especially if you live in someplace like Woodstock and you're not going out and socializing like in New York City for instance, then I tend to know people but we don't get to hang out. And I love that sort of camaraderie aspect of it all and I tried to do that on Unplugged. I love to get people to sing and play together, but it was kind of like pulling teeth sometimes on Unplugged. Some people are just inclined to do it and be more outgoing and other people are not used to it at all. Especially when it's a live situation in front of a huge MTV audience, they were loath to put themselves up to that for fear that it would not look good, so we had that problem a lot. On the record it was easier because you're in a more controlled situation. You can do more to make people feel comfortable. And I've always been attracted to singing with other people. I grew up singing with my brothers and I miss that sometimes, not being in a band.
C.O.: Speaking of working alone, I didn't know that Todd Rundgren had produced your first solo record.
J.S.: I love Todd. He's a really great guy. As far as his demeanor goes, maybe it's not my favorite demeanor as far as a producer goes. He cares a lot about the things he cares about, and the things he doesn't really care about, he doesn't care about at all. Now I tend to be a little like that myself and that's fine for me as an artist because I'll have a producer to look after things. But when your producer is like that it can be a little unnerving. There were many times when I would sing a vocal and he would say That's fine.' and I wouldn't think it was good enough. And I was really used to the opposite situation with a producer. I felt like he was settling a lot of times. But the plus side was that we liked a lot of the same music and as people we got along really great and still do when we see each other. I don't think we're all that compatible as an artist/producer combination, but at the time it seemed like an excellent idea.
C.O.: Now as a producer, was it kind of tricky to coax certain things out of people performance-wise for this new album?
J.S.: Yeah, for some people. Some people just come in and they do it and they know it's right and it turns out better than you imagined it was going to sound. When that happens, you take it as a gift. Other times, people were just unprepared. Like the same people who never did their homework in high school are still doing that to this very day out in the real world. They'll show up and just not know the song or think they knew because they went through it a few times on the tape. But when it comes down to hearing us sing together on tape, you just know it's not there. Then you have to get down and get it any way you can.
C.O.: Were there any tricks you used to get people on track quicker?
J.S.: If we had to do them separately, I would just have them come and sit with me in the control room just because it would make people feel like it was a more intimate setting, which is what I wanted for the record anyhow. Just talking to people about the songs (was another way), because generally they would just hear a demo of me singing both parts of the song with my part on far left and their part on far right. So even if it was like a female, I would sing the guest part in falsetto. That was all they had when they came in, so sometimes it was good just to sit down and go Here's where it's coming from and yes I really meant it to be like that.' Sometime you have to discern from people whether they're just singing it differently because they think it should just be different or whether they just remember it that way and they don't know they're doing it a different way. And in 90% of the cases, they thought it went that way and not that they were trying to improve it. A person like Carole King could make up something, change it, and actually improve it.
C.O.: So generally it went fairly smoothly.
J.S.: It went unbelievable smoothly. One of the things we talked about when we were first doing this is Is this going to be a nightmare working with people who are unable to sing the parts or can't sing the parts?' Doing a duets album is really opening up a can of worms, particularly if it's a whole bunch of songs that nobody's ever heard before. So it's not like doing classic songs with new arrangements, these are songs that when people hear these duets it's going to be their first exposure to that song. They're going to think that this is the template, this is the way this song was written to go, so I wanted to get it right first time around.
C.O.: Was there anyone you tried to get that wasn't available?
J.S.: There was one person we tried to get whose record company would not allow them to do the record and that was the only time. That was another thing that people told us when we started to do the record, was that 'You're never going to get permission from people to do this.' Sometimes it took a little bit of talking through administrative people to get them on the record, but only once did an attorney try and get in the way of the whole process and say that their artist couldn't do it. And that was unfortunate because it was with someone who I'd sung the song with live, but in the end that was the one Margo Timmins sang and she did a fantastic job and it's hard to figure that song sung by anybody else at this point.
C.O.: Were there any songs that didn't make it on to the album that were a little more uptempo or pop-ish?
J.S.: No. Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow all the way up to almost mid-tempo. I just didn't want to make one of those records (that was all over the place). With Todd, he would listen to thirty songs I wrote and say Let's do a rock one, let's do a slow one, let's make this one psychedelic.' He had kind of a one-of-each' approach to do an album. On this record I didn't want that. If you put this record on at the beginning and played it all the way through...it was kind of a late night record where you could put it on and not get jarred half-way through. I wanted it to be all cut from one cloth and that was the way I approached it in the writing and we took it that way through the whole production process.
C.O.: So where do you think you stand industry-wise at this point in your career?
J.S.: You know, I try to create my own reality as far as where I stand. I try to bring the industry into my own reality, rather than me going to theirs. If I was going to do that I wouldn't be doing the music I do. I wouldn't be doing anything I do. I would be paralyzed basically. And so the only thing you can really do is create the climate yourself rather than figure yourself into one that already exists.
C.O.: Is there anyone that you've wanted to write for and haven't been able to get a hold of?
J.S.: No. I don't really go out looking for that kind of thing. Things kind of happen organically (with me).
C.O.: Well was there anything particularly fun or memorable that happened during this record that you'll remember?
J.S.: Angie (Hart) brought her mother with her (laughs)! After she left, we kept on saying She brought her mother with her!' Her mother was really nice but that was pretty unusual!!
