Tag: Jackie Greene

Mixtape: Jackie Greene & Band’s Soul and Funk

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This is a playlist about the new band’s favorite soul and funk music at the moment. We’re a diverse group of musicians with different tastes and backgrounds, and these are genres we all like and listen to together while rehearsing and recording.

Jackie Greene (Lead):

Sly & the Family Stone – “You Can Make It If You Try”
Who doesn’t love Sly? This is the funkiest circus I’ve ever heard.

Lee Dorsey – “Neighbor’s Daughter”
Sort of an obscure record, The New Lee Dorsey has a bunch of Allen Toussaint songs and all of them are awesome, but I always really liked this one.

Bill Withers – “Ruby Lee”
One of the baddest, rawest grooves ever. The album +’Justments is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Ben Rubin (Bass):

Marvin Gaye – “Got to Give It Up (Pt. 1)”
I love this song because the pocket is so deep and sparse and Marvin lays on top so sweet (yes I meant that figuratively and literally).

Prince – “Sign ‘O’ the Times”
I love this song, because to me it represents some of Prince’s best work. When the song came out, it was so ahead of the times in terms of lyricism AND production.

Megan Coleman (Percussion):

Aretha Franklin – “Day Dreaming”
The groove and musicality of this song legit brings tears to my eyes. Also, I’m a sucker for a good ole fashioned love song.

Michael Jackson – “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”
I mean…how beautiful is he in this music video? This was one of the first songs I fell in love with as a child and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

Jon “Smoke” Lucas (Drummer):

D’Angelo – “Playa Playa”
This is the intro to the era that captured my soul at 12 years of age. The sound, feel, and performance of this record is priceless! All-time favorite of mine…

Nathan Dale (Guitar):

Otis Redding – “Ole Man Trouble”
I wore out both sides of my The Dock of the Bay cassette during the summer of ’92. “Ole Man Trouble” was the last song before the auto-reverse tape deck flipped back to side 1. The song hooked me every time. There is some kind of magic happening between Cropper’s guitar parts and Otis’s painful vocal delivery. Otis opened the door to soul music for me.

Prince – “Sign ‘O’ the Times”
Prince’s brew of pop craftsmanship is something I was never embarrassed to admit I loved. His blend of funk, soul, blues, and R&B along with the addictive hooks is a perfect kind of music to me. The genius of his artistry is captured brilliantly in “Sign ‘O’ the Times.” Its sparse musical approach keeps the funk but leaves room for the lyric’s heavy topics of the 1980s.

Alex Kettler (guitar tech)

Lettuce – “Phyllis”
It’s a simple groove that opens up to a plethora of synths and horns. The song keeps progressing while always lightly grasping the main line until it goes full-circle.

Photo credit: Michael Weintrob. Pictured front: Jackie Greene; Back row (L-R): Nathan Dale (guitar), Jon “Smoke” Lucas (drums), Shannon Sanders (musical director, organs), Megan Coleman (percussion), Ben Rubin (bass).

‘Back to Birth’

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On this Steve Berlin-produced longplayer, Jackie Greene adeptly inhabits the same neighborhood of fashionable yet forthright pop and roll that was built 40 years ago by Andrew Gold and Stephen Bishop and has been regularly reinhabited by the likes of Matt Nathanson and Howie Day.

Greene’s somewhat more soulful, though — more a mix of Daryl Hall with Amos Lee — and that adds considerable strength to tunes like the opener, “Silver Lining.” Southern Cali oohs-and-aahs anchor the song’s semi-funky harp as well as its Hall and Oates hand-me-down groove, as Greene bids goodbye to Bowling Green. “Now I Can See for Miles” is a head bopper and toe tapper that rings with the same sunny ocean shimmer as Robbie Dupree did when he stole away. “A Face Among the Crowd” is a pretty ballad, albeit with some platitude-packed poetry, while “Light Up Your Window” settles into a nice backbeat. “Trust Somebody” draws on the Philly soul ballad with considerable strength, while “Motorhome,” one of the rootsiest songs of the set, takes to the road with an easy attitude. One of the most beautiful songs on the record, his rendition of “Hallelujah,” features Greene singing softly in his upper register to start and then breaking into the full-on gospel clap and praise at the finish. He gets the blues on “Where the Downhearted Go” — a touch of Memphis contained therein — then balances the ballad against the beach on the ebb and tide of “You Can’t Have Bad Luck All the Time.”

Though the words sometimes hang on the precipice of prosaic — and the band members seems a little gentile about their intentions at times — this is a nice record that mixes well with many of the aforementioned musos. If he’s half as good live as Amos Lee, this’ll be a fun record to hear in concert.

 

WATCH: D’Addario Presents Guitar Power Acoustic with Sean Watkins and Jackie Greene

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Artist: Sean Watkins
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Album: What to Fear
Series: D'Addario's Guitar Power Acoustic

In Their Words: "It's fun to sit down and talk shop with a fellow musician. I had a great time chatting with Jackie. We covered a lot of ground in this video. It's great that the folks at D'Addario are getting musicians together to talk about the stuff that normally is only talked about backstage, but stuff that a lot of people would find really interesting, and presenting it in such a cool way." — Sean Watkins

LISTEN: Jackie Greene, ‘Motorhome’

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On his upcoming Yep Roc Records debut, Back to Birth, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Jackie Greene gets back to, well, basics. He strips away pretense and focuses on the songs as a cycle, of sorts, that traces and tracks life as a circular experience rather than a linear one. It's his seventh solo album in the past 15 years, with his last one, Till the Light Comes, dropping in 2010.

"['Motorhome'] was a song I wrote for Levon Helm after the first time I met him some years ago,” Greene says. “Levon was such a hero of mine. I imagined myself driving through the Southeast in a cool vintage Airstream — stopping where I wanted, playing banjo and mandolin at night, sipping Coca-Cola and hanging out with my dog, Charlie. That kind of freedom is intoxicating, so I put it into a song. For some reason, I imagined that might have been the kind of thing Levon would've done in his younger years."

Speaking of hitting the road, Greene is on tour for the majority of the summer. Take a look at his awesome road trip playlist on Spotify, and view his upcoming tour dates right here. Over the weekend, Greene told fans via Facebook that he was quitting the supergroup Trigger Hippy, though the departure is amicable. We wish him the best of luck on all his solo endeavors.

Back to Birth hits the street on August 21 via Yep Roc Records.

Photo by York Wilson.