Chaka Khan

Chaka Khan

Chaka recorded two songs of mine, "A Woman in a Man's World" and "Sleep On It". I wrote them with my friend Andrew Kastner. It opened a lot of doors for me, mostly the door that made me realize how much more work I would have to do. I would have to learn to write consistently, become a better guitar player/musician, and improve my singing. I'm not sure how much people are aware of it, but every singer you love uses at one time or another, a vocal coach. If you didn't, you'd blow your voice out on the first night of your tour and have to cancel your next week of shows. Recording is the truth-teller. The audience last night was wound up, you were killing it, then you press the record button and suddenly under that glaring light, your intonation and performance may not be as great as you thought it was.

Speaking of singing, Chaka is amazing. As they say, she could sing the phone book and make you weep over it. Chaka has a recent NPR Tiny Desk concert and she is still tearing it up, as are her backing vocalists and band.

Everywhere I travel, I go rummaging through vinyl record shops. I recently found an album I wasn't aware of, by Arif Mardin called "Glass Onion."

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Arif was Chaka's producer on several of her great solo albums. He also was one of the  producers of Aretha Franklin's great albums, like "Young, Gifted and Black." Arif was one of the backbones of Atlantic Records. What a gentleman and genius talent. With grace and skill he commandeered Chaka's recording sessions. What a thrill and education it was for me, a twenty-something boy from Maine, to be in the studio with Chaka and Arif. Like boys who loved baseball cards, I read the back of album covers, and knew the backstory on every player in the room, Phil Upchurch, Hamish Stuart, Richard Tee, Anthony Jackson and more. As I said previously, I realized I had a lot of "woodshedding" to do.

Let's talk about record producers for a few minutes. My young man's fantasy was to have someone like Arif Mardin be my producer. He knew and worked with all the best musicians. There was an artist he produced beautifully, Danny O'Keefe ("Goodtime Charlie's Got the Blues") who was similar to me. Having worked with many producers the thing I came to realize is that you need to create your own vision and find a producer who can assist you in that. You don't want a producer to put his vision, his sound on you. There was a George Benson album produced by Quincy Jones. George felt that it turned out to be a Quincy album, and not a George Benson album. You don't want that. I have a lot of personal experience with my own projects, and many others I witnessed, in Los Angeles and New York, that were an unsuccessful match of artist and producer.

I recorded "Sleep On It" on my debut album on Columbia Records, Phyllis Hyman also recorded it, and it was recently used in a mattress commercial! As I've said before, like my children, the songs are no longer mine. They go walking down the street without me.