THE INTERVIEW: REVISITING SINGER/SONGWRITER BUD BUCKLEY (PART 2 OF 3)!

Bud In Concert at The Sarasota Arts Fest!
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MM: That's great and Kathy sounds like a sweet person. The music field is crowded. Major labels have redefined themselves to the point where major artists like Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell are using ingenious marketing avenues like Starbucks Coffee stores to market and sell their CD's. Fellow blogger David M. Bailey tours worldwide, and Deni is well known in New York. Where is the niche for Bud Buckley?

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BB: I've always felt more comfortable trying to carve out a niche with a one day commute. The Internet lets me expand well beyond that to some degree. I still need more hours or a full time aide to expand my numbers. I work hard at selling CD's on the web through CDBaby, iTunes, Snocap and others.The financial reality of putting out an album of this high quality, though, dictates that I stretch out a bit and try to perform in bigger venues a bit further away. So I now appear on world wide web radio. "Let Me Go" is on several compilation disks. "Crowded Memory" can be heard with my ad card showing on a public service ad in California. I keep trying for more stuff like this. I guess I'll just ride it out to where ever it goes.

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MM: I want to talk for a moment about two developments that I've witnessed with excitement, your new studio and now your new label is coming together. Please tell us about this direction and how does it fit together with your overall plan as a musician?

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BB: My studio is just a demo studio and a writing tool for me. And I'm struggling with software upgrades that I don't even have time to deal with because this is my busy season. It will see more work after my busy season. My label, BuBu Records, a division of Budley Music publishing is a way for me to control my own music when I license it to other users. The long range reality of the music business is that you have more opportunity to earn with your songs' publishing than you do with your actual recording. The business is changing so rapidly that I'm just trying to position myself to be flexible. Signing with a label steals your flexibility. And your money. Not to mention your self respect.

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MM: Your new CD upon first listen clearly spoke to me as a more cohesive, intimate project than the first? Your love of life, Cathy and your dedication to your students is here but there's more delving into our day to day emotional lives that we all share in common. What are your views on the emotional timbre of this CD? Would you characterize it as I have?

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BB: It's true that the old themes of my devotion to Cathy and to my kids (both genetic and "adopted" through teaching them) run through out this collection of songs. My collaborations with one of those former students, Kathy Feeney, took me into different territory. "Keeping Secrets" was her breakup song. Long story on how that came to be. I took her to the studio the day I did the vocal and sat her on a stool within my sight. I said, "Kathy, I haven't been dumped since 1983. Sit there and look like a girl who's just been dumped." I needed that to reach that emotional level. "Meltdown", was a angry diatribe by my friend and guitar student James Braha after a stock partnership deal went very sour. He had it as a kind of ballad. I gave it a riff and sped it up. Reworked some lyrics. Dumped a bridge. Helen, of course, had a fair amount of influence in this song as well. James was delighted. "Let Me Go" is really from another person's point of view. I don't like to advertise the particulars because it's a hot button issue for some folks. I'll just say it's about a person who is dying. It's not a traditional breakup scenario.

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MM: Okay. The importance of time and what we do with it reaches out to me in "Elevator". Tell us about this focus?

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BB: I'm glad that comes through for you. The whole album deals with time in one way or another. It was Mark Zampella's (former producer and designer of this cover) idea to find a unifying theme so I chose all my songs that dealt with time. I was surprised so many turned out like that. I had to allude to it on the album cover to help people get it. I've been fascinated by quantum physics very much from a layman's point of view. Kathy Feeney was a physics major during a lot of this period and shares many of my outlooks. She also digs old buildings and that's how "Keeping Secrets" got started., as a birthday poem to me about a decaying church she saw. When we sat down to write it as a lyric, it took an entirely different direction as I was reading her mind about her recent breakup before she even told me about it.

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MM: I think your Granddaughter Stella, has to be the youngest person on my Blogroll! And your entire being, your voice changes in "I Still Remember (How That Feels)." How did you come to write this song? Describe how it came together?

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BB: This is a deeply personal song, really, about my daughter, Bree, not about Stella. Stella's song will come when we've had a longer history. I think the chorus speaks for itself. I'll leave the rest open to interpretation.

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MM: While we're on the material, please talk about "Tattoo" and "Elevator" because they have the tendency to tickle and inspire with their hooks. Do I detect a more relaxed sense of humor here?

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BB: Miss Feeney's "Elevator" came to her while she was sitting in her college lobby watching the lifts and the drama. I took a little license with that and did a little mind reading. We don't often get to write within a thousand miles of each other. So mind reading is essential. She was in the studio for a minor rewrite. Often she writes me free verse and always says, "Do whatever you want with this." I have a folder of such gems in need of development. When I do this one live I slide up and down the neck of the guitar in the chorus like an elevator. But we decided to let Deni provide soaring effects when we got it in the studio.

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The idea for "Tattoo" came about during the recording of my first CD with Mark Zampella. We were totally out of studio time and I was out of money and up against a self imposed deadline. These are conditions under which one should never attempt to record anything good. I was bummed about a song or two and Mark consoled me by saying, "It's like these tattoos. When people ask if I regret them I tell them, 'No' because they represent who I was at that place in time." So my last CD is just that. When I started to write that as a lyric, it just took a turn on it's own and wrote itself about a relationship. Mine, of course. I wrote the opening bars of music while at the beach when we had a condo there. They just happened. Helen changed the key for me to let me sing it in a more laid back, unstrained manner. I made her play it because that samba thing she does is so cool and I didn't want to burn up expensive studio time learning it in a fingering I had never played before. Scott put in the stand up base and piano and it just grew on it's own into what it is. It's who I was at that place in time. And then we did "Underground" and I was somebody else.

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We Conclude Our Visit with Bud Buckley Tomorrow!
Note: To order Bud's CD go to: www.budbuckley.com