Exclusive Career Spanning Interview With Eagles’ Timothy B. Schmit.
Exclusive career spanning interview With Timothy B. Schmit who talks about his current album, Day By Day, the universally acclaimed songs he sang on for international artists and bands plus possible further Eagles activity and solo tour plans.
Interview by Paul Davies.
On the face of it, Timothy B. Schmit is a man in tune with his nature. He also strives to live in harmony with mother nature choosing to leave a careful and considered footprint wherever he goes. Our chat together follows the Eagles headlining BST Hyde Park show of which Schmit remarks: "It was really great. There was an ocean of people that was pretty fantastic." To judge him by the songs on his recent release, Day By Day, he appears to be at peace with himself and living in harmony with his surroundings at his home nestled in a rural area of outstanding beauty in Los Angeles County. A relaxed Timothy reveals the inspiration behind the title of his new record: "Well, I don't always like to title albums after songs, necessarily. I try and look for something that might encompass the whole thing. It just so happens that the phrase 'Day By Day' is in two songs. So, I thought it'll work. It's kind of that simple.” Recorded at Mooselodge, his Californian home studio, there's a warm and woozy vibe running through the expressive and diverse stylings of the dozen songs that make up his seventh solo album recording. These lucid, mellow, autobiographical, and essentially happy compositions define Schmit in a myriad of ways. This is explained in the lyrics to his album's opening song, Simple Man, where Schmit sings: "I'm no sinner man, though I make mistakes. Weaving in and out of touch and doing what it takes. To be lucid, warm, and happy whenever I can. It's no promise, but it's my loose plan." Seems like a cool credo to live by: "Well, as the song says, I try to strive for that. But it doesn't always work," Schmit wryly remarks with the air of a soul searching for an uncomplicated existence which, being in one of the continuing biggest bands of all time, must be a challenge. How did he find time to write the song? "Relative to me, who is very slow at this songwriting craft”, admits Schmit, "It was pretty smooth. Because as soon as I sort of latched on to the theme, which is how I'm looking at life, being older and all that, it went fairly smooth."
Photo: Dove Shore
This album has a Class A list of ‘West Coast’ associated musicians who dropped by, there was no remote recording allowed on this record, Schmit's Mooselodge home studio to lay down their inimitable musical characters to a smattering of songs across this excellent recording as Timothy opens: "There's Al Jardine's son, Matthew, who has done a lot of work with the Beach Boys and with Brian Wilson. Also, there's a guy named Chris Farmer, who's on two songs, who is in my touring band, and he did like ten years with the Beach Boys. Those two who are probably lesser-known and for Lindsey Buckingham, Jackson Browne and John Fogerty, the process was no different. I just got a hold of them and texted and emailed 'are you interested in hearing the song I might want you to work on if you're into it? and they all said 'yes'. And I sent these various songs to these people." Timothy emphasises the human interaction that made up the ensemble feel on Day By Day: "I don't do anything remotely. I don't like that. It takes all the fun out of it. It takes all the immediate back and forth out of the picture. I've called people in the past who wanted to do stuff, but they couldn't make it, so I didn't do it with them. I wanted people to come into the studio and interact. I want to interact with people. Everybody on the album came through the studio. My studio." This natural back-to-basics working relationship fires the imagination to wonder if there was a supergroup of musicians all playing together at any one time, but Schmit quickly scotches this flight of fancy: "Mostly, I can say it was all individual people like Jackson and John Fogerty. They had to come on different days, which was fine. On the song they sang which is called Grinding Stone - a song inspired by an ancient millstone left by the Chumash people on Timothy's protected property close to the Santa Monica hills - I had already put down all the parts, but I didn't like that it was all me: I didn't give it enough texture. There was too much of me in it, of course. So, that was at least a guide for them to hear what I wanted; it's straightforward," Schmit continues, "I knew what the part was so if they were getting something a little bit not quite right, we could do the back-and-forth thing. Can you try and sing this note instead of the one you're going for kind of thing?” Timothy admits that he couldn’t record everything at home: " I put some strings on the song called Tastes Like Candy. We went to Sunset Sound Studio right on Sunset Boulevard that's been there forever, that's produced a lot of well-known records, I went there to cut the strings, but other than that I used my studio," recalls Schmit with some wistfulness given his previous peripatetic career as a go-to vocalist who has appeared on a truckload of ‘West Coast’ records by international artists (about more of which later). Timothy's eyes light up as he explains the set-up of his Mooselodge Studio: "When I originally outfitted this sort of guesthouse building that I have, I outfitted it as a demo studio over twenty-five years ago, and I was gonna just write and make demos with drum machines that was just before computers were becoming dominant. Then I decided to upgrade it, get some stuff, and get the real thing going and make it more of a fully-fledged studio. I had the choice of going vintage or moving forward into what you call state-of-the-art. I had seen so many pictures of small digital consoles sitting on top of a vintage desk that I thought I'm going to move forward. So, yeah, it's a digital recording board, which is really a sophisticated mouse into Pro Tools, but there's no tape. Although, when we master, we put it on tape and then master it but there's a lot of vintage and analogue equipment there to go through when I'm recording." Timothy expertly explains the difference between the recording process of today compared to days of yore: "The biggest difference is the speed at which you can do things. The real audio heads will say that they like the warmth of tape, and I do, too, but I just don't worry about that. As a singer, for instance, when I said about speed, I used to sing on a lot of records and I would sing with maybe two other people or by myself and then do a take and then do it again, sometimes several times, and you always had a little rest period while the tape rewound. They don't have that anymore. They can just go boom and start again and sometimes I have to say, 'give me thirty seconds to get my oxygen back' and all that. Of course, there are all kinds of things you can do now that you can go too far with- there are a lot of records that purposely use too much Auto-Tune - but that's the effect that they want. A lot of pop records do that. These things to me should be used as tools and treated gently. It's important to get as many organic things into your record as possible and then if you need a little touch-up here, or there, you can use it as a tool but it's best not to depend on that stuff." Modern-day artists who lazily overuse this technology should heed the sagacious words and advice of someone with an in-demand pure and beautiful voice as Timothy B. Schmit who has developed his gift naturally.
Photo: Dove Shore
Like many artists, Schmit spent the hiatus time of the pandemic tapping into his creative juices to complete Day By Day. Although tracking began during breaks in the Eagles’ touring schedule, it is the remarkable result of this highly focused time as he tells: "Well, probably about a third of it, maybe a little more, was written when everybody was sequestered. There were no other distractions. You couldn't wonder 'where will I go out to dinner tonight'? My process is I don't sit down and go OK time to write a new album. I just try and write songs. I don't even turn on the studio, I use my studio as a private space. Me and my guitar. And I might do that for days and days or weeks and weeks and something develops, and I eventually have a song and I'll record it and then I do that process all over again. Sometimes I have two or three songs started and if one takes off quicker than the other, I'll pursue that. There's no big plan or concept. I just try and write good songs." Being his seventh solo album and the latest in an incredible run of recordings since 2009's Expando and 2016's Leap Of Faith, has being in the Eagles and rubbing elbows with living songwriting legends rubbed off and given Schmit extra confidence in his abilities as a songsmith: "I certainly have learned a lot from Don and Glenn, and others, but I don't think it's necessarily because I've been in the Eagles. My confidence comes from myself. Three albums ago, including this, I decided not to collaborate as a songwriter with anybody on my albums. I don't care how long it takes. It began on an album called Expando, I said I'm going to do this myself, no matter how long it takes, because I like the songs. I also wrote on my previous albums by myself for the most part. Because you don't have to answer to anybody. I write on an acoustic guitar, figure out a song, I record the guitar and get the lead vocal and that's how I do it." Timothy makes the creative process sound so simple and that's the beauty of his songwriting, all the hard work underneath is translated with an upfront cool grace as in the personal statement in the songs I Come Alive and Heartbeat: "My wife Jean is in a lot of my songs. I get a lot of inspiration from her. We've been together for many, many years, and we're still really tight and it's nice. I seem to always find a place for her in my songs. I mean, it's not like I'm even trying to, but I can go to that place and come up with something." Continuing this familial inspiration, Timothy's daughter also appears on the album: "My oldest daughter Jeddrah is a great singer. She's excellent with harmonies which thrills me. She sang one song with me, The Next Rainbow, and it was very satisfying and fun to have her come to sing. It's a bit of a family affair." Which reminds Timothy B. Schmit of the time, as a youngster, when he realised that he had a voice to give to the world via his love of music: "I knew when I was maybe twelve years old and just starting high school. My two friends, who were musically inclined, had been singing with another guy from school; they had been trying to put something together. It was folk music stuff playing on cheap guitars and trying to learn stuff. They invited me over to join them one afternoon and I remember singing harmony to a song when they started singing and they never went back to this guy again. I think that was the start of all this. Although singing to the radio all the time, that's pretty much how I learned how to sing." This early 'wow' moment led to Schmit being involved in his first group The New Breed who scored a local Californian hit with Green Eyed Woman: "That happened right out of high school, with the same folk people that I played with, we eventually added a drummer and we started playing around town. We went through the surf period, and we did a lot of different songs and wrote a little bit and one day we wrote this song together. Our manager knew a guy who could produce it, he was a DJ, and he took us to San Francisco, which we called the city in Sacramento, and we recorded and mixed Side A and Side B in one day and I eventually heard it on the radio." Then came an early taste of success as Timothy recalls: "It was number one in Sacramento, but it was also top twenty in San Francisco and a few other places. It was very thrilling, and I was like nineteen! We had a fan club and all this sort of hype around us. They didn't know we were still only making like one hundred bucks a night. It was a lot of fun."
Photo: Dove Shore
Timothy consolidated his music career when replacing country-rock pioneers Poco's bass guitarist Randy Meisner who joined the fledgling Eagles, a twist of fate that would repeat later in his career when Schmit was drafted in to fill in for the departing Meisner on the Eagles' 1977 tour in support of their humungous Hotel California album, "I had a mutual friend who introduced me to Richie Furay. I still lived in Sacramento, but she would go down to Los Angeles a lot and hang out with these people and she's the one who introduced me to Richie and Jim Messina. It was a little rough at first, but it eventually worked out for me." While holding down his gig in Poco, Schmit was in hot demand from fellow artists who wanted his soaring high register harmonies to fly on their recordings as he explains: "I never considered myself a session singer. Although, I did a lot of singing for people. I met Steely Dan's producer Gary Katz and I said if you ever need any help on your projects give me a call. I'd love to do it. And he took me up on it. And I would tell other people the same not knowing if anything would come about and a lot of people started calling. I think it was word of mouth after a while." Word of mouth travels wide and far down the years as Schmit uncovers the Steely Dan songs on which he has contributed his vocals: "Ricky Don't Lose That Number, probably half of the Pretzel Logic album, Night By Night and I sang on Aja, on Josie and Don't Take Me Alive. They were very perfection minded. Which suited me as I'll do it as many times as they want to please them." Amongst his plentiful CV of vocal contributions for other artists, Timothy also tracked vocals to Toto's 'yacht rock' anthem Africa. By sheer happenstance, one of his sessions has gone down in mysterious folklore with Queen's Freddie Mercury also lending vocals to Andrew Gold's '78 hit Never Let Her Slip Away as Schmit imparts: "I had no idea Freddie Mercury was on the same record. In fact, I couldn't even remember the song! I sang on a lot of things. So, wow, I'm on the same record as Freddie Mercury. I went to Wikipedia, and it appears I did sing but I did not meet him. I had no idea. I had forgotten the song title or even how it goes, and I had no idea that he put him on it as well." Back to the current day and his Day By Day record, are there any plans in the pipeline for Timothy to tour this album: "I want to but I'm still waiting to hear if there's any more activity this year with the Eagles which I should find out pretty soon. That takes priority in my life. I'll have to wait and see if that's happening. If it's not happening, then I can make some concrete plans. I want to but I don't know if I'm going to or not at least yet. When I do, I'll concentrate mostly on my last three albums because I think it's more me and then sprinkle it with a Poco song or two and my Eagles’ stuff."
Whether in solo flight or with his fellow Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame bandmates, Timothy B. Schmit is an immensely gifted, sweet-natured, and of voice, humble human being whose recorded life speaks beautifully for itself as his current release Day By Day once more proves. Furthermore, his putative solo setlist fires the imagination for gigs to come as does the possibility of ongoing Eagles activity be it night by night or day by day.
