It’s been what, a month, since Tampa last saw David Ryan Harris?
Fans not paying attention may have missed the Los Angeles songwriter as part of the band John Mayer brought to Amalie Arena in August, but they’ll get a chance to see Harris — touring in support of a new album, Songs For Other People — front and center at this solo listening room gig powered by an electric guitar and Harris’ one-of-a-kind voice and gift for melody.
Harris has visited the area with another band in the past, but you'd have to be an old head to remember the time Follow For Now played St. Pete.
"Is Jannus Landing still there?," Harris asked CL while driving through the hills of Kentucky. "That's the last place we played. I can tell you the date, I think. It was April 23rd, 1992. Maybe it was the 22nd."
Harris, 49, remembers the date exactly for two reasons. First because his son was born days after and second because the band was opening for Pearl Jam.
"I got a call the morning after the show that my wife was in labor and that I had to leave the tour," he explained. "They were on the Ten album still playing places like Jannus Landing, so they weren't quite the band we know today."
Harris — on break from the John Mayer tour and writing songs for a follow up to Songs For Other People — arrives in Ybor City on October 3 where he'll play a solo electric set at The Attic at Rock Brothers Brewing.
Read our Q&A and listen to the complete album below. More information on the show is available at local.cltampa.com.
Are you driving right now?
Yeah driving from Nashville through the hills of Kentucky.
I know the band kind of split before anything big could happen, but do you remember if Follow for Now ever made it down to Tampa for shows?
Yup. Is Jannus Landing still there?
Yeah it's called Jannus Live now.
That's the last place we played. I can tell you the date, I think. It was April 23rd, 1992.
And were you headlining?
No, we were touring with Pearl Jam.
Touring with Pearl Jam. That is awesome.
Maybe it was the 22nd. I know the date because My son was born on the 24th. That was our last date with them. I got a call the morning after the show that my wife was in labor and that I had to leave the tour.
At least you got a few shows in.
Yeah, yeah. We got a few in. It was great. They were on the Ten album still playing places like Jannus Landing, so they weren't quite the band we know today.
That's cool, so your son is in his 20s now, and you mentioned that you have a little kid who just started walking right?
Yes.
How many kids do you have?
I have a five. I have three older boys; 23, 25 and 21. And I have 6 and 1 now.
You’ve talked about Brendan O’Brien being a big family guy. I know that you're obviously busy with the tour with John and your own stuff. What’s that time over the holidays gonna be like for you?
We do a sort of Friendsgiving thing in Los Angeles with all the orphans. We don't really have any family out there, so we love hosting friends that don't have family out there and it's become a really fun thing to do. Really reflective on our time, and for Christmas we come back to Georgia. My wife's family is up in Gainesville just north of Atlanta, so we spend time with her family and my family which is sort of in Atlanta proper. We bounce between the two.
I like talking to people from L.A. because they always talk about the two different sides. The side that's glitz and hard to cope with, but people who live in L.A. say they wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
Yeah, it's definitely a magical city, and when people say they hate it I know exactly why. I think more than most cities L.A. is, I don't know, 90-percent dependent upon who you're hanging out with. The city has things about it that are great, but it's all dependent on who you experience it with, I think. So if you get a bad crew, then you hate L.A.
Speaking of people you hangout with. You write a lot of songs with people. Your sweet love songs are different from the rest in that they feel so pure without being cheesy. It’s been like that for your whole career. Where did you start to learn what affection and love is?
Uh, I guess my mom planted the seeds, but I don't think they really bloomed until after my first marriage, uh, just in terms of me seeing the concept could actually be applied to real life. I think, you think that forever love, or at least I did, you feel like that sort of stuff is just for movies. You see so many people that have love mixed with a little infatuation and lust in the begining of their relationships and then the love doesn't come, but you just kind of go, "Well I guess we're doing this. We said we're gonna do this, so I guess this is what we're doing." So a lot of my early relationships, I just kind of stayed in that place thinking that the early spark was the actual playing, but it's not.
So it took until my first marriage actually fell apart, and then I was sober for, like, three-and-a-half years just being more reflective. You know, going through meetings and therapy and just really sort of started to uncover the seeds that my mom really planted about being compassionate, taking stock in the things around you, being grateful and, you know all of those things. They were there all along, but they were being covered by 21-year-old behavior.
The sheen that touring with Pearl Jam can bring to a young person's life.
Yes, absolutely.
Real quick, I know you like to play in the full band dynamic, and I'm assuming this Ybor City show is gonna be a full band. If so, would you mind telling me who is playing with you on this run?
Actually is not. It's just me, solo electric.
So is it still gonna have a lot of the dynamics you bring to the full set, a lot of loud and soft?
I think, I tend to be pretty dynamic. I was doing solo acoustic for a while, which I still really love all of the sounds you can get out of an acoustic guitar, but the electric thing I'm doing now I think affords me an even wider dynamic range. So yeah, it's a pretty dynamic show, and I think that I've learned over the years that, I don't have it so much anymore at my shows, but people talking, they don't talk at my shows because they are there to hear the songs and stories, but I sort of learned that playing with dynamics is a way to get someone to shut up.
If you play super quiet and someone gets caught talking it tends to make people shut up, so I love that part of it.
Yeah, one of those L.A. people I was talking about, that's something she's mentioned. That she just plays quieter as the room gets louder.
Yup, that's the trick.
So, okay it's a solo thing, and the new record has some cool sounds on it and a great polish. What kind of gear do you bring? Looper pedal?
I do bring a loop pedal. I don't think I loop anything on the new record. I kind of have it there in case I get bored. I'm not a guy that does layers and layers and layers of stuff. I used to do it, but for me it feels a little like a circus act, and I feel like one of the things I relate to with me is how accessible it is. Like, "That guy is just singing the song right now. There's no building on top of stuff, no pre-recorded stuff. This is all happening right here and right now." And I like to, as well as play with dynamics, when I'm by myself I like to play with tempos and, you know, hold sections about longer and make them more legado.
There's be a little kick drum thing. I think I get a lot of mileage out of the stuff that I have. Definitely not a boring show.
That's neat to hear that you like to experiment. What does the music you’ll never release sound like? Do you keep it? Get rid of it?
Nah I keep it all in case I need to go back and see which one of those things should see the light of day or be finished. You know some of them, having done it for a while, there's some that I think are just great, it's just that they're outliers in that they just don't fit on records. You know, I'm always entertaining ideas like, "Maybe I'll do a whole record where this song could be the center piece." I dunno. Maybe at some point I'll put some of that stuff out.
I love when you talk about working with other songwriters and being to work with them to put them in the frame of mind they need to be in to write a certain type of song that they kind of want to. A lot of songwriters can’t co-write for a various of reasons (process getting gunked up, thinking what the other songwriter is thinking) — why does it seem to work for you, at least well enough to get an entire album of mostly co-written songs? Is it about teaching people? I mean you essentially have an entire album here of songs you co-wrote or wrote for other people.
I think I'm just a good listener so it's easier for me to see big picture if I can get the seed of what somebody else is trying to say. I'm just kind of good at articulating what they want to say. It's easier to see the big picture working with someone else than it is to see the big picture working with myself. So a lot of times I enjoy co-writing. Co-writing just feels like a lot less hard to me than writing my own stuff, which seems like really hard work.
Is there a song you regret selling off that you wish you would've recorded or kept in your stable?
No, nah. Because I feel like they're all still mine, and I don't have the kind of career where if I wanted to do one of those songs that I couldn't do it. So they're still my kids, they're just living with their step-parents.
I think you just kind of answered this question, but since you have that songwriting trip to Nashville coming, and here you are with a bunch of songs that aren’t necessarily about your life. Is that approach, writing form others' perspectives, one you’re going to continue to explore on this trip?
I think I'll just mix it up a bit more. It gets a little bit exhausting always trying to write from an autobiographical point of view.
For sure.
And I kind of set a precedent for myself, like that's what the records always were, so I think this record is kind of like a transition to making records where people don't automatically assume that it's my life. Because at a certain point, you know, like I'm not 21, so I don't have the turmoil, the daily turmoil that a 21 year old has, so at a certain point you just run out of stuff to say. Like, what am I gonna say? "Happy to see you go to third grade?"
"Don't forget to tie your shoe before you get on the bus."
Yeah, exactly.
Let’s talk about “Coldplay” and “Average Joe” — sweet and salty tunes there. “Coldplay” is about a band’s place in a relationship, but who did you write "Average Joe" with. I kind of wanted to know where the animosity in the song came from? It seems like the guy there is, not angry, but salty.
I mean, he is, his initial point of view is a salty point of view, but by the time the song is being written he is actually kind of reflective and, uh, he just realizes that in him sitting around and calling this other guy pathetic that he is actually pathetic. So it's less that he's angry and more about him realizing, "Oh, they're living their lives and I'm obsessed about their lives, so who's the loser?"
And I'm sorry I don't have the credits in front of me, so I don't know if you did, but can you say who you wrote that song with?
Uh, I wrote that with a guy named Paul Moak who has a great studio in Nashville called Smoke Stack. H'e produced a bunch of records, some with Mat Kearney, I don't know his full discography. I met him for the first time when Mat Kearney was opening for John Mayer eight years ago or so, and Paul was playing with Mat and I actually wrote the chorus of the song in Australia. In an Airbnb by myself and never really finished it, so a trip to Nashville where Paul and I kind of knocked it into shape.
And is that where you think you're going to record in the spring? I understand you have some recording plans for the spring?
I don't know. I'm gonna start it in L.A. I'd like to make, I don't see myself living in L.A. forever, so I'd like to make a California record before I don't live there.
Right on. I would like to hear that. I guess in my mind I never thought that David Ryan Harris didn't make a California record, but it'll be nice knowing that was your intention. I know you've been friends with John for a while now, I mean he pretty much looked you up when he got to Atlanta to help him with his career.
Right.
I know that this current tour that you guys are on is two long legs, I was wondering how that affected your approach to playing solo shows. I know that it's really the only other touring and that you do, and that you're having a lot of fun — especially with this lineup — and I don't know if Isiah is coming on the second run, but watching you play in Tampa was a lot of fun. There's a lot of freedom, but is there any element of fatigue that creeps into your solo show? Or have you just been on the road with John so long that you are kind of ready to do the solo thing?
Nah, I mean, I guess there is a little bit of fatigue coming off of such a big tour where, actually, I think a lot of that interplay that you see on stage is the guys having a blast, but I still get to have that [on the solo shows], but I have it with my audience. Like there's less of a wall between where I stand and where they stand. It's kind of an inclusive experience. The only thing that's, you know, hard is literally just physically singing for 90 minutes a night. The amount of work that I have to do with John is tiny compared to what I have to do in the solo show.
Right, nah, for sure. Lastly, your Twitter makes your politics pretty clear. Your fanbase is pretty diverse as far as its political/socio-economic situation. Do you bring any of that attitude from your non-musical life to the live show or do you separate those two?
I mean, to be perfectly honest I am kind of at a place where I am a little bit torn about how to make, not even necessarily my political views, not front and center, but not so separate from my everyday life. You know, just trying to do less compartmentalization. So just trying to figure out a way to do that. You know, where I speak about my politics I don't ever want to be dismissive of somebody else's point of view unless it's harmful or directly trying to harm me. So I am trying to figure out a way to do it, and even if people have different views than I have, like I am genuinely interested in trying to figure out and understand why people feel the way they feel about things. And it doesn't , uh, sometimes people want it to be a wrong or right thing, but I just want to understand where you're coming from. You're not gonna change my mind, I just wanna know where you're coming from. So hopefully there will be some sort of metamorphosis. I feel like we're in a season where we've never needed more protest music or more music that speaks to social unrest or emotional unrest. We have such a lack of that, and I feel like I have a platform to address it in some small way, which is separate from my personal politics, which has been what I've written about in my past three records or so.
Right on. Is there anybody that you listen to in particular who does a good job of making sure that their music is reflective of our times right now?
I mean, uh, there are people that touch on things. More often than not the tone that I am looking for is in records from our last, sort of social upheaval, mid to late 60s stuff.
Marvin Gaye.
Yeah. Sly and the Family Stone. Stevie Wonder has done a really good job of sort of addressing a positive mindset without being overly political and not necessarily kumbaya. Bob Marley did the same in some of his stuff. I love Rage's stuff. It's great. Lyrically, you know, super smart and on point and that's definitely something to aspire to.
Right on, well thanks for your time, man. I appreciate it and safe travels and see you here in a week and a half or a week maybe.
Yeah, see you soon.
Yup.
Take care. Bye.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 6, 2017.