Unsurprisingly, Michael McDonald’s rants unfurl quite poetically, and his voice — even when dancing around a topic that angers him — is remarkably smooth under duress.
“I’m reminded of the conversations my wife and I have sometimes. She'll say, 'I'm seriously worried about us. We're not talking much. You're on the road so much. We talk on the phone, we kind of chitchat, but there's a lot of stuff where we really need to get down to the heart of the matter on, and I don't want to see us drift too far apart,’” he says while checking in from his home in Santa Barbara.
The 65-year-old blue-eyed prince of old-school rock and soul is using his relationship with Grammy-nominated songwriter Amy Holland in an analogy that illustrates how the ultra-divided factions of American thinking are preventing the country from having thoughtful and necessary dialogue about things like Black Lives Matter and gun control.
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“Because of the kind of husband that I am, I'll get all defensive because I don't really wanna talk about it. I don't really want to get down to the truth,” McDonald adds. “I have to realize that's what has to happen, and as painful as it may be to me, she's right. That's what we need to do — is talk about it.”
We’re about two weeks away from McDonald’s performance at the 38th Clearwater Jazz Holiday at Coachman Park, and his remarks are reminiscent of a lyric from “I Keep Forgettin’,” where McDonald sings, “I know that it's hard for you to say the things that we both know are true.” It’d be pretty funny to bring up, but McDonald — who says he was an avid gun collector in his younger years — is in the middle of a 10-minute tirade about the NRA and the leadership qualities of the United States’ esteemed 45th president. We’re also just a few days removed from the Las Vegas terrorist attack on a music festival that left nearly 60 people dead. McDonald is a little ticked about politicians’ general deflection of conversation about the ease with which mentally impaired people can buy assault rifles, silencers and bump stocks (which allow semi-automatic weapons to behave like automatic ones). He’s also not very amused by Donald Trump’s nuclear ballet with a certain North Korean ding-dong.
“The way I look at the Trump thing is if it wasn't so scary, then it'd be funny,” McDonald says. “Him and Kim Jong-un — Tweedledee and Tweedledum — two little goofy deranged idiots poking each other in the chest, and the scary part is they both have nuclear codes. What are the chances that one of these idiots isn't going to press the button?
It’s not exactly the conversation you’d expect to have as one of soft rock’s most distinctive voices calls you in the early morning hours, but it is a good opportunity to steer the conversation towards another one of his 1980s yacht rock classics, “Sweet Freedom,” which is probably a little ironic to play these days.
“When I play that song I think of what it means, all the songs that I play, typically, they're about a certain scenario, but a lot of times, for me, and even for the audience, there is a larger message,” McDonald says.
These days — four decades removed from his time collaborating with Steely Dan and then seriously updating the Doobie Brothers’ tired boogie-rock sound — McDonald is still looking for deeper meaning. He can talk at length about his admiration of his new friend Thundercat, a bassist whom McDonald says is updating the work done by luminaries like Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius. McDonald, less-bearded than he was in the ‘80s, has even reached back towards all of the sounds that made him famous en route to releasing a confessional new album, Wide Open. It’s his first collection of original music in 17 years and touches on elements of acid jazz, African music, San Bernardino folk and classic rock. It’s also an emotionally honest exploration of the self-doubt that still runs through McDonald’s veins.
“That’s human nature. I've lived long enough to know that growth is painful, so when I am feeling fearful [I] typically know some kind of growth is happening,” he says. “I should look at it that way rather than resort to reactionary traits to my own fear. I wish I could practice that like I'm preaching it most of the time.”
McDonald added that he’ll be mining old tapes as he starts to work on a follow-up to Wide Open, and is, in fact, wide open to having conversations about his own personal development with loved ones and friends. When asked about the subtle hints and at humility on the new record, McDonald once again holds nothing back, flipping jokes about his old, bad-ass beard into a more serious missive about how his biggest problem in life is being self-centered to the extreme or always thinking his way is right.
“I don't know that I'm all that humble. Not like I'm bragging all the time or anything, but all I think about is me. I've learned that, slowly over the years, a lot of the times when people give me advice it's good advice. I've just got to be more willing to accept it, listen to it, and implement it because my lack of humility has really kind of manifested itself in 'I wanna just do what I wanna do,'” McDonald says. “That's smited me as much as it's ever benefited me — maybe more.”
Read our full Q&A with McDonald here. Get more information on Clearwater Jazz Holiday, and listen to Wide Open, below.
