Tony Furtado Interview

by Tom Watson.

Tony Furtado thinks 13 could be his lucky number. Thirteen (2007, Funzalo Records) is the 13th album from the 13-x-3-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist-banjoist whose career highlights range from winning national banjo competitions to appearing on stage with Keith Richards and Telecaster master James Burton.

Furtado's 1987 win at the National Banjo Competition (a feat he would repeat in '91) led to a touring sideman stint with bluegrass musician (fiddle) Laurie Lewis (Laurie Lewis and Grant Street) and the launch of his professional career. But, bluegrass was only one style of music that interested Furtado. He'll spend the next two decades fusing bluegrass, country, rock, blues, jazz, and folk (both American and European) on his expanding instrument arsenal of banjo, guitar, slide guitar and voice.

A sampling from Furtado's discography illustrates the eclectic nature of Furtado's career: Swamped (1990, Rounder Select); Within Reach (1992, Rounder Select); Full Circle (1994, Rounder Select); Roll My Blues Away (1997, Rounder Select); Tony Furtado & Dirk Powell (1999, Rounder Select); Tony Furtado Band (2000, What Are Records?); American Gypsy (2002, What Are Records?); Live Gypsy (2003, Dualtone Music Group, Inc.); These Chains (2004, Funzalo Reocrds); and Bare Bones (2005, Funzalo Records). You can preview each of these CDs on CD Universe. Be prepared for everything from bluegrass banjo picking to fusion jazz.

Furtado is a mature multi-instrumentalist whose desire to communicate engaging stories has encouraged him to develop his vocal abilities over the years. Both 2004's These Chains and 2007's Thirteen showcase his singing, though fans of Tony Furtado the instrumentalist won't be disappointed. Furtado strives to create music in which his voice and string work contribute different elements to the story being told.

And storytelling is the essence of Thirteen; stories of, from, and to the heart.

The upcoming release of Thirteen (street date: January 23, 2007) served as the backdrop for the interview below, which took place on December 12, 2006. Will 13 prove to be a lucky number for Tony Furtado? Fortunately, for Tony, the success of Thirteen will have little to do with chance and much to do with listening pleasure.

Listen to two tracks from Tony Furtado's new CD, Thirteen.

"Thirteen"

"Sevens"

[Please note: While Modern Guitars has been given permission to provide full track on-demand streams, the tracks have been downsampled to 64 kbps to accomodate the Modern Guitars stream server and don't represent the fidelity of the original CD.]
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Tom Watson: I hear the Road Dog's on a road break.

Tony Furtado: I've been on a break for about a year now.

Tom: Nice.

Tony: Not a full-on break. I've done little tours like once or twice a month for the past year and few months, just to kind of keep money in the bank and groceries on the table and to keep things going a little bit. But for the most part, I haven't been touring so much. I took a lot of time off the road to write songs for the album and then to actually make the album and to chill out a little bit. It gave me some necessary motivation and necessary time and space to focus and relax, you know?

Tom: Sweep the cobwebs out.

Tony: Exactly. I was able to practice my instruments a little bit more, as well as just read a lot and work on some song writing, which I've wanted to really focus more on. The last album I put out was called These Chains and it felt a little bit more like exercise than anything. I felt like it was an album that needed to happen. I hadn't really focused on song writing like that before. A few of the songs came out good, but I think with this one [13] I was more focused on actually writing from the heart. When we recorded 13 I had a bit more fun because I felt like it was coming from a deeper place.

Tom: You’ll hit the road in January to support the new album.

Tony: Yeah. Exactly. I kicked back this year [2006].

Tom: Who are you taking with you on the road?

Tony: Oh, some guys from around here. There's a bass player named Damian, who's actually the nephew of Peter Erskine, who's a famous jazz drummer. He's a great bass player. And a drummer from here named Drew Scholls who's just a very fine young drummer. And I'm not sure who the fourth person's going to be yet. We're still working on that.

Tom: How old are you?

Tony: I was born in '67. I just turned 39.

Tom: What an eclectic career you’ve had.

Tony: Definitely. I started off in I guess it would be '89 … or '88. I left college, basically. Fresh out of high school, I was hired by a woman named Laurie Lewis, and I was just playing banjo back then. But I was really into banjo. I mean, really into banjo.

Tom: What year did you win the National Banjo Competition?

Tony: It was in 1987 and in 1991. I did it twice. The first time was because I didn't know any better. The second time I did it because I needed to pay rent. The first time I was 19. I had just graduated high school and I'd been going to a lot of fiddle contests. But I was also practicing my banjo eight hours a day. I was just about to start college, and I just wanted to do something … like, prove to my folks that I was serious about music and prove to myself that I could do something like that. A couple of friends who were touring musicians were, like, "You've got to do this. Come on. You will definitely win." I was like, "Come on. Shut up." So my parents flew out there with me. I just wanted to go for the experience and have fun. I get there, and next thing I know I won it.

Tom: Did you learn the five-string banjo by taking lessons?

Tony: When I was a little kid, I took lessons. I went through about four or five different teachers. I ate up everything every person had to show me. In fact, just about every one would end up going, "Okay. I've taught you everything I know. Now you've got to find someone else." The last guy I studied with seriously was a guy named Rick Shubb, who is more of an inventor, and he invented the Shubb guitar capo.

Tom: Were you living on the West Coast when you took it up?

Tony: Yep. Born in Oakland, raised in Pleasanton, California.

Tom: Why the banjo? Most guys were probably picking up the bass or guitar.

Tony: I didn't pick it up because of bluegrass, that's for sure. I was 11-years-old and I had to do a report on a musical instrument and I also had to make the instrument. I was in 6th grade. I didn't know what to make but something popped into my head, because I was making a lot of balsa wood airplanes at the time. I took a pie tin and a stick and glued some paper under the pie tin, baked latex paint over the top and put it in the oven to stretch the paper. I pulled rubber bands around it for frets and strung it up with nylon fishing string. I thought I was making a fiddle, but I thought about it more and I remembered seeing Roy Clark on the Beverly Hillbillies, and I was like, "This is a banjo." I begged my parents for a real banjo, because I had to read about it, too. I read that it came from Africa and that it was an instrument you could play all kinds of music on. You know, everything from dixieland jazz to Irish music and Appalachian folk music and bluegrass - all these different things. I was, like, this is different. I want to try this. So, I got a banjo and the rest is the rest.

Tom: Was your home environment country? Folk? Bluegrass?

Tony: Nothing. Not a thing. In fact, I didn't like country music. When I was a little kid, I didn't really listen to any music in particular. My mom had some old albums in her collection, but she wouldn't really put them on very much. I had to sort through them. She had The Who. She had Quadrophenia, a collection of Creedence Clearwater albums, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Neil Diamond, and Tony Orlando, you know? It was like this funny collection of albums. I remember riding around in a car with her and she'd have FM stations on that would play all kinds of stuff. I remember hearing Glen Campbell and Gordon Lightfoot, and I remember hearing “Deliverance” on the radio. But I didn't know what it was. It was this twangy weird tune and I was like, "What is that?"

Tom: You're playing banjo as a teenager in a place that's not well known for banjo playing. How did your friends…

Tony: They were into it. They definitely joked around with me quite a bit, and I was the butt of a lot of jokes, but it was almost like I liked it because of that. You know? Because I wouldn't have otherwise gotten much attention.

Tom: Here's one way to stand out in the crowd.

Tony: Yes. I found an instrument that I loved to play, and I just sat around and played it all the time. It didn't matter to me what kind of music I played on it. My teacher did say, "Well, you're going to have to learn something called bluegrass." And I said, "Okay." And he said, "Do you know who Earl Scruggs is?" And I said, "I don't know." And he said, "Well, get this book." And I got the Earl Scruggs book and I learned everything I could out of it. At the same time, though, I remember a couple of years into it I started really studying music theory and I studied jazz and be-bop and studied Irish tunes, and anything I could really sink my teeth into that was fun to play, I would just go for it. He also had me listening to rock bands like the Eagles and a couple of other bands I can't remember that had banjos. Oh, like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He had me listening to them a bunch. So John McEuen was an influence early on, too. Later on, I got to know John pretty well.

Tom: At what point did you think that you could make a career out of this? When you were 18, close to the end of high school?

Tony: That's a good question because when I started college I was a fine arts major. I was going to be a sculptor, but I was attracted to the banjo all the time. I knew it was easier for me to sculpt than to play music. That came more naturally for me. But I loved playing music. So I spent all my time practicing. Then after I won that contest I got a job offer to tour around with that band Laurie Lewis & Grant Street. That's when I knew. I said, "Well, let me try this for a little while and see if I can really make this work."

I was also writing some tunes at the time. I've always written instrumental tunes. That's around the time I met Mike Marshall. He's a famous acoustic musician from the Bay area. He plays guitar and banjo and all kinds of instruments, you name it. He's been in the classical scene, the world scene. He was on Wooden Hill for a while. He's also been in the bluegrass scene a bit. He produced my first album when we started getting together.

Tom: Was that the 1989 album, Swamped?

Tony: Yeah. Exactly. We started getting together and working on tunes and then put together a little demo. Then my parents funded recording my first album and we shopped it around. We didn't know who would put it out. We pretty much got turned down by everyone and didn't approach Rounder until the very last label because we didn't think they would actually put it out, because I was 19 or 20. But right away they were like, "Sure. Sounds great. Let's put it out. Let's get you going." So that was the first album.

Tom: When did you add slide guitar to your repertoire?

Tony: That was a few years later, like when I was 24 or 25. It was after I'd made a few albums for Rounder and I'd been touring around quite a bit just playing banjo backing people up. I was getting kind of musically frustrated and I couldn't tell why. After I made an album called Full Circle, I was really frustrated. I felt like I squeezed out an album that just wasn't ready to be squeezed out and I wasn't completely saying what I wanted to.

Every time I’d hear slide guitar I’d flip out. Even when I was a little kid, I remember hearing it and just going, "What is that?" So, I just finally took the time. I bought up some Ry Cooder albums I always wanted to get and holed up. I moved back to California from the D.C. area where I was living at the time. In fact, I moved in with my folks for a couple of years and started woodshedding and playing at farmer's markets and wherever I could playing slide guitar, just practicing and listening to the old recordings of Blind Willie Johnson and Fred McDowell and trying it out on different types of music. I tried to slide a bit on some Irish tunes I was learning and I was learning every Ry Cooder thing I could. Then once I started writing tunes for the slide, that's when I started to feel like, okay, I'm starting to own this thing now. That's when I made that album called Roll My Blues Away.

Tom: Was it Cooder's Paradise and Lunch album that inspired you?

Tony: Yeah, that's the first one I got. My favorite one was Boomer's Story, but Paradise and Lunch was what started me on it.

Tom: Was there something in particular that spoke to you? Electric slide guitar, especially, seems far away from banjo.

Tony: I started with acoustic slide. I think it was just the vocal quality of it and also the very dark and mysterious sound to it. It's got a great history, too, you know. I always like to check out an instrument's history. It's also an instrument … you know, it's funny, but I never really thought about this … but it's an instrument that was basically brought over by the slaves just like the banjo. That's an interesting connection. It's almost like an instrument born of repression. That's interesting because the banjo is exactly that. It came over as a 3-string gourd instrument with skin on it, and then the guitar came over … you know, it started off as a diddly-bo, and it gradually formed into the slide itself. They would string up a porch, basically, with a string and play it with a bottle and a washer or something.

Tom: There is a drone similarity between the 5-string banjo and slide guitar.

Tony: Certainly. Definitely. And there's also a classical Indian instrument. I don't know what it's called, but I know you play it with a glass ball, and it's a similar slide thing. So they're definitely around the world. But it helps to create that big, round, warm, mysterious sound, or it can be real twangy and scary. It's the stark tonal opposite of the banjo, totally, because the banjo's high and twangy and plucky, where the slide guitar is more round and warm and can be friendly or can be dark and mysterious. So, having those two sonically bouncing off of each other in my brain was probably a really good thing for me at the time. Not to mention that I eventually wanted to sing, and I thought this is going to be a good way for me to get into singing and doing that kind of thing.

Tom: Slide guitar is more vocal-like than the banjo.

Tony: Definitely. And the banjo’s harder to sing with, too. You know, one of my great heroes over the years is a guy named Tom Hartford. He sang and played the banjo like crazy, but I still haven't been able to really work that in yet.

Tom: It can be a definite challenge to sing lead and play 5-string banjo at the same time.

Tony: My main problem is when I start playing banjo, I try to get more complicated than I should, and I get distracted. When I'm singing, I'm constantly going, "Why am I playing that? Why am I playing that? Why am I playing that?" You know, or I'm saying, "God, that sounds really dorky. Why am I playing that behind my voice?" And then I try to do something else, and then all of a sudden, "Oh, what's the words to this song?"

Tom: Am I playing or am I singing?

Tony: Yeah. With the guitar, you can either strum or you can just sit there on a simple box roll or whatever.

Tom: I've said already, you're very eclectic and I think your 2002 American Gypsy album definitely fits that description. How did that come about?

Tony: American Gypsy. That came about because I was still gradually moving towards the more vocal things, discovering different folk and root songs that I wanted to work into my repertoire. But I was also playing with these amazing musicians who had played everything from serious jazz to rock. Like Tom Breckline is on that album. He's a real famous jazz drummer. He plays with Chick Corea and Robben Ford and all these people. That's the drummer. The bass player is Myron Dove, who's played with Santana and Robben Ford and all these people. Intense bass player. And then Paul McCandless is playing some wind instruments, and he played with Jaco Pastorius as well as a band called Oregon and tons of other folks.

Anyway, just having gotten on the road with these guys a little bit and played some of their tunes, it helped me to really kind of focus on getting more experimental with the slide and the banjo. It wasn't that much of a departure from what I'd been doing before, I don't think, but it felt like it went up a notch, you know what I mean? It felt like it kind of coalesced a bit and really focused a little more. So we did American Gypsy and then we also did the live Gypsy album, which was two live shows that were recorded. That was like even another step up in intensity. It was also mainly a step into the direction of me trying to sing the songs on an actual album.

Tom: How would you categorize American Gypsy?

Tony: I would call it, as strange of a title as it might sound, American roots because that's what it's influenced by. You could also vaguely call it folk, but it's a little more rocking at times than that. The whole thing is inspired mostly by American roots, and when I say American roots, I'm talking about everything from deep, dark Delta blues and fuel haulers and work songs to straight-up folk, like Rove Riley Rove. There is a bit of Irish Celtic music that's inspired that album. There's even some … it's inspired by New Orleans Second Line on one of the songs. So that's what I mean when I say American roots.

Tom: By 2002 when the American Gypsy studio album comes out, you're already singing?

Tony: I was already singing. I started singing 10 years ago, it's just something that I gradually worked up into my set more and more. I started off touring with my own band where it was like all for one and one for all until it broke up. I was like, "Okay. I just want to do this myself. I don't want to be in a band that's going to break up. I want to go for it and just do my own thing." So I started doing that ten years ago. I started off by having one song that was a vocal per set. Then I'd work in two songs per set that I'd play live. Those crowds early on were subjected to me learning how to sing.

Tom: Easing into it.

Tony: Yeah. I'd played with a bunch of great singers who had given me tips on what to do with my voice and over the years it gradually sank in, and I really put a lot of focus on it. I took a couple of lessons. It’s at the point now where I feel comfortable with my voice, and I feel like I'm able to sing with a little more expression than I used to and kind of have it at least start to match up with my guitar playing, which is pretty important. One of my big heroes is Leo Kottke. He can play his ass off, but his voice is different. He's gotten the two to kind of marry in a really cool way.

Tom: How would you characterize your upcoming album, Thirteen?

Tony: To me, it's definitely a coming together of all of the elements at this point for me and coming from a deeper place. But, musically, I would say it seems to be more of a rock album than anything I've done in the past. Like you say, it's definitely eclectic. The influences I hear on the album go from Tom Petty to a little bit of early ZZ Top. There's even a little of the late Elliot Smith in there. Other people that I think have influenced me would be like Richard Thompson, who combines guitar playing with singing. I think that's had the biggest influence on me over the years have been from Ry Cooder to Bruce Cockburn and Richard Thompson and David Lindley. Thirteen kind of moves more towards the rock realm, but singer-songwriter rock. I don't know.

Tom: Woody Guthrie was a singer-songwriter, but these days it seems like everybody’s a singer-songwriter.

Tony: I think you had this period over the years where a lot of people in rock and pop didn't write their own songs. And now the people that don't write their own songs nowadays are country musicians. It's true. You find the people that want to make a living just writing songs nowadays, they're either writing country songs or show tunes. If they're not going to go out there and play their own songs and record them, they're going to move to Nashville or write songs for the stage.

Tom: I'm starting to think it's more of a lifestyle than a musical style, folks writing their music, taking their instruments and equipment on the road, and earning a living as a solo, duo, or small group.

Tony: Yeah, there's a lot of people that do that, for sure. Now, with the technology that can record everything, they can put up videos on YouTube, put up their own snippets on MySpace. You know, there's all these things they can do. It's definitely an attainable goal for many more people now instead of it having it be the big rock 'n' roll dream where you had to win over a label to get behind you. Pretty soon, the labels will start disappearing. Music’s been given back to the common man. You can make a modest living. I think, in the years to come, you're not going to find as many Bruce Springsteen stories or people who are discovered and then the label puts a bunch of money into them and lets them kind of ride it out for a couple of albums to find their own place, and then knows that a few years down the road they're going to really shine. Nowadays, the labels will dump a bunch of money into one person, give them one album to give it a shot, and if it doesn't do exactly what they want the artist is dropped instantly and they're screwed.

Tom: If they don't make the numbers.

Tony: Yeah.

Tom: That's why, when I think of singer-songwriter now, I don't think of a particular style of music, I think of a particular kind of person.

Tony: A singer-songwriter to me is not just a John Gorka or Gordon Lightfoot. A singer-songwriter to me is also a Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen.

Tom: It’s easy to forget that when talking about Petty or Springsteen. Like you said, though, I get this independent feel from the phrase singer-songwriter, a man or woman doing their own thing without the big label, hitting the coffee shops, the bars, the smaller venues in cities that aren't the big dots on the map instead of the 25,000-head concert venues.

Tony: Well, you're probably speaking about what Petty and Springsteen were when they were young. They're just guys that ended up making it, and now they're playing 25,000-seat coffee houses. In a way, yeah, they want their independence. Believe me, they could probably be as independent as they would like to be. But they've got independence because they write their own songs.

But as far as not being known and playing small town coffee houses, that can also have a not-very-independent feeling when you're doing it. Some people might play the cool coffee house down the street and get to play anything they want to, but a couple of nights a week, they've got to play Top 40 songs with their band and sling songs and try to make a living. So, it's independent and it's not.

Tom: Independent, but not free-wheeling or free-styled.

Tony: Right. For me, I love going on the road and doing my songs and hitting town to town and hitting the stage. It's my favorite thing in the world to do. There's also a fear involved, because I'm not at the level where every show's going to be sold out or every show's going to be a packed house. There are places where I don't know if there's going to be a crowd and there are places in the country where I can count on 500 people showing up and having a blast.

Tom: Are your audiences familiar with These Chains or do they come thinking of you as the banjo and slide guitar instrumental player?

Tony: Happily, it's a very mixed crowd. I've got people who show up that have my first few banjo albums. I've got people who show up because they heard These Chains as a single. I've got people who saw me sitting in with String Cheese Incident and all these jam bands. So everything from guitar and banjo geeks, to serious folk snobs, to people who like country music, people who like rock. It's definitely a good mix of a crowd. Then there's also a good portion of the crowd that comes to the shows that I do with my band that like to dance. We kind of get into it instrumentally live. I know the new album only has one instrumental on it, but in my live shows I definitely mix it up. I like to have a good, balanced, fun show.

Tom: An eclectic musician draws an eclectic crowd.

Tony: Yeah. It’s beautiful.

Tom: Your shows are eclectic, but is there a focal point?

Tony: Well, the focus now is the new album, Thirteen. There's more songs that I'm playing live now from this album than any other album. But I still pull out the banjo and play a few banjo tunes a show, but the banjo tunes aren't like bluegrass tunes. They're eclectic. They're high-intensity and kind of rocking. The slide guitar instrumentals I'll do, I happily have a big bag of tricks I can pull on. I can either do a simple, pretty slide guitar ballad from American Gypsy, or I can do some intense bluesy rockin' thing that I might have written, and then do a bunch of songs that I sing and write. Mix it up a bit.

Tom: Thinking about you as the eclectic musician I’d say the one theme that underlies most of your work is storytelling. Doesn't matter if you're singing the story, you're playing it, or both.

Tony: That's a good way to put it. Definitely storytelling.

Tom: Let’s talk about your singing. You have a “nice” voice. It's not a gravely, I've-been-on-the-road-for-100-years, hardcore voice. It's a nice voice.

Tony: Believe me, my manager's got harsher words for my voice.

Tom: I can understand that, especially in light of some of the stories you tell. The title track, “Thirteen”, for example. I know the background of the story, the mining accident in which 12 miners die and one survives. It's a hardcore tale. It's not puppy dogs and summer love. But your voice is nice. What makes it work is how your dark guitar and nice voice complement each other.

Tony: Thanks. Appreciate it.

Tom: I don't want to hear a nice voice with a nice guitar telling that story, but the combination of a nice voice and a down and dirty, deep, dark guitar can pull it off.

Tony: Yeah, that's me. When I was saying I've always worked on getting the voice to match up with the guitar, it's not ever going to match up and be the same thing, but I think it's getting to the point where they're complementary of each other in a way I need it to be.

Tom: Let's talk about the title track, “Thirteen”, specifically. How did your use of the story come about?

Tony: Each story has its story, so to speak Like, for instance, there was one point where my manager turned to me and said, "Do you have any mining songs?" I said, "No, I don't, actually." Even after singing so many folk songs and hanging out in Kentucky so much - I hung out in Kentucky quite a bit and I've seen a lot of the tragic mining areas and hung out with people that had families that mine. So I was like, "I've got to write something, some mining song." I remembered that story about the Sego Mine, and really checked it out and read about ten different stories about it, and, God, what a tragic story. I didn't want to tell it in a super literal fashion, either. I didn't want it to be, like, and now this happened and that happened. I wanted it to be more of a poem than anything, where you kind of get little pieces of it and you get an idea of what's going on just from hearing little pieces. Like when you read an abstract poem, you get the gist of what's going on. I tried to use certain words that would kind of kick off emotions in your head.

Tom: You paint an emotional landscape, not just a factual one.

Tony: Yeah, and the melody I had sitting around from another tune that just wasn't working for me, so I just put two and two together and came up with a chorus, and I feel like it tells the story nicely.

Tom: Luck is a theme that runs through the album and several of the songs are about the bad variety, but I still get an overall feeling of optimism.

Tony: Totally. That pretty much is what I try to make sure all of my albums have. But it's funny you say that. Someone in my management company actually said that. She said, "This album's got more joy and optimism than any of your other albums." I was like, "Really? There's really pretty dark stuff on this album."

Tom: I didn’t expect optimism from an album titled Thirteen.

Tony: You know, I did research on that. Some people think it's lucky, some cultures thought it was unlucky. Who knows? And I personally don't think it's either one, but it sure for some reason was popping up in my life a whole bunch. It's my 13th album, my age is three times 13 right now. And it's funny, every time I’d look at a clock it was something-13. So it was making sense to me. I wrote that song “Thirteen”. I had to come up with some kind of title and theme for the album. The album was made, but I was like, "What's the theme that runs through all these songs?" and I started thinking more about the songs. I didn't pick “Fortunate Son” because it's a good luck/bad luck thing, but there it was, “Fortunate Son”. It's like that song in itself is a combination of fortunate and not fortunate. Then “Thirteen” is 13 guys went down the mine, 12 guys perished, but the 13th guy lives - depending on how you look at it. And then the first song on the album, “Used”, is like this weird mix, of political and personal all just meshed up into one theme of not having any luck. I just started noticing this thread about luck. I was like, "Okay. Thirteen."

Tom: The instrumental, “Sevens” - why the number seven? Is it because it’s normally considered a lucky number?

Tony: There's a stupid pun there. First of all, yeah, “Sevens” is the lucky number seven. But, also, I wanted the song to be the sixth track - six plus seven tracks equal 13.

Tom: I wouldn't have thought of that one.

Tony: We'll see who catches it. I'm kind of curious who's going to catch it.

Tom: I was proud of myself to realize there were 13 tracks on the album.

Tony: You know what I really wanted to do? I wanted to have it be 14 tracks and skip over the 13th track. Have it just be like 13 seconds of blank space.

Tom: How does “Another Man” fit into the luck theme?

Tony: That's a song about me, early on, when I was with one of my first girlfriends and I had no luck with her at all. Just forget it. That was a doomed relationship.

Tom: You recorded Thirteen at WaveLab Studios. Why a 16-track and two-inch analog tape?

Tony: Well, that's just what they do there. It's warmer sounding.

Tom: That, of course, is what I expect people to say. Do you really think that's true?

Tony: I think nowadays technology is getting to the point where it's harder for most people to hear the difference. Quite frankly, I don't know if I do anymore. I did early on when digital was becoming a thing, but it's getting harder for me to hear it, because there's all kinds of tricks you can do, too, to really master it. In the end, it's all digital anyway, but if you can at least record it to two-inch, to the tape, it'll kind of give it some bit of warmth. But like I say, the technology's getting crazy these days. The other fun thing about it was, it was 16 tracks, so once you're at 16 tracks, you're done. And they were being really creative to squish in all these guitar parts. There's some songs I'm playing four guitars on. So we're having to figure out a different way to squeeze in the different parts.

Tom: Can't you bounce them down?

Tony: You can, but I don't think that's the best thing to do because then you lose control over that. I thought it all worked out great. It was fun. It was a fun re-exploration for me, because the last few albums I did were done with ProTools. My first six, seven, eight albums were all two-inch tape, so it kind of reminded me of what it was like to try to punch in on things. It's like, you know what? You can't punch this one. You're going to have to do the whole tape again.

Tom: Another interesting thing about this studio is that they have some vintage instruments available. Did you use some of them?

Tony: Oh, totally. I found myself just grabbing weird guitars off the wall and trying them out on songs. Sometimes they worked great.

Tom: What did you use?

Tony: Oh, there were a couple I didn't even know the names of. But one of my favorites for the album was an old Les Paul, Jr. I don't know what year it was, but it was just one of those one-pickup Les Pauls. It had a great sound. He [Craig Schumacher, producer, engineer, and mixer] had me running through a couple of different amps sometimes that … there was one that didn't even have a name on it. I still don't know what it was. But he's got all these great amps there. He's got all these great guitars. There was a Gretsch I remember playing a little bit on. There was a Danelectro - I don't know if that part made it on, but I remember farting around with a Danelectro that was in there. And he had me running through tons of different pedals, because I don't tend to travel with many pedals. I'm not that experimental with my electric sound. I just kind of get the nice grungy slide tone that I need, and that's fine. But this time we were trying a lot of different things, and it kind of made me want to be a little more experimental live now. Craig's great that way. He would change out different guitar pedals and then he would help me manipulate them because there would be, like, six or seven in line that sometimes would need to be pushed and sometimes not, and I need to focus on guitar and needed help with manipulation. It was fun.

Tom: What are your main guitars?

Tony: As far as electric, I have a couple of Les Pauls. I have one of those Epiphone Elites that's got the pickups in it called Blast Buckers. I think that's what they're called. That's one of my Les Pauls. The other one is a Gibson Les Paul Studio that I got from Gibson. I'm sponsored kind of by Gibson and Epiphone. Sometimes they'll slide me a thing to give it a shot. Then I also have a Strat reissue of some sort. I took out the pickups and had a couple of Fralins and a Seymour Duncan put in there. So those are my electrics that I'm using. And then as far as amps, right now I've got a [Fender] Twin and an [Vox] AC30, but I'm looking to downsize the amp thing.

Tom: Those Twins are heavy.

Tony: Oh, yeah. The Twins are a pain in the ass. They can be fun to play through, but for what I'm doing, with the slide, sometimes it's not the perfect thing because sometimes I have to be way too loud for some of these clubs to get the right tone. So I'm kind of thinking of downsizing the amp, maybe going with a single speaker or a couple of smaller speakers. I might actually try a boutique amp of some sort. I don't know what, but I'll find something.

Tom: What about acoustic guitars?

Tony: Acoustics, I'm definitely not in the modern guitar realm. I have a couple of old Martins that I tour with all the time. I've had them for about ten years now. They're both O-17s, so they're all mahogany. One is from 1944, the other one is 1930. And I have them rigged up with a Sunrise pickup in the sound hole and those old [L.R.] Baggs pickups in the bridge. I used to go through this kind of elaborate rig that was just great for playing really loud music and getting pure tone, going through Avalon pre-amps and Daedalus cabinets. But I'm going to try to figure out something else for this 2007. I'm just not sure what it's going to be.

Tom: Let’s get back to Thirteen. How did you pick the three cover songs?

Tony: Two of the covers I decided on, and those would be “Fortunate Son” and “Won't Get Fooled Again”. “Won't Get Fooled Again” has been fun to play live. Someone else wanted me to try the third, “Take Me to the Pilot”. There were seven covers that we laid down basics for because we didn't know which ones would take. We were originally only going to have two covers on it, but I'm not the only voice of reason for the album.

Tom: You're familiar with Elton John's original live recording of “Take Me to the Pilot”?

Tony: Yeah. It's killer. There's another cover of that song that I've heard that I really love by Ben E. King. I was like, "Damn. This could be a cool soul song, but I'm not a soul singer." That's the problem. The problem to me was, when I did it solo and acoustic, I liked it. It felt good to me. It was like it was right and I didn't just Na-Na-Na it, and I had this nice little acoustic version. Then gradually, while we’re recording, one thing led to another, and all of a sudden we're doing something more like the original and I'm Na-Na-Naing.

Tom: What was it about “Won’t Get Fooled Again” that made you want to include it on the album?

Tony: A couple of things. One is, I remember hearing The Who when I was a little kid. I remember seeing Tommy. Just loved them. The other reason is timeliness for us, for me, because I haven't been very proud politically for the past six or seven years and there's a lot of people who feel the same way I do. So it felt good, it feels really good to sing it. People sing along when I play it live.

Tom: It seems that, given the political situation we have today, a lot of the music of the ‘60s and '70s is relevant again.

Tony: Heck yeah. “Fortunate Son”. That one's relevant, too. It's got somewhat of an anti-war, political vibe thing going on.

Tom: You also remember Creedence Clearwater Revival from your mom’s record collection.

Tony: Oh, yeah. When I was a little kid, I used to listen to those albums all the time. There was actually another song that I was wanting to cover – “Run Through the Jungle” - because I had a cool version of it. But “Fortunate Son” got the thumbs up by all the guys that played on the album and the producer and my manager.

Tom: You're a Charles Bukowski fan.

Tony: Yeah.

Tom: Was the track “The Alcohol” Bukowski-inspired?

Tony: I think probably, because I had moved down to L.A. and I didn't like L.A. when I was living there. I had a hard time incorporating myself into it, and I had just gotten into reading a bunch of Bukowski and John Fante and stuff, and something about the way Bukowski tells a story just felt so real to me. I would just sink into those books and his poetry. And then one thing led to another and I noticed I was drinking a lot more. Seriously, I was drinking a lot. I was like, "Whoa. What am I doing?"

Tom: Were you reading more Bukowski because you were drinking, or were you drinking more because you were reading Bukowski?

Tony: I was drinking more because I was living in L.A. I don't know. It was a combination of everything. But I was also trying to write songs, too. I just remember strumming my guitar when I had a little bit of a buzz and coming up with a couple of those lines. Then I just put the song away for awhile. Then I moved back up to Portland and was doing some songwriting with Amelia White, and we just kind of sat down and hashed out the rest of the song.

Tom: What does a story have to have to get your attention?

Tony: Well, if you're talking about a story in a song …

Tom: Let's talk generally.

Tony: A couple of things. One, it's just got to move me somehow. I can be moved by the art of the words chosen and the way that the story progresses. I can be moved by the momentum of the story. Also, I love history. And when someone tells a tale really well and kind of makes me feel like I'm in the story right there and I sink into it. It's got to be dimensional. It's really got to be deeper than just the surface level thing. Like with a Bukowski story, it's deep on a certain level, but it's also very, very real.

Tom: Bukowski could give a story depth using the most ordinary language conceivable.

Tony: Totally, yeah. He'll talk about an emotion or convey an emotion while talking about getting buzzed and raw sex. The stuff he's talking about is deep, it's just that it's infected with porn and flames.

Tom: Like a mean streets journalist. On the surface he's recounting facts, but it’s what those naked facts imply that give the story power.

Tony: Totally.

Tom: How does that translate to music?

Tony: Well, one way I heard it translated literally in my own mind was by listening to Tom Waits. He's got to be a big Bukowski fan. His new album has a couple of cuts where I think he actually takes a Bukowski story and puts it to music. There's a couple of songs on there where I’m like, I've read that story, I know what he's talking about. But for me, now, it's more about taking something that's either personal or not, and trying to convey some kind of emotion through the use of colorful words, whether it's literal or whether it's abstract. But, since I'm a musician, I've got to use melody to help drive it home. I think that's probably why it's so interesting to me. You can have a story that kind of lies flat, but then put a certain music to it, and all of a sudden it comes alive. It's also works the other way. You could destroy a perfectly good story with a flat melody. It's the marrying of the two together that really makes it come alive. So to me, it's such a good challenge.

Tom: Am I correct in thinking that your approach to slide guitar is treating it as a voice?

Tony: Yeah, pretty much. Most of the time, it's what I can’t do with my own voice.

Tom: It's its own voice. It gives you a whole other dimension that you don't have to be able to do with your voice.

Tony: Totally. And that's pretty much what slide guitar came along as. It's the blues guys sitting on the back porch doing those songs. If you listen to some of the old recordings, you'll hear that sometimes the lines won't even be sung. All of a sudden the slide guitar takes over and sings the line itself.

It’s like Derek Trucks. He's the epitome of having the slide guitar be a voice, because he doesn't sing. He doesn't even talk on stage. I swear. I toured with him a bunch. He's the sweetest guy you'll ever meet. And that slide guitar is his voice. He stands in one place, and you hear it, and it sounds like a voice. It sounds just like a voice singing, singing away like a madman. That's his voice.

I think, for me, if I’m going to have a guitar voice, my guitar voice is when I'm playing acoustic slide guitar. That's where I'm most comfortable. I love playing electric slide guitar, but that's usually a little less controlled for me, which can also be fun though.

Tom: Let’s wrap it up with the Graham Parsons tribute concert.

Tony: That was fun. Getting to meet all of those musicians and play with them.

Tom: Any good stories?

Tony: Probably a few. Right off the bat, it was really interesting being placed next to Keith Richards and hearing him talk to me. I don't know what he said half the time. He was blabbering about something, and then I looked down and he's drinking some orange liquid that I didn't know what the hell it was.

Tom: You couldn't tell what he was saying because of the way he spoke or because of the ambient noise?

Tony: Oh, I heard his voice.

Tom: Did you act like you understood what he said?

Tony: Hell, yes! It's Keith Richards! I just smiled and laughed and said to myself, "I'm talking to Keith Richards."

Tom: It's all good, right?

Tony: Yeah. It's cool. Sitting next to Keith Richards and James Burton, you know? I felt like a badass.

Tom: Had you ever met James Burton before?

Tony: No. He was cool. He was something else. And Al Perkins. All of them right there. Unbelievable, you know? All the gods right here and they stick the little banjo picker in the middle of them.

Tom: What's one of the most incredible live music experiences you've had?

Tony: Well, it would be one at which I didn't actually play. Have you ever heard of Hun-Huur-Tu? They're Tuvan throat singers. They're like Mongolian cowboys. There are four of them.

The show that I saw was at the Boulder Theater. It was them on one side of the stage, the Bulgarian Women's Choir next to them, and then, in front, directing the whole thing, was this jazz quartet from Russia. My God, it brought me literally to tears at times. It was the most intense, intense music and just so big and full and interesting and really, really emotional. I had no idea what they were singing ever - ever - because it was all these different languages. But it was so deep and heartfelt. There's actually a CD out there of that that's called, Fly, Fly My Sadness. That was the most amazing concert experience I've ever had. It tells you something about the universal power of music.
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Thirteen Track Listing
1. Used (Tony Furtado)
2. California Flood (Tony Furtado)
3. Won't Get Fooled Again (Peter Townshend)
4. Thirteen (Tony Furtado)
5. Hurtin' In My Right Side (Tony Furtrado/Stephanie Schneiderman)
6. Sevens (Tony Furtado)
7. Another Man (Tony Furtado)
8. I Wait For This (Tony Furtado)
9. Fortunate Son (John Fogerty)
10. The Alcohol (Tony Furtado/Amelia White)
11. Take Me To The Pilot (Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
12. Stay Awhile (Tony Furtado)
13. Long Journey Home (Tony Furtado)

Related Links
Tony Furtado
Tony Furtado on MySpace
Funzalo Records

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