Sob Rock

Maybe my next record is, uh club cuts with a “z”, and two “k’s”. “Klub Kutz.”

I think the record is great and it's going to piss off some Dead Heads because it is not Grateful Dead-inspired music, through and through. It is incredibly pop, man. It's [a] very pop record, so we will see. I enjoy the wavelengths beating up against one another.

Q: Did you draw inspiration from specific guitarists for the new album? ❤️❤️❤️

A: Yes! I kind of looked at myself as my own album's "studio musician." So I thought a lot about the greats like @stevelukatherofficial and @brentmason.official whose signature guitar I used quite a bit in the recordings.

Q: Where on Sob Rock do you see Don Was's hand the most clearly?

A: @donwas goes under and through the entire album; he's the one who lets me go into the unknown and keeps this sage, watchful eye. He'll ask me what I'm going for, let me go looking, then with just a couple of sentences, lead me closer to the mark if I need it. Without him, I'd probably get lost and throw things.

It wasn't until recently that I realized that artists like to go backwards and pay homage to the music that influenced them. And I think Billy Joel did that in the case of this song, "Uptown Girl."

Bruce Springsteen has his own way of writing songs that, if you've listened to Sob Rock, my most recent record, a lot of the songs borrow the Bruce Springsteen structure of the last line of the go-round kind of being the one-sentence chorus, and everything builds up to that one moment.