{"id":3436,"date":"2011-08-18T22:26:22","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T05:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=3436"},"modified":"2011-08-18T22:26:40","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T05:26:40","slug":"john-oates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/john-oates\/","title":{"rendered":"JOHN OATES"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

JOHN OATES<\/h1>\n

Writing a musical autobiography by rediscovering his roots<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When John Oates first started getting to know Darryl Hall more than four decades ago, the two young Philadelphia natives had a love of R&B in common. But Oates had another passion, one that got obscured during the duo\u2019s subsequent rise to pop stardom: roots music. Although you might not guess it from Hall and Oates\u2019 hits, he cut his teeth on classic folk and blues as a teen\u2014a sound he revisits on his latest solo album, Mississippi Mile<\/em>, made up mostly of covers from Oates\u2019 youth. \u201cI\u2019m getting back to where I started before I met Darryl,\u201d he observes, relaxing in a chair at his record label\u2019s office on Nashville\u2019s Music Row.<\/p>\n

Oates recorded the album just a half-block away, at a small publishing-house studio. He and producer Mike Henderson worked quickly, recording for only four days with a pickup band of local session pros like Dobro master Jerry Douglas and mandolin giant Sam Bush. \u201cThis album is about as close to a live album as you can have,\u201d Oates says. \u201cThere are hardly any overdubs. What you hear is what we played that day, and I sang 80 percent of the vocals while we were cutting the track. I had never done that before.\u201d Oates used a Guild GAD-F20 acoustic outfitted with a Fishman pickup for all his guitar parts. \u201cThe funny thing is that all my vocals came through the pickup, so I was stuck,\u201d he says with a chuckle. \u201cHad I not been singing OK, it would have been a big problem\u2014I would have had to\u00a0overdub all my guitar parts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The songs he selected form what Oates calls \u201ca musical autobiography\u201d covering his early influences, heroes like Mississippi John Hurt, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and others\u2014all in drastically different arrangements from the original recordings. \u201cI like to get back to where the song was even before it became a record, before the producers got involved,\u201d he says. \u201cI go by feel\u2014if it feels right, it is right, as long as the songwriters aren\u2019t going to be insulted or freaked out. I don\u2019t think we messed with the songs,\u00a0we just reimagined them.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Hall and Oates, while the duo continues to tour together there are no plans for a new album anytime soon. \u201cDarryl and I are more interested in what we\u2019re doing individually,\u201d says Oates, who now divides his time between Colorado and Nashville. \u201cWe do about 30 to 35 dates a year. It\u2019s fun, we have a great band and people love it. But it\u2019s like visiting a great museum\u2014it\u2019s fantastic when you\u2019re spending time there, but you don\u2019t want to live there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Chris Neal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JOHN OATES Writing a musical autobiography by rediscovering his roots When John Oates first started getting to know Darryl Hall more than four decades ago, the two young Philadelphia natives had a love of R&B in common. But Oates had another passion, one that got obscured during the duo\u2019s subsequent rise to pop stardom: roots […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[2404,1807,2405,10156],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3436"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3436"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3439,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3436\/revisions\/3439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}