Music Interview with Lowen & Navarro

Lowen and Navarro Interview - January 2000

Lowen and Navarro are writers and performing artists from Southern California. They are perhaps most famous for penning "We Belong" which was a huge hit for Pat Benatar. For more than a decade they have been releasing records on several labels and touring continually. You can find out more about them and purchase recordings at their website: http://www.lownav.com

Paul Iwancio met up with them at lunch on the afternoon before their gig at Fletcher’s.

The interview took place at Liquid Earth(one of Paul’s favorite places to eat) on Aliceanna Street and the sound of the coffee grinder started at the same time that he pressed record on the tape machine

Dan: That’s not the grinder, that’s the sound of our brains.

Paul: Are you guys are still living in Southern California?

Dan: Yes we are. We actually enjoy it. We like being able to travel and see other places. But to me, I’m from southern California, it’s home. I’ve been all over the world and I like a lot of places but nothing else feels like home.

Eric: My kids live there with my ex-wife so I’m there for another 15 years, minimum.

Paul: But you guys must like Baltimore to come here so often.

Dan: Very much. We love to play here. It’s a great place for us to visit.

Eric: Our favorite place in the country would be a toss up between the Baltimore-Washington area and Chicago

Dan: Speaking for myself. I confess, I’m a little partial to Chicago. I love it here, but in Chicago there’s something...Chicago is one of those places that also kind of feels like home.

Eric: Yeah, Chicago has more music than any place else on the planet.

Dan: Absolutely, it’s incredible.

Eric: But we enjoy it here a lot. We just started rehearsing with a band to have a kind of local situation. And that’s going to make it feel even more like home. And some of the venues around here are just great. We were talking yesterday and the Birchmere is one of the best places to play in the United States of America.

Paul: Are you active at all in the Southern California music scene?

Dan: Sure, absolutely.

Eric: Oh yeah, the musicians that we play with, they all play in other bands and there’s some real good music out there. Sometimes a music scene is hard to see when you’re in it. You know what I mean. So it seems it seems to us like maybe there’s not so much of a music scene, but when you actually think about it, our drummer and one of our bass players play in a band called the Mojo Monkeys that are just great. And they’re being looked at by Rounder Records.

Paul: That’s great.

Eric: Yeah, our music scene is national too. We’re real good friends with Eddie from Ohio. And with email, and the fact that we travel a lot we see them as much as we see our own band at home.

Paul: Are you guys friends with Phil Parlapiano?

Dan: He’s played on three of our records.

Eric: He’s also in the Mojo Monkeys.

Paul: Is he?

Eric: Yeah, he plays with him all the time.

Paul: Is he good to work with

Dan: He’s the best.

Eric: How do you know him?

Paul: I saw him when he led the band on John Prine’s tour some years ago.
And I was blown away by that concert.

Eric: He learned a lot from playing with John Prine.

Dan: He learned more from playing with Dave Koz. Which is an interesting dichotomy when you think about it. John Prine the earthy-gravel-voiced folkie and Dave Koz the epitome of .....

Paul: Dave Koz?

Dan: Dave Koz is a saxophone player who just had a #1 smooth jazz record. Smooth jazz is kind of noteworthy for very much like meat substitutes as not having very much jazz in it. No offense to Dave. I don't mean to be insulting to him. My wife works in promotion for the smooth jazz format for Shanacie Records. And there’s no jazz in it, in my opinion. It’s improvisational pop instrumentals is what it is, and a lot of covers.

Eric: Not much improvisation.

Dan: "Just My Imagination" and "That’s The Way The World" by Earth Wind and Fire, and those are the kind of things that go to #1. Along with a lot of original stuff.
So Phil was playing keyboards with Dave Koz and bandleading for John Prine. Most recently he and his ex-partner Bill Bach were working with Shawn Mullins. Phil is one of our closest musical friends. And when I say musical friends, especially in Los Angeles, it’s easy to think of a person you work with every day as one of your best friends, and they can be.
But Eric and I each have personal friends who sometimes have nothing to do with the music business, not people we collaborate with on that level, that are just our friends. And Phil is a friend. But we tend to see him most often when we work together.

Paul: I like what Phil did on your records, very tasty playing.

Dan: Yeah, he played on 3 of our 5 albums.

Paul: Now, you guys aren’t playing just as a duo tonight, you have some back up musicians. Who are they and what are they playing.

Eric: Robbie Magruder on drums and JT Brown on bass. They were Mary Chapin Carpenter’s band for, I think, a long time.

Paul: Are they still working with her?

Eric: No , they’re not right now. JT wanted to get off the road and I think Mary Chapin Carpenter is using the drummer from Fairport Convention.

Dan: They’re great and we’ve barely known them 24 hours.

Eric: Let’s see, 19 hours right now.

Paul: Do you guys write much when you’re on the road?

Dan: Almost not at all. We have occasionally done it. We used to make regular writing trips to Nashville. Not only to work with writers there but to work on our own. "Dreams I Left Behind" which is on our second album was written in a stairwell of the hotel we were staying in Nashville. We had to go 2000 miles to write a song that we could have easily written at home. There’s something about the focus. When you’re touring, there is so much focus time, that any unfocused time is usually spent snoring.

Eric: You know, since your organization is designed to be a support group for songwriters, and to foster an environment that is friendly, that Nashville could be a model. I don’t know how much you know about Nashville, or how many people you run across from Nashville. But Nashville is the most songwriter supportive community that I’ve ever witnessed. I mean, songs are in the atmosphere there because everyone is writing songs. The place kind of runs on songs. At least it did, I don’t know if it’s happening as much as it used to. But everyone is kind of running around doing songwriter stuff. And everyone is very supportive of songwriters, and supportive of each other.

Paul: What about competition?

Eric: Oh, the competition is brutal there. But at the same time everyone is really happy for someone’s success. They have a celebration there everytime someone gets a #1 record, they have a #1 party for the writer. Not for the artist so much, but for the writers. And think about that. That is something that isn’t done elsewhere.

Dan: The competitive nature of Nashville is best exemplified by the old adage "keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer". They’re all in competition with each other but they know that it helps them to be supportive of their competitors. They want what their competitors have but they’re not going to get anywhere by squashing their competitors. They’re going to be served by supporting them because when the shoe is on the other foot the competitors will support them.

Eric: And the way they deal with things is if someone you know or someone you’re associated with has a big hit, you just want to write with them more.

Paul: You guys have written with some other folks. How did those collaborations come about?

Dan: Some were engineered, where we said "this might be a nice thing to try", others were serendipity where we meet somebody and say, "well, let’s write a song together". A lot of the collaborations we had, some with extremely successful writers, never saw the light of day. Others like "Cry" on Pendulum with Gretchen Peters, who is an extremely successful Nashville songwriter, whose only other collaborations were with Bryan Adams. Other than that she writes alone. She sent us a lyric at 10 o’clock in the morning and by 3 we had the song finished. We had met her a few weeks before and so she sent something to us. We had met her in October of 94 or it might have even been 93. We stayed in contact and a year later we said, "let’s try something". We met her at a songwriters conference in Durango Colorado.

Eric: Right, we were all on the same panel. We went to her house and she was obviously uncomfortable with the idea of us picking up guitars and starting to shoot ideas across the table. She just didn’t seem to want to do that, at least not that day anyway. So she said she would send us something. We said fine and it worked out great.

Paul: What was the panel you were on?

Eric: It was Stephen Alan Davis, Gretchen Peters and us.

Dan: We were in the round.

Eric: Right, it was just the four of us. There was a little symposium that was happening every year in Durango Colorado that would invite songwriters to come. And on our panel we would talk about songwriting and answer questions, be wise guys, and then we would do a concert at the end. And it worked out pretty well. Stephen Alan Davis is a very talented songwriter he wrote ( Dan starts singing "Take Time To Know Her") when he was sixteen. He still has a lot of hit songs. He has 30-40 #1 hit country songs.

Dan: And he writes all different kinds of songs too. He writes a lot of stuff.

Paul: I noticed on your last album that your writer credits will sometimes list Eric first and sometimes Dan. Does that signify who is the main writer on a particular song?

Dan: That is brand new. We only did that on the most recent album and it was my idea.

Eric: Good idea, yeah.

Dan: And that’s because we had always just credited Lowen and Navarro and there’d be times when it really didn’t reflect who wrote the song. Most of the time people think that the song is written by the person who did the lead singing. But we went through a period where "Hammerhead Shark" I sang but had nothing to do with writing it. Eric wrote it. She Said No Eric sang but I wrote that with another guy. And on some of the songs we did cowrite it didn’t reflect accurately. On "All Is Quiet" the verse I sing he wrote and verse I wrote he sings, because the producer we worked with said you know, it would sound better if you switched this. And we did, and it did sound better.
Well, it got to the point where it started bothering me. Where I didn’t feel I was getting credit for what I had created. Usually credit works itself out in the wash. And in particular in a song "Keep the Light Alive" which I’m credited on, I had virtually nothing to do with. I think I might have nodded a couple of times, and said "yeah, I like that". I couldn’t remember that I ever contributed to that song. And there have been other songs where the shoe was on the other foot. So we made a decision on this album to have the writing credits reflect who contributed more to the song. There were a couple of songs that were a coin flip. In particular "Blessing", because we both had a lot to do with. Eric sang lead, I won the toss, so my name went first.

Paul: Let me ask you something about "Blessing" since you brought up that song. The third line of that song goes "walk in beauty".

Eric: That’s from another songwriter. (laughing)

Paul: I was wondering where that came from because I was wondering if that was an allusion to the Navajo healing ceremonies. Many Navajo healing ceremonies close with the line "In beauty it is finished" and "walk in beauty" is another common line.

Dan: I’m almost positive it does refer to that. The guy who came up with that line is who "Save the Best for Last" is written about.

Eric: Remember that song (singing "save the best for last")

Dan: Wendy Waldman wrote that about her husband, Brad Parker. He used to say "walk in beauty".

Eric: Brad Parker, what was the name of that Patty Loveless song he wrote...something about my parade.

Paul: But you had no idea that had something to do with Navajos?

Dan: Well, we had some idea. But we put it in the song because it made sense in that spot and we always liked the sounds of those words.

Paul: I used that line in one of my songs, before I ever heard yours. The song is about the Navajo healing ceremony called The Blessingway.
I saw your line "walk in beauty" and the song title "Blessing" and thought they were related.
Once again, the listener can make a connection with the lyrics that maybe you weren’t necessarily going for.

Dan: Well not specifically but I’m sure that there is something to that. Because I know that the phrase, when Brad used it, had something to do with that. I think that’s why he was invoking it. Although he never told us specifically I heard that it had something to do with some metaphysical process. Now we like the sound of it. When we put it in the song we were trying to find....well it isn’t "hold your head up" it isn’t "walk tall". Eric wrote that line I just said "cool".

Eric: Stole that line.

Dan: (smiling) Adapted, interpreted that line.

Eric: But you know that is when songwriting is so accessible. When people actually listen to it and make it their own.

Paul: When they can take it personally.

Eric: There was a question that was asked of David Wilcox in a previous interview [see last issue], about his song topics and Christian fans.
It happened here in Baltimore after a particular beer soaked evening at Max’s. Some women came up to me who were absolutely convinced that we were christian. We have a song called "Oh Mary" and they were convinced that it was a religious song. Early on we had a parts guy at motorcycle place I used to visit who was convinced that we had satanic references in "We Belong".

Paul: It is interesting what people read into the music.

Dan: There was a guy, who heard us at the Kerrville Folk Festival, who put a posting on a newsgroup, who was convinced that we were motivated strictly by greed. He felt we were hacks who didn’t feel one ounce of what we wrote, and was complaining bitterly about it. So it’s funny what people read into things.

Paul: Let’s go back and discuss some of your writing techniques. You told me earlier that you don’t write on the road, but rather at home. Do you have a structured time, routine or place for writing?

Eric: Lately we get done promoting a record and doing all the things that surround that whole process. And then it gets time to come up with another record. It didn’t used to be that way, but it’s become that.
We’re approaching that now. I tell people that we’re getting ready to start looking forward to planning to opening the door to beginning to write.

Paul: Have you written anything since your last record "Scratch at the Door"?

Dan: Not a damn thing.

Eric: I wrote one song with somebody else.

Dan: Actually we did write one song "The Illusive Drug" with Damhnait Doyle who is a Canadian artist on Capitol. And it’s going to be on her album. Other than that song, we haven’t written anything. We’ve had a lot of personal things to go through. And last year was our busiest touring year since 1994. So we really had a lot on our plates. We’ve got the possibility of another record coming out this year. So when we get home we’ve got to start hitting the boards and start writing again.

Paul: Will the record be on the Intersound label?

Dan: It won’t. It’s a contract that hasn’t been struck yet. It’s about to be issued so we can’t really say who it is. But it’s a different situation than normal. It’s not a real record company and it’s not a real record that’s available in stores.

Paul: Do you mean MP3?

Dan: Well, it’s an online situation but it’s not like most where a website will say "hey, come put your record on our site". This is an organization that is financing the record. So it’s like a real record company, it’s just not going to be in stores , it’s going to be on the ‘net. And when the deal is struck we can let you know.
This will be our fourth record deal and for the fourth time, they didn’t want to hear music. I don’t know how that happens.

Eric: After tremendous expense and trouble making demos, the company usually asks after we make a deal "oh by the way, we heard you have
a demo".

Dan: For the first record company we played live in the office. We had made a demo and they had never heard it. The second record company heard that first demo and knew us from some other work we had done on the label. When we went to Parachute, this guy had an idea of making the label, and had us help plan the label When he got the financing for the label he said "well contracts are being struck... I guess I’d better hear some music."
The next time, we had put out our own live record and Intersound picked it up. And we said "let’s talk about a new real record". Now we did, in fact, do a five song demo for that. But those demos appear, only with remixing, and some modest re-recording on "Scratch at the Door". So we had basically gone out and done masters at our own expense, Intersound said "yeah, we like what we hear, do you have the rest of the record?" We said "yes", but we didn’t.
So we’ve been remarkably immune to that process. We don’t know how, but we have been. We’ve got friends who have thousands upon thousands of dollars in recording gear, making demos all the time.
Now these are artists.
If you’re a pro writer you can’t get away without making demos. In fact you practically have to make masters. And in many cases, if you’re writing R & B or certain kinds of pop, usually you have to turn over your programs. So they can just modify them.

Paul: They want to hear something fully produced

Dan: Right. In our case we had hundreds of dollars in recording gear. I say that way on purpose because for the last few years we’ve been demoing live. We would program drums and bass into a workstation, output it through a mixer, guitars and vocals live, and go into a DAT. And record two track DAT live. And if we made a mistake, we’d go back and do it again. And so all the demos that we have done for our records were not produced demos, they were all live documents. And they worked well enough to show what the song was and we got the idea if anybody liked it. We didn’t ever want to suffer from "demo-itis". And we found it a little more convenient.

Paul: (laughing)Demo-itis?

Dan: It’s a common term in the LA music business: you like the demo so much, you never top it. I have friends who were in a band called The Rain People that was on Epic twelve years ago. And their demos were aweinspiring, and their album was average. With the same song, you go in and you overthink the process, and try to clean it up, and it’s a hard thing.
So we’ve downplayed our demos to try to never get into that bag.

Paul: Let’s go way back...how did Pat Benatar come to cover "We Belong"?

Eric: Well...long story or short story?

Paul: Medium? (Laughing)

Eric: Dan and I had been in a band together. That band kind of exploded. We didn’t speak to each other for a while. We wrote "We Belong" and immediately after we started writing with Rick Boston. So we established this three-way collaboration and we made a lot of demos. And we had 20-30 songs built up and there was all this talk about how people were getting publishing deals. So I was unemployed at the time and Dan was working at an ad agency. So I decided to take "We Belong" and 4 other songs around on a demo. And we had done a pretty weird demo on "We Belong". It was an experiment. It had lots of synthesizers. We were having lots of fun with that. We didn’t have a proper drum machine at the time and we didn’t have a drummer, so we just kind of slapped this thing together.
In any case, there was something obviously very special about it. And so we put it together with these other songs and took it around. Then I was at a birthday party at Dan’s house. And there was a guy who had a brand new A&R deal at a record company. I heard a lawyer talking to him, I was kind of eavesdropping. The lawyer said, "you know if I were you I’d let anybody in my office who had a tape to play." The other guy said "that’s exactly what I plan to do". So I stuck my hand in and said, "Hi, my name is Eric, I’d like to play you a tape." So he said, "ok, call my secretary". So I called his secretary on Monday to get instructions. And I made my appointment for Tuesday at 11 o’clock. I went to the A&R guys office and he loved it. I’m going to call a guy in the publishing department and get you an appointment. So he calls this guy and he really didn’t want to hear about it, so he says "yeah, sure, have him send me something, have him call me". So I started to call this guy, his name is Tom Sturges. It took me 2 and half months of calling him everyday, not getting any response. Finally the secretary started to feel sorry for me, I was always polite.
And I heard him standing at her desk saying "tell him I’m in a meeting".
So finally I said, do you think there is a time when I could really reach him. And she said to call between 4 and 6 on Fridays. So after 3 more weeks I finally got him on the phone. He told me to put the code word "blue" on the envelope and leave it at the security desk. So I did. Meanwhile I got turned down by everybody else and never heard back from him. Then one night, during Christmas vacation, around 8 in the evening he calls me and says " I’m listening to your tape right now, trying to catch up on some work before the new year. I think you guys are really good and should start a band and try get signed". I said "we’ve done that for the last 8 years, I’m not sure we want to go through that". He said "I’m looking for covers and I don’t hear anything very coverable here, but consider your tape listened to". He was the last hope, I had been turned down by everybody. So I was discouraged. I made another appointment with another guy who was fairly accessible. He was one of the other publishers who worked at CBS. So I made an appointment with him, just to get some feedback to find out why we were missing the point with these songs, cause I thought they were really good. So, he granted me an appointment and said, yeah I’d be glad to talk to you about them. So the day before that appointment I got a call back from this other guy who had turned me down, Tom Sturges. And he said " I have a meeting with a major female artist tomorrow and I want to take her your song ‘We Belong’, I think it’s her next single. Can you come in my office and make a deal?"
I said "no, as a matter of fact I can’t tomorrow, I’ve got a meeting at CBS". [Paul claps] I don’t know what possessed me to do that. He says"can you come before your meeting?" I actually didn’t know what I was doing, I was playing some sort of game with my own brain. I said " I’ll come after the meeting" he said "ok". So I go to CBS, all shoved up cause I’ve got this other meeting. And the guy at CBS plays the 5 songs and he starts fast forwarding through "We Belong", and I said "why are you fast forwarding through this one?" and he said "oh, the demo’s so bad I couldn’t even listen to it. I said, "well, you’ve go to listen to it because I’m on my way to Screen Gems to make a deal on this song". So he listened to it and said "Wow, that is a great song, thank you very much." So I left. I heard later that his boss put a sign on his door that said "The guy who turned down ‘We Belong’.
So I went over to Screen Gems and the guy told me he wanted 100% of your publishing. I think he had pitched the song and he already had the deal. I said "ok, well, we want to make the deal, I don’t know about 100% of publishing. I’ll talk to my lawyer". I didn’t really have a lawyer, so I went back to that same lawyer from the party, the only lawyer I knew. He was out of town and had a law student working for him. So the law student gets Screen Gems on the phone and tells me that we’ll try to get a percentage or a reversion clause. So I listened to the conversation as he told Screen Gems that "we’d like to get this percentage down" and Screen Gems said (emphatically) "No way." "Ok, we’d like to get a reversion clause" Screen Gems: "No way" "ok". So obviously we had a real heavy hitter on our hands. And so, we gave away a hundred percent of the publishing for $450. But, on the other hand, within two weeks, it was the first song Pat Benatar recorded for the album. And there was never any doubt that it was going to be a single. And little doubt that it was going to be a hit.

Paul: You sold that song for $450?

Eric: uh uh

Paul: And that’s all you ever got on it?

Eric: Oh no, no, no. We got the writer’s share. Which we split 50-50. And over a 15 year period we probably made a couple hundred thousand a piece.

Dan: The only thing you have to realize is that it probably would have been closer to half a million. We gave up a lot. But we got a lot.

Paul: Are you still getting money on that song?

Dan: Oh yeah, you betcha, about 10 grand a year.
Actually a little more than that.

Paul: God bless classic rock stations.

Eric: It’s appeared on four greatest hits of hers, so a total of five albums, and a few other covers all over the world.

Dan: "Hot Summer Nights" in England was a compilation that did about a million. I’ve actually found 6 more compilations off allmusic.com
And I found out 2 months ago that it was put out as a disco version by a group called Double Dare out of Brazil.

Eric: Really? I had never heard about that.

Dan: I never did either. I got an email from a guy saying "I am trying to reach the girls from Double Dare. I love your version of the song ‘We Belong’"
But I haven’t heard it.
We are members of BMI and the statements show extrapolated numbers of plays. And it gets to 4-5,000 plays a quarter 8 years ago. Then all of a sudden, 5 years ago, it started coming up, and now it gets 22-25,000 plays a quarter. We hit a million play hits a year ago. So we still make decent money. Writers who have 8, 9 or 10 of those do great, it’s an annuity.

Paul: Now, today, for publishing, I see several publishing companies listed for your songs. What it that all about?

Eric: (laughing) We’re just whores, we get around.

Paul: Do you have your own publishing company?

Eric: Now we do. I have two. One is Marion Place and Eric Lowen.

Dan: I have three. Salsongs, which the early stuff is on, Dan Navarro music which is the stuff on Polygram, and lately Jodada music.

Eric: (laughing) If I had 3, he’d have 4.

Dan: Salsongs is administered by 4 different publishing companies and it started getting confusing. So when the Intersound deal came about I decided to start fresh, starting a new company so that it was real clear what was what. And I actually took all of the catalog that I control is now on Jodada, all the Salsongs stuff is controlled by other people, and the Dan Navarro music is all at Polygram. Kind of keeps it straight in my head. Because I have Salsongs and other people have Salsongs. And it was getting really nutty. Same publishing company but different titles. Chrysalis had 4 Salsongs tunes, EMI has 3, Sony has 30. Finally, when it got to stuff I got back when I left all those companies, and didn’t leave there. They were also Salsongs. It was hard to tell the difference over what was what. So we are now both at Bug Music which administers our catalog. I started Jodada for all the stuff at Bug.

Paul: What exactly does an administrator do?

Eric: They collect the money. They watch out for the songs.

Dan: An administrator issues the mechanical licenses.

Eric: They issue copyrights when you present them with a new song. They copyright it for you.

Dan: And they also keep track of it for you. With duplicate song titles or a tape that gets out to Europe or something. European publishers visit their US counterparts and then take a bunch of tapes with them. And then suddenly one of your songs is out in Europe. Like the demos that are out there getting cut as a source cue in a movie and you don’t even know about it.

Eric: The administrator keeps track of it all. And it’s a pretty sloppy process. As hard as people work at it, it’s still sloppy. Our songs are all over the place and there’s all kinds of weird stuff going on. There were nine titles in my catalog that I had never even heard of. And Dan had some screwed up with his cousin Dave Navarro. He had some credit for Dave’s songs and Dan had some credit for his. That stuff happens. And you’re assuming that these people are professionals.

Paul: How about BMI?

Eric: Actually at BMI they seem to have their shit together.

Paul: I thought it was their job to keep track of your stuff.

Dan: Well it is, but only for performances. So the publishing administer also deals with them.
One of our problems is that we have an old friend who writes with us named David White. Well, David White at BMI is known as David White-11
Because it is such a common name. There are other professional David Whites out there. I’m lucky that there’s no other Dan Navarro, but I did get confused with Dave Navarro and he’s at BMI also. I went on the website at BMI.com and discovered that 7 songs of mine were credited to him. I was comparing statements with Eric one day. Eric got paid on "All is Quiet" and I had never gotten paid on that. So I called BMI. It turned out that there was about $800 in royalties that were sitting in an escrow account for some guy named Aldo Nardini. He was the next guy in an alphabetical sequence. They found the money and they sent it to me. The guy said "it ain’t much money, just 800 bucks". I said "That’s 800 bucks, give it up".

Eric: I’ve had things like that too, where I didn’t realize, with the administration thing also, they administer your half of the publishing. And on most things, they’ll give you an advance. Like the deal at Polygram, called a 50-50 deal. That means they have 50% of the publishing, a quarter of the whole song. So that 50% that they administer, they gave us a chunk of money and they take all money til their chunk is paid back, then you get your 50% after that. Well, a lot of times they give you a lot of money and the chunk doesn’t get paid back right away. So, I didn’t really worry about that publishing company. I started Eric Lowen Music for that, for the Polygram deal. I didn’t really worry about it cause it was going to be a month of Sundays before that ever paid back. So it turns out though that there were some performances, and some other things that were exempt from the deal and somehow I had accrued 1600 dollars.

Dan: What was amazing was when I got to Bug, the person who was their very knowledgeable and skilled copyright administrator, started going out and straightening out the spaghetti mess that had ensued when I left Chrysalis, then I was two year at Sony and had left them. And certain titles reverted to me, certain titles did not. It was all very complicated. She went on a search and there was one particular month when I was in a bind, I borrowed money from my parents to cover rent. Then one day a check arrives, and it’s for $26,000. So I called Bug and said "what is this?" They said "it’s money that Sony never collected, that’s been floating around cause so many titles used to be at Chrysalis, basically it’s money that fell between the sofa cushions."

Dan: When money falls between the cracks it goes into these huge escrow accounts. It’s like, "we don't know where this goes, we can’t take it".

Paul: So they put in the escrow account in case someone comes to claim it.

Dan: And they earn interest on it by the way.

Paul: And you get the interest?

Dan: RRRRRRRRRR. I don’t know how you spell that. [Paul inserts onomatopoeia] So it’s fine for them. They’ll leave the money there. I had one recently with Sony, who I left and still owed them money, but there were certain titles they were supposed to collect on and some they weren’t. I owed them probably 8-9,000 dollars on a 50,000 dollar deal. So the money worked its way down. And I earned back most of what I was supposed to but I still owed them some money. All of a sudden, a year ago, I get a check for 1600 dollars. And I said "great". Then I looked at my statement and realized that I had earned 10,000. Very unusual. And I started looking at the titles and thought, they’re not supposed to collect on them. So I contacted them and the administer in Nashville happens to be a friend. And she searched and said "well, this is money we were collecting for Bug, they were supposed to get, but they never did. We were sitting on it, not sure what to do with it and the amount got so high we finally put it to your account". "Well" , I said, " you know something, that’s supposed to come to me and Bug’s supposed to be getting their percentage". They said " If you forego the Bug percentage and let us keep that since we did the work, we’ll send it back to you". So I ended up getting a check for 8,500 bucks. And now I still owe them 8,000 dollars, instead of owing them nothing. But all the ducks are in a row now.
Very complicated process.

Paul: They have a lot to keep track of in that money business.

Dan: Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of songs and millions of writers and even within those million writers there are songs with different publishing percentages. Our own little catalog is complicated.

Eric: Yeah, I saw a special the other night on Biography about Irving Berlin. One of my favorite songwriters. He’s the epitimal songwriter, more than Woody Guthrie

Dan: He almost invented it. Stephen Foster kind of invented it, but he (Berlin) was the quintessential songwriter.

Eric: And I remember that Irving spent 3 years after coming back from France running his own publishing company. And I thought, "wow, he was in publishing too". He was dealing with supervising the people who were dealing with his own copyrights. That’s all he was doing, for 3 years. And that would be a full time job.

Dan: Absolutely

Eric: Diane Warren Music, you know Diane Warren right?

Paul: Oh yeah

Eric: It was the publisher of the year. And she only publishes her own songs. They were the BMI publisher of the year. So Diane Warren and her songs, all by herself were worth more than Warner Brothers, Chrysalis... Really huge

Paul: I heard that you don’t pitch your songs?

Dan: We pitch a little. Cuts are harder and harder to get. So we don’t just send things out there.

Eric: I was doing it every week for a while

Dan: Really?

Eric: I was sending songs, you know the rowfax? We get it from Brian, he sends it to Mike and he sends it to me I just send out country songs.

Paul: Do you get covered?

Eric: No, but I’d love to be happily surprised.

Dan: We’ve had one clean cover, meaning a song got sent to somebody cold and was recorded. It was "You Don’t Have to Go Home Tonight", covered by a Dutch group. Now we work mainly with the artist or we don’t get the cut.

Paul: And in the past?

Dan: We were covered by the Four Tops, Nile Rodgers, Dave Edmunds, they were all cold.

Paul: What do you mean by "cold"?

Dan: Meaning somebody sent something and it worked.
The Bangles, we worked and wrote with them. We do very little outside work, it’s mainly if we’re working with the artist. And that’s kind of the way it is these days. If you’re not working with the artist or the producer it’s a real hard thing to pull off. It’s possible but really difficult.

Eric: Billy Steinberg, who is a well known successful songwriter, every time we see him he complains about how hard it is to get his songs out there.

Paul: Billy Steinberg?

Eric: He won a grammy for that Celine Dion song. Six number ones in six years.

Paul: And even he says it’s tough?

Eric: He says it’s not like it was 20 years ago.

Dan: There’s a handful of artists, who are really prominent, who do outside songs.

Eric: There used to be Rod Stewart, Dionne Warwick, but those people aren’t recording or aren’t as successful any more.

Dan: Celine Dion just retired too.

Eric: Even Britney Spears, a lot of those people write their own their own songs. In the R &B realm it’s a bit different. But now the producers are writing songs, managers are writing songs. Because everyone is realizing that there is a lot of publishing money to be dealt with. We have a friend who sang "Oh What a Night", the Four Seasons song. Which was the biggest Four Seasons song ever. Up until 1994 when it became one of the biggest singles ever. This guy sang the song and performed it, but he was a salary employee. So when it became a hit again, and went up the charts with his vocal, he didn’t get a dime. He got absolutely nothing. Now he’s the vice-principal at a high school, and leads the marching band.

Paul: What’s his name?

Eric: Gerry Polci. He’s one of our old drummers.

Dan: He married Frankie Valli’s daughter.

Paul: Let’s try to get back to a few more questions, before we run out of time

Eric: (referring to the length of the interview)
We can talk. Can’t we , Paul?

Paul: (laughing) We talked a little about the Temptations. On your last album, there is a song "Happy Birthday 2 U" that sounds like a great soul song. Was that intentional?

Eric: Soul-Folk.

Dan: Solk, we call it. It was intentional from the standpoint that we like writing songs that sound like that whether it’s Just To See You or Looks Like Sunshine. We like something that’s got a little bit of grease in it. We had come up with the idea for that song about two years before we wrote it. I found it on an old work tape, and I said you know, we’ve got to do something with this, we’ve got to finish this song. It definitely had that soul feel which is not real common anymore. It certainly is very rare
in R & B.

Eric: Soul music has gotten very smooth and jazzy. Or it goes toward the hip-hop side. But that old, major chord, soul music doesn’t happen much anymore.

Dan: Mostly white guys doing it these days.

Paul: Sometime ago I remember someone labelling you guys Nu-Folk. Was that a term you came up with?

Eric: Absolutely

Paul: What happens when people ask you to define your music with some kind of descriptive category? What do yo call it? Sometimes people see an acoustic guitar and automatically say, oh, you play folk music.

Eric: We just say yes.

Dan: We’ve been known to call it acoustic rock. Which we’ve shortened to acrock.

Eric: I say folk rock now.

Dan: Folk rock is a good descriptions

Eric: For some reason it makes me cringe the least.

Dan: Cause it’s hard to categorize. We write lyric based music. We use acoustic guitars, basically cause I can’t play electric guitar.

Eric: No, you weren’t

Dan: You weren’t watching when I kept hitting the volume knob, unintentionally to go "bap!"

Eric: We decided that part of the reason we play acoustic guitars is because we want the vocals to shine and we love acoustic guitars. We always have. (They tell a joke.)

Paul: Speaking of some humor, you had a song "Hammerhead Shark" on your first album. I haven’t seen any humorous songs since.

Eric: "Happy Birthday 2U" is pretty funny

Paul: Do you plan to do any more humorous material? My kids loved "Hammerhead Shark".

Eric: The lyrics of that song were written by Preston Sturges, son of the famous filmmaker.

Dan: Brother of the publisher who dealed on "We Belong".

Eric: Check out the lyrics on "Pride and Hunger". It has the same lyrical bent.

Paul: Is there any advice you’d give to the songwriters in our group?

Eric: When we talk to songwriters who want to do this as a living, we tell them it’s a very tough pursuit. The artistic life is a very insecure and very difficult one. It’s a very difficult road to take. And we say this half tongue in cheek: "quit when you can". Just because there are a lot of things that are easier, and seem to be more suited for human life. But on the other hand, speaking for myself, it’s been the most fulfilling road I could have taken. And we are living....you are sitting here at lunch in my dream come true.

Paul: (laughs)

Dan: Welcome to my nightmare.

Eric: It’s one or the other. Some days are one, some days are the other.
When we are forced to reflect on it we feel

Dan: very lucky.

Eric: Absolutely we are doing what we want to do and we are affecting people the way we want to affect them. And our range of success has not really wowed a whole lot of people. I mean, they’re not writing about us in Rolling Stone, they’re not writing about us in Billboard

Dan: right now.

Eric: We’ve been written about in both publications on some level. But at the moment we are just doing what we want to do and connecting with a lot of people in a very profound way. And it enjoying more than we ever have, and enjoying more than we have a right to, almost. It truly is, to quote the song, "it’s a blessing".

Dan: (speaking of advice) Above all, enjoy the work. Cause it is work. And it’s great work if you can get it. It’s important to keep your eyes on the prize, but it’s not what you’re really doing it for. The goals are milestones. They’re signposts, they’re really not what you’re there for.
You’re there to do the work. And toward that end, dare to be good, risk being self-critical, learn from everybody and everything. And become the sum total of your entire experience. Because if you simply limit yourself to where you feel, in a given moment, you’re going to lose everything you could have in terms of accomplishment, professionally or creatively, artistically. All the songwriters who don’t like to take criticism, because what they meant to say, they said. And to them I say, fair enough. You will accomplish as much as you can. But if you can’t absorb from what’s around you. If you can’t look at your 20 word verse and cut it down to a 5 word verse, and feel that you’ve served the song, then you’re not going to grow. But the person may say, but this is what I meant to say. And I say, fair enough. And you’ll have 4 people listening to it. Now you may not want millions of people listening to it. Also, fair enough. But maybe take the time to learn enough to have 40 people like it instead of 4. By simplifying, by taking the shortcut to a point of view, rather than taking the long way around. In songwriting, less is more, in my opinion. In my humble opinion.

Paul: Even if you take seven bridge home? (Quoting from one of their songs)

Eric: (laughs)

Dan: "Seven Bridges" by itself is a case in point of the stuff I’m talking about. When Eric and I started writing, I had a lot of experience and he had none. We accomplished a certain kind of success very quickly. But he always used to look to me for validation. At the point which "Seven Bridges" was written, I was moving away from working with him exclusively and trying to stretch out to other things because of some things going on with the band that I wasn’t a part of. That bothered me, which is my own cross to bear. And so, he wrote this song that I thought was pretty normal and pretty average and not necessarily very compelling. And he wanted me to write the lyrics. And at this stage I said, you know, I’m done, this is your song. You write it. Eric, at that time, was not known for his lyrics. Eric took the challenge, went home and wrote an awesome lyric. And turned an average song into a spell binding song.

Paul: It is a great song

Dan: By taking the opportunity to say what he wanted to say, in the way that he wanted to say it.

Eric: I’m blushing.

Paul: (laughing)

Dan: I’m sorry it’s true.

Paul: I think I’m blushing too.

Dan: So, from that standpoint, the criticism was not don't write this, write that. The criticism was, you do it.

Eric: Satisfy yourself. Challenge yourself.
On the one hand you have to continually push yourself to really distill songwriting. Like Dan was saying, less is more. It’s very important that people don’t mistake the number one rule of songwriting which is satisfy yourself. But don’t mistake that for indulge yourself.

Dan: Right. A very, very fine line.

Eric: It’s a very fine line. But no one else is going to satisfy you. And if you spend your whole career trying to be somebody else’s idea of a good time, you’re not going to feel very good. That’s part of why we started performing for ourselves and stopped writing exclusively for other people. It had become a drag. People would say, "no I don't want it to be like that, I want it to be like this". We’d say "YEAH, alright, whatever". But doing that is a kind of kiss-off while you’re doing something as personal as songwriting.

Dan: Yuck.

Eric: We actually came up with that line: We didn't want to be somebody else’s idea of a good time. We didn’t want to live that way. We wanted to be our own idea of a good time. And I’ve got to say that’s what we’re doing. When we play, there are songs, we break each other up, different times...
Talking about that songwriting process, when we were writing "Crossing Over", we were trading lyrics. We were sitting across from each other. Dan gave me this lyric, I think it’s in the third verse

Dan: The second verse

Eric: Where I just started crying. Oh my God.

Dan: Eric and I were writing about my mother’s passing, after she passed. And we were trading stuff back and forth, and there was this one section of the verse that was accurate, and not wordy by normal standards. But, there were a few lines in there... And I looked at it and said, this says it, but it doesn’t. So I crossed out four lines, and wrote one line. He looked at it and fell apart. And I don’t remember the full lines, but it got canceled down to "I’ve made my peace, let me memorize your eyes".

Eric: And the other piece of advice for songwriters, which comes right out of that, is to always to use the Irving Berlin "so what" test.

Dan: Yeah.

Eric: That was another thing that I heard about him, was that he would write a song and he’d look at it, and he’d have to ask himself "so what?". And if he couldn’t answer that question, then he put it away. And there has to be a "so what" about a song. It make me laugh, it touches me, or something that means something to me.

Dan: Because of the fact that you are creating something from nothing. A lot of times, what is merely competent, appears to the creator as genius. And it’s hard to take yourself out of yourself and look at something and go, just because this sounds like music, and rhymes, and is tuneful, doesn’t mean that it’s compelling. Competence is not the same as compelling. And so sometimes it’s a very simple twist of phrase. We had an old song, called the War of Love. Where there was a line about a person standing in Washington Square, and the person had tears in their eyes and snow in their hair. Nice little rhyme and I thought that was sweet and you got the picture, right? We were sitting over at Rick Boston’s house and I thought "the tears in your eyes were turning to snow in your hair". Suddenly there was a connection between this and the frozen water. And I remember at that point Tom Sturges looked at me and went "oh yeah". Because it’s a simple little twist, of pulling that one little thread to connect everything.
The other line worked fine. The new line got a seasoned publisher to go "oh yeah". So that’s the kind of things you want to do. That’s where self criticism, not self destruction, not self immolation, we’re taking about looking at something and going ok, how can I look at this as if I didn’t write it.

Paul: Right, objectively.

Dan: If you think about the fact, animals, when they give birth, love their offspring. Until later when they either appear to be competition or food. And the same sort of thing happens when you take yourself out of yourself, and read something. What if a stranger gave this to me...well, I would take that line out, I don’t like that line. And it’s a good thing to do. It’s a hard, hard exercise. But I’m sure that there are people who look at our songs and go "unh unh, it’s all crap". But we at least, take ourselves through a process that works for us, as far as making it work.
In "When The Lights Go Down" the line originally said "middle age is breathing down my neck, got a wife and a kid and a house with a mortgage I can’t afford". That kind of didn’t work. Then " a wife and a kid and a lawn and a mortgage I can’t afford" That was more interesting but who the fucking cares about the lawn. Then I went " a wife and a kid, and a life with a mortgage" you mortgage your life, you sell out. Most people don’t hear that, it goes right by, and they go "man, when you were talking about your mortgage" but they don’t necessarily hear it’s a life with a mortgage. But to us, if you take the time to go through that, you find there’s more there than just the superficial story.

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