A Conversation with Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Kenny Wayne Shepherd stopped by the Sirius XM studios with band mate Noah Hunt to talk with our own Ron Bennington about their new album, Here I Go. Kenny is known as one of the best blues guitarists of his generation. This is his sixth album.
Ron Bennington: How you guys doing? It’s good to see you here. Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Of course Noah Hunt in studio with us as well. This album How I Go got recorded when?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: We did it kind of slowly over the past year and a half but it just got released about three weeks ago, four weeks ago.
Ron Bennington: Now do you like to sit down in the studio like that and do a whole album, or would your rather do what you did this time, just piece by piece.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Well, this was a new approach for us. We used to just bang records out. We would be on the road for like a year, then we’d come home, and I’d write for like two months. We’d record for two or three months and then hit the road again and put a record out. This time I wrote in my spare time. A lot has happened over the past several years; we had lots of shows to do; I had three kids in the past four years.
In between all of that, trying to find time to write and then record, we kinda had to break it up a bit. But it was cool because we actually got to live with the material for long periods of time. We’d go record for like two weeks and then two months would go by before we’d go back into the studio. So I really got to listen to what we did, and you know, get a game plan together, as to what we wanted to do– to actually make it better.
Ron Bennington: Would you do any of those songs on the road, or would you keep them in your back pocket?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: We don’t normally do that. We did some, right as the album was just about finished and we had some of the songs. When we had the end result right there, then we started testing some of them out at the live concerts just to give the fans a little teaser and a little taste of what they were in store for.
Noah Hunt: And we didn’t want to let too much out too soon. Once you play a note, it’s on the air these days.
Ron Bennington: Yea that is a major problem isn’t it? Everybody’s set list is out immediately. And that whole thing of just being surprised at a show, I don’t know why we don’t want that anymore.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yea, I mean, first impressions still, in my opinion, mean a lot. And I wanted to be sure that when people heard the new material, they were going to hear it as good as possible.
Ron Bennington: With writing, do you know when the songs are going to come to you? Or is it more about the discipline and sitting down with it?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: A lot of it is just sitting down with it. But, what I’ve done– now that we have iPhones, everybody has a digital recorder with them all the time. So that’s been great because there’s been probably hundreds of songs that have never come to fruition over the years, cause I had an idea and I didn’t have a way to record it immediately so I forgot it. So I accumulated over 300 different guitar riffs and grooves that I had recorded into my phone over the past several years. And then when I sat down and said alright I’m going to start writing this record, and putting this stuff together, then I just started going through all that stuff and picking the ones I thought would be appropriate for the next record.
Ron Bennington: Now you just start improvising that? Or are you thinking about it. Do you kind of find it?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: If I was sitting here, for the next five or ten minutes, just jamming around…I try to just let it go and see what happens and normally I’ll come up with something within you know, five or ten minutes.
Ron Bennington: If that happens I want you to jump on it, and then I want a writing credit with you guys. I’ll throw in a half a lyric, and that will be it, you’ll owe me forever. Noah are you the same way or is it a whole different feel for you?
Noah Hunt: The way I’ve been writing lately, its been more of kind of just writing words. Cause Kenny’s such a wealth of guitar riffs and music– I’ve just been kind of writing these free form stream-of-consciousness things. And hopefully I’ll be able to put some of those to some of his riffs. But it has to kind of come to me. It’s hard to just it down and force it.
Ron Bennington: The whole thing of song writing is so mysterious, isn’t it? When you look at– sometimes people work so hard on something and then at another point, a great song just comes rolling in, within minutes.
Noah Hunt: The best songs seem to come that way, but it’s so rare.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: What’s cool is – like every record that we’ve done– I’ve come in with at least thirty songs worth of material when we go into the studio. And then we start cutting a whole bunch of stuff, and then the best stuff tends to surface, and an album begins to take a direction and take shape.
Also, I like to co-write. Because I always find when I’m writing with somebody else, it generally inspires something in me that probably wouldn’t have happened if I would have tried to do the whole song by myself. And a lot of times it will take different directions; and it keeps it interesting for me. So a lot of times when we’re working on a song and we’re beating our heads up against the wall on one particular song, and then we’re like, lets step away from that and try something else. And then we try something else and write this really cool song. And then later we’ll come back to the one we were doing before and then finish it up too.
Ron Bennington: So writing alone for you…I wonder if its like being in a conversation. Like, if you’re in a good conversation, you’re not thinking about so much what you’re going to say. But if someone said, alright I need you to sit down and write a speech about one of your friends– it would be the most difficult thing in the world.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: There’s definitely more pressure when it’s just you. I remember when I wrote some songs back in the day, early on in my career, I wrote the entire song but I was too self conscious to put it out there. So I took it to somebody else and just had them change one thing so that their name could be on it too, so I didn’t feel like I had all the pressure on me.
Ron Bennington: So you didn’t want to be the person who handed it in…
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Well if it sucked, then it wasn’t all my fault, you know? (Laughing)
Ron Bennington: The other thing too, is when you come into it like you did– being a kid and loving music– you are presented with history’s great songs. So, here’s all the great songs ever written– now lets see you write something of your own.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Oh yea, I know. A lot of what we do is blues based and we played traditional blues in the show. And its challenging, man, to write an authentic blues song nowadays. It’s challenging to write a new blues song that doesn’t sound contrived. But the goal, I think for any artist, is to try and write material that essentially sounds timeless. And people can enjoy it forever. I think we accomplished that on a lot of our material. One song in particular which is Blue on Black which was the big hit off our second album, Trouble Is, back in the 90s. And that song was number one for like 17 consecutive weeks. Eventually it was 27 weeks at number one on the rock chart. It’s like a reoccurring classic rock song that gets played a lot. That’s the ultimate goal for a songwriter– to write a song like that. Now its been fourteen, fifteen years later, and people are still listening to that song.
Ron Bennington: And yet, the first time you hear that song, you’re like, well wait, was that from the sixties or the seventies? Which I think is classic, and what you guys do has always had that classic American Sound. We were talking about song writing, was Blue on Black one that came pretty easy to you or was it one you had to wrestle with a little bit?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: That one came pretty quick. We were down in New Orleans. And me and Mark Selby and Tia Sillers, who I wrote that song with. I think we had a gig down there and they came down a couple of days early, and we rented a house in the French Quarter. We just sat in there and banged out a whole bunch of songs that day, for a couple of days.
But what was funny was…. it’s a real deep song, and the lyrics are kind of heavy. But it all started – I had the music, and I was like, hey what do you guys think of this? And I started to play the music and we were trying to think about what to write the song about. And Tia…I had a shirt on that was two different kinds of fabric sewn together that was blue and black and she was just like Blue on Black! It’s a total cheesy way to have birthed a song. But it ended up being such a wonderful song, you know.
Noah Hunt: We had just recorded that song, do you remember? In Sausalito about fourteen fifteen years ago. We played that song on our acoustics that night to these two girls and they started to make out in the middle of the song. So I guess we shoulda known it was gonna be a hit.
Ron Bennington: Yea, something is working. So that’s the way we can start to figure out whether we’ve got a hit or not…if the girls are kissing. But do you feel it? Do you feel it when you have a song, especially this breakthrough song– this signature song. Do you know it? Or are you just like, grateful?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: We didn’t know how far the song was going to go but we knew we had something special. I remember mixing the song at this studio in Burbank. And my producer was there, I was there, my dad was there, my producers wife was there– we had the whole control room full of people and we were playing the song back while he was doing the mix. And it was like magic man. People just got up and started dancing around the room and high-fiving and hugging. It was like this really spectacular moment and we knew we had something special. We just didn’t know it was going to go as far as it did.
Ron Bennington: And that’s the strangest thing about that song too because it almost fees like a memory. I can’t remember when I first heard it but I know I had to be much older than I was in my head. I have a feeling I heard it when I was a kid but that couldn’t possibly have happened. So, you never know when these things are going to come in and you just welcome them when they happen?
Kenny and Noah: Yea, absolutely
Ron Bennington: But you play every day right?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: When I’m at home, having three kids…
Ron Bennington: how old are they?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: My daughter is about to be 4, my middle son is about to be 2.5 and my youngest is like 5 months. I used to pick up the guitar around the house, and my daughter when she was younger, she would be like daddy no! daddy no! And she would like pull on the guitar and I thought that she was getting jealous that the guitar was taking the attention away from her. And after awhile I just figured I can’t do this around the house because I don’t want her to feel like I’m neglecting her. And then finally one day she kept saying that and I was like– what is it? And then she took the guitar from me. She wanted the guitar. So I can’t pick up the guitar cause my kids try to take it away from me and they want to play on it. And it makes it challenging to play every day when I’m at home. But the best practice that we get is every night on stage. Even when you’re practicing at home– you play with a different level of intensity on stage than you just really don’t do when you’re sitting around the house.
Ron Bennington: And in front of every audience, it’s a little different too right? We were talking about the strangeness of how to write songs, but how weird is it that with different people, it’s a different show. A different place, it’s a different show. It could be the same lineup, everything’s done the same, yet everything feels different on that night.
Noah Hunt: It just depends on the audience and the energy in the room. But, it doesn’t really matter because every night a strange transformation takes place in our heads. Like two seconds before you walk on stage you become another person. Something flips and all of a sudden you’re on this wild ride that’s incredible.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yea the audience does play a big role man. We play a lot of theaters and because of the seats people feel inclined or obligated to sit down. But we love it when people get up and start dancing, (although the people that they’re standing in front of might not be so happy about it) but when everyone kind of sits there cause they have to..it can kind of be like…but once they get up and they really start dancing and get into it, definitely it contributes to the performance and to the energy of the show. So the audience has a role in the quality of the show too.
Ron Bennington: And I’ve felt that from an audience place, where everything will just flip. You just hit that spot where it all gets together. And I feel that’s just the crazy thing about music– particularly the kind of music you guys play being blues based, being American based where it all feels like it’s coming from some other spot that’s been around America for a long long time.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: From what I understand, to play this kind of music authentically, you have to come straight from the heart, and that’s the most natural place you can tap into man, if you’re playing straight from the heart and soul and putting all of yourself into it, then people are going to feel that.
Ron Bennington: Well you did that DVD where you went out and talked and played with so many of the blues guys. What got that in the back of your mind? When did you think I want to go in and do more than just play, I want to connect with these people.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: When we were doing our third record, we were in the studio and Jerry Harrison has produced many of our records including the new album. Jerry was in the Talking Heads. We were just kind of brainstorming and this was like in 2000 and Jerry had this idea, he thought it would be a cool experiment to like write new material…..like if I went down to find some old school blues guys, and went down to their house or whatever and just set up and jam with them and try to write some material with them. And then see how that worked out. So we had talked about that just briefly in 2000 and then many years went by and we never talked any more about it.
And so then we did our fourth record which was called The PlaceYou’re In. And that album was really just a straight ahead rock record, so it was a little bit of a departure from what a lot of people had come to expect from us. I knew when we did this rock record, we had a huge fan base of Blues fans that love what we do so I was like– man we gotta give the blues fans something to really sink their teeth into.
So we revisited Jerry’s idea and actually decided to take a film crew, and go down there, and rather than try to write songs with them we would go down there and jam with them and perform songs, and make a documentary film and a record doing it, which was really cool. A lot of really great legendary musicians and some lesser known blues players as well but very talented people.
Ron Bennington: But you guys are always open to ‘lets just jam.’ We don’t need to talk about it, we all come from the same place, and you’re willing to throw it out there, right?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Every night we try to improvise. We’ll change up the set list at the drop of a hat, and we’ll extend the solos in songs. I try never to play a whole set the same way twice. Even if you came and saw us two nights in a row and we played the same set list, you’re going to hear Noah sing notes or phrases differently on those two nights. You’re going to hear me play solos differently on those two nights. That’s how we keep evolving as musicians and learning as musicians. If you’re just going through the motions and playing the same thing every night. To me, that would get kind of stagnant after a while.
Noah Hunt: And you just have to let yourself feel it. It’s just how you’re feeling it at any portion of the song. You know, just let it go.
Ron Bennington: But I guess there’s some kind of subconscious communication that takes place. Cause you don’t go, hey on this song I want you to do this. You’re just trusting each other to go with it.
Noah Hunt and Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Sure, there’s a lot of that.
Ron Bennington: But is there times you look over and go what the hell is he doing? What is this shit?
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: (laughing) Well for him… I start changing up the set list, and sometimes I don’t …
Noah Hunt: (laughing) Sometime I announce the song to the audience, and he’s like, oh, wait. That seems to happen a lot.
Ron Bennington: Its like when you see the guys playing with Dylan. They’re always watching his hands cause they don’t know what he’s going to do at any time. Nobody ever wanders away from him.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: We used to not even have a set list. I would just kick off song after song and everybody would just fall right in. But we got a really great band with us now, probably the best touring band that we’ve ever had. On drums, we have Chris Layton who was with Stevie Ray Vaughn on Double Trouble. On bass we just added Tony Franklin who was a bass player in the band The Firm with Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers and Blue Murder and a whole lot of other bands. And then Noah and myself and Riley Osbourn on keyboards. Especially me and Chris. Being the drummer, he’s like the backbone, he’s like the engine of it all. And we’ve been playing together for so long now. Its like, when I go off on a solo, and I stray from the norm, he knows– its like intuitive– he knows right where I’m going. It’s like you were saying, there’s no direct communication but we understand where we’re going together without even having to say anything, and everyone goes right along for the ride.
Ron Bennington: And again, it goes right back to the mystery of the whole thing. You can’t sit around and try to describe it, and yet, it just happens. Another thing that’s also interesting about you guys– you come up in an age where you didn’t necessarily have to be blues guys and yet you were pulled in that direction. I mean, there was so much music open to you, you could play anything and yet it went back to the Blues.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd: Yea there was a lot of stuff going on. That was when hair metal was big and when Metallica was really getting big and then even a few years later with Nirvana and Pearl Jam and all of those guys coming out. I was listening to Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and BB King and Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn. I was just drawn to the music. I’m from Louisiana; I grew up around the blues. My dad was in radio so I went to all of these concerts and he had an extensive music collection. I just always felt very attracted to the blues.
Ron Bennington: And let yourself follow it. I think that’s cool. Hey it was great meeting you two. Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Noah Hunt. New Album, How I Go. Thanks so much and we’ll see you guys next time.
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You can hear this interview (and others) in its entirety on Ron Bennington Interviews which airs weekly on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. Don’t have a subscription yet? Click here for a free trial.
And you can click below to get Kenny’s new album on Amazon.com.
