For The Verbs, It’s Always Music First
Steve Jordan, Meegan Voss, Danny Korchmar and Tamio Okuda, all incredibly talented musicians on their own– also make up The Verbs. They stopped by the SiriusXM studios last week to play music and talk with Ron Bennington about the band, songwriting, creativity and their new album, “Cover Story”. Excerpts of the interview and a song they performed for us live, appear below.
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Check out the Verbs Performing Baby Blue Here:
[powerpress = “https://theinterrobang.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Verbs-BabyBlue.mp3”]
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Ron Bennington: The Verbs are with us. It’s great to see you again Steve. You’ve got Meegan [Voss] with you and Danny’s [Kortchmar] with you and Tamio [Okuda]. And he’s actually going to be using an interpreter.
Steve Jordan: On occasion. It depends on what kind of question you ask.
Ron Bennington: How is it for you guys to communicate as a band? Is it difficult?
Steve Jordon: Well you know something, it’s not difficult because as you know, music is a universal language. We’ve known each other for about fourteen years and we’ve never had a problem communicating. Tamio and I, it’s incredible, really, it’s kind of psychic. So we’ve never had a problem. We only brought Charlie around just in case.
Ron Bennington: And Danny’s here today. Now Danny’s name is on about half the albums that I own, whether he’s played on them or produced them. How did you hook up with these guys?
Danny Kortchmar: Well I’ve known Steve a long time, at least thirty years, and we’ve been playing together all that time. So when he started to put The Verbs together and hooked up with Meegan and started making music, they called me to come down and fool around with them, have fun with them, which is something Steve and I would be doing anyway.
Ron Bennington: Do you guys play every day of your life or are there periods of time where no music is played.
Meegan Voss: That’s a good question. No, we have a recording studio in our loft…Kooch you have one as well right? So we pretty much play all of the time. You don’t think about it…because you’re wearing your pajamas.
Steve Jordan: And Tamio has a studio in his home as well. The only tricky bit is Tamio lives in another hemisphere. So it’s a little tricky to get us all together, but when we do get together we have a blast.
Ron Bennington: Is this how you met Meegan? Under the same circumstances? Was it music first?
Steve Jordan: It was music first. I was auditioning somebody and this person, who I didn’t even know, said you’ve got to meet this girl. And this person was very serious about it. And then we met, and the person was right, and we’ve been making music ever since. And I married her twice. We had two ceremonies in the same day. I just wanted to make sure that it stuck.
Ron Bennington: But you play with a lot of people and you have chemistry with a lot of people. How did you know that this was more than just musical chemistry?
Meegan Voss: Well, I can’t speak for that, but, he always wanted to have his own band. He’s a producer, he’s a multi instrumentalist, he’s a writer…you know, he can do everything basically. So to be able to have complete control…well he can’t control me, but to utilize all his talents, it’s a dream for him.
Ron Bennington: Well I do see you– and I don’t see this with a lot of people– you are laughing in the studio, you are having fun. Just being in the studio is fun.
Steve Jordan: I love it. That’s why we have a studio in our home. We’ll get up, maybe we’ll right a tune and say, hey, let’s record it. That’s how this whole thing started. I tried a band and then it wasn’t really happening and so we started writing and we recorded. And next thing you know we had three albums worth of material. And it was…oh ok, let’s start a band, and then I’d say let’s call Danny. We’d call Danny an adverb. And then I was in Japan playing with Sonny Rollins. And I was doing an interview and Tamio was actually interviewing me in a big pop magazine over there. And then at the end of the interview he was talking about our first album and I said, ‘would you play with us? If we played Japan would you be in The Verbs?’ And he said yes, and I couldn’t believe it. I was like really? And so he’s been a real member of the band ever since, and it’s been incredible for us. I played on his first solo album, which was what, fifteen years ago? See he was in a huge band called Unicorn, so he’s like a legend. He’s got this whole living legend thing happening.
Ron Bennington: So when you guys go to Japan, it’s like who are these guys with Tamio?
Steve Jordan: Exactly. So we are drafting on him.
Ron Bennington: What a great asset though. What a great thing to have.
Steve Jordan: Well the thing is, we never have to talk about anything music. I never have to say, can you play this? He just plays anything we want to hear, instantly. It’s weird.
Ron Bennington: And as musicians, you’ll know that right away– whether you have chemistry– in the same way as basketball players know immediately that some guy could be good but he might not be a Laker. Danny, you’ve written with so many people. How is that different? I mean, to sit down and write with another person is always a mystery to me.
Danny Kortchmar: Well, it should be easy. You know, my philosophy about music and writing is, it should come pretty easy. I’ve been lucky that I’ve co-written with and for a lot of great singer songwriters, and generally we’re on the same page. If I write something I know instantly if it will work for James Taylor or if it will work for Jackson.
Steve Jordan: Usually when he writes for someone that’s really great it like scares the person he’s writing it for, it’s so good. So when he wrote Dirty Laundry for Don Henley– it scared him.
Ron Bennington: Is it weird too when you’re with somebody like Jackson Brown to be able to go, hey what do you think of this song? Cause that has to be intimidating, right?
Danny Kortchmar: Well that’s exactly who you want to ask, ‘cause he’ll know. If anyone knows, he does, as great of a writer as he is. I’ve known Jackson since he was eighteen or nineteen so, I don’t have any problem approaching him, he’s a dear friend.
Ron Bennington: The song, World’s A Mess, which I told you before, I’m a gigantic fan of, this is off your last album.
Steve Jordan: Well Meegan wrote this song. I was on tour with Eric Clapton and I said, well, look, I’m going to go on tour, just start writing the album. And when I got back, the whole album was written.
Meegan Voss: I was lonely (laughs).
Ron Bennington: Does it always come that fast for you?
Meegan Voss: I don’t stress about it, I’ve been writing so long. I mean, I’m not Kooch but I kind of know my thing. You kind of feel it building when you have to do some stuff. I don’t try to write, I don’t think I could do like a Nashville thing where, like, okay we scheduled a writing day and you’re going in, and you’re going to write this song. I don’t know what it would sound like.
Ron Bennington: Are you the same way Kooch, or can you sit down if we said we needed a song by 7:00 tonight.
Meegan Voss: No, he’s a journeyman as well.
Danny Kortchmar: No, I don’t write like that. There’s a lot of great writers who can do that, who can sit down and right a song on the spot. With me, I’ve got to wait for something to come out of the ether and turn me on.
Meegan Voss: Well when you write with us, you’re always right there.
Danny Kortchmar: Well I always have a lot of ideas but they don’t coalesce until the last minute.
Ron Bennington: But other people kind of help bring it out of you? Like if you’re with somebody who can write…that kind of opens it up for you?
Danny Kortchmar: Oh absolutely, certainly that’s the case with Steve and Meegan. We get together, and something always happens.
Ron Bennington: The next project you guys are doing is going to have a lot of covers on it as well.
Steve Jordan: Right. It’s called Cover Story.
Ron Bennington: Why now covers?
Meegan Voss: Well, these are songs that I think affected me my whole life, listening to AM radio. Remember AM radio? I love radio and just listening to the radio and hit songs just stuck in my mind and I liked them. And I actually didn’t think that I could do them. But I thought, well let me try, so they’re kind of different.
Ron Bennington: Has it always been music for you ever since you were a little kid?
Steve Jordan: Absolutely.
Ron Bennington: Same with you Kooch?
Danny Kortchmar: Oh absolutely.
Ron Bennington: You were professional by what age?
Danny Kortchmar: Well as soon as I graduated high school I started my first band and never looked back.
Ron Bennington: And your first band, who was all in that, do you remember?
Danny Kortchmar: My first band was called The King Bees. This is 1965. And we played all the discoteques– they were then called discoteques all over New York, all over New Jersey, up and down the coast everywhere.
Ron Bennington: How do you know when a song is done, it’s time to stop tweaking.
Meegan Voss: Well sometimes I know it’s just wrong and you keep singing. Like Burnt Out Star. I had it in a different kind of idea off of Trip, our last album. And I kept playing it and playing it, and then one day I just changed the chorus. Just wrote the new chorus. And actually Kootch wrote in on it.
Ron Bennington: But when you take that in studio, when you’re done– are you ready to let the session players jump in and change or, when you guys are working sessions do you just give them what you want? Or are you always trying to improve on the songs.
Danny Kortchmar: Always trying to improve on the songs. As for calling people in, you call people you know are going to give you what you want.
Ron Bennington: It’s still not a science is it. At a certain point there’s craft but then there’s that other thing. Whatever magic happens in songwriting.
Danny Kortchmar: Yeah, I think you have to stay open to ideas all of the time. You have to constantly have your head open. Keith Richards talks about having antennae. Ideas are in the ether, and they come to you if your antenna is up.
Ron Bennington: It is almost a spiritual thing at some point. I guess we’ll never have the full understanding of it. Particularly why some people, if you look at their careers, write such phenomenal stuff for awhile, and then it seems to be lost on them. Other people, they’re still writing great stuff well into their 60’s 70’s 80’s no matter what age they are.
Meegan Voss: It’s mystifying. It’s almost like you have to stay young. It’s like playing. You play music– it’s playing– goofing around. So you have to stay innovative and young minded and open.
Ron Bennington: That’s an interesting thing because some of the people that get to be more nostalgic I think, are the ones who give it up. When you reach people who say this was the perfect time– 86 – 91 – cause that just happens to be when they were a certain age and open to it– they can get stuck in those times.
Steve Jordan: When I played with Sonny Rollins he was always writing new. I asked him, can we play Tenor Madness that he recorded with Coltraine. He wouldn’t want to play it. I had to beg him one night, can we please play Tenor Madness. He said he was not into the nostalgic thing at all. He was always writing new material- and this guy is 77 years old, playing better than ever.
Meegan Voss: And Keith…
Steve Jordan: And Keith. Well Keith is really insane, actually with the thing. Well first of all, you’re right, it is a spiritual thing. I feel like I’m a conduit to all spiritual things. And Keith is the perfect example of somebody who loves music so much that all that’s important to him is making good music and writing great songs. That’s number one.
Ron Bennington: And everything else that has come and gone for him, the stardom and all, it’s still never as important as the next gig or the next song.
Steve Jordan: Well the next song. And he feels really comfortable in the studio. That’s like his home away from home. Or his home. If he’s recoring– which is the reason why he recorded in his home in France at that time– it’s because where he’s at his best.
Ron Bennington: And isn’t it amazing how some guys are great on stage but awful in the studio or some people are really comfortable in the studio and not on stage. Is it two different worlds for you guys? Is it two different skill sets?
Danny Kortchmar: Yeah, it always amazes me how anyone could be good at these very different skill sets. Being a performer is totally different than being a songwriter. Being a singer is totally different than being a guitar player or instrumentalist. And all those gigs are different from being a bandleader, which is yet another gig. So to be good at two or three of those is pretty amazing.
Ron Bennington: The Verbs. Thanks so much for coming by today. Really big fan of everybody here, and we’ll see you next time coming through.
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This interview can be heard in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? You don’t have to worry, you can click here for a free trial subscription. Want to know more about Ron Bennington Interviews? Click here. Get more information on The Verbs at www.theverbs.us. Also check out www.dannykortchmar.com and www.stevejordan.net .
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Hear The Verbs Play Silent Man, Live.
Hear The Verbs Play Out of Time, Live.
