On meeting Jimmy Buffett, his ban on sad songs, and the album Nothing But Time.

Making the Nothing But Time album

I wrote a bunch of new songs and we wanted to make an album. I've been playing with the guys in my band for a number of years - we're good friends. Somebody suggested Joe Chiccarelli as a producer. I called him and he was in the south of France producing a record for Morrissey at the time. We finally hooked up, I sent him some demos of the songs, and he said, "I'm in."

We recorded the album at EastWest Studios in LA. We rehearsed for 10 days. Joe came to all the rehearsals, and we went in and knocked out the album. It was winter at the time, and we were testing for COVID. Our bass player, George Sugarman, got COVID halfway through, so Joe brought in Sean Hurley to play bass, and he played on "Wonder Of It All" and "Maybe." Sean is John Mayer's bass player, and Kaveh Rastegar, who's John Legend's bass player, played bass on "Send Them Love" and "Stars."

He's won 11 Grammys. He's worked with Elton John, U2, Beck, the Counting Crows, The Killers, The Shins, Jack White, The White Stripes, Michael Bublé... a wide variety of artists. We've become really good friends - I just spoke with him yesterday.

We had the songs pretty well worked out, but he'd say, "Try it a half step down." Little things like that make a difference. He brought the best out of all of us.

I told him that I had a sax player in the band, he goes, "Great, I'm not afraid of saxophones." He has no fear, and a great ear. He has the best ears of anybody I know.

I think we were playing "Send 'Em Love" and he comes out of the booth and says, "Hold on, I want to try a different snare." He changed out the snare, and I'm thinking to myself, I can't tell the difference. A snare drum is a snare drum. But there was a very subtle, nuanced difference in the sound of the two drums and Joe picked up on that.

Leaving Disney to Pursue Music

I met some amazing people when I was at Disney and it was great to be around that creative vibe. I got to work with Steve Jobs a lot and other people that I just learned so much from.

I always wanted to get serious about music. Over the years we opened for Lyle Lovett, Dickey Betts, Eddie Money, but I could never really devote full time, which I think you've really got to do if you want to be serious about it, and I just decided that someday is today. I just woke up one day and said, "Someday is now."

"Wonder Of It All"

About 10 years ago I moved up to a home situated in the Santa Monica Mountains. There's deer and a lot of wildlife around here and it's just so peaceful. My mental state kind of changed.

I took a trip to Bora Bora, which was one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, and flying over Alaska you can look down and see what the Earth looked like before man got involved: There's no roads cut in anywhere, there's no lights at night. When you fly from the East Coast to the West Coast there are squares or different geometric designs that the roads make and that the farms make, and you can see how humans have kind of scarred what was otherwise the pristine surface of the Earth. You fly over remote areas like Alaska and there's just nothing except beauty and the surface of the Earth as it was before man did all that.

I feel like nature is Wi-Fi for the brain. When I'm in a nature setting, my mind goes to places and I think about things in a different way. But there's no roaming charges and there's no buffering: It's just constant, perfect reception.

"I Just Wanna Drive"

I love technology and I think it's allowed us to do some amazing things. I worked with Steve Jobs and learned a lot about it. We all have iPhones. I've got my Apple Watch on. We've gotten to rely on it, but I also think it's infringed upon our humanity.

A few years ago I wrote this song called "Face To Face" about how "it's a shame that folks don't talk no more, they text so much their thumbs are sore. And you must admit that cyberspace ain't the same as face-to-face."

So I was already thinking in that direction, and then there was this explosion of AI. I wrote that song about a year ago, and the first line is, "In the not-too-distant future say, 2035, things will be much different, folks won't feel quite so alive." I'm thinking I should change that 2035 to 2029 because it seems like it's already here.

Right now, computers are making decisions that affect our lives that were otherwise made by humans. Like whether or not somebody gets medical treatment. Humans have compassion and empathy, but now it's an algorithm that makes that decision without any emotion. More and more of that's going to happen, so "I Just Wanna Drive" is a metaphor for how I want to keep our humanity. I don't want a self-drive car. I want the human experience of driving myself.

And I talk about the fact that there's drones and cameras everywhere, and what happened to privacy? Robots are in control towers, flying planes and serving cocktails on robot-driven trains. It's where the world's going. I just hope we don't lose our humanity.

"Yesterday This Yesterday That"

There's a lot of Beatles influence there. I love that song. I love The Beatles - I don't think there's a singer-songwriter around today that hasn't either consciously or subconsciously been influenced by the music that they wrote. I love the song "Yesterday" that Paul McCartney wrote. People say it's been covered by more artists than any other song ever written.

You hear stories that there was this competition between John Lennon and Paul McCartney - they were both songwriters. And I kind of was one thinking, I wonder what John Lennon would write as a song in response to Paul's song "Yesterday?"

So I put my head into what I imagine John Lennon's headspace to be and wrote that song. Okay, Paul's saying, "Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away, how I long for yesterday," and John's saying, "Yesterday this, yesterday that, yesterday ain't really where it's at." A "live for today" kind of thing.

We went for a Beatle-esque vibe in that song.

Tommy Mars Drinks The Wine

When we played with Robby Krieger, his keyboard player was a guy named Tommy Mars, who used to play with Frank Zappa. We were in our dressing room, and at the time I would sometimes bring around a nice bottle of wine. I don't drink anything before a show because it's hard enough to remember lyrics, but sometimes all the guys in the band, we'd open a bottle of wine and have a toast.

We went out and did our soundcheck, we went back to the dressing room and Tommy Mars is sitting in there. He had opened the bottle of wine and was drinking it. We walked in and he said, "Hey, What are you guys doing here?" I go, "I think this is our dressing room." He goes, "Oh shit, I thought it was mine." 

He was a really nice guy, but it was funny that he thought it was his dressing room and helped himself to our wine. He's an amazing keyboard player.

Lyle Lovett couldn't have been a nicer guy. When we played with him he was at the Saban Theatre Beverly Hills with his Large Band. He was extremely nice.

We opened for Dickey Betts, and Johnny's (Bardwil's guitar player Johnny Stachela) favorite band is The Allman Brothers. Dickey's son, Duane Betts, was playing in his band. Johnny and Duane are about the same age. They were talking, one thing led to another, and they ended up asking Johnny to join The Allman Betts Band, which he did, and he still plays with them and tours and records with them. So Johnny kind of had his dream fulfilled through that experience.

Songwriting

When I write a song, I write the lyrics and I come up with a melody and chords, and then I'll take it to the band. We'll talk about what vibe we're looking for. I'll play it for them a few times and then they'll just start playing along, and after an hour or two we figure out where we want to go.

"Magic Night In Paris"

"Magic Night In Paris," I went to this club in Paris called Le Caveau de la Huchette. It was a jazz club in the '40s and they have swing dancing and stuff. I saw this older man ask a younger woman to dance, and they were just unbelievable dancers. The crowd cleared a space, and as the night wore on, I don't know if they went home together, but it sure seemed like they were heading in that direction. There was definitely some romance going on.

I took a video of them dancing because it was unbelievable, and a few years later, I was looking through stuff on my phone and I saw that video. I just wrote the song and told the story about what happened that night.

I showed the band the video, and I said we should try and go for that kind of jazz club in Paris in the '40s kind of sound, so that's what led to that song sounding the way it does.

What Song Do You Wish You Wrote?

"Imagine" by John Lennon. "Hurricane" by Bob Dylan. I think that's an amazing song and it accomplished something that was meaningful in the real world. "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys. Very cool song.

There's some John Mayer songs I think are really cool. "Your Body Is A Wonderland" is a really cool song.

Jimmy Buffett songs. People think Jimmy Buffett just wrote stuff like "Margaritaville," kind of silly stuff, but there's some pretty deep stuff that he's written. "A Pirate Looks At 40," Bob Dylan thinks that's one of the best songs ever written. It's pretty darn good.

I worked on a movie called Arachnophobia, and Frank Marshall directed the movie. I had to go look at the movie for legal clearance, and that there was a scene I had to cut out because there was a box of Cheerios and a spider came out of the box, and we couldn't really have that in the movie. But the screening was at Amblin because Frank Marshall had his office at Amblin, which is Spielberg's little production company. I was in the screening room and there's like three or four other people, and this guy comes walking in and sits right next to me. He says, "Hi, I'm Jimmy." He was just making wisecracks during the movie,

There was a lunch afterwards and we're sitting there talking, and he says, "We're playing the Hollywood Bowl this weekend, you should come. We're going to have a volcano on stage." Then I figured out it's Jimmy Buffett.

I hadn't listened to that many of his songs, but I went to the concert and it was the first time I'd seen all these Parrotheads. It was really fun. So I got some of his albums and started listening to them, and I was blown away by his songwriting.

That's kind of when I decided to write songs and have a band.

Coming Attractions

I've written some new songs and I want to talk Joe Chiccarelli into producing another album.

There's a new song I wrote called "Scarecrow." The universe works in weird ways. I was thinking that Scarlet Rivera, who was Bob Dylan's violin player - she was the one who played on "Hurricane" - would be amazing on that song. I mentioned it to Joe and he agreed. And this past Sunday I performed at a charity event with other artists, and she was there. We started talking and I asked her if she still likes to record, and she said it's her favorite thing to do. I told her about the song, and she said she really wants to do it.

We're doing a show at the Troubadour on the 28th and she's going to come play with us. I think she's an amazing violin player.

No Sad Songs

We don't play sad songs. It just seems like there are enough things to make people sad or bring you down. I don't want to be part of that energy or that vibe, so I try to write stuff that's uplifting, that's fun, that maybe makes you think about things a little bit. That's how I look at life, too. I'm more of an optimist, a glass half-full guy.

All the money from the ticket sales of the Troubadour show we're donating to the victims of the LA fires and stuff like that, so if there are things that the music and the art can do to help people, that makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing.

May 1, 2025

More info at stevebardwilband.com

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Mike Stoller of Leiber & Stoller
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