Conversation with Todd Sharpville – Part 2

Todd Sharpville “Part 2”

This part two of our interview with Todd Sharpville, in this segment we’ll be discussing his latest work and some of the great players that took part in it.

TS: I had a second birth, everything to me musically now makes sense.

After the divorce, I fell to pieces. I was able to sit back and look at

things with some objectivity. While I put myself back together I left

some of those pieces lying on the floor. I realized for the first time

in my life that there were some things about me musically and about

life that I wasn’t fond of. So I left those on the floor and took the good stuff with

me. So now I am getting better musically because of

this. Everything that has happened since then I’ve been proud of, but I

am especially proud of “Porchlight”. “Diary Of A Drowning Man” is good

as well. It’s sitting in a drawer somewhere.

I needed to grow up a little and take my knocks.

To this day I cannot listen to my first album. I can’t listen to the

stuff I recorded in my youth. Like a lot of those kids we talked about

before, maybe I was exposed and unleashed on the world earlier than I

should have been . I think I should have played the bars longer

instead of jumping in the club scene right away. So,”Porchlight”

is some of the best.

TS: I guess about a month. I went on a crazy song writing blitz and

Duke only had a certain window of time. You know, when he would be

able to do it. So we ended up being in kind of a rush, I guess. I

thought I had more time on my hands and then all of a sudden I didn’t.

The majority of it came out of this period. From a writing perspective

all of a sudden I had to sit down and be a blues writer instead of

just sitting down and writing a song. It had been a while since I had

done that, so I just sort of locked myself away in the middle of

nowhere in an apartment in Wales by the sea. I spent the best part of a

month just going crazy writing as much as I could. After the process

started out, I realized that some of what I was doing was shit and

dumped it into the garbage bin. Then I really got going on some decent

stuff and when you start doing something decent, you don’t want lose

what you have, so I didn’t sleep much or eat much. I ended up with

about 30-35 tunes out of it. My girlfriend is thankfully deaf in one

ear, so she learned to sleep on one side. I could be in the other room

banging away on the piano and she’d be sound asleep. So I put this

stuff together on a multi-track recorder and sent the files to Duke

and just waited to see if any of it was any good or not because I

really had no idea. We finally got the thumbs up from Duke and went

over to make the record. The only real problem was the amount of

songs, we had the good problem of what do we keep, because Duke wanted

to keep a lot of it!

TS: I have a ton of respect for Duke. To me, Duke is one of the

classiest blues musicians in the world. Playing with Duke didn’t phase

me because we knew each other and had recorded together before and I

knew how he operated. Joe, now we have had a very strange relationship

since I was a teenager. He has been my mentor or my blues guru for a

long time. In the early days he used to let me hang out. Then after a

while he would let my band open for him and then later still he brought

me up for his encores. I had to earn my respect with him. This whole thing

just came full circle because I had guested on one of his albums. Joe

had already seen some shit by the time he met me as a precocious

teenager. So this this was kind of cool and it was an extra special

moment. Kind of like the student coming full circle.

Kim Wilson has always been my favorite harmonica player as far as

living guys in the world. When I think of all the harmonica players

around today it is a very exclusive little club of people that I hold

in the highest regard. It’s one the instruments that anyone thinks

they can play but there is only like 10 guys on the planet that can

really play, James Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite. Curtis Salgado is a

great friend of mine and another great player. Curtis played with us

on the Blues Cruise one year. He learned Kim’s chops even though we

told him to play however he wanted. There are a couple of great

players in Europe as well. 10 or 12, but I really see Kim being at the

top. I think everyone kind of looks up to Kim.

TS: Yes it did, I’d already written the bulk of the tunes. He died

literally just at the time I was going to start production, so

Porchlight was kind of a late addition to the proceedings. I had my

guitar tech that had split up with his wife and needed a place to

stay. This poor motherfucker, I had him staying on my couch and he was

engineering my multi track recorder, working day and night pushing my

buttons. It didn’t take long for him to get back with his wife, he’d

have done anything to get away from my apartment after that! Then,

when we were done with that phase I had a plan to sleep for a week

straight. Do nothing. I’d emailed all the tracks off and I was done.

I finally went to bed and a half an hour later my mum called and said

your dad collapsed at the bottom of the stairs. So then the whole

roller coaster started and we had to postpone the recording sessions.

I was thrown into the mix of organizing my dad’s funeral. During that

period I had a lot of time to think about things. We had pushed everything

back about 3 weeks or a month but yes, it totally changed the

direction. After I wrote Porchlight, we now had a title track. A lot

of people would think the sessions were depressing but it was quite

the opposite actually. Yes, we had some teary moments and it was

emotional at times but it was a big relief really to be in the studio.

I was so immersed in taking care of all of the affairs and

arrangements for the funeral that I hadn’t really had a chance to stop

until we got in the studio. My dad was a statesman and the funeral was

a total head-fuck to arrange. We needed a statesman-like funeral. Of

course my mum was in the deepest of grief, so I needed to handle it. I

wanted to respect my dad’s musical interests and the music had to be

world class. We had hand picked musicians and my mum picked music that

she and my dad liked, so these guys had to learn all this new music

(to them) in a week. It worked and we pulled it off, it was great.

That was pretty much the emotional equivalent to recording an entire

album.

TS: To be quite honest, I haven’t really had time to sit back and

think about how I feel about it yet. I think it is still happening as

we speak. I think I will be working through my grief, one little piece

at a time. Porchlight wasn’t about just healing from my dad but also

from my divorce and also my other CD that never got released. It’s

like going through the pains of having a baby and not getting to watch

it grow up. Porchlight is going to signify having another baby, and

watch it grow up and watch it go out into the world and achieve

something for itself. So I’m still going through the process. Up until

now it hasn’t been expressed to rest of the world. I’ve done it

privately but not publicly.

TS: Hard question. I’m really a song guy more than anything else and

I’m very protective of songs. Everything I do is to make the song look

good instead of making myself look good. Songs are like births

sometimes: they pop right out and sometimes they are breached and come

out backwards. One thing that happened during my songwriting blitz in

Wales, I was able to finish a lot of songs that were just parts and

pieces, or riffs. So a lot of it just sort of poured out. As far as a

favorite, it’s like having kids. How do you pick a favorite?

They are individually unique in and of themselves.

TS: Absolutely, I come over and the do the blues cruise pretty often.

We are actually finalizing a deal to come over and do some dates with

Tommy Castro and some other things. A lot of it of course depends on

how Porchlight does. I also might be opening up some arena shows in

the states as well. We’ll see.

If you missed “Part 1” Here is the link