Mike Montrey Band has released their latest and one of their best albums, “Love, Time & Mortality,” which was produced by Mike and features guest appearances by Morristown-raised session legend John Ginty (Robert Randolph’s Family Band, Allman Betts Band) on Hammond B-3 and electric piano, and instrumentalist extraordinaire Nicole Scorsone (Yawn Mower, Fretless Youth) on violin, and New Brunswick-based jazz-rock veteran Mike Noordzy on upright bass. PHOTOS & VIDEOS BY DAVID ZEIGLER/PHOTOBOMB PRODUCTIONS
Known for their dynamic fusion of Americana rock 'n' soul, Central Jersey-based Mike Montrey Band's fifth studio album since 2011, "Love, Time & Mortality," encapsulates the essence of life's relentless march through poignant musical narratives. Singer-songwriter-guitarist-pianist-producer Mike Montrey possesses a distinct ability to weave personal tales with broader philosophical musings, a craft honed over more than two decades of songwriting and performing across the United States also with the bands … water … and The Samples.
On the surface level, a classic Americana sound is steered by Mike’s acoustic guitar, the upright of sought-after New Brunswick bassist Mike Noordzy, and the fiddle of in-demand violinist Nicole Scorsone with a dash of pedal steel by longtime MMB member Jack Stanton, the Hammond B-3 and Vintage Vibe electric piano of Jersey session legend John Ginty (Robert Randolph’s Family Band, Allman Betts Band), and the spot-on harmonies of 2020 Makin Waves Award-winning Best Vocalist Jen Augustine.
Mike, who won the Makin Waves Male Artist of the Year in 2018 and Producer of the Year in 2023, produced “Love, Time & Mortality.” He said he wanted the LP to sound like walking through a field of wildflowers in late spring on a grass plain shimmering in the sunlight somewhere in America. Anchored by his gruff, emotive vocals and dexterous acoustic guitar work, an intoxicating sonic brew laced with world-weary wisdom and poetic storytelling unfolds. It is an ambitious, thematically rich exploration of the human condition that dissects those inescapable abstractions all grapple with, eternal forces constantly shaping our chaos, joy, despair, and everything in between.
The album production shuns over-polished aesthetics for a more grounded, organic feel. This choice underscores the themes of authenticity and impermanence that run through the album. The engineering work by Adam Vaccarelli not only captures but enhances the spontaneous bursts of creativity that occurred during the recording sessions.
At Mike’s core, the introspective 47-year-old is the prototypical road-worn artist who has lived enough life to pour those experiences into his craft with uncompromising honesty. From passing family members, going through a divorce, having a child, and starting a business running music programs for adults with disabilities, adulthood’s joys and tests have all etched their marks into his soul over the last turbulent decade-plus.
In terms of legacy, Mike has been a fixture in the music scene long enough to avoid clichés about musical journeys; his work speaks for itself. His previous collaborations with names like Grammy-winning producers Jim Scott and Marc Swersky brought different flavors to his music. However, with “Love, Time & Mortality,” Mike brings us into his most personal songwriting yet.
Aided by his impeccable cast of musicians, every passage hits with uncanny human warmth and intimacy. In the end, Mike emerges as an emotionally rich storyteller baring his soul and psyche in a brutally honest fashion. “Love, Time & Mortality” is his State of the Human Condition address, confronting our deepest strifes and joys without filter or copious arty pretense getting in the way.
Mike Montrey Band not only has produced an album but also crafted a sonic exploration of life’s inevitable chapters. As listeners, we’re not just hearing another album; we’re privy to a soul laid bare, underscored by the universal experiences of love, time, and the realization that everything eventually comes to an end.
The album will be celebrated Sept. 7 at Belmar Arts Center with opening act Juliana Frangella, whose impressive 2023 debut LP, “Intrusive Thoughts,” nabbed Mike the Makin Waves Producer of the Year Award. All proceeds will benefit the arts center. Other MMB shows can be found at mikemontreyband.com/live.
The following chat with Mike takes a look at each of the songs, while chronicling a career that with the exception of “Love, Time & Mortality” has included on each recording former … water … bassist Anthony “Duke” Duca, who remains active with the full Mike Montrey Band live. In addition to providing music programs to adults with disabilities as a state-certified vendor with the Division of Developmental Disabilities, Mike’s side careers include teaching music. More about Mike’s teaching and music programs can be found at mikemontrey.com, as well as in the following chat.
Why and how have you been contemplating ‘Love, Time & Mortality,’ the title and theme of your new album?
I guess I always think about those things to some extent, and as you get older, you lose people or you have kids, and stuff like that becomes even more apparent in your life. You have more of a story to tell as a songwriter. That’s something I’ve realized more than anything else. Like you don’t go and say, ‘I’m going to write about this thing today.’ That’s not usually the way it works. It’s usually I come up with a song I like and start thinking about lyrics and how things intertwine with what I’m trying to say. It works a little more spontaneously.
The songs come off the Song Tree.
Right. I was listening to Jason Isbell talking about this not too long ago, like ‘what does this song actually mean to me right now or even later on?’ You reflect on it. I was definitely trying to say something, especially when there’s this group of songs, and you sense there’s this thematic element. That’s what happened here.
I’m writing these songs one at a time. I’m coming up with them. I like them. And initially, I was just going to record a few of them, and then we wound up doing more of them. As I looked at it as a whole, it was telling a bigger story of something that’s been on my mind. You get to a point in your life where those things are there more frequently.
Mike Montrey is pictured with his band mate and girlfriend Jen Augustine, winner of the 2020 Makin Waves Best Vocalist Award.
How are love, time and mortality related in each of our lives or at least in yours?
Not to minimize the human experience, what more is there than love, time and death? (laughs). It’s all tied together. It has to be.
We live in this very delicate state of life, aware of the fact our life is finite, but yet, we don’t allow that to contain our existence entirely. My dog, Oak, is not aware of the fact that his life is finite, but he’s very aware that his reactions to anything that might threaten his life at any given moment are way over the top, like, ‘Holy shit, who’s this guy?’ (imitates barking excitedly). We’re able to balance those things somehow. We’re balancing time, mortality and love, which is any of our relationships. If one of those things is too heavily outweighing the others, you start to lose sight of everything else because you can’t be oblivious that what’s happening. You can’t just live life like you’re never going to die because you could end up unhealthy to a degree where you wind up killing yourself. There are all kinds of different things that you could do with that, be it drugs, food, alcohol, whatever. And you can’t be oblivious to time. You can’t pretend that it’s not passing, that it doesn’t matter. And you can’t be oblivious to love either or you wind up invoking pain that could get to a point that would be worse than bludgeoning yourself with drugs or whatever. You’ve got to figure out the balance of that. Within the songs that I was writing, they all angle toward one of those things. Sometimes more than one of them.
At the end of the day, this is the only experience that we know we’ll have. Based on people’s beliefs, they might think otherwise. Like as far as what I know, this is all I know.
Is ‘Love, Time & Mortality’ your best album? Why or why not?
I don’t know if that’s for me to necessarily determine. People who listen to the music might have opinions on that, and I’m sure they’re varied. Most artists feel a bit of an attachment to whatever they’re doing currently. More than anything else, I was after something that I wanted to accomplish in which the music met the ideology and succeeded. I knew that right away when I was listening back to it. It was like a match made in heaven.
I felt very strongly that way about the ‘John Street’ record too. I felt like this is what I want to do. This music should sound like this to support what I’m saying, and all the other elements representation-wise, I felt that way about that as well. But this one, maybe even more so because I produced this record myself, and I’d be lying if I said working with (‘John Street’ producer) Jim Scott didn’t have a huge impact on that because I learned a lot from him in the way that he did that, and that was what I wanted to do again but in my own way.
Is it your most cohesive album?
Yeah, it might be. I did think the ‘John Street’ one was as well. Those two stand out to me in that way.
One interesting thing about those records is that I only played acoustic guitar. What you have when you do that is a sound that spreads across the whole thing. When you just sit in a chair with your acoustic guitar and play the songs with the same drummer, bass player, and that’s it, you do create something sonically that makes you like, ‘Oh I’m listening to this record now.’ (Jim Scott engineered) Tom Petty’s ‘Wildflowers’ is an album like that that comes to mind.
I was reading the other day on Instagram an artist asking his followers if it was worthwhile to spend a lot of time making a great album or should he just focus on singles.
I saw that. Recorded music is basically free. You’re paying $10 a month or whatever it is, but you could choose not to pay anything and go to YouTube or wherever else and listen to commercials. When we were younger, and we wanted to buy records, I’d buy 40 or 50 albums. If I’m paying 15 bucks for each one of those records, you’re spending $600 or $700 a year and reinvesting into that eco-system. All of that went away. All of it.
Then people are like, ‘These guys are crazy charging this much money for a ticket!’ You can’t have it both ways. I get it. It sounds crazy that you should have to pay $500 to see The Rolling Stones, but I don’t see you offering more money to listen to their music. It’s not a sustainable environment, especially for artists who aren’t The Rolling Stones, which is most artists. What really bothers me is that I don’t see people ever giving a shit enough again.
Music has become disposable.
Exactly! Rick Beato is a session guy who does a lot of cool stuff about song structure, breaks it down, and talks about that. And he was like, when you needed to get a record when you were younger, all of the effort and energy you had to put into doing that – to get the money to do it, to actually part with that money, to say to yourself, ‘I’m going to part with this $20,’ especially if it’s a 17-, 18-year-old kid -- that meant something to you then, that you had that record. No way where you going to give up on that.
Now, that value has been taken away. So even if they like the song, there’s no intrinsic value anymore at all, and I don’t think you can just make that come back. So where are we at? We’ll see. But it’s certainly a dangerous trend.
What inspired the first single, ‘Stained Glass Window Panes,’ and its video?
That song is a reflection of the relationship I had with my Mom. She used to gather these stained-glass windows. She would collect color glass in various forms and sometimes go as far to have door panels with the glass in it. She had a penchant for these glass panes. She’d put them in the yard, like art. It was cool. That was in North Brunswick.
How and why did your Mom influence your love of music?
She was a musician. She played largely classically-trained piano. And she taught piano at times while I was growing up.
The music she listed to, I really liked as a young kid, like Earth Wind & Fire, Hall & Oates, a lot of jazz stuff, like Quincy Jones, Chris Botti. Hearing that stuff was big. Also, she gave me my first guitar, but that wasn’t until I was 16 years old.
I played the trumpet for a year as a kid, but I didn’t like it so that probably doesn’t count (laughs). Although it did shape some element of my consideration as far as teaching people music, because the reason I didn’t like it is that I didn’t like the person, which is something.
I loved music, but I didn’t have any skill set around playing it. She got me this guitar, and to be honest, at first, I just kind of it kicked it around. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t have any lessons or anything at first. I started to play a few things from people I knew, and then when I went to college, I spent more time trying to figure it out.
I originally went to the University of North Carolina, but I felt like I didn’t have a path so I left there and went to live with my brother, who was going to Syracuse, and got a degree from junior college there just to get a degree.
Then I went to Rutgers to study music. By this time, I was 22, playing the guitar for six years but without any proper backing. I started to study jazz guitar and did jazz studies, and that was around the time that I put … water … together.
How long have you been teaching?
That started in 2006. The job that I took when I stopped going to Rutgers was a mutual fund company. I worked there six years basically the whole span of when … water … was playing. I didn’t really want to do that anymore. And that band was disintegrating. I was young enough where I didn’t have enough obligations – I didn’t have any kids. I wasn’t married yet. I had a profit-sharing plan I cashed out. I knew I could play gigs and make some money.
It was at that time that Dan O’Dea was the gateway. I was starting to record my own band’s demo CD that I could give out to places so I was looking for more acoustic gigs where I could make money, and I did it with him. He had a little makeshift studio set up in Highland Park. We did that, and he said, ‘You should teach guitar classes at my studio.’ He was opening a dance and music studio with his parents. I still have pencils (laughs).
I was very apprehensive because I’d never done that. He was like, ‘You’ll be great. You’ll like it, and they’ll like you.’ And he was right. It was great, and it took off.
Then I got the call to do the gig with The Samples, which took me out for a few years. So, I started working with companies that contracted me to teach. One’s called Musica. I still do some work for them. They send you referrals. So, that gave me a lot of flexibility. And then from there, it took off, especially when I came back and was done doing The Samples as extensively. A couple of times we did 52 shows in 55 days. It was nuts.
Don’t get me wrong. It was amazing. To be able to do that at a point in your life where you could do that, I would never give that back for anything. I loved those guys. I loved everything about it, but when I did come back, that was when I dove into teaching even more so. I was able to build a more solid base.
What inspired the second single, ‘Fortune Teller,’ and its video?
That’s clearly more about the time/mortality spectrum of this whole thing. That’s one’s on the nose. Like we talked about before, there’s a finite amount of time. That can come off one of two ways. There’s only so much time. I’ve got to do everything I can with this finite amount of time. And then, because there’s only so much time, why am I so worried about all of these things?
Does that ever happen to you? I’ve thought about this. I talked about this with the guy who recorded the record at Retromedia, Adam Vaccarelli. Eventually, I’m going to be dead. Hopefully, not too long in the grand scheme of things. Hopefully, 40 or 50 years. This is not going to matter. Not that it doesn’t matter, but it does for a second, put it back into perspective. That’s what that song is about.
Maybe it’s about the struggle of what those two things are, both of those perspectives because they all come together for everybody. You can’t just navigate life with no consideration. And you also can’t navigate life with the sole purpose being, I’m gonna do everything that I possibly can in that period of time because excess will drive you toward burnout.
How and why does ‘Holdin’ on to Nothin’’ examine the complications of love?
It does because love is not easily defined. We live our lives like watching movies and hearing stories of love and the romance of it. Not even the happy ending of it – although that’s part of it. Some of these things that happen that dictate the course of a relationship are often times, like, you’re not sure of something, whatever it is. These older people are like, ‘I always knew … blah, blah, blah.’ I wanna be like, ‘Did you always fuckin’ know?’ (laughs). That’s just being honest. Who the hell knows?
We don’t like things that are unresolved as a consumer, movies especially. Everybody wants that to be tied up. Tell me what just happened, and why it happened. And it’s true with songs a lot of the time. Make me understand what this means to me. But I’ve always leaned toward the Bob Dylanesque way of writing. They’re still holding on, and maybe that’s the only thing that they can do.
How and why did the Dust Bowl inspire ‘Cimarron County’?
I got in my head what that must have been like. We live a life that is not often threatened in the sense of mortality on a regular basis. We have threats, sure, be it disease, but not like, when I wake up today, can I even go outside? Imagine if next week, there is a dust storm that took out New Jersey and lasted years, and it impacted every single thing about your existence: crops, water supply, everything. What must that be like to live through that? So that’s where I was, like, this is nuts. I started thinking about writing something from the perspective of people who were living through that every day. How did that start to be a part of your regular existence? It’s crazy.
Did the Edna Ferber book ‘Cimarron’ about the evolution of Oklahoma from a territory to a state influence the song?
Not directly. It was one of these things that worked backwards for me. I thought about that concept, then I started looking deeper into exactly the spaces that was happening, what the experiences were. I started reading about it … zeroing in on Cimarron County.
But there’s also a very linguistic song thing too here. How does that sound coming out of what you’re trying to say?
I remember reading something once about when Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were writing ‘The Days Between’ at the end of the Grateful Dead. That was one of the last songs that they wrote. There’s a line that says, ‘When phantom ships with phantom sails set to sea on phantom tides.’ It’s a great line. When talking about it, Garcia was like, I want this to sound like the perspective from the way the rhythm of the words is going. I want this word to sound just like this word, but it can still be that word: phantom, phantom, phantom. That’s a great line, but it’s not a line that somebody wrote down because they thought it was a great poetic line. It’s a line that somebody wrote down because it suited the rhythm of the song.
So ‘Cimarron County’ did that for me. It just hit. I could sing that and built this whole story around it. That happens a lot with songwriting. When you’re listening to somebody’s songs, you can tell this person definitely wrote the lyrics before they sang the song. For me, it’s usually the other way around. I come up with a song concept and a melody, then I’m like, let me write something that fits in with what I’m musically doing.
How and why is ‘The Devil Caught Me Napping’ about the dance between good and evil, morality and immorality?
The devil is a metaphor for the things this particular individual is doing, and he has regrets about doing. Let’s say that person was a drug addict, the devil in that case is the drug that keeps showing up. It’s like, you called me to come here, and now you don’t want to see me. That’s a dance that we all do. It could be anything. There are reasons why people are drawn to these things. It’s not just all bad or we wouldn’t do them in the first place, whatever they are.
How and why did your brother turning you onto the Grateful Dead inspire ‘Our Last Goodbye’?
Of all the people you’re closest to in your life – and I’m really close with him – there will be a time when it will be the last time you’re going to see them. And you might not know that. A lot of times you’re fortunate enough to say goodbye, but sometimes you’re not.
And we live far away from each other. He lives in Seattle. That’s about as far as it gets (laughs). I see him a few times a year. He either comes here or I go there or whatever. We figure it out. Still, a lot of time goes by. Who the hell knows? That thought is something that entered my mind before, and it has weighed on me. Not just with him, but with other people. But maybe more so with him because of the nature of our relationship.
Mainly what I’m singing about there is the summer of ’93, he told me to come with him to RFK Stadium in D.C. from Jersey to meet up with these guys. At that point, I had not fully dove into it, but that (Dead show) was a life changer.
The first Dead show I saw was earlier in the summer of ’93. At that point, I had no concept. I had heard ‘Skeletons in the Closet,’ that greatest hits record they had. ‘Uncle John’s Band’ I thought was a good song. On the way to the show, they were trying to explain the phenomenon to me: ‘See that car with all those people? They probably go to every show.’ Every show? Why would they want to do that? I couldn’t wrap my head around it at that point. So, my first experience, I barely knew any of the songs. I remember the encore was ‘Box of Rain,’ which was the only song I actually knew. We just smoked pot and hung out and laughed at Giants Stadium. I was very removed from it because we weren’t close to the stage. I had a good time, but I wasn’t into the music.
Later that summer, they were playing at RFK so we drive down. I don’t know if you ever saw the Dead at RFK, but there were no rules. No one checked a ticket anywhere. A lot of these places the Dead played, nobody cared that much, but there still usually was a distinction from the floor and the seats (laughs). But this was like nothing. We walked all the way down to the stage. They come out and Garcia launches into ‘Bertha.’ That was the moment where I was like, something’s happening. From that point on, I saw the Dead 26 times through those three years.
I was at the last show. That was a crazy story because we just decided on a whim to drive to Chicago. We were in Princeton at a party, me and Duke and these other two guys, and we were like, ‘Let’s just go.’ We had no idea it was going to be the last Dead show. The Band opened that show by the way.
My last Dead show, Bob Dylan opened at Giants Stadium. I went with my Dad, which brought it full circle.
That’s very cool. My Old Man went to the Englishtown show. This house was right there. He grew up in this house. He was never a big Deadhead. His tastes ran more toward AC/DC and ZZ Top. Good bands. But he branched out.
Interestingly enough about both my parents as I think about it more, they never stopped engaging in new music. Music is so representative of nostalgia. That’s the thing with all these tribute acts now. That represents nostalgia, what do I remember about feeling about this music. A lot of people define their musical tastes in their teens, early 20s. That’s when that forms, and for most people, that’s just the way that it stays. That’s it. That becomes the soundtrack of their life. And that’s fine. There are people out there who don’t even listen to music, and a lot more than you think.
But I noticed with my mother and my father, they had continued to get new shit that they liked. My Dad got into Danzig and German industrial rock. All of a sudden, he got into 89.5 Pirate Radio. He just sent me something the other day, kind of like a metal proggy thing. It was cool. And I think that says something because I’m kinda the same way. Obviously, I’m immersed in music one way or another because I get so much thrown at me from different people. It has made me consider that whole nostalgia thing and what the value of that really is. It’s dangerous when you cross that into art though. It can exist and that’s fine. I’m not trying to take that away from anybody, but we certainly can’t start replacing art with nostalgia because then we have a place where it’s like, well, who’s creating shit? (laughs)
I was talking to somebody the other day about the Dead & Company stuff. I’m not going to give Bob Weir shit for going out there and playing his music. He was a part of it. The people are still there. It’s the people who want to see it, so why would he not do it? I don’t necessarily want to see that myself.
But I wonder, why doesn’t he write some new songs for that band? He’s playin’ with this band for friggin’ years! He writes music otherwise. But nobody wants hear that. And that kinda pins the tail on the donkey right there. Don’t waste my time with something that I have to reconsider and think about again. Just let me think about what I’ve already thought about.
How and why do ‘To Be in Love With Me’ and ‘Inside Out’ add to the love theme of the album?
They go with a similar vibe with ‘Holdin’ on to Nothin’.” Relationships are complicated. I don’t mean that as a negative. That’s actually part of the beauty of what it is. Otherwise, it would be a little monotonous after a while. The same complications that come from the very strong, powerful feelings of love and affection you might have also come from the same feelings you have of distrust or something as simple as, ‘Why aren’t you paying more attention to me?’ Those things all play pretty strongly in all three of those songs.
We all tend to be, well, this relationship didn’t work out. What does that mean? Relationships only work out when they last forever? I don’t think that’s true. So much comes out of a relationship. Every woman I ever met, I wasn’t like, ‘Let’s try to make this last forever’ (laughs). That would be great. Don’t get me wrong, but I also think you could have a relationship with somebody, move on from it, look back, and be like, ‘that was a good thing that happened.’
Things usually end badly because you’re defining your relationship by what happened at the very end of it. That’s not the way it necessarily was defined. Now it could be. There are extreme versions of everything, but I don’t think that’s always the case.
Joni Mitchell said monogamy is hard to do because it’s really easy to move on from it and keep telling your story to somebody new. And that’s really just something you do to serve yourself. If you do that again, you’re just feeding the ego. Once those stories are gone, now you’re left with somebody who you have tie into on a deeper level. I agree with that.
The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, one of my favorites, was married seven times at least, and I guarantee if he could sit down with us here today, he’d give us good reasons why (laughs). Most love songs are about the success or failure of love. Mine are about the process of love. We’re in that. Why can’t we talk about what we’re in, not the result? That’s what I think about.
How and why does ‘Take Me Home’ relate to time?
Home in that sense – the way that I think about it – is maybe less of a physical place than a state of mind, but it obviously relates to this physical place in the way I’m describing it. The further you get pulled away from that, the more valuable it feels when you get back to it. Even when I’m out doing what I’m doing for a longer period of time than usual, like I’m playing music or just hectic. The last couple of weeks, we’ve played so many gigs. I didn’t have an opportunity to be here with my son, with Jen and with my dog. You yearn for that. At least I do. I think most people do. Wherever that place is. So, the time you’re separated from it is the time that I’m feeling in that. That’s the way I thought about it.
What is it about Bob Dylan’s ‘Emotionally Yours’ that fits into the themes and sequence of the album?
I’ve never recorded a cover song before in all the time that I’ve been doing this. It fits in perfectly in my mind the way I was describing these other love songs. Like, ‘I will always be emotionally yours.’ You will always have that part of me. That doesn’t necessarily mean that this works … this is not enough, but it sure means a lot. I’m not gonna ever forget that, and that can’t necessarily be broken. It’s putting those things into words that really hit you.
I’ve always loved that song. I loved when The O’Jays did it. It’s really good. Then one day I just decided to play it with the finger-picking style that I used. I made a video, just totally random. Sometimes I’ll record myself playing a song in my music room, and I’ll put it online. I did that one day, and people really liked it.
You know the song ‘Leather and Lace’? That song is largely just acoustic guitar and electric piano. I think that combination sounds really cool, and that’s what inspired me. I was like, I want this to be this way, and I got John Ginty to play that part. It’s fuckin’ great, man! That’s such a sublime, subdued piece of music that the world will never fully get (laughs). The way he plays on that song, it’s simple and perfect. He’s amazing, that guy, as a musician. How much he cares about what shit sounds like.
I stood in an elevator in Cape May with him. He was playing a gig with us, and refused to do it without his B-3. It barely fit in this elevator. It was me and him and the B-3. I was up against the wall trying to get this thing into this gig, and he was just not going to do it. I love that about John Ginty. It matters to him.
You know why it matters to him? His grandmother was an organist in a Morristown church. That’s how he learned how to play. It’s a spiritual thing with him.
Oh, I know. He digs it deep, man.
What about the other folks on the album? What was the most significant contribution of each of the other performers on ‘Love, Time & Mortality’?
On this particular record, I had the vision of the upright bass, which is why I went out to get Mike Noordzy. It’s the only time I’ve recorded something where Duke wasn’t the bass player. I told him beforehand. He doesn’t play upright bass. It was like, ‘This is what I want for these songs.’ I’ve known Mike Noordzy for years. I’d just never done anything with him yet. He was the first guy who came to my mind.
Santo Rizzolo is just a great drummer. I can’t say enough good things about him. He has such good feel.
Jen & I are singing these songs obviously. And Jack has been playing pedal steel with me now for six or seven years, and I wouldn’t let anybody else do that.
And this girl Nicole Scorsone who played violin. She was the one who I didn’t really know. I got a recommendation for her from both Marc Swersky and Santo. I said all right. I talked to her at first and got to know her over the phone as much as I could. The way that she played that violin, like ‘Fortune Teller’ especially, the soulfulness of that playing. It’s not the notes. There are really just a few notes. You can’t replace that with anything else.
To me, it’s, like, get the people and let them play music. Sometimes it’s what you don’t tell somebody to do that matters. Some producers will walk into a room, and they’ll want to control the whole fucking record, every last goddamn note, and that point to a certain extent, why don’t you just get some robots to come in here and play?
How did Adam Vaccarelli and his Retromedia Sound Studios impact the album?
The way I met him originally was we did a record called ‘Weaving the Basket’ live in Retromedia Sound Studios. At that point, my band was me on guitar. Jen had just started singing with us so she’s on three or four of the songs. Duke was on bass. Karl Dietel was on keyboards. We had a horn section then: Alex Gardner, Hayden Wright. Rob Smith on drums. And we had two percussionists who played on that. We had a big band. We did an electric set and an all-acoustic set. We were working in the same way that … water … worked. We’re writing songs, and we’d go out play them because we were always live. I’ve always been a live musician more than anything else so we were playing and playing and playing, and we were like, ‘Now, we want to record after we had just played the shit out of them.’
As opposed to this record and ‘John Street.’ Those were totally the opposite thing. So, we wanted to do that thing and have it be captured, so we found Retromedia. We wanted a live audience for it, a 20-person audience. We were going to do it twice. We had an afternoon show and an evening show. We had two takes of each song.
Adam was just an engineer at that time. He was worried we were going to fuck it up. He didn’t know how good we were live. The next thing I knew he bought the place. From that point forward when I’m in charge as producer, that’s where I go. That’s where I went to do the record with Juliana, and where we’ve gone to do stuff in the past as well. He’s great. He just has the right vibe.
Mike Montrey Band will celebrate the release of “Love, Time & Mortality” on Sept. 7 at Belmar Arts Center.
Who is making the recent crop of videos for you, and what do you like most about their work?
That’s Dave Ziegler of Photobomb Productions. I met up with him a few years ago when he was doing stuff for Fortune Web Marketing down in Asbury. We did some shows. One show was at the carousel in Asbury. He’s done a lot of stuff. He’s good. He’s an interesting dude. He’s very artistic.
There’s an old-time feel to these videos, like an amber vibe.
Yeah, which I think suits the music very well. There’s a lot of sunlight.
How did producing ‘Love, Time & Mortality’ compare to being produced by Grammy winners Jim Scott and Marc Swersky?
Doing that with them helped me a great deal. It made me a better at that because I think that in the earlier stages, my production was less about production. What I noticed about some of the older stuff is that there’s too many people playing at the same time sometimes. There wasn’t a thought put into where’s the space and the separation?
It’s nice to have somebody else in charge, but at the same time, if you know what you’re going for at the onset, it goes smoothly. I also tend to be the kind of person who enjoys and functions well in the cycle of having to adjust. I don’t always love having a plan, and that is the plan.
Bringing back the Ginty thing one more time. When he first recorded with us, one time I remember with the ‘John Street’ record, I had said to him, ‘I can send you some demos of the songs before we go into the studio.’ He actually did not want that. He said, ‘I’d rather just show up and play what I feel in that moment.’ I can relate to that a lot more now because something comes from that response to what’s happening. It’s real as opposed to a pre-conceived notion. Now I have to honor that even though something may be telling you not to. Then you get into that whole debate with yourself (laughs).
I’m interested in the exploration of the art form more than anything else. In a lot of cases, it’s like, let me do this thing with this person to see where they take it. Let’s see what happens because it’s interesting to me how a song becomes what it becomes.
For the most part, you’ve only produced yourself and Juliana. Do you think you’ll produce anyone else?
I like it. Definitely with her for sure. We still work on stuff. We have plans to do more stuff for sure. Absolutely, she’s a great songwriter. I like her stuff.
I would love to, but it really just depends on time (laughs). Back to the theme.
What did you like most about producing Juliana Frangella’s 2023 album, ‘Intrusive Thoughts’?
She’s really good at what she does. She’s ahead of her years in the sense that she can hear what she wants. She’s pretty far along in the process as far as learning and execution. It becomes more like how do I get the vision that she wants? How do I get what she’s going for? It’s easy when you have somebody who has a good idea of what that is. So that I liked.
But I could see myself in a situation where somebody has good ideas, but they don’t have it together at all. I think I would like that too. But with her, the talent that she already has, that’s what I really, really like.
Have you passed the love of music that your Mom gave to you onto your son Jack?
Sometimes I think so. He plays the drums. He plays the saxophone too, but here’s the thing with that. They have to get that themselves. It took me until I was 16 years old to really give a shit about it. What I notice is that you can’t force that. Jack will sometimes be at my shows. And people are like, ‘Oh Jack, do you play music too?’ Maybe fuckin’ not (laughs). It becomes their identity with it whether they like it or not when your parent is something, no matter what it is, but especially if it’s interesting in the sense of being a musician or if you’re a baseball player or something like that.
It’s up to him. If he wants to do that and likes it, but he’s gonna have to figure that out. He’s going to have to want it. If I could say anything with the people who I work with or teach, ultimately, you have to want it.
How and where did you get into providing music programs to adults with disabilities and what do you like most about that?
In 2020, during the pandemic, I received a call from Sesh Subramanian, founder of Dawn to Dusk Wellbeing Center. I had taught guitar to his daughters, and he was in the process of opening a center for adults with disabilities with a day program. He was interested in hiring me to run music programs for the center. I was hesitant at first, as I didn't have much experience in the field, but I took the offer. Fast forward four years, and I run that program twice a week, in addition to teaching participants music lessons one-on-one, and am now a registered vendor for DDD (Division of Developmental Disabilities) services in the State of New Jersey with over 10 clients of my own. I run a daily music program virtually in which multiple participants join the group, request songs, and engage with singing, dancing or just listening. To say this work has changed my life would be an understatement. Not only do I find satisfaction in the services I provide, but I receive so much positivity in the process. It is a beautiful thing. I'm fortunate to be a part of music impacting these individuals in such a positive way.
Bob Makin has produced Makin Waves since 1988. Follow Makin Waves on Facebook and contact Bob at makinwaves64@yahoo.com.
