The Kelley Stoltz Interview
Tell me about growing up in Birmingham, MI. When did you first begin to fall in love with music and songwriting? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years and why?
Growing up in Birmingham, Michigan was awesome. It was a beautiful neighborhood that was upper class, safe, clean and filled with nature. A lot of trees, rivers, parks and lakes where me and my friends would cruise around until nighttime on our BMX bikes. That was an idyllic place to grow up and as the years went by, I got more into music. I bought Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” 45 brand new and was really into Village People at the time. That was the stuff that was on the radio during the disco era when I was young, and I also remember joining the Columbia Record Club (you know when you would send away a penny and get 14 records in the mail?) I had no idea who Pat Benatar, or REO Speedwagon were, but those were the ones I ordered. They either looked good on the cover, or maybe I recalled their names coming off of the radio, but I didn't really know the songs. I tried hard to like Loverboy, REO Speedwagon, or whatever I ordered, but I remember thinking they weren’t that great. It was probably Duran Duran, the Thompson twins and stuff like that. What really caught my ear was Men at Work’s “Business as Usual”. That was a big one. I was lucky to have an older stepbrother who came and lived with us for a summer, and he left a bunch of his New Wave records with me. Suddenly, I had this collection of Bauhaus, David Bowie, Echo and the Bunnymen and Cocteau Twins. All these things that I had no idea even existed looked very interesting, had cool haircuts and looked totally different from the REO Speedwagon guys. I slowly began listening to these bands that didn't make sense to me, but I knew that I was curious.
Around the age of 13, or 14 my taste changed and that became the music that I would carry with me for the rest of my life, but as for songwriting, there was nothing going on. I mean, I had a family piano that I would play, but I didn't know any chords. I did try to write a song, or two with really simple piano things that were maybe a minute long. I had a cassette recorder that you just pressed record/play and you would just speak into it. I did sing some into that when I was around 15, but I didn't equate that to recording. I didn't think of it as me making a collection of songs. I was just curious to see what a piano and my little song sounded like. So I guess I did experiment, but I had no idea about four tracks, getting a band together, or doing anything like that. It wasn't really until eighth grade around the time I was 15. I had a band with three friends from school and we played Echo and the Bunnymen songs as well as “We Played a Song” by Minor Threat. We had like two originals that were probably pretty terrible. My dad played piano and was really good with show tunes and had a memory for it. Though he couldn't read music, he had a really good ear, so he would pick up stuff he was always playing. My parents were divorced. So when I would go to Washington, DC to stay with him, he had this big piano in his apartment and I would just sit and listen to him play. So the music and songs were there, but it wasn't a huge part of my daily life, though it was present. I'm glad to have seen the adults in my life playing a guitar, listening to records, or playing piano because I guess probably it got into my brain somewhere that this was something you were supposed to do and it could be fun.
Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to becoming a solo musician? What ultimately inspired you to pursue a life and career as a musician? You’ve been releasing music as far back as ‘99 with your debut on The Telegraph Company entitled, “The Past Was Faster”.
I played in a band called 1000 years back in 1986. That was the second band I was in and we were perfect. It was older guys that included a songwriter named Paul, who wrote all the music and lyrics, a guitarist, drummer, and I was just the singer. We were kind of new wave Cocteau Twins meets The Cult that had a harder edge occasionally, but was pretty crazy and atmospheric. We were good. I think we only played live twice, unfortunately. We tried to do some recordings with me in the vocal booth, but I was young, scared and probably doing very well because nothing ever happened to it. I assume that I just didn't do well, but I do have some cassettes of those songs. I listened to them like two years ago, around the time my dad had passed away. There was still a cassette at his house that I'd probably given him in the 80s, so I listened to it and it was good. It was perfect. It will probably be reissued now on some label as some long-lost Detroit New Wave group. I didn't really do much apart from playing in high school bands at talent shows doing R.E.M and David Bowie covers, but I did cut a few songs with some high school friends at my uncle's house around 1989. They were sort of Echo and the Bunnymen meets R.E.M., but I still hadn't really found my voice at the time. I remember one song was kind of a ballad that I sang with a lot of earnest passion. I thought that's how you're supposed to sound when you're a man, you know, earnest.
It's fun to listen to it now, but they were okay. I don't know if we ever had a name, or anything. It was just like my uncle had a little studio and wanted us to record, so we went over there and did just that. I also liked a lot of parody music. My best friend Jared and I were influenced by the absurd Monty Python, The Muppets and things like that. We would make up funny, Weird Al Yankovic kind of music, not necessarily parodies, but funny lyrics about things, and so I was always interested in songwriting. I felt like David Bowie was from Mars, and I was just a kid from the suburbs of Detroit. It wasn't until I moved to New York City in 1994 and got a job working for the singer Jeff Buckley and his manager. I figured if I could work in the music industry, maybe that was what I wanted to do. You know, it seemed if I could just hang out and see musicians, that that would be enough. It was a cool and fun job, where I did some interesting stuff helping out with some of his concerts, collecting his fan mail/bringing them back to the offices, sorting things out, dropping things off at his apartment, etc. Over time, I learned that I didn't want to be working an office job, whether it's about music, or selling furniture, I wanted to be writing songs. So that was a valuable job to have, because it kind of gave me some insight into what I really wanted to be and that was to write songs like Jeff Buckley. To be the guy who was the creative part and not just working behind the scenes and that was when I realized I was kind of sidelining myself on the business side. I really had no interest in that, but I wanted to be a songwriter and creative.
Around that time, I was friendly with a guy named Pat, who lived in New York and was into the noise scene there. He had a four track and loaned it to me, so I kept it in my bedroom for a month, or two and recorded with just a guitar, a delay pedal and that was it. I sang, played guitar and used the fuzz from the radio in between stations as kind of sound scape thing and thought that might sound pretty cool. But that was really my first experience with multi-track recording on my very own in my bedroom. It was sort of the birth of my interest and I soon got my own four track. By that time I was living in San Francisco and the friends I lived with had a drum set, so I added a couple more instruments to play with. I began really working on music every day down in the little basement that we had and I'd go down there for hours and hours to the point that it became what I wanted to do all day, every day. I was really influenced by Guided by Voices/Robert Pollard and their sort of Lo-Fi recording of just beautiful, perfect songs. It didn't matter what environment they put them down, it was like the quality of the song was so much more important than how pristine it sounded. That gave me hope that I could write a good song and it would translate no matter what it was, but if I had a good melody and lyric, maybe that meant it was a good song. I spent a lot of time trying to do that and because I was so influenced by The Bunnymen, Peter Murphy, Joy Division and David Bowie, I could sing every song in an English accent. I was just beginning to like folk music like Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, so “The Past Was Faster” is a funny listen for me because it's me trying to still find my voice and learn how to write a song. It was important in that I learned how to manipulate a four track and so it's got a place in my heart, even if I never want to hear it again.
Tell me about writing and recording this album. What was the overall process and approach to bringing this album to life? I understand you self released your ‘01 follow up “Antique Glow”. Jumping ahead a bit, tell me about joining Echo and the Bunnymen (our mutual heroes) and what that experience was like.
The next album I made and probably, to some, the best album I ever made, was called “Antique Glow”. I released that back in 2001 and by that time I had learned a lot more about music. I was open to jazz, folk, blues, psychedelic rock and pop. I kind of mixed all of that in a naive bedroom way and I became better at recording. I'd also gotten an eight-track tape machine and a Tascam 388, which is now kind of an expensive machine, but I was the first one in San Francisco to get one. Over the years, the OCs used one; Ty Seagal, The Fresh, All Nice and Sunny and the sunsets. If nothing else, I can go down in history as sort of the inventor of the 3d Eight within the San Francisco scene. That's my tiny little footnote that will follow me around. I released 300 records on LP and thought that that was going to be it for me. I didn't have any idea that there would be a career, but I wanted to make an LP because I was a record collector in my teens. I thought if I just had one little artifact on vinyl, I’d be a happy man. I'll have it forever, and I can look at the grooves and have some pride. Having done that, I got the records made, but I didn't have enough money to do the artwork. I didn't think about paying for the paper or the cardboard to go around it. I didn't think about any of that. So I would go to the thrift stores and this place called Grooves, which was a secondhand record store that I was a customer at, and they would let me take stuff out of their dollar bin to paint it.
So maybe Frank Sinatra would paint bunny ears, turn into an alien, or there would be some classical album with a nature scene that I would add an abominable snowman to. I would paint and draw each one individually, so all 300 were different. I remember selling them for $8 because I thought, would be, I'm an unknown and no one would buy these, but I wanted to sell them. It was kind of like selling them for less than they actually cost me to make, but I just wanted them to be out in the world, and they've kind of become a collector's item now. That makes me happy as a person who spent too much money on records to have one of my own that is hard to find that people may want. I joined Echo and the Bunnymen in 2016. I had been a longtime fan of the bands since 1984/85 when I first saw them play. So somewhere in the early 2000s, I did a song by song covers album of their record “Crocodiles”. I think it was around 2001, so they were aware of me, and they knew that there was some maniac in San Francisco who not only worshiped them, but knew all their songs and could play them. As the years went by, they would let me backstage and I kind of got to know Ian, Will and the rest of the guys in the band, as well as their management. At some point in 2016, they emailed me because the rhythm guitar player’s mother had fallen ill, and they needed someone to fill in for a tour. It was supposed to be about three and a half weeks, but I ended up sticking with them for three years. I mean, to be on stage with your favorite band and traveling around the world on a tour bus playing festivals for 60,000 people was a check off so many fantasies in my books as well as my life! That was an unbelievable experience that has given me really fond memories and, you know, it was the biggest thrill musically in my life that can never be topped.
You’ve worked with some incredible artists over the years such as the great John Dwyer, Sonny Smith, Rodriguez and countless others. Having a career as diverse as yours, what keeps you most motivated and inspired to create and make things happen in an artist capacity.
I've always treated my home recording recordings being like a job, because this usually meant it to be something you didn’t look forward to. It's what I like to do every day and recording this new album was no different. I just made time for it, worked as many hours as I could and the only big difference with the recording “La Fleur” is that I'm now a father. I have a daughter who was born in 2022, so that makes me an older dad. She was born when I was 50, so it was a struggle to find both the energy and the time to make those songs on the new record. There were periods where I thought I'd never have the time that its is necessary to take to make a perfect record, but you know, when you have this new responsibility encroaching on what used to be basically freedom every day, you either just give up, or you find a way to fit it in. Over time, I learned that I had to go to bed and get to work earlier, so I started to record around 8/8:30 in the morning, which was not a time I would ever be awake, let alone to be doing anything musical. But she gets up early, so I get up early, and I get to work as quickly as I can to try to put three or four hours a day in before I need a nap, or to pick her up from daycare. I'm really pleased that I made it, and I'm kind of happy to think that I made one of the best records of my career in a totally different state of mind on a totally different level of freedom. I figured out a way to do it and I think that’s the way it should be if you're really in love with the process of writing songs. You'll find a way to do it no matter if you're happy, sad, angry, or have a cold. However, you find a way to make time for it, that's how you know you're an addict and that you're happy.
It’s this place I like to go to let my mind go, where I don't think about bills, politics, or the weather. There's just a time to be in you in your consciousness and that's a really nice place to be for parts of the day. I feel very blessed to have recorded the OC’s, played drums on many Sonny Smith/Sonny and the Sunset songs as well as playing rhythm guitar with Echo and the Bunnymen. I played keyboards with Rodriguez and lately I've been playing a lot of drums and doing some singing, sitar playing and overdubbing parts on some Robin Hitchcock songs. I just feel really blessed to have this kind of diverse and deep meaningful experiences with a lot of my favorite musicians. So it's easy for me to stay inspired and creative. It’s just what I do every day in my life, so I don't have to spend a lot of time motivating myself. There is no problem with motivation anymore. You go through periods where you have writer's block, or you're just not writing very good songs, but I always knew that this cyclical thing would pass, and eventually you would get into writing good stuff again. A lot of times you look back at the things you worked on that you didn't like and you find what was good about them and eventually see the little seeds that they planted to get you to the next new thing. It's a struggle sometimes to go through that and feel a little down about it, but I never have any problem feeling motivated, or that I don't want to do this. It's like breathing, eating and the other thing I need, other than sleep, to make my day complete.
Recently coming off some support shows with Robyn Hitchcock, what does the rest of summer look like? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
I haven't really had time to work on any new songs of my own. I always have lots of things that didn't make the cut for records that I like to look back on and maybe improve to see if they're something I can take an idea from, or use for a future record. I've begun the process of digging into some things from the past couple of years that I might want to revisit, but I have been really busy getting the artwork and taking care of booking tours, making t-shirts and all the other things that go along with an album release. So I haven't really sat down and started working on new music of my own. I have a few more shows this year with Robin Hitchcock playing drums, and he has some new songs that I've been involved with, which has been a lot of fun and a real honor for me to be involved with. And I do have a new project I'm doing with a friend of mine, Rick Hornby, who lives in Manchester, England, and also Mike Joyce, who was the drummer in The Smiths. He, Rick and I have formed a sort of transatlantic recording project and have about five good songs. Rick writes bass lines and guitar lines and Mike puts on drums before they send them over to me. I kind of chop it up into what I feel like is a good song digitally, and then I sing, add keyboards, other guitars, riffs, shakers and stuff. We're called the Pleasure Hits. At least that's our name as of this minute. It may change by the time we hit the big time, but that's a really exciting project because working with Mike is something I never would have dreamed would happen when I was a 15-year-old sitting in my bedroom listening to “Hat Full of Hollow”.
