Dave Stewart has made a great many albums during the past 47 years — on his own, with his bands such as the Tourists, Eurythmics and SuperHeavy, or as a producer for the likes of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, Ringo Starr and many more.
But the new The Way It Was Back Then, which comes out Sept. 18, is unlike any he’s made before.
“I didn’t know I was making an album,” the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee tells Billboard via Zoom from the offices of Rare, an artist’s rights company he co-founded in London. And as such he wound up creating the 10 tracks “back to front” at his island studio on Harbour Islands in the Bahamas, rather than in a conventional recording manner.
Inspired by last year’s ad hoc Dave Does Dylan solo acoustic covers set, The Way It Was Back Then developed out of a somewhat similar process. “I just sang the songs with the acoustic guitar, straight into (the recording), just like the Dylan songs,” he recalls. “I didn’t have any of the words written down or in my mind; I just sang them stream of conscious, into the mic. What I got was the spontaneous, one-take vocal and guitar, or with a funny little keyboard called an Orchid. I just thought, ‘Right, I’ll fix some of this later,’ but the more I listened the more I didn’t want to change anything.
“Usually you play everything and make a track and then the singer sings on top of it. This was the exact opposite. It was very homemade.”
Stewart and engineer Jesse Samler subsequently overdubbed all the instruments onto Stewart’s vocal and guitar tracks, adding only “a couple of local ladies who don’t really sing — one of them sings a bit in church — to sing these high backing vocals” on some of the songs. But the result is anything but raw; “Your Wishes,” the album’s second track, features lush orchestrations, while the title track, “He House Where I Was Born,” “Oh Jesse,” the Bowie-esque “Thin Ice” and “All Done” are high-octane, full-band constructions. The more restrained “Black Cat” — which Stewart says is “one of my favorite songs” on the album — builds into a brief guitar solo that he says was actually about 15 minutes long during the recording, and “Makes Me Happy (And Sad)’s” intimate ambience feels like a Pink Floyd demo.
“Jesse plays the drums really good, and we both play the bass and keyboards and guitar, or whatever the songs needed,” Stewart says. “It was funny; I have these concerts in my home town, Sunderland (England) where I’m playing the whole album and not anything else, and I said to Jesse, ‘Hey, I better learn these songs,’ ’cause the only time I ever sang them was when we were recording them.”
Lyrically, Stewart found himself digging deep, waxing nostalgic in the title track and “The House Where I Was Born” — which came from observations he made while once staying in the house across the street from his childhood home and visiting his old school and other parts of the neighborhood. “Cry If You Want” was inspired by one of his daughters’ severe health issues, he says, while “Black Cat” is an expression of defiant resilience.
“I count my blessings and find myself lucky,” Stewart notes, “but it doesn’t stop me from having really deep emotional struggles and feelings in my own world.” In that way the album, especially with its off-the-cuff approach, became a kind of musical therapy for Stewart.
“When you’re younger you’re very busy and you’re doing this and that, you don’t have the same introspective or reflective way of looking at things as you do when you get older,” he explains. “I’m 74 now. I find that as you get older it’s more about the feeling you have of this particular period or that particular time, the feeling you had when that particular moment happened. So the songs tended to be more about that… even though they’re descriptive in certain ways in use places and people or whatever. But I was emoting the feeling of that time and place more than the details, I think.”
In another unconventional move, The Way It Was Back Then is being released in limited physical editions on vinyl and CD via Bay Street Records, as well as via Stewart’s Art of Chaos app, which features a variety of other exclusive content. “After it’s been out for a while, I might allow it on other (platforms) that might become available,” says Stewart, who’s planning some “pop-up concerts for the U.K.” after the Sunderland shows. “At first I want it to be something people make an effort to get for themselves. I actually love it now that I’m hearing it after the fact. My first thought back when we started was, ‘Oh, is this an album?’ Now hearing it, I’m going, ‘Yeah, it is.’ It’s not just me and Jesse; it sounds like a record, which makes me happy.”
The tracklist for The Way It Was Back Then includes…
“The Way It Was Back Then”
“Your Wishes”
“Cry If You Want To”
“The House Where I Was Born”
“Black Cat”
“Makes Me Happy (And Sad)”
“Oh Jesse”
“All Done”
“Thin Ice”
“What’s A Man Supposed To Do”
