Category Archives: Interviews

May 22, 2012

Kenny Chesney: He Works Hard So You Can Relax (Men’s Health)

By Jeff Vrabel

Men’s Health — ONE OF KENNY CHESNEY’S BREEZIEST songs has the comforting title “Be As You Are.” It’s basically what would happen if you folded up the island of St. John and slipped it into a cassette deck—an acoustic carpe diem about finding an idyllic Caribbean harbor within yourself. This is a nice sentiment, and elements of Chesney’s life mirror the song. He spends an enviable amount of time in the tropics, and even when landlocked he seems to fully embody life in paradise. No man is an island? Tell that to Chesney.

On his epic summer tours, he creates a tiki-bar atmosphere on football fields in places like Indianapolis and Kansas City. He makes 50,000 people think they’re at a tin-roofed beachside canteen that seats nine. He preaches simplicity and oceanside afternoons in songs that hit a demographic sweet spot: folks young enough to feel free and old enough to reminisce about easier times. This recipe has made Chesney really, really popular.

Read the full article at Men’s Health.

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April 13, 2012

Zac Efron’s full body transformation (Men’s Health)

By Jeff Vrabel

Men’s Health — It’s a warm southern California morning, and I’m meeting Zac Efron in Studio City at a place called Weddington Golf & Tennis. With a name that stuffy, I expect marble and money. The course turns out to be public, with a plastic-cup snack bar where a waitress, without looking up, informs the 24-year-old movie star that she doesn’t take credit cards. They’ve reserved us a private tee, which is approximately 4 feet away from the adjacent public one.

Here at the practice range, Efron—in T-shirt, oversized cap, shorts, and Vans—strolls around in disarming anonymity, though to be fair, it’s hard for even the preeminent teen pinup of the 2000s to attract notice in a crowd that includes this many codgers in lavender pants. After talking and meandering (not especially well) through a bucket of golfballs, we encounter Roger Dunn, a California golf-shop magnate who gives lessons wearing a Panama hat and smoky sunglasses. We’d heard that Dunn is just shy of his 50th year of teaching, and he’s been introduced to us as a man of considerable local repute. Mostly Dunn has something to teach, and Efron is drawn to that.

Read the full article at Men’s Health.

5 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Feature Articles, Interviews, Men's Health

January 26, 2012

Interview — Mac McAnally: Buffett’s sideman has some stories he could tell

By Jeff Vrabel

Island Packet — Mick Jagger has Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen had Clarence Clemons. Jimmy Buffett’s onstage foil/sidekick has for decades been a very large, congenial ginger named Mac McAnally.

With a massive helmet of Hagar the Horrible-thick hair, dry-rubbed Southern wit and considerable tallness, McAnally does not exactly fit into the Caribbean-escapist vibe conjured up by Buffett’s beach blanket blowouts.

But since the 1990s, the Mississippi native has served as Buffett’s onstage counterpoint, guitarist and producing and writing partner. (He also has, during performances of “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” served as Alan Jackson.)

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2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Music Writing, Interviews

July 12, 2011

Interview: Gillian Welch on perfectionism, fireworks and why even metalheads think she’s dark

By Jeff Vrabel

Metromix — Gillian Welch is a band, one that features Gillian Welch on vocals and guitar and partner Dave Rawlings on guitar, and that is how Gillian Welch has worked for years.

It’s the honey voice of Welch that usually first pulls listeners into the duo’s spare, warm songs. But nearly two decades into a friendship forged at the Berklee College of Music over a shared love of very old music, Welch and Rawlings have evolved into an extraordinary duet machine, one that blends crackling acoustic music, Appalachian folk traditions and bluegrass into an effortlessly rich rural sound.

Such synergy is hard to maintain in real life and harder to maintain in music (we’re still not entirely sure if Simon and Garfunkel like each other). But part of Welch and Rawlings’ persistence as a duo comes their perfectionism and pragmatism. “We’re perfectionists of a certain stripe,” she says. “We’ll take all kinds of haphazard and accidental things in recording, but with the songwriting I feel like we inhabit this really sparse, almost puritanical world, and there just isn’t very much that fits in that world.”

Read more at Metromix.

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April 1, 2011

Who Is Andy D: Probably the best story I’ve ever written about a guy who raps shirtless in a Viking helmet and white shorts

By Jeff Vrabel

(Michelle Pemberton/Metromix)

Metromix Indianapolis — In an online video for “Ragnarock (Viking Lover),” Andy D is shirtless, wearing a vest, plastic Viking headgear and a fanny pack. He’s rapping, dancing, singing and jumping. Mostly, he’s sweating.

Around him are two men who have given greater attention to their abdominal area than he. Without too much effort, it’s also possible to find photos of Andy D wielding a sword and riding a horse that’s wearing a party hat. There are also a lot of jorts.

“The white cutoffs have been with me since day one,” he said.

Further investigation reveals that in songs like “Party Nite,” “2 Inches from Crazytown” and “Dirty Boyfriend,” Andy D — real name Andy Duncan — is concerned with the following things, in order: party-starting, love-making, party-maintaining, and then, farther on down the line, eating, sleeping and respiration. A typical line: “I like my movies like I like my women / short, low-budget and independent.”

His best-known track is called “God Loves Drunk Chicks.”

But there’s one final thing about Andy D that seems to keep coming up over and over again: Not everyone is into Andy D, but those who are go all in.

Read more at Metromix Indianapolis.

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November 22, 2010

OK, Self, you’re talking to Bruce Springsteen. NO FAINTING.

By Jeff Vrabel

Swarm of the Plaid People. From left: myself, Ben French, Bruce and Jonathan Cohen.

On about a dozen occasions in just under five minutes, it becomes clear that the person talking to me is Bruce Springsteen. This, in case you are wondering, never stops feeling like getting walloped by a large rolling boulder, or shoved into an above-ground pool filled with half-melted ice cubes. You would think that after some time your brain would become used to realizing it’s maintaining eye contact with Actual Bruce Springsteen while simultaneously attempting to convince your hands to stop shaking like that, but curiously this never occurs. The net effect is that every few minutes I realize, for what seems like the first time, that I’m engaged in a real conversation with Bruce Springsteen and it would be best for everybody if I didn’t throw up or try to hug him.

Currently, Bruce Springsteen is talking to my friend Ben and I about parenting. I was introduced as having come to New York City from South Carolina, and Springsteen mentions how he just moved his daughter to Duke, and as someone who has equated Duke with cartoonish supervillainy since the early ’90s, I note that in talking to Bruce Springsteen for 14 seconds we’ve stumbled into the only topic on which I’ve ever really disagreed with him.

Ben (who is executive producer at RollingStone.com) mentions the pocket-sized baby girl his wife delivered two weeks prior, and this redirects the conversation into the kind of small talk you might have at the play gym, about how one day they’re newborns and the next day you’re moving them into a dorm and sweet weeping Jesus I’m talking to Bruce Springsteen about children and family units and how he and Patti — it’s strange the conventional role she plays in this particular narrative — enjoyed and facilitated their kids’ closeness. I should make clear that I’m completely paraphrasing this part, as obviously I have zero recall of the words Bruce Springsteen actually used when he was talking to me — for all I know he could have been reciting detailed schematics of the Starship Enterprise in Farsi — but I got the gist of it, or at least more than I would have thought I could while concentrating on not babbling like a drugged maniac.

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45 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Humor Columns, Interviews, Music Writing, Springsteen

September 2, 2010

Interview: John Mellencamp’s new testament

By Jeff Vrabel

Hilton Head Monthly — A few weeks ago, John Mellencamp wandered through a large and shiny mall in Indianapolis in a futile, climate-controlled and probably Cinnabon-smelling hunt for the record store.

This was, of course, a terrible idea, in part because you can imagine what happens when John Mellencamp wanders unannounced through a mall in Indianapolis, but also because he’d have had about as much luck finding a reliable VCR repairman or some MySpace gear; who knows the last time the mall had a record store. So he abandoned the search and did the only logical thing he could — went over to the Apple store. “The place was packed,” Mellencamp said. “Packed. People swarming in line, the way the record store was when we were kids.”

That was, needless to say, some time ago; these days when you accidentally stumble across a record store it feels weird, like an abandoned mining town or an undervisited museum. It looks passed over and it feels old-fashioned, but that makes sense, says Mellencamp, because so is rock ‘n’ roll.

“It’s done. It’s over. We killed it,” he says, pausing for effect between each little eulogy. “There’s nothing that’s going to revive it, or give us that extra little goose, like punk or grunge did. We ruined it. We outgrew it. So I’m kind of excited to see what’s next.”

Read the full story at Hilton Head Monthly.

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3 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Hilton Head Monthly, Interviews, Music Writing

August 10, 2010

Interview: John Mellencamp on “No Better Than This,” his unusual fall tour and what the blank he was doing in the ’80s

By Jeff Vrabel

Rolling Stone — Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp’s tour wraps in September, but Mellencamp will continue on this fall with sixteen Midwestern dates in support of No Better Than This.

Unlike his immaculately produced ’80s albums, Mellencamp wrote this record quickly, on acoustic guitar, and recorded it in mono on a 55-year-old Ampex tape recorder. “I looked at T Bone and I said, ‘What the fuck were we doing in the ’80s?’” Mellencamp told RS. “I made a record once that took almost a year. I spent millions of dollars dicking around with songs, and in the long run it paid off because it sold millions of copies. But I go back and I listen to the record today, and it was…more of a craftsman thing.” Read the full story at Rolling Stone.

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  • Stream the title track from “No Better Than This” at mellencamp.com

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January 15, 2010

Interview: A modest proposal: Joe Henry’s letter-writing campaign results in Mose Allison’s first record in 12 years

By Jeff Vrabel

All About Jazz — Joe Henry’s strategy for coaxing Mose Allison back to the studio for the first time in twelve years was simple enough: All he had to do was quietly and thoughtfully stalk the jazz icon for a year.

“He kept at it, and kept calling me and emailing and so forth,” the 82-year-old Allison said of the courting process by Henry, who received two Grammy nominations this month for his production on Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s A Stranger Here. “And so I finally decided, ‘Well, what the hell, I haven’t done a record in a long time.’”

That record is The Way of the World, due out in March on Anti, home of Tom Waits, Neko Case, the Swell Season and Henry himself. Read the full interview via the good people at All About Jazz.

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October 22, 2009

Interview: Tenacious D: Mike Ness on 30 years of Social Distortion

By Jeff Vrabel
sociald

Mike Ness, pictured here rocking faces off.

Island Packet — For a number of extremely appropriate reasons, the music of Social Distortion serves as a particularly effective antidote — or at least an accompaniment — to adolescent-era small-town near-panicky Friday night restlessness, which is why theirs was generally the first cassette Aaron Bradshaw would snap into his tape deck on our regular, mostly pointless semi-excursions into northwest Indiana nights (usually the one with “Ball and Chain,” the band’s definitive kiss-off to a tortured relationship that either of us would have sold the other out for without a second thought).

Mixing Springsteen’s factory-overalls ethic with Southern California punk energy and outerwear, Social Distortion boiled all the wordiness and loftier ideals out of “Born to Run” and redrew the map so the highways all ended basically in the same town they just left. And they did it with a metaphorically impeccable chain of iconic dusty punk images, ideas and inventions: the albums had names like “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell,” they cooked Johnny Cash songs into fiery punk rave-ups and they starred singer Mike Ness, a mess of tattoos and broken-down proclamations whose voice sounds like he’s dragging it behind the truck on a chain. (“I’m a Cadillac tramp at the end of the road/I’m a guitar gangster without a tune” — damn right you are!)

But in the 30th year of their career, Ness and Social Distortion have managed to do one of the most un-punk things you can do these days: They failed to burn out. They’ve never become obsolete, never released a single featuring a rapper and never transmogrified into some sort of Frankenstein monster riding the rails powered by scrap parts and nostalgia T-shirt sales. This year alone has seen Ness turn up at a Springsteen concert in California to do one of his own songs (“Bad Luck,” see below); the band leaves Hilton Head Island to open for Pearl Jam for two nights in Philadelphia alongside fellow enduring punk godfathers Bad Religion.

“It’s still a rush, no matter what, when you’re walking out there,” Ness said by phone last week from New York City. “You spend the whole day sometimes toiling, and you walk out there and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah. This is why I’m here.’ ”

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8 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Interviews, McClatchy-Tribune, Music Writing

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