“About every two months I decide that it is totally impossible for me to ever write another song and that everything I’ve ever done before was absolutely a fluke and based on some bizarre divine intervention in the usual mundane functioning of my brain,” says Kevin Gilbert, the multi-instrumentalist/singer/songwriter behind, Thud, a new pop extravaganza that’s most assuredly not mundane, but rather divine.
At the ripe old age of 29, Gilbert has racked up quite a resume: he’s worked in various musical capacities with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Toy Matinee, Ice-T, Wire Train, Julian Lennon and even The Muppets. But it’s his status as founding member of the Tuesday Night Music Club (the fertile project that launched Sheryl Crow) that has put him on the map.
He co-wrote most of Crow’s multi-platinum debut album, including the summer hit “All I Wanna Do.” The TNMC “started when Bill Bottrell [Crow’s producer] and I got frustrated with the isolation of working alone,” Gilbert recalls. “We really missed the days when you got together with a bunch of people and just jammed and didn’t worry about whether it’s a great song or not, or you didn’t worry if it’s going to be a hit record or if your A & R person is going to approve. So we started to get together on Tuesday nights to have fun.”
Gilbert’s girlfriend at the time, Sheryl Crow, had just made an album for A & M which neither she nor the label was very happy about. So she came down to The TNMC to jam. The rest of that story you know. The club has been a helpful forum, says Gilbert, for the times when he’s feeling stuck “in the usual functioning of my brain.”
“It’s been great for coming up with grooves and functioning backing tracks that you can fit a lyric over and craft a melody to,” he says, then points to “Joytown,” a wonderfully moody track from Thud as proof. “The song gestated in my head as a concept for three or four months. I was thinking where would I like to be living right now and what would be going on there. Then one night at TNMC we were sort of jamming and I started rapping on these lyrics spontaneously - all those things spilled out and over an hour I assembled them into couplets that rhymed.”
From the memorable lyric: Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha live in town / Zoraster and Ba’h’aula and Moses hangs around / And when they get together they are quite a noisy crew / They laugh about their legacies over cigarettes and brew.
“Joytown”, despite its title, is colored with a maroon tint, as many of the songs are that populate the grooves of Gilbert’s latest. “I think that’s because I become more inspired to work when I feel a little bit alien to everybody around me,” Kevin explains. “It’s a way of communicating when I feel alienated.”
Gilbert prefers to write in his home studio, where Thud was conceived. He says, “The idea that you have to make a record in a big studio is gone. Get an eight-track, a couple microphones, a decent mike pre-amp. Start recording your stuff, then take it to a decent studio to mix it and it’s going to sound every bit as good as a twenty, thirty thousand demo.”
When asked to impart advice to songwriters, Gilbert points to what he calls “the last evil thing in the music business that affects songwriters” first: “Do not sign a publishing deal, unless it’s just administration. Don’t sell half your publishing to anyone for any reason. Take a bank loan first if you need money. You sign a publishing deal, they take half your writing and you pay that loan back with a hundred percent interest, which is outrageous.
“The other important thing is that whatever you do as a songwriter, make sure it’s yours. If you try to write like someone else because it’s current and popular, you’re going to wind up with a hollow piece of shit. It’s been a struggle for me because what I do as a songwriter hasn’t been popular in a while - adventurous, progressive, orchestral music. There’s a big stigma on progressive music.
“But I’m not going to stop writing songs like “Shadow Self” [Thud’s ambitious centerpiece]. If I try to shut off the part of my brain that writes stuff like that, that will immediately shut off the part of my brain that writes “Joytown.” You can’t force yourself to think like that. Remember you’re going to write what you write.”