Speaker 1: It really is about sharing stories. But the question is,
as the listener of podcasts, what kind of story are
you willing to digest today in this moment of now.
That's why we give you a choice on aero dot
net aroet net enjoy your exploration. So to jump onto
this project, what was it that you felt that it's like, Okay,
I need to do this because it's like something is
calling for it and I've got the tools to make
it happen.
Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of sprung out of a period in
my career where I felt like I needed to eat
my vegetables and get and stop being a band leader
for a while. This kind of sprung out of the
pandemic and to focus on just songs and performance and
not as much of the organization and all the things
that come along with organizing a band, booking and things
like that. So I had a residency at the end
of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for the last couple
of years. Every Friday at the park, Shela and I
decided why not document this period where I've been playing
a lot of solo gigs, and so I came up
with a solo acoustic album.
Speaker 1: So amazing because it gives you that opportunity to step
into a realm of you know when they always tell
people just do it yourself, put it in your own
vocals and your own display. Because when I heard the
song Fame, I was like I was in love with
a new song. It was like, oh my god. You know,
how do you take a chance on this and then
to make it even better than the original?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: Thanks, I mean that's kind of part of the song
selection process is I think a good cover usually or
a classic cover, is one that makes it complete. It's
a completely different take on something. And that's an example
of one where I tried to make it my own.
It wasn't totally straight faced, I have to say, because
Fame is not exactly a song that I by Irene Cara,
we should clarify it's not the David Bowie song.
Speaker 3: I tended to listen to the David Bowie song a lot.
Speaker 2: More in my playlist over the years than the Irene
Caro and it was, you know, with all of its
eighties synth drenched in there and stuff. I always felt
it was a little silly, but it's a good song
and I enjoyed kind of making that my own. Some
of the other covers, though, I tried to be a
little more true to the songs themselves because and they
were a little bit of a challenge to play physically
and technically, you know, like dream On by Aerosmith, there's
not a lot of room to make that completely your own,
and I tried to copy as many of the classic
Joe Perry riffs in one live take.
Speaker 3: That's what I should have mentioned.
Speaker 2: Also, is that this album has no overdubbing or anything,
so I had to really focus on the formans itself.
Speaker 1: When you do a song like dream On, because in
my world, that was my stairway to heaven. Those guitar
riffs as well as the singing and the whole entire performance.
But when you step into it and listen to how
you bring it forward, it's almost like you're giving me
an interpretation of a song that really gives it more depth.
It's almost like, you know, when Paul McCartney, you know,
stepped away from the Beatles in the way of allowing
orchestras to record his music. I'm going, this is what
it's all about. There is a deep, deeper meaning and
deeper purpose, and you're proving that on one take here
is that it goes a lot further than what we
think we know.
Speaker 2: Well thanks, well, yeah, I mean I actually explored a
little bit more of dream On, which I'm not an
Aerosmith fan per se. I respect their music and what
they become Becommon and just like you, I grew up
with that was like one of the top five songs
that was always in the radio stations, like July fourth
countdown right, listening to the top four hundred and then
Dreamond's going to be up there with Freebird and Stairway
to Heaven, right, So, and then when I read about
it more, I found out that this was very early
in Steven Tyler's musical career and he wrote it, and
I never thought of him as a musician. I just
thought of him as this showman and this big rock star,
and so it was kind of cool to reconnect to
that song in a way where I felt this guy
I could picture him in his parents' basement, like playing
around on a piano and coming up with this thing
before he became a star.
Speaker 3: And that was beautiful in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Aren't you kind of proving in the way that's saying
that Yeah, you've sung these songs while driving in the
car or sitting in your office, but you haven't been
listening to the lyrics. You may know the lyrics, but
you didn't listen to them. And now what you've done,
Alex is you've provided that opportunity for us to go, Oh,
my god, so that's what they were singing. I had
it wrong.
Speaker 2: Well, I think a lot of us are finding one
of the best uses of the Internet is to find
out what the real.
Speaker 3: Lyrics and songs out of these days, I.
Speaker 2: Forget the word. I'm forgetting the word. There's a words
that somebody made up of a misheard lyric and I'm
spacing it right now, but it's like a portmanteau or
something like that. And there were definitely a few lyrics
in there that I had to go back and check.
And I was miss singing one from Elton John's Mona
Lisaes and Matt Hatters, and my wife corrected me.
Speaker 3: She was like, don't you want to because I think, oh, because.
Speaker 2: They can't and that is why they can't look up.
And I kept singing and they can and that is why.
And she wanted me to go back and rerecord it
because meaning changes.
Speaker 3: See.
Speaker 1: See now when you bump into a song from Joe Jackson,
is she really going out with him?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Come on now, I paid ninety seven cents for that
forty five as a kid, and then when I hear
it from you, I'm going, oh, oh my god, this
isn't the poppy little I want to be kind of
a punk rock band kind of performer, Joe Jackson. This
is you saying, Hey, we've got a moment right now,
let's add to that moment. Is she really going out
with him?
Speaker 3: Is she?
Speaker 1: I want you to decide on the opposite side of
this song what you're feeling, because I'm asking is she
really going out with him?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: You and I grew up with that one as a hit,
but I actually so when I first broke that out
in my life Sets, the drummer from my band fog
Swamp was sitting in with me on percussion and he's only.
Speaker 3: Like thirty years old.
Speaker 2: So I sent him a few of the songs that
we were going to be playing and he was like,
you know, the first line is pretty women out walking
with gorillas down my street, and he was like, that
could be kind of inter He wasn't very comfortable with
the lyrics, and then I explained that this was a
hit song in the seventies, and also Joe Jackson was
dealing with his sexuality at that point, and then came
out of the closet and I was like, does that
help you clear your conscience before we perform it? He
said yes, absolutely, So I think that put it in
context for him.
Speaker 1: See, it's a conversation starter, and isn't that what music
used to be? And what you're doing is you're kind
of like inviting us to go back into that.
Speaker 2: I think so, I mean, and then my own internal dialogue,
I was trying to reinterpret some of my own originals.
Speaker 3: I just should have mentioned that.
Speaker 2: So there's twenty eight songs on this YEP, this album
and accompanying videos with each thing, and seven originals, twenty
and twenty one covers. So the seven originals, those were
originals that I wanted to think about in a totally
different light and sometimes different instrumentation. There's a few songs
that were just like pianos that had no guitar, and
so I had to reimagine them. Some of them had
ten fifteen guitar tracks layered with strings and horns, and
there were bigger, bigger instrumentation. If you want to go
back and explore my catalog, you can search alex Wise
or fog Swamp in the streaming media wherever you listen
to your music, and you can kind of do an
ab contrast and compare how these stripped down versions compare
to the originals.
Speaker 1: How are you breaking down the songs? Because I mean,
back in our day of forty fives and even cassettes
in eight tracks, I mean, we were able to go
as slow as possible. We could slow down that turntable
stylus just a bit just so we can hear the
guitar riffs and stuff. I mean, but you've done it
in a way to where you have broken it down,
grab some gorilla glue and pasted it all back together.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I have to also give a nod to the Internet
because some of these songs I could not figure out
without a little bit of assistance, like the Rain Song
by Zeppelin. So there's two led Zeppelin and two Stevie
wondercovers on this. The led Zeppelin on the Rain Song
is one of these beats that guitarists never really They
argued a lot about in the eighties and nineties, before
the Internet, when there was some clarity in terms of
the tuning that it came in. A lot of these
songs that have any of the songs that you hear
like any jamming or improvisation on there, those are the
songs that are played with open tunings. And the Rain Song,
I think is maybe I've read the only song in
pop music that is in this tuning. It's called open
page tuning because Jimmy Page just made it up for
the Rain song, basically because I think George Harrison needled
him little bit and said, you guys, don't write any ballots.
He's like, I watch this, So he wrote the Rain
song and so this isn't a weird tuning. And once
once I was able to discern that it was in
this tuning thanks to the Internet, the song opened up
for me and it was really it was fun.
Speaker 3: It was like getting the cheat code.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaking of fun, don't you think the fun really
isn't in the memories that you have of a song,
but rather discovering new ones. And when you do something
like one take, you're giving us that opportunity to take
something that we already know which is human form that
and then we grow with it by listening to it,
like every little thing she does is magic. I mean
this song right here, dude. If it is not at
weddings in twenty twenty six, then weddings are wrong. Not
the musician, weddings are wrong.
Speaker 3: Well, that's very kind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially some of these songs that we've heard so
much of. Yes, and we have the opportunity to listen
to them on repeat as much as we want now
because of streaming.
Speaker 3: I think it's nice to be able to find some.
Speaker 2: Unique takes on these songs that we may have overplayed
in our playlist and find refreshing new perspectives on them.
Speaker 1: Do you find classic rock stations knocking on your door saying, hey,
I like your interpretation, we want to do some sort
of specialty show or just add you in on our
playlist just to keep our classic rock sound fresh.
Speaker 2: I wish, I wish, but there's not a lot of
people knocking on my door to be off. I'm just
trying to spread my music however I can, and I
don't tour. I stay mostly in northern California, and this
is my seventh album. My first album was the first
one that really was the only one that really got
major distribution. And then the Internet came along, and I've
been singing the Internet's praises, But once Napster and the
other ways to steal music came around, it wasn't as
easy to sell music for a struggling singer songwriter like myself.
Speaker 1: But you know what I love about where people are
today with the music, especially with streaming, is that it's
like walking into a tower records or a music land,
and we get to discover new music. And the only
way to do that is that we have to sit
here and share, like one take twenty eight tracks. It's
original songs as well as the cover songs, and then
listeners are going, I gotta go find this, and all
of a sudden it becomes a part of a Spotify list,
it becomes an idheart iHeartRadio list. I mean, when you've
got a song like Won't Get Fooled Again, that's one
of those songs that people go, did you hear this
yet from this Alex wise guy? Well, who's Alex?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 1: You need to find out who? And that's what I
love about when people do that. They start going, you
need to find out who this dude is So it's
almost like the being you know underground and then all
of a sudden people start going underground to find you.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope coming on shows like Your Fine Show
can assist in that. Won't Get Fooled Again was a
fun one because it was if you just like play
it as a campfire song. A it's beautiful and it's
politics and it's message and it's power. But the subtlety
that you get to have by recording it just with
a microphone or guitar and your voice is that you
can break down like the synth parts on it, which
really makes it one of the classic rock anthems in
a way as those synth parts. Otherwise it's just I
don't know, it kind of gives it more dynamism, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, please do not move. There's more with Alex Wise
coming up next. His latest album is called One Take.
We are back with singer songwriter Alex Wise. I think
one of my connections with the music is the fact
that I mean here in Carolina is that grocery stores
now feature live music. They have a place where the
bands and the performers go and play live music. Because
grocery stores here in the Carolina's come with bars, wine
bar and beer bars, and so it's such a major
part of what we're doing as a lifestyle. And Alex,
when I heard this, I went, my god, what is
it going to take to get this guy over here
to the Carolina is to go on this grocery store tour.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm a tar Hill born Chapel Hill.
Speaker 1: You get it.
Speaker 3: N Yeah, I'd love to come on down.
Speaker 2: I have some friends in North Carolina, but I only
lived around two weeks in North Carolina.
Speaker 3: I don't recall it.
Speaker 2: I was an infant when I left, but I still
get to root for UNC basketball.
Speaker 1: Well, it's in your soul because it all comes from
the dirt here, man, It's in the dirt.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I guess I'm about as Carolinian as James Taylor, who
I cover on this album as well, and his first
song something in the Way She Moves, which I don't
know if you heard that cover, but I just you know,
he sings Carolina in my mind. But I didn't realize
he was like a transplanted preppy from the Northeast to
who then I guess his parents moved down to North Carolina.
But that song I don't know if you knew much
about something in the way she moves, but I read
about that as I was covering it, and that was
one of the songs he auditioned for the Beatles. He
was playing it for McCartney and Harrison at Apple Records
in like nineteen sixty eight and just like a gangly
heroin addicted preppy kid and they signed him, and George
Harrison openly admitted that that was the inspiration for the
opening line to something for him. So he was kind
of cool that he just sat down and there's like
a BBC footage of James Taylor maybe nineteen seventy you
can look up on YouTube, and he's talking about like
last time he was in England he auditioned for the Beatles,
and just seeing this shy kid, because he was very
awkward and shy at that just it was beautiful to
think of that moment where these amazing, huge rock stars
sat down and were blown away by this kid's finger
picking and singing.
Speaker 1: God, where I would love to see you is. Norah
Jones has now started a podcast where she goes around
to musicians like yourself and she sets up shop in
a studio and she's and you guys record together and
you're talking this unbelievable music you've got on one take,
and she's in there and she's jamming out with you,
and it's like, that's where the music industry is growing,
is that there's so much collaborating going on and so
many people that are inspired by what you're doing. Alex
that because they you know, they're they're doing their thing.
But here's Alex doing his thing, and it's like, that's
where I want to be. I want to be what
he's doing.
Speaker 3: Well. I'd like to be doing what Norah Jones is
doing well.
Speaker 1: She's working with other people, she's i mean this podcast
that she's created where she goes into these other studios
you find yourself going. I can't wait to talk with
because it'd be so fascinating to hear his stories, to
understand why he's doing what he's doing, you know, on
you know, recording that music and to take it out
there to a live audience in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: Well, I'd love to come on her show. She's an
amazing musician. And I also need to check out this podcast.
Speaker 3: Have you checked out?
Speaker 2: So in terms of music podcasts, I've gone down this
rabbit Hole with this five hundred Songs.
Speaker 3: By Andrew Hickey.
Speaker 2: Wow, The five hundred Songs of the History of Rock
and Roll by Andrew Hickey. It's a very strange podcast,
but super well researched, and it's a project that's been
going on for years and he's still only around, not
even halfway through it. Each episode is like two hours,
like going down a rabbit hole of each song, like
he'll do All on the Watchtower. He'll have a two
hour episode that focuses on Bob Dylan's version, and then
the next week it'll be a two hour episode of.
Speaker 3: Jimmy Hendrix's All Along Wow Wow. Highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: That's what I love about where we are with music today.
And so you know, I mean, I love me some radio.
I like terrestrial radio, but man, when it comes to
where we are on the streaming platform, it gives us
the opportunity to open the door for people like yourself.
Speaker 2: Alex, Yes, I mean fortunately or unfortunately, that's the new medium.
I'm a radio host for fifteen years see Change Radios
on around two hundred stations around the country. Focuses on
sustainability and social justice issues. But our platform is limited
because grassroots radio is a little anachronistic in some ways,
and so you can still access the show on podcasts,
but the preponderance of the majority of our listeners are
on terrestrial broadcast.
Speaker 1: So what is it going to take to get you
onto one of these little festivals? Because it seems like
that we've become the nation of festivals now. I mean
they just recently had Bonnaroo, Fandango. I mean, here are
the Carolinas, we have festivals. Everybody's got all going on
during the spring and summer months. What what's going to
put you there?
Speaker 2: Probably a better press team. Maybe maybe once I go
on the Nora Jones there you probably I mean what
I mean to be honest, Now that I'm not a
band leader, it does make it a little easier to
fly in and play one off gigs and also tour
a little bit. And so that's something I probably need
to cut my teeth on again. I used to tour
a little bit more, but have not been since I've
become a dad. But now that I'm an empty nester,
maybe I can maybe I can re refocus on playing
playing all around. I used to, uh, you know, and
I my music career really kind of started in Japan,
so and that was where I first sold most of
my records. I got a record deal in Japan, and
so I was big in Japan first.
Speaker 3: So maybe I need to go back there too.
Speaker 1: No, I totally get that because my wife's ex husband,
Bruce Goich was one of the things that he did
was he he played a lot of times in Japan.
He just said, there's no one more loyal than those
that live in Japan when it comes to American music.
Speaker 2: Well, any kind of English speaking music, I think because
it's very well, it's deeply rooted in karaoke culture because
there's you know, a lot of people would go to
seek their fortune in Japan by trying to learn how
to They would go to Japan to teach English, and
there's a hunger from the Japanese population to learn more
conversational English, and karaoke is a really good vehicle to
practice On's pronunciation, which is one of the problems that
a lot of Japanese English learners have is the pronunciation.
They've all studied it in grade school, but they haven't
had a real opportunity to use their English. So karaoke
is one of those outlets. I didn't realize that when
I moved there in the nineties. It was like I
would do karaoke with my homestay family and they were like, oh,
good pronunciation. I was like, yeah, so a lot of
that singing English songs, English speaking songs or you know, Beatles, Eagles,
whatever covers people wanted to hear.
Speaker 3: It was really there was a lot of leeway.
Speaker 2: Because as long as your pronunciation was good, everything else
was not a problem in terms of the musicianship. They
just really wanted to hear somebody pronounce those songs correctly.
Speaker 1: Where can people go to find out more about you?
And one take? Because I want them to tap into this.
Speaker 3: Oh that'd be great. Yeah.
Speaker 2: If people can check out my website, it's alex Wise
al e x.
Speaker 3: Wise dot com.
Speaker 2: And then I have a Instagram's alex Wyse SF or sorry,
alex Wise Music and my you can you can stream
my material either with keywords alex Wise or fog Swamp.
That was my We have three albums my band fog Swamp,
and they can also go to my YouTube playlist and
they can follow along with the twenty eight songs on YouTube.
There's a one take playlist as well.
Speaker 3: If they search that.
Speaker 1: Dude, you got to come back to this show anytime
in the future. The door is always going to be
open for you. And I really do mean that.
Speaker 3: Oh that's so very kind of you. I really appreciate
you having me on.
Speaker 1: Well, excellent man. Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, all right YouTube you bet, bye guy, all right,
thanks again.