Nica Strong: How did you get started in music?

John McAndrew: I grew up in a very musical family, and lots of brothers and sisters. My father, among other things, was a clarinet player. He played jazz on the steamboats in East Saint Louis, and with a lot of jazz musicians, and after the war he played a little bit with Stan Kenton orchestra. He came back home, raised a family and finished college, but he always had a little trio playing in the basement. I remember as maybe 6, 7, or 8 year old kid playing a bottle with brushes, learning how to play drums. My older brother, Amil played bass. We had a lot of music going around in the house. Downstairs would be the grateful dead and the Beatles, and upstairs it was jazz. They were stressful times, you know. My brother put on a song by the Chambers brothers called, “People Get Ready.”  It’s an old gospel tune. It did something to me. I know I can’t explain, but it said, “Music is a really powerful thing,” and it affected me so much. So when I first found the piano, and all sorts of little instruments, I would try to play them. But I didn’t pursue it until I was well out of high school and started to play a little more seriously.

NS: Your music is usually described kind of like piano based adult pop with jazz blues and rock influences.

JM: Yeah. Thanks.

NS: You have heartfelt songs that have a conscience. So how do you balance all those together to create your unique sound?

JM: We can look in the rear view mirror, and then things start to make a little sense. We moved a lot and had a lot of different experiences, and then starting to play live music. I’ve played every kind of venue you could imagine. Country music, rock and roll… I played in some jazz clubs in New York, and once I got out of playing with bands. I started to play solo, write my own songs. I think a lot of musicians are like me. I had to make a living, so I had to learn to play different influences. The piano is really nice way to be able to do that, to play jazz and pop.

NS: Oh, yeah. And then you have to sing, and you gotta do it in front of people.

JM: I’m a real sucker when I watch a movie and it says, “Based on a true story.” So that’s kind of the way I write. I tell stories. It’s an intimate thing. I’d like to tell my story, and I hope it’s your story.  The thread that runs through it is that we are all just human beings. And as we get older, I’ve gotten older, I’m not 29, our instincts, and the things that we seek and we need and sometimes demand change a bit. So there’s a bit of that looking back, of course, in my storytelling, but we are all the same. I was raised thinking you had to be perfect and first, but we do the best we can, and then at the end of the day I hope you saw the better side of me. That’s kind of the tie in to the last song on the record. We had 17 songs in the can, and decided to do all original stuff. We didn’t have a title and I went in and wrote that song in about 10 min, and that sort of encapsulates it. If you’ve worked with people, the more we find out, the simpler it gets that we’re all that. We’re all pretty much the same. We’ve got little weird stuff around us but in the very center of this whole deal we’re all human beings.

NS: Yeah. It’s about forgiveness.

JM: Yeah, if you can.

NS: And that one hit me because I’ve been feeling that way. The song is my new mantra now!

JM: That’s really wonderful. I recorded that at Muscle Shoal Studios, which was my first record deal at a pretty famous place down there. I came from Minnesota and went down there to do that record, and we recorded that song. Now, since then we’ve overdubbed some stuff. But that song, you know, I told you about the song people get ready.  My dad passed away – he never heard me play. But I had a dream, and my dad came to me in that dream. As I was getting ready to go out on stage in a small theater, he grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around, and there he was. He said, “You’re really good,” and patted me on the buttocks. My dad was just like he probably was as a child, clear eyed and full of love. It was so amazing, and I turned around to go out on stage. When I woke up I was in my room up in Saint Paul, in a little cheap apartment. I went “Holy cow, you know Dad.” Once we practice that a little bit it gets easier to forgive yourself. Maybe forgive somebody who cut you off. Those little things. We joke about the woman in front of you at the grocery line with about 35 coupons, and you get so impatient, but then you have to think she’s probably living on a fixed who knows what her struggles are?

NS: The majority of your songs are at the piano.  What role does that play in your songwriting? Do you compose at the piano? Do you base all of your music around it?

JM: It’s a good question. Songwriting and performing for me was directly related to how much I practiced and tried to learn new things. It was really easy to get stuck in a groove. So I if I wrote a few songs that sounded a little similar, my natural reaction was, “Let’s do something, bluesy,” or “Let’s do something up tempo.” Playing the acoustic guitar has helped a little bit because it’s just very rhythmic, and I can get different rhythms out of it. And the piano can become really melodic for me. But I think, as my piano playing improved, moving to Tennessee where there’s a lot of songwriters, like really great ones, helped. It’s all about learning stuff from other people and then practicing and getting better at it. The piano is my favorite instrument to play because you can do so much with it. At the core of my heart I would just play Boogie Woogie and blues piano all day long. I generally start off on the piano with a song, and sometimes I just think of something. I’ve written many, many songs while I was doing sound checks for concerts. and all I’m doing is picking. Yeah, there’s 5 or 6. I’m just picking a thing, and I get the melody, and I speak it into my phone. And a couple of days later I start to write a song about it. So it comes It comes from somewhere, but I gotta be at the piano to work at it or at the guitar. It’s discipline too.

NS: Are there any specific artists, past or present that has influenced your playing?

JM: Well, going back a few years, he first time I heard Oscar Peterson I went, “Boy, there’s no use even trying to play piano anymore.” He’s one of the greatest jazz piano players. And then there’s an old guy who played jazz and sang, and he was kind of bluesy and simple, named Gene Harris. And a lot of these people. And Jackson Brown influenced me really a lot with a song called “Dr. My Eyes,” because it’s so easy to play in the piano. It’s so groovy. And then, when Marc Cohn came out with walking in Memphis, again I decided I should just quit. It’s so beautiful. And, Billy Joel and Elton and all these guys influence all of our lives and influenced me because, as I’m learning to play and make a living, so I can support my own songwriting people are going to ask you to play those songs.

There’s another song that by a guy named John Hyatt called, “Have a Little Faith in Me”. When it came out, it was just John playing the piano and singing and that’s the real deal right there. No other instruments. You can pull it off doing that. We all want to be different and I tried so hard to be different that I missed a lot of simple things, but it just takes a while to figure that stuff out.

NS: Your album Souls and Forgiven were in Grammy consideration for roots, gospel and Americana categories. What drew you to explore spiritual or roots based themes in your music?

JM: I just did that music and the record label from in Nashville submitted in those categories. I think it’s about this journey from the old life to the new life and the and getting a little bit older. And let’s just use the analogy, I don’t know if this is a good one but, you’re in one of those big air balloons trying to go up, and you’ve got to jettison some weight, so you gotta drop some crap off on the way. I think some of the songs are about that on this record. You start to look at the calendar, and you realize you got fewer days ahead of you, than you do behind you and you start to treasure things a little more. I think all spirituality and all religious, if you want to use that word… all those pursuits by human beings are kind of the same thing. To try to just be at peace and be comfortable, because life is a tough thing, with all the curves and the bumps you go through. So, I’m treasuring each day. And you know I’m a therapist as well. I don’t talk a lot about that, music therapy, and a lot of this life and spirituality is about subtraction or letting go. Most of my life, I thought, I’m not enough so I’ve got to add something to this, but I am enough already.

NS: Cumberland Heights was featured at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Museum. Tell me about the inspiration behind that song and its significance to you.

JM: Yeah, just like pinball machines, you like you never know where it’s going, bing, bing, bing, bing! I got signed at Muscle Shoal Studios, and went down south. That’s where I met my wife, Nancy. Nancy had 2 daughters, and shortly after we met her oldest daughter was going to get married, and they live in Birmingham. So we go down to Birmingham, and Mom and daughter are going out to shop for stuff, I said. I’m going to go over and look at that museum. It just fascinates me, and I spent the whole day at the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Museum, and what I saw so affected me. Nancy and I were living long distance and I went back to Minnesota, and wrote that song. I had a producer in LA named Morgan Ames, who worked for Quincy Jones and we recorded that song, and then I sent it to the Pastor Hamlin at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and they invited me down to meet me. I went down there with a cassette tape. There’s Pastor Hamlin and a gentleman named Barry Mcneely. I became best man at his wedding. He goes “I hate you for writing, for being able to.” in a loving way. He said, “I’ve been trying to write a song about this forever,” and we became best of friends. I got very involved with that community performing learning from them, and being a part of the Institute.

NS: How has your music therapy work informed your songwriting, and your perception of the power of music.

JM: I backed into this. I backed into playing music in front of audiences that are in the process of healing and with groups and then individuals. And then I ended up at a place called Cumberland Heights in Nashville, and they afforded me an opportunity with a big music room instruments to do a music therapy program, and then also work with music professionals. So what I’ve learned, and since then I speak about this. I do workshops on music, and the power and music in the brain, and in recovery and healing. And what’s neat is with being able to image our brains. Now we can see our brain on music, on prayer and meditation, on an exercise we’re doing. We’re focusing and dopamine and serotonin levels and all sorts of science is happening which is beautiful. And at the same time the spirits happening, and they both just overlap. So that’s what fascinates me, and then watching people heal with a unlimited amounts of ways that music can help heal the body. I mean mentally, spiritually. So I’ve seen it up close and that influenced the song up on River Road. That’s on the album. It’s the second song, and that.

NS: That’s what Cumberland Heights was about.

JM: That’s exactly where it all came from. I came down from Minnesota, Catholic Lutheran church services. I kind of snuck out the back door of the church, and took awhile to get back to some of that stuff. But we sang, and it was just not very… then I came down South, did that Birmingham song. And now I’m in the black churches and healing and singing. I got swept up in all that for sure. That was a part of it.

I know guys that are car mechanics, and it’s just as healing for them to work on a water pump because they’re in the present moment they’re not thinking about where they goofed up in the past, and they’re not  getting all the anxiety about the future. When I look at my old life I was kind of lost for a lot of years. I would break into a church. Well, I didn’t have to break in, but churches and schools and universities that had pianos, and I’d go in there and play. I didn’t know that that was sort of that was medicinal for me. But you think about blues, music. and the influence on all the music that came from the pain and suffering of the South. and how that influenced country music, how that influenced rock and roll in England, you know, when you get older you can start following all the little threads back to where they started, and it all come, it comes from this now, the pain and suffering is definitely part of it. But what comes from it is the joy, all of that is in the music, and it’s you know. I it’s hard to explain to somebody, but you have you experience it, you know, and that’s what we do. And I hope people can listen to this album from the beginning to the end, because that was our intention. There’s a bunch of stuff in there just and hopefully just check out for a little, maybe an hour, and sit and listen to the whole thing. And it’ll make sense to you.

My grandson William is such a musician, and he kind of grew up on my lap watching me play. But you know I’m telling him we put some other albums together for spotify, and I’m all uptight about the song he goes, “People don’t care about that. They only listen to one,” and it’s true. Vinyl comes back, and then people are kind of going back to some old ways. And there’s a small niche of people who can find the time to do that now in our busy lives.

NS: I tell people that all the time I’m like when you listen to a record on Vinyl, you have to sit and get immersed in that sound. You can’t be cleaning and doing everything else.

JM: People that buy vinyl records are really committed to this music thing, the liner notes and the artwork.

NS: So throughout your long and illustrious career, what has been your most memorable or impactful moments in your career so far?

JM: I would say there’s 2 or 3 of them. I already mentioned the moment when I heard “People Get Ready.” But early into my new life I was playing at the Mall of America with a large country band, and they were really good. And I had recorded a song and had a little single. It was on the local radio. and they were playing country music, and they’re all out there dancing in cowboy boots and stuff.  Then I played my song and the dance floor completely empties, you know, and I realized it’s going over like a lead balloon, and something hit me at that moment that, John, this is not what you want to do, so I quit and got a job playing solo piano in a really fine club in Minneapolis, and that started me writing learning jazz standards. It really was a pivotal moment where I was lucky enough to get a job 6 nights a week, and it paid really well. Minneapolis is such a great town for that. It wasn’t long before somebody came up from Nashville and sat and heard me, and probably said, “It’s pretty rough, but there’s some talent there” that led to me getting signed at Muscle Shoals. Then playing in Minneapolis in July of 2000, I believe, and it was a very special event for about 50,000 people, and I got to close it with a song and that just did something to me that day.

I came to Nashville now that I’m earning a living, and I’m doing a bunch of stuff, and I’m playing a little restaurant, and it’s closing, and it’s down in a fancy part of Nashville. And I go, “Oh, heck with it! I’ll play this little original” and in walks a guy named Mike Thomas. All I remember is he was really obnoxious, threw his keys down, pulls his chair out, says “Waitress, give me my usual piece of pie and a diet Coke”. Then, right in the middle of the song he goes, “Who are you?” I gave my name. He goes “What in the hell are you doing here?”  And we talked, and what happened is a long relationship. He produced me, taught me a lot. brought me into the Nashville scene a little bit. I’m not country music, but he was a really experienced, so I want to throw a little shout out to Mike Thomas, because I know he’d appreciate it. So those are some little pivotal moments, you know that, and then meet my wife, Nancy. Of course, the best I always love when I hear love stories I just love it.

NS: If you had a chance to work with an artist either still here or transitioned, who would that be?

JM: Well, let’s take one that’s transitioned. It would be Ray Charles.

NS: Now that is interesting. Tell me more.

JM: Well, when I started I got into a little journey playing in little clubs and restaurant my favorite thing to do was Ray Charles stuff! It just tickled me, the different variations of stuff he did. He got a little push back, because he got into white music with the strings and the country stuff. He’s such a humble man, and he didn’t care who, couldn’t see who he was playing for. His vast array of styles, and just how talented . A living person today would be probably Paul McCartney.

NS: Oh, yeah, I’m a big fan.

JM: My producer formed wings with him. All sorts of little tidbits about his life that we all most people don’t know much about. But you think of the songs that Paul wrote, and John Lennon too. “Imagine,” is sort of the centerpiece for me of what a musician can do with a song.

NS: And so many people have remade, did different versions of that. The first time I heard it was from another singer, and then I went back to his version. And I was like, ‘Oh, wow!’  It’s amazing what you can think of, and how sometimes your music can actually lead to social changes and to conversations that are kind of difficult to have.

JM: The song “Freedom’s In Our Blood,” which is on the record, is sort of that song for me. and I wrote it many years ago, when the wall came down, and I’ve made some very. I made some variations to it to kind of catch up with, and the deal is, oh. I don’t care where you live and who you’re with, but for. In everybody’s blood. For some reason.  Our humanness thinks that if I get mine, then you can’t have yours, or you know, or if I let you have yours. I can’t get mine.

The very conservative people out in the country, in the farm. They want their freedom just as bad as you do as a black person. and that’s why I get passionate about it. Martin Luther, King, and people that transcend all this stuff. Wasn’t about color for Martin at all. I know stories about him are unbelievable. We all need this, and if I can just say, you know I got it. You live out there, and you don’t want people running out and robbing your house. So you want a gun. I get it. But I also want to be able to vote. I know it’s really idealistic. And I get accused of that a lot. But that’s the “Freedom’s In Our Blood,” is about the fact that we are. We all have that, no matter who we are. and if I can recognize you got it in your blood, and that’s the last line is that I can. I can have your mind, and you can still have yours, and I can still have mine. Now. It may be too idealistic. I know. Other people that were great spiritual leaders that were very idealistic. I’m sticking with those.

NS: Now, you know, it’s interesting that you mentioned that about Dr. Martin Luther King, because a lot of people don’t realize that about him that when he was doing the Civil Rights movement it wasn’t just for African Americans. It was for the farmers. It was for people who were in poor white community it was for everyone having, and his thing was, give us all a level playing field.

JM: Workers, education.

NS: Everybody experienced that, it’s like when we went through the big depression. Only, you know white people experienced it. Black people experienced it. Hispanic people experienced it, everybody experienced it. So it’s like even going through the civil rights movement. Poor white people experience that, too. I don’t know why people think that that’s just really just a black thing. It’s not a black thing. It’s a human thing. It’s a civil rights thing, and it’s all encompassing.

JM: Yeah. And we know as a as a therapist. And you know, we work in this field, and it’s all the same stuff. But fear generates everything. Their instincts to have a safe place, to live, to get affection and approval, and have some money in the bank. It’s all God given stuff, and we all want that. It’s just really hard for some people to get over the fear. Like with immigration. Nothing has to be done about it but that the fear is we’re giving all our money to these people who don’t deserve to live here, and the fear generates all that stuff. Martin tried to get people… if you look at the speech he gave in Washington, it was way more white people, and all the black people that could get there. and we need that again, and the only way to do it is, “I understand you’ve experienced something, can I? … As long as we got time? This is very fascinating, and you’re one of the first people to really touch inside here what this is about.

NS: Thank you.

JM: George Wallace is, you know I grew up North and just hated that guy and all that stuff, and I got to meet him.  In George’s heart he cared about everybody, and he did a lot of bad shit that people in Alabama want it done. But the first thing he wanted to do is to make sure the black kids get the same school books that the white kids have, because it’s not fair for them to be reading out of stuff that’s falling apart. That was one of his first things, and they pounded him down. You know the fear of the white people there, and You know what the core we need to encourage the better side. But it’s Corny. How we got to that courage the better.  Well, we need to encourage the better side of others as well.

NS: If you have someone who’s young, who’s trying to get into the music how would you encourage them?

JM: If you’re driven to express yourself that way, and it’s healing for you, then do it just for that play and practice. The more you practice, and the more you learn, just like with painting or any other art, you get more colors, you get more textures. and the pictures get deeper and 3D. And all sorts of stuff happens. So if you’re doing it for yourself, it’s really important. If you want to do it for other people and make a living you just have to stick with it, and live your life and pay attention. From that it will come. I think you know most of your inspiration. A lot of people want to write the hit song get really famous and all that stuff. Just enjoy that moment when you’re playing and singing, and then each time you learn something new and get a little better. It’s really exciting.

NS: Any parting words?

JM: I really enjoyed our conversation because we got to the deeper undercurrents where a lot of this music comes from. But, we are all human, and we all fumble, and we all have the same stuff, pretty much so if we meet each other where we’re at, and take some time out of the day to do that. I think we inspire the better side of ourselves. And we then inspire the better side of other people is also, that’s the we part of it.

Interview by Nica Strong.