II sounds laid-back and atmospheric. Was that your intention?
It feels a lot more cinematic to me than my first record. It’s less about particular soloists or virtuosic things, and more about subtlety and details. If people know that that’s the intent, then it’ll probably be better received. It might capture something in you internally, but it won’t hit you over the head.
What is it about movie music that’s so appealing to you?
It calls up so many pictures in your head and brings out a kind of emotion. If you listen to the score of a film you haven’t seen, you can let your brain fill in the blanks when the music seems to imply action. Why would there be a ten-bar phrase here or an eight-bar phrase here, or why does the triangle come in? What is the musical gesture here? It can then be a guide to your own personal story rather than being about what happened in the film.
Does your cinematic approach to your own music apply to how you play bass with others?
As I’ve gotten older or wiser, I’ve made my playing less about myself. I grew up listening to John Paul Jones and Leland Sklar, and I was always more interested in finding out what they did in a particular song that might make it special instead of having a rule of thumb for every song. I try to think of what’s best for each tune. If one of the other instruments is doing something special, I don’t necessarily try to double that. I want to let that instrument speak, and if there’s a hole that’s better for me, I try to take that. In a lot of ways, it’s thinking like a drummer, figuring out whether the best fill is at the beginning or end of a phrase.