Rob Duquette Interview
Doug Burke:
Rob Duquette is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and head of the eponymously named band Duquette. A longtime sideman during the 1990s on drums, xylophone, guitar, and vocals for Jonathan Edwards of The Lovin' Spoonful's touring band, and one half of the critically acclaimed jazz folk-pop duo Cactus Highway during the 2000s, Rob finally broke away and created three solo work albums including his latest, Stay with Me. Recorded at Acadia Recording Studios in Rob's home base of Portland, Maine, Rob plays nearly all the instruments on the album. A skilled musical instructor and arranger, his work reflects his versatility and eclectic musical range.
Welcome back to Backstory Song. I'm here with Rob Duquette of the eponymously named Duquette, who has three albums out, Stay with Me, Trust the Night, and This Time. Let's start by talking about Moving On. What's this song about?
Rob Duquette:
It's about accepting that or finally ... because in my situation, personally, it was a situation I held on for a long time, held off from moving on, because kids were involved. I wasn't sure if I was meant to maybe not be completely happy in my marriage life while sticking around for the kids. I knew that wasn't the way to do it, but it was a hard transition, as some people might be able to relate to that. It was hard to finally start talking about the fact that I'm not happy and the kids aren't benefiting from that.
Doug Burke:
So this is a breakup divorce song with your first wife?
Rob Duquette:
Yes.
Doug Burke:
In the first verse, you seem to make reference to the Almond Brothers.
Rob Duquette:
The original lyric actually had the artists, Jackson Brown and Jonathan Edwards, because I was hugely influenced by Jackson Brown in my twenties, and to this day, he's my all-time favorite. Then Jonathan Edwards, him, Cat Stevens, and John Lennon were the three people that got me writing when I was a kid. So I had those two guys in mind, Jackson Brown and Jonathan Edwards.
Doug Burke:
About running on.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, particularly Jackson, with his songs about being on the road, for sure. But Jonathan had some of those running through his songs, too, particularly his first album.
Doug Burke:
So you're an incredible multi-instrumentalist. Maybe you could tell me some of the instruments you actually play on this song.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. Drums and percussion were always the main things that I've been known for, but I've always played guitar, and xylophone tied right in with percussion. So hand drums of various kinds, world percussion, hand drums, drum set, xylophone, guitar, keyboard. I'm a bit of a hack on keyboard, but I do love playing. I'm going to be doing an online show soon where I'm incorporating all those things. I'm going to be doing a setup where I have a xylophone in front of me and a kick and a snare and a high hat and then a keyboard to my left. It's been my COVID project, I guess you could say.
Doug Burke:
You have been a session musician, mainly on percussion instruments, and, in fact, have been part of Jonathan Edwards touring band, right, in that role?
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. I was in his group for about four years. He hired me as a drummer and a backup vocalist. So I sang all the high harmonies, and for those of you who listen to Jonathan and haven't seen him for a while, he's as fabulous as he's ever been, both his harmonica playing and his singing. He sings Sunshine, Go Away in a higher key than it was originally recorded. I don't know how he does that. So I had to sing the high harmonies on all that stuff, which was right at my peak in some situations. But then he heard me play guitar, and he asked me to start bringing my guitar. So I had sort of a multi-setup. That was my first-time sort of professionally bringing more than one instrument to a gig. So I had a small drum set, conga. He loves conga, and a doumbek, so some hand drums and then my guitar.
Doug Burke:
I've notice that the percussion instruments, the broad range, what most people will don't realize is kind of at the core of your music, piano is a percussion instrument. Most people don't realize that.
Rob Duquette:
That's true. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
In Moving On Here, you have the first verse where you're talking about the road in reference to some of your inspirations. Second verse, you talk about being in Idaho and Eastern Washington.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. I was in a group called Cactus Highway, and one thing ... I don't know. I can almost answer both of those questions in the same way, because I was touring in the early 2000s, and we had a gig in Pocatello, Idaho. Then we made our way through Oregon, and we went up to Washington. That was a real tour that we did. Bellingham was where we ended, and then we went down to LA from there. But anyway, so you asked about the line I think about picturing the road and all that stuff. I gave up touring completely when my kids were born because I wanted to be with them every day. So one thing I did was I quit touring. We moved up to Portland, Maine, and I played in bars just about every night as a drummer and a singer. Then I started playing guitar in bands and led my own bar band for a real short spell because I had never done that. I'd always done original music. So I thought it was almost like something I should do at some point. So part of it was letting go of the road so that I could be with my kids, and I've never regretted that for a second, but that imagery comes out in that song when I was thinking about leaving and whatnot.
Doug Burke:
So in the last verse, where you're kind of trying to come to a resolution about moving on, you say, "I use my mistakes for my fuel. It's nothing you said. No, it's nothing you did."
Rob Duquette:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Kind of putting it on yourself and not the other person.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. At the time, I was. But it takes two to not communicate, because it was kind of a situation where there was less and less communication as time went on, sort of an inability to get past that, to connect. But I was definitely acknowledging my own mistakes, accepting them, and working through them.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, I feel like the last line is a bit of a lie. Not to call you on it. "It's nothing you said. No, it's nothing you did." Well, come on.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. It was "some things you said," and it's "some things you did." Yeah. But where I was coming from with that line also was it was what she didn't say. It was that lack of communication. So "It's nothing you said," that's kind of where that came from, although when I wrote it, I knew that it could be taken a different way.
Doug Burke:
I really like how you end with this sort of echoey, screaming, painful back vocal.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. My producer, for the record, asked me just to kind of improvise, and I didn't know what he was going to keep. So I think he went a couple of times through. So I just improvised. I wasn't thinking of anything at all. Even now when I sing that song, it's hard not to get very emotional singing it, because it's so personal. This album is more personal than anything I've done, frankly. But I think it was just I still had it and my emotions were still kind of raw. So I just kind of improvised from that, kind of. He kept what he liked, I guess.
Doug Burke:
So tell me, when did you start writing songs, and why did you start writing songs?
Rob Duquette:
Well, I started playing in bands when I was really young as a drummer. I didn't even sing. I was too kind of shy. So I was 14, 15, and then by 16, I was playing in bars professionally. It was around that time that I started writing my own songs. I had no desire to show them to anyone. They were kind of like Cat Stevens songs. They were very spiritual and personal and everything. So I couldn't imagine sharing that with anyone. But I don't know. It was kind of an expression that I took to, I guess. Now I know that writing is a way that I work through certain things. Even if I'm not writing songs at the time, I am journaling, and it's kind of the same outlet. If I don't journal or write anything for a while, I feel it emotionally. It's the same as if I don't drum for a couple of days. I get very antsy. Physically, I can't sit still. So it's one of the outlets that I've found that I need to be healthy. So when I started writing songs, I got a kick out of it, because I was already playing guitar at that age, just in my bedroom, and keyboards. I was just learning Beatles songs or whatever. But I could instantly come up with a melody and a chord progression and have a simple tune. So by the time I was maybe 20, I had 30 songs maybe that I started recording on my four-track. That's when I started playing them for maybe a girlfriend here and there or maybe a friend, but I didn't sing and play guitar in public until I was probably 25. Nobody knew I did that.
Doug Burke:
The next one we're going to talk about, Rob, is See Me, also a breakup song. I really love the xylophone introduction on this. You don't hear xylophone a lot on rock and pop and alt-indie albums these days, and it's kind of neat.
Rob Duquette:
Thanks. I love the tonal qualities of this xylophone and that you can get a nice melody from it. I'm not a horn player. So that's one thing I could always do, is add xylophone to the composition elements of a song. So I always love that, and I'm inspired maybe by Frank Zappa as much as anyone in bringing that instrument to a popular setting. It's a similar topic from Moving On. They kind of go together, a divorce situation, hanging onto the situation maybe longer than I should have, and the inability to communicate.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. This one has a real Jackson Brown-y feel to me.
Rob Duquette:
Oh, cool.
Doug Burke:
It's kind of interesting how you don't rhyme. You don't have couplets in the song.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, yeah.
Doug Burke:
It's still quite listenable. Do you ever think about that, that you don't actually write rhymes?
Rob Duquette:
Not when I was writing that one, no. But I have thought about that before. In fact, the first time I started thinking about that was a Jackson Brown interview. I think it was Songwriter Magazine back when I was in Cambridge. I spent a long time in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a songwriter. Late '90s into the early 2000s, my wife and I lived there in the Boston area. They used to have Songwriter Magazine there, and he talked about how, at the time, he was interested in not rhyming, not having everything line up. At the time, my wife and I were both writing. Early on, I think it was just a matter of it was more emotion and how he could be kind of different. But at the time, I think we were both very intrigued by the craft of songwriting. So rhyming was certainly a part of that.
Doug Burke:
So tell me about the production of the album and the song, See Me, Moving On.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. Both those songs were obviously very personal, and the process of recording them, the production was really freeing. Doug Luther was the producer, and the engineer was Jason Phelps. We had the grand piano set up. We had a drum set, all miked. We had the guitar rigs kind of on the ready, or we'd be able to set them up pretty quick, whether it was an electric guitar or acoustic guitar, percussion. We had everything ready to go, and it was just they were like, "Okay, what do you want to do?" So I'd lay down some drums. I'd lay down some piano, and it's kind of the way I started doing it when I was a kid with my four-track because I would just do all the instruments myself, whereas the last album that I called Trust the Night, I had a lot of guests. Jonathan Edwards was on it and some other really great players. It was a pretty amazing experience, really, to go back to that, but have it in a studio. I didn't have to worry about the engineering part of it.
Doug Burke:
All right. You Be the Tree. Nice major key with a nice hook in this song. I love the hook in this song.
Rob Duquette:
Oh, cool. I'm not sure when that came in, but I know that I started writing that after I had left home and was grappling with, "Okay, how can I still let the kids know I love them more than anything and not see them maybe as much as I was?", although shortly after that, I found that the quality time had not diminished at all. I was still having quality time with them, and they never felt like they weren't loved. But I started writing about dropping them off basically at their mom's. So it starts off with dropping my son off, and clearly this was a song for my son, who had a hard time with it, harder than my daughter. What happened was I was kind of renting a room for about a month or so, and then when I first got my apartment, I started writing the song. I couldn't get through it. I couldn't. I'd work on it, and then I'd start crying. I couldn't get through it. So it wasn't until several months later that I could actually finish it and think about maybe performing it live. I don't know.
Doug Burke:
So you do perform this live now?
Rob Duquette:
I do. Yeah, yeah.
Doug Burke:
You don't cry when you do that?
Rob Duquette:
It's close sometimes, actually. It's gotten easier, because I spend so much time with both the kids, and they're just doing so great.
Doug Burke:
So this has got a lot of parental moments in it, blowing a kiss, secret handshakes, talking man to man.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Is this a poem to your son? Do you want him to ...
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, I guess so, and it's sort of a wish to continue as we had been when I was living at home with them. I didn't want any of that to change, really. I wanted our relationship to continue to flourish and grow. Then there's that bridge where I say, "I'm all right." I don't know what prompted me to do that. But it just kind of maybe was one of the things that helped me not cry when I was singing it, "I'm all right. I'm all right." Sometimes a mantra is helpful to parents, to anyone, but a mantra that it's okay, you're doing all right.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, it's kind of like the whole song is you talking to your son, and then in the end, you're just kind of talking to yourself.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, yeah, reassuring myself. Yeah, I needed that at the time.
Doug Burke:
The sort of cliche is the apple doesn't fall from the tree, but your chorus is kind of the opposite. Tell me about the chorus.
Rob Duquette:
Well, there's the nourishing factor of soil and the tree growing above the soil, right? So "I'll lift you up over my head. I'll be the dirt," that's almost a funny line to say, call yourself dirt, and I accept all interpretations that people might have, especially if it makes them smile for a minute. "I'll be the dirt. You be the tree." Since they were babies, I've always kind of pictured lifting them up, letting them grow, and just nurturing them. In fact, this goes into the song that I wrote for my daughter, Lighthouse, which we haven't gotten to yet.
Doug Burke:
Let's talk about that.
Rob Duquette:
Well, there's that line where I say "letting go of the anchor," because there's all this sort of ocean sort of imagery, and I'm talking about letting go of the anchor. The way I've always parented has been like little by little, you just let them go a little bit more and make more and more of their own decisions and have their own say. It's kind of a gradual thing. So that's kind of, I guess, an imagery for both songs.
Doug Burke:
I kind of like that one song's about your son and one clearly is to your daughter.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, yeah. I lucked out, I guess. Lighthouse was a poem that I wrote when Stella ... She was probably in fourth grade, I bet. She's in high school now. I'd walk her across the street. Little by little, I'd let her walk further and further on her own. This is a good image of what I'm saying about letting them have more and more of their own choice. So it ended up being eventually I just kind of walked out to the driveway and watched her walk to school. One morning after watching her walk to school, I just went in and wrote a poem called Lighthouse. I might've already been in the studio at this time. I released the album Stay with Me. I released it in December, but we started that about a year ago. So I think I was already in the studio, and I had You Be the Tree. My producer was adamant that we had to record that song, and I was thinking, "Oh, that'd be cool if I had a song for the girl." I remembered that poem, and sure enough, I found it in a journal. Just by sheer luck, the tune came to me. So bang, I had one for each of them.
Doug Burke:
So you live in Portland, which is on the Atlantic Ocean, and this song has a lot of sea imagery in it.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah right down to the cover of the album, which was a bit of a lark. It's weird, because I left home in February, I'd say, of 2017, I think. It was January, and then in April of that year, I met my current wife, Amanda. Neither of us were in a place where we wanted to be in a relationship, but it wasn't really up to us, because we fell deeply in love. What happened was I proposed to her at that spot where the album cover, that picture that was taken. That's right after I proposed to her. It's my favorite spot on the ocean, and I proposed to her. We were hugging and everything, and then she clicked that shot. If you look closely, there's a shadow of us hugging and her leg kicked up behind her, sort of. She's a dancer, so it's almost like this old sort of school hugging each other with her kicking her leg up. So even the cover has that ocean imagery. The ocean has been really important through this whole process, I guess. I've always felt that.
Doug Burke:
Well, you guys do some performance art pieces, right?
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. It was sort of short-lived, but basically I did what Jonathan Edwards is doing now, which is just doing all his gigs solo, really. So I started doing that with Amanda dancing, and we've had some really magical moments with that, because she does lyrical dance. She grew up dancing and teaching dance and everything and studying dance. So not only do we do our kids' music together, but we do that together. That's kind of on pause, of course, along with everything else. But no, that was great to have the dance and that just me on whatever instruments I brought. I think the last thing we did, I had xylophone and guitar, I think. So I went between the two instruments.
Doug Burke:
This song, Lighthouse, has a wide range of instruments. Is there a cello on it or ...
Rob Duquette:
Oh, that's actually, Stella playing the violin.
Doug Burke:
Oh, is it? Oh, it's a violin.
Rob Duquette:
There's a little bit of mandolin there toward the end. Then I think everything else I played was guitar and percussion. Luke plays shaker, my son.
Doug Burke:
That was just a real family affair on this one, huh?
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. It was great.
Doug Burke:
So do you like being a parent?
Rob Duquette:
I love it. I love it. It's the best thing that ever happened to me.
Doug Burke:
So you write kids' music.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
So tell me about that.
Rob Duquette:
When the kids were still babies and I was with them every day, somebody wanted me to come and play music for a daycare at the time. There was a lot of kind of home daycare centers. So I was like, "Yeah, sure. I'll do that." I've always appreciated Fred Rogers and the Sesame Street crew. All that stuff was so inspiring to me. As a kid, the Muppet Movie was the best. So I always had that in my head, and I started doing this about once a week. I'd bring my kids, and I'd sing a few songs, maybe a half-hour, and then leave. I started coming up with my own things, Brush Every Day, Friends Forever. These are songs that I still do. One summer, I was like, "I'm going to do a couple of kids' shows. What the heck?" So I did three concerts that went quite well. By the next summer, I was doing 30 shows, I think, or something that summer. It just became a no-brainer that that's where I should be spending my tension. So I've done that. I don't know if it's been quite ten, but probably close to ten years, and my wife, Amanda, and I have joined forces, because she's been Amanda Panda for quite a while, maybe the same amount of time. So we've combined our thing into Kind Kids Music, and Kind Kids Music has been going into schools and libraries and around the country for several years, teaching children about kindness through our songs.
Doug Burke:
Oh, that's great. We had Steve Seskin on Backstory Song.
Rob Duquette:
Oh, right. Yeah. I can't wait to hear that one.
Doug Burke:
Do you play Lighthouse and You Be the Tree to the kids?
Rob Duquette:
We've done that. We do this big concert on New Year's Eve at LL Bean, Freeport, Maine. It's an amazing night. There's a countdown to six PM. But it's huge. It's thousands of people, and it's outdoors, so it's really cold, but it's super fun. In the middle of that concert, of us doing our regular repertoire of kids' music, I did ... I don't remember if we did Tree, but we definitely did Lighthouse. It went over great. It's almost like a crossover sort of thing, where it's almost like a kids' song, but it's obviously directed toward parents, I think, overall. But it went great. Without asking, kids started singing along, because there's a big pause before I sing "lighthouse." There's a big pause, everything stops, and then I go, "Lighthouse." One time through that, kids started singing along. They'd go, Lighthouse," before we even started. So that was really neat.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. It's a song that really feels like it's from Portland, Maine and that whole Maine coast area. Are you inspired by where you live?
Rob Duquette:
Oh, the ocean has just been always important to me. I grew up in Hollis, New Hampshire, so it took about an hour to get to the ocean. But whenever we made the trek out, it was really special. I remember spending a lot of time in Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, and coming up to the Maine coast was always really magical. Then I went to school for a couple of years up here in the Portland area. Always had a mind of moving north. After I got my undergrad in music performance, I went down to Boston for quite a few years, but always wanted to kind of move back to Maine. So yeah, that's always been a big part of it. It's funny, because lighthouse, I picture as the strong structure that is easily found, right? The imagery, I think, when I wrote the poem was that that was my desire to be like a lighthouse for her when she got older, because, like I said, when I wrote that poem, she was in elementary school. From when they woke up in the morning until three or so, four o'clock in the afternoon or whatever, I was with them. So it was kind of easy, but I think when they get to be teenagers, there's more challenges that come up. So I think it was my desire to continue to be like a lighthouse for her when she needed me.
Doug Burke:
Well, we're recording this right in the middle of the corona quarantine, which is affecting all teenagers in a totally unique way. I mean, it's an unpredictable thing that's monumentally transformative and confining. So how are you dealing with that with your teenage daughter?
Rob Duquette:
It's been great. I get them about half the time. I'm big on giving them a good breakfast. I love cooking for the kids. So we'll have a nice breakfast together. They'll go do their work. I hit the studio to practice and do my work. Back together at lunch, check-in, and then we go back to work. I go back to the studio, or I'll work on my Hand ... I'm doing a book called Hand Harmonies, which stems from my years of teaching. I hope to release it soon. But anyway, so I'll either practice some more or I'll write or I'll work on my book. Then we just kind of come together. They usually finish school pretty early, so we'll have the afternoon and evening to hang out. It's been hard that they don't get to see their kids, and they both have birthdays during this time. So they can't have birthdays with their buds. That's kind of a drag. So we're just trying to make it as special as we can for them.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. I know it's hard. I have a teenage daughter. Her senior year's being ruined, and her freshman year in college is going to be different, too. We don't want to kind of know how that's going to play out.
Rob Duquette:
Wow. So that's that year. Yeah. Wow.
Doug Burke:
So Rob, the next song we're going to talk about is It's Okay. I like this one. Again with the xylophone.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. I'm liking that melody more and more as I play it, because I'm learning how to play these songs live still, picking what instruments I want to play. I kind of had this concept where I wanted to sometimes show up on a gig and just play just xylophone on all the songs or just keyboard or just guitar. So learning how to play that one has been really fun.
Doug Burke:
Another Jackson Brown no rhyming song.
Rob Duquette:
No, I didn't realize.
Doug Burke:
So you don't even think about that? You just kind of ...
Rob Duquette:
No, no, I don't think so. This one came probably around the time that Tree came. So that one obviously is more about my son, but It's Okay was about me. I found myself drinking wine and finishing the bottle before I even knew what was happening. So I stopped doing that right away. I was like, "Okay, that's not helping anything." But I came up with the original concept while having a couple of glasses of wine, and the original lyric was kind of like a scrambled egg situation. You know how Paul McCartney wrote Scrambled Eggs and it turned into Yesterday, right? So it was kind of like I had words that were just there, which was, "I'm a walking cliche." I was divorced. I was in my forties. I was drinking wine. I was like, "Wow, I'm a walking cliche. Look at that." So that was my original lyric, but I turned it into "finish the race." I was feeling that was making more sense than the other line. It was kind of like I had a placeholder as these silly lyrics, kind of, which has happened before. What has happened often is I come up with a placeholder for lyrics, and I never go back to it. I kind of figure, "Okay, that song's never going to happen." But this one had something, and coming right out and just saying, "It's okay to be vulnerable now" or "It's okay to be loved," kind of focus on myself a little bit and make sure that this thing that I went through with Moving On and See Me doesn't happen again.
Doug Burke:
But are you talking to yourself, or are you talking to others?
Rob Duquette:
Both. I'd say when I wrote it, I was talking to myself. We have a lot of blocks, I think, as humans, and so many people sort of fighting each other and getting in their own camps, and this is well before the situation we're in now with COVID-19. At the time, I was just feeling like, "Let's just throw our hearts out there and sort of communicate," I guess.
Doug Burke:
You finish with your falsetto, which you've mentioned you've been hired for.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, I've made some of my living with the falsetto, although Jonathan always had me sing in my chest voice. If I went to falsetto, he'd call me on it. If we were doing any vocal warmups before the show and I went to falsetto, he'd be like, "Chest voice." He didn't like the falsetto, so I had to sing in full chest voice, which is cool.
Doug Burke:
This chorus does rhyme. It's just your verses that don't rhyme.
Rob Duquette:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it does. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
The minor key here, right?
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. It's kind of a descending sort of thing that I came up with I think shortly before the lyrics started coming. It wasn't really a separate thing. I think the lyrics came pretty quick, but I was liking the feel of there's some tensions in the chords, but it's a descending sort of line. At one point, the melody came to me separate from an instrument. So I had to sing it into my voice memo.
Doug Burke:
Oh, really?
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. I knew there was a good potential that that was the melody. I just had a hunch that was what was needed there, and it was. It was perfect. I didn't know for sure until we did it in the studio.
Doug Burke:
So tell me about that. You jump in the studio, and who's with you? How did it go down?
Rob Duquette:
Just me, man. I'm playing everything except for the violin that Stella plays, and there's a couple of tracks where I had my good friend, John Kumnick. John Kumnick has been the bass player in the group for a lot of years now. He's played with Cyndi Lauper and David Bowie and these folks. The producer, Doug Luther, wanted it just to be me, because he heard me play and he's like, "No, I just want you, and that's it." But I talked him into having John come in and play bass on maybe four tracks, and then Jason Phelps, the engineer, played bass on a couple. Then I played bass on a few, but it's basically just me playing everything. So we had the basic guitar and drums and maybe bass, and it was basically at the point in the song where it was like, "What do you want to do?" So I was like, "How about I go in and I'll see if this melody works? Because I've got this melody that I just really think it'll make sense in there." There was a xylophone there. I didn't have to bring mine. So I played it, heard it back. I was like, "Yep, that's it. That's the melody." For years, I was really focused just in composition. I stopped writing songs for a spell, and I had a group that we were all jazz musicians. I'm jazz trained, so we were playing basically world jazz, so kind of jazz compositions kind of done with different worlds genres in mind. So I was just doing instrumental music and composing for that. So that's where the xylophone comes in even now, I think, where there's melodies and harmonies that go around the stories.
Doug Burke:
That was the Cactus Highway, right?
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, yeah. That was in there, too. Sure.
Doug Burke:
That was a kind of heralded jazz folk-pop group, if there is such thing as jazz folk-pop heralding.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. We were compared to Steely Dan and groups like that, which was very humbling. We were both coming from a jazz place, but steeped in folk. I love the stories, and the folk tradition is so strong. That really served me well when I was in Jonathan's band. I learned so much more about it when I was in his band.
Doug Burke:
You guys were playing some of the legendary clubs, some of which are gone, Richard's Cafe, Bar Lubitsch, The Bluebird Cafe, Kenny's Castaways, which is gone.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. Nietzsche's in Buffalo, I remember liking that place. That was really neat. That's still around. Yeah, we toured all around. It was really fun. It was a full band for a while, and if you listen to the first Cactus Highway album, I really liked the idea of interspersing some acoustic numbers with the full-band numbers. That band that's on that album was a gigging band. We were doing gigs with that exact ensemble. Even then, I would go from drums to guitar, depending on the piece. But then we started touring more, and it just became the two of us. The lineup was Andrea on sax and flute and vocals and then me on guitar and vocals, basically.
Doug Burke:
The last song I want to talk about, Trying Hard, is actually one of my favorites from the new album. It's probably the most poppy song out of the ones we've talked about. It also features the xylophone, which I kind of love.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. So I mentioned leaving home in January of, I think, 2017. Then so February, March, April, so three or four months later, I met my wife, Amanda, and we both were not interested in anything other than friendship. So we instantly really liked each other and wanted to continue a friendship. We were adamant that we didn't want anything else. Of course, that's not up to us. So we fell for each other hard, and so that song basically was just saying, "I'm trying hard not to fall for you." Of course, that's not so easy to do, to force such a thing to happen. So it became kind of a funny sort of tune, but I was really excited about it, because I love pop music. As much as I love Thelonious Monk and Anthony Braxton and all these, Lee Konitz, jazz people, jazz music still inspires me greatly, as does folk. But I really love pop music. I grew up with, like the song says, '70s songs on the radio. That's the first thing I heard. But when I came up with that tune, it wrote itself pretty quick. I was really excited about it, and we were doing pretty regular gigs with the band. So I remember doing a voice memo and sending it to the band right away and saying, "Hey, I'm going to write out charts. We're going to learn this tune." I was feeling like, "Wow, this is a pop tune, man." But it's basically about trying not to let anything happen romantically. Of course, a few months after that, we bought a house and we got married. So there we are.
Doug Burke:
It's like a love song about not falling in love.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, fighting against it.
Doug Burke:
It kind of has a Neil Simon Graceland feel or Del Amitri Roll to Me, it reminds me of.
Rob Duquette:
Oh, Paul Simon? Really?
Doug Burke:
Or Paul Simon. Sorry. I always do that.
Rob Duquette:
I knew what you meant.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. It has a Paul Simon Graceland kind of feel to me.
Rob Duquette:
Wow.
Doug Burke:
Kind of that world beat element to it with the xylophone.
Rob Duquette:
That's great. That's great that you'd say that.
Doug Burke:
Del Amitri's Roll to Me is famous for being ... DJs are looking for songs that are two minutes because if you have two minutes left to play, you can't play a three and a half minute song before the commercial break.. So they loved that song for that reason. This has that kind of feel to me.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I didn't do any promotion for this album at all, really, because the last one I did and I toured on it, was 2017, I believe. The kids were getting a little bigger, so I started venturing out again. This album, we released it in December, and come March, the whole world's changed. So we got some local airplay. WCLZ has been great. They've been very supportive, playing the album. We haven't done any kind of getting that album out there at all.
Doug Burke:
So I ask this of most people. Do you have any songs that you've written where you would love to have a voice, the dream voice sing it, if you could take any one of your songs and you could pick any artists to record it?
Rob Duquette:
Can I pick a couple people?
Doug Burke:
Yeah, absolutely. You can pick a couple of songs. You can pick a couple people.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah. I love Jackson Brown so much. He's my all-time favorite, but also, as you know, I'm a big jazz fan, so Kurt Elling or Bobby McFerrin or someone like that. Al Jarreau's not with us anymore. But any of those guys, if they could sing anything from this album, It's Okay maybe or something, that'd be pretty amazing.
Doug Burke:
I'd love to hear how they interpret it.
Rob Duquette:
That's the thing. I think most songwriters don't want to hear it done like they've done it. They want to see if there's another way of doing the song. Guys like that, Kurt Elling, he's done amazing stuff with Wayne Shorter pieces and things like that. He's certainly someone I'd love to hear what he would do to it.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. They make it their own.
Rob Duquette:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Rob Duquette, thank you for being on Backstory Song. I have to thank you, and I have to thank Wyatt Schmidt, our recording engineer here in the booth for putting this together. We thank you for listening to Backstory Song. Is there anything you'd like to say to your fans, Rob?
Rob Duquette:
Just thanks. We're at musicandmagic.org, where we sort of have all the stuff that we're doing, Duquette, obviously, and we're also doing Kind Kids Music, but also, for ten years now, we've been giving instruments to kids. That's been a mission of my wife for ten years now. So it's kind of an umbrella for all the different things we're doing, and we're on Facebook and all that stuff. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
What's the Facebook address?
Rob Duquette:
Duquette the Band, and then it's Kind Kids Music. Then, of course, the education part of what I do is Hand Harmonies. That's the book and the video series that's about to be released.
Doug Burke:
Rob Duquette from Duquette, thank you for being on Backstory Song again.
Rob Duquette:
Thanks so much, Doug.
Doug Burke:
Thank you for listening to our podcast.
