Danbury Show August 13—

Kenny Loggins Holds Nothing Back On His Latest Offering

By John Voket

If you think singer-songwriter Kenny Loggins can mix things up in concert, balancing delicate ballads like “Danny’s Song,” with high flying rockers like “Danger Zone,” from Top Gun, you should hear him trying to explain the cathartic process of writing about lost love while rustling up eggs and sausages for his two youngest children. Loggins talked candidly with The Newtown Bee this week in advance of his two Connecticut appearances, August 10 at Westport’s Levitt Pavilion, and August 13 at Danbury’s Ives Concert Park.

Loggins recently released his 14th original solo album, How About Now, in partnership with Target stores and its 180 Music. While the CD features a re-make of his classic hit “A Love Song,” which was also covered by Anne Murray, the balance of the new project alternates between mid- and uptempo numbers with Loggins’ trademark vocals, poignantly punctuated with a number of deeply personal songs which he penned following the deterioration of his second marriage.

His early 20s found Loggins sharpening his guitar chops with the psychedelic era band The Electric Prunes before he teamed up with former Buffalo Springfield producer and Poco member Jim Messina to catapult his career into high gear. That relatively short-lived collaboration yielded numerous radio-friendly hits, many of which are still popular today and still find their way into Loggins’s solo concert set.

The pair reunited for a highly successful tour and DVD project in 2005. But between the first Loggins & Messina split and the recent reunion, Kenny Loggins became something of a music industry superstar, penning material for the likes of Barbra Streisand, and collaborating with Michael McDonald and Journey’s Steve Perry.

He contributed to the success of films including Caddy Shack, Disney’s The Tigger Movie, and the blockbuster film and musical Footloose, while selling out concert halls worldwide.

Loggins took home a Grammy Award for his infectious hit “This is It,” and was also among the cast of musicians who recorded “We Are the World” to benefit the famine relief project USA For Africa.

Newtown Bee: You have certainly enjoyed a spectacular career to date, and it doesn’t look like there are any signs of things slowing down. First let’s talk a little about your newest project, How About Now. If song titles can tell part of the story it looks like this is an extremely introspective project, but is there a thematic link between songs like “A Year’s Worth of Distance,” “I Don’t Want to Hate You Anymore,” “One Last Goodbye Song,” and “I’m a Free Man Now”?

Kenny Loggins: I think you’ve pretty much put the story together. It’s directly out of the journals. Like “Leap of Faith,” the new album follows a passage in my life. This passage and the loss, grief and rebuilding is chronicled as sort of a mirror image of “Leap of Faith.” It is one of the inevitable passages of being human, losing something you don’t want to lose. And unless I dropped deep into the shadow part of it, it wouldn’t bring credibility to the hope part of it. I felt I had to chronicle every aspect of this passage the same way I chronicled the falling in love time with “Leap of Faith.”

Newtown Bee: You seem to touch so many people by bringing a human quality and a shared aspect to an all too common experience.

Kenny Loggins: Well said. When people ask me about how personal a record this is it scares me because I don’t want people to think it will be painful to listen to, or it’s so personal to me that it won’t apply to them. The truth is we’re all going through the same stuff. It’s the job of an artist and writer to describe the human condition and how each of us interprets and informs that is what brings commonality to the music. Maybe people are touched by some of the music because I’m willing to write about things nobody else is writing about.

Newtown Bee: So in some ways the new album is a musical survival manual.

Kenny Loggins: Hey, I like that. It is in some ways. I’ve met people and the music spoke to them and their hearts because they were going through similar situations. Take the song, “This Too Will Pass,” that phrase hasn’t been heard in a song, and I clung to that like a life preserver, even though I was a little reticent to use it because it is such a cliché. But for those who need it, hey, lay it down.

Newtown Bee: The new CD also covers Loggins & Messina’s “A Love Song.” Is this something that boomeranged back around to find an appropriate niche on How About Now, or did you always plan to reinvent it and this seemed like the right time?

Kenny Loggins: It came around because of the Loggins and Messina tour. Much of How About Now I owe to that tour because it brought me back to writing that sort of folky, countrified material. But I rediscovered “A Love Song,” during the acoustic part of the show with Jimmy, and I thought it might be a good song to reinvent if I dressed it up a little bit.

Newtown Bee: With this new album, you’ve also formed a strategic partnership with Target. While there will always be the nay-sayers who complain about selling out, this is the music business after all. Since you have been around this crazy business for so long, can you talk a bit about why this kind of partnership is both a positive business decision, as well as being a logical creative collaboration?

Kenny Loggins: This is where the business is right now. Retailers can get a record into a store for less money because they can work at a different price point. Big record companies need the Gwen Stafanis who can generate millions of single sales on one record. The retail collaboration can make money on a half-million units. Maybe I should think bigger, but when I was doing a million units with Columbia Records they dropped me because I wasn’t selling enough. In the case of How About Now, I had most of the record done before the deal was done, but it was good to finish it off knowing I had a home for it.

Newtown Bee: We talked about the personal nature of certain songs, and at the same time you’ve brought pop culture staples like “Danger Zone,” “I’m All Right” and “Footloose” to generations of fans. Tell me about the first time you were solicited to create material for a movie versus having an existing song picked to include in a soundtrack.

Kenny Loggins: The very first one was very much the exception to the norm. It was with Dean Pitchford, who was a buddy of mine. He wrote the screenplay to Footloose, and he wanted to write songs with me to help cement him as one of the songwriters as well as the screenwriter. We had no visuals to work with, just the title and the story, and that’s really rare. But I think it brought some of the power to the movie because when they got around to the dancing, they were dancing to the real music which was already in the can. That’s why the movie already felt like a musical.

Newtown Bee: Let’s switch gears and go back to the days when radio wasn’t afraid to play five or six minute songs, and talk about the process of creating numbers like “Angry Eyes” or “Vahevala?”

Kenny Loggins: You know in those days it was part of the fun to develop material that was deep. What I didn’t realize until the L&M reunion tour is that way back then, we were a jam band. Back then it was just what you did. You got to go wherever it goes. Those jam bands still exist, you just don’t get to hear it on the radio.

Newtown Bee: You’ve probably told this story a million times already, but can you talk about how the concept of continuing the “House at Pooh Corner” story decades later with “Return to Pooh Corner?”

Kenny Loggins: I wrote “House at Pooh Corner” when I was 18. And when it came around to having my fourth child, Luke, I had this splash of an idea of writing an ending relating what it was like to be a parent, instead of looking at it as though I was a child.

Newtown Bee: We will be seeing you in two stops here in Connecticut in the next few days. What do you have in store for concert audiences this time around?

Kenny Loggins: I have a six-man band and I’ll be doing five songs from the new album. The balance of the two-hour show will have a lot of the hits and a few album tracks like “I’m Free” or “The Real Thing.” We’ll probably do “Angry Eyes,” or Vahevala” or both.

Kenny Loggins performs at a benefit supporting the Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts in Westport, Friday, August 10. Go to LevittPavilion.com for details and tickets. Kenny, with his son Crosby Loggins opening, then plays Ives Concert Park in Danbury on Monday, August 13. For tickets and information visit IvesConcertPark.com.