Ditch what you think of “best of” albums right now. What if it weren’t just a re-packaging of greatest hits, and was instead a sonic patois of who you were, and where you’d been your whole life, and how you see your entire career right now? Would you think about the album differently? Would you feel vulnerable? Would you feel it represented you at your best?
In the tradition of the Finn Brothers and countless others, John Waite is the consummate overlooked legendary songwriter. Waite rose to fame as bassist and lead vocalist for The Babys, but it was his solo career that brought him platinum success in the US with “Missing You” and “Tears.” The British musician’s intimate familiarity with massive stardom has afforded him the luxury of exploring his talent and relinquishing obligations when it comes to his retrospective, BEST, released in May of this year. Waite dismantled his songs and reassembled them into new recordings, adding live and acoustic cuts to the mix as well. You won’t even find his biggest hit in its original form; instead it’s his 2007 duet with Allison Krauss that made the cut.
Waite’s career since has been anything but ordinary, writing eclectic and existential tunes without excuses. And although Waite has closed a chapter in one sense with BEST, he’s potentially writing a new novel in another.
“The question is,” he asked us, “do I want to make music for me, or am I trying to say something?”
https://youtu.be/qUvYxx7aa4c
I’ve always had this admiration for those who play the bass over guitar. There’s something very Zen about it—that it’s as much about what you don’t play as what you do play. As a songwriter, what was it that drew you to the instrument?
That’s a great question. The first bass player I heard that made an impression on me was Paul McCartney. In the middle of “I Saw Her Standing There”… [sings] “I’ll never dance with another…” and he hits this note on “dance”—he plays this one passing note—and I’d never heard anything like that in my life before, and I don’t think anybody in contemporary music, outside of jazz, had done that before. I started looking at the bass more than I was looking at guitars. My brother played guitar in the house all the time, and my cousin was a banjo player. Both of them were brilliant musicians, really. Both guitar players, but the bass was, like you said, kind of Zen. It was four strings; it was ultra-simplistic. You could suggest things and you could finish the chord with your voice.
Paul McCartney would do that, he would sing this simplistic kind of melody against the root note and it made The Beatles what they were, really. People tend to forget that there’s a huge amount of celtic kind of folk harmonic influences in The Beatles’ harmonies and some of their melodies. A lot of it is derived from the bass. But from that point on, I liked the fact that nobody played bass, and you could sing and not get lost in the chords. It was simpler to handle and you could sing at the same time, more or less. Whereas people like Jimi Hendrix made it so there was no point in even picking up the guitar; between him and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, they completely reinvented the electric guitar.
