A Conversation with Harry Connick, Jr. – HuffPost 8.28.13

Mike Ragogna: Harry, how are you doing?

Harry Connick, Jr.: Great, how about you?

MR: I’m doing great. Your new album is titled Every Man Should Know. What’s that?

HCJ: I think every guy has the ability to love somebody. There are so many people that do things well and it kind of keeps the world turning, you know? Airplane pilots and journalists and doctors and lawyers and fishermen… I’m just glad that those people are around when I need them. Not everybody knows how to write songs, but we all know how to love somebody, so that’s kind of what the gist of it is.

MR: That’s really nice, beautiful message. And look at the song titles–“Greatest Love Story,” “I Love Her,” these are personal statements on relationships and love in general, aren’t they?

HCJ: They really are. I think probably ninety percent of the songs I sing are in some way related to love in any form. It could be heartbreak, it could be infatuation, or anything in between. Sometimes I sing songs about cities or other types of feelings, but most of them really are love songs. It’s such fertile ground for songwriting and singing and playing, it’s just endless. Everybody knows what that’s like. I think it’s a very relatable topic.

MR: You’ve had an amazing catalog and a lot of recordings with original material, of course, but this is the first one where I feel like this is Harry Connick Jr. introducing himself closer to the field of singer-songwriter than you’ve ever done before. Is that off the beat?

HCJ: No, not really, and I take it as a compliment. It’s a lot easier for other people to describe what I’m doing. I’ve written hundreds of songs and I don’t really know what a “singer-songwriter” is. I just don’t know what it means. I didn’t make this record saying, “I’m going to try to be a singer-songwriter.” I just did what I always do, which is, half the time, write my own stuff and sing it and play it. It’s all very interesting to hear, I just haven’t really spent a lot of time trying to analyze it like that.

MR: And thank God you don’t. Categorizing music is a job for nerds like me.

HCJ: [laughs] Yeah, but that’s cool. That’s part of the evolution, too, because that whole term, “singer-songwriter,” even though I only think I know what it means–like James Taylor–I don’t know what the difference is between Cole Porter writing a tune or Burt Bacharach writing a tune and not singing it and somebody writing. I just don’t know. But it’s all good, it’s interesting.

MR: Harry, you’ve recorded many albums to date, each with its own identity. With this album, was it Harry Connick Jr. going into writing mode and this batch happened to come out?

HCJ: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. You can take that same concept and put it back on a CD I did called To See You. It’s essentially the same thing. The only thing different about this record is that I didn’t try to make it gel with the throughline of a genre. I didn’t do all orchestral stuff or all trio stuff or all R&B stuff. The only thing different about this one is that I didn’t really care about the mixture of different styles, which is kind of a nod to where I am right now. Ten years ago, I might not have done that for whatever reason. Maybe I didn’t want to confuse people or I wasn’t into it or whatever, but the singer-songwriter part really for me hasn’t changed. Just like you said, this is the batch that happened to come out right now.

MR: So you have this reputation for being a badass piano player and I think that overshadows, maybe unfairly, the depth and quality of your writing. Then again, you have so many fans and people that buy every album who do know what you’re doing, so maybe that’s sort of an unfair statement.

HCJ: Yeah, I get it. Even when I did my first record with Columbia, there was a guy named George Butler who was the A&R guy. He was there for a long time. He signed me and he signed Wynton and Branford [Marsalis]. He’d been there a long time, but he said, “Look, man, when you make your first record, don’t sing on it. Once you start singing, people are going to forget about your piano playing.” He was right. At this point in my career, at least once a week, somebody says, “Oh, I didn’t even know you sang!” Forget piano playing, they don’t even know I’m a musician, period. They think I’m an actor, which is fine. You can’t expect people to look and see who was conducting the orchestra or who was the person writing the arrangements or orchestrating, I let that go a long time ago because I wouldn’t sleep at night if I was worried about people thinking of me as an orchestrator. They don’t know. All they do is hear the song. Ninety-nine percent of people don’t know I wrote them or played on them or orchestrated them, conducted them, produced them, but that’s okay. The end result is as important as going into it.

MR: And the truth is you have left a mark on not just pop culture, but jazz culture, too. You were on American Idol as a mentor. You’ve got all these different talents, including acting and everything you mentioned, so it’s hard to pigeonhole you although you do have an identity.

HCJ: Well, I guess. The great thing about entertainment is that everybody has individuality. I do lots of different things and I love doing it. I’ve never really seen anybody else do it the way I do it, and that goes for most of the other performers out there, too. Everybody has their own kind of thing.

MR: Getting back to Every Man Should Know, can you take us through the creative process? Did you sit at the piano and write the songs from there, or did they come to your head and then you had to run to the piano?

HCJ: The piano really isn’t even a part of it. That’s one good thing about having good ears and being well-trained is that the piano doesn’t really factor into it that much. The lyrics come first for me, always, and then, whether I’m sitting at a piano or sitting on an airplane, the melody comes next and then it’s harmonized and I start thinking about how it’s going to be arranged, whether it’s going to be a small group country-type tune or if it’s going to have strings on it. I start thinking about that and then comes the most time-consuming part of the process, which is the actual orchestration because you have to sit down and write all those notes out and then you go into the studio and record it or conduct it or play on it or whatever you have to do, and then the last piece is the singing, which is nice to do last. When you’re working with the other instruments, if I’m conducting, I can’t sing. Next, you get down to the mixing part, which is a very long process. Then it gets mastered and then you’re on your way.

MR: When you’re playing with a small ensemble, is it recorded more organically and live as opposed to a lot of overdubbing?

HCJ: It depends. Some records I’ve done were all live. Some records, like this one, have a huge amount of overdubbing just because the strings were put on in LA and the guitar was put on in Nashville and the bass was put on in New Orleans and the piano was put on in New York. Even though it may not sound slick, it was much, much more produced than most records that I do. This one had a lot of pieces to put together.

MR: You mentioned how you can do songs about cities. In this case, we’ve got New Orleans and Louisiana. How do you feel these days about the progress that’s been made to restore New Orleans?

HCJ: Oh, it’s awesome, man. I think, given what we went through, it’s surpassed what it was. It took some pretty hard blows but it’s back to what it was and more. There are still some pockets in the city that, over time, I think are struggling to get back to where they were. But you’d never know that if you went there to visit. It’s such a prosperous, fledgling, almost new attitude with New Orleans. It’s modernizing, it’s got great ambition. You’d never know anything ever happened.

MR: You have a major tour coming up in support of the album. It looks like you’re booked totally through October. What’s it like touring versus the studio for you? Are they pretty equal? Do you prefer one over the other?

HCJ: They’re just totally different. The studio is like looking at everything under a microscope and touring is just trying to do the best performances you can live. So they’re very, very different in that way, but none is more or less satisfying than the other, really. I love them both.

MR: I have a traditional question that I ask everybody. What is your advice for new artists?

HCJ: Just practice. It depends on what kind of artist you want to be. If you want to be a pop star, I don’t know, put videos out on YouTube and hope, I guess. If you want to be a musician, practice. Just practice really hard.

MR: Nice. And that’s what you did, isn’t it.

HCJ: Yep, I’ve worked pretty hard, man, really hard, practicing and listening and studying, trying to learn what I could.

MR: With all your movie and television acting, you’ve also been able to record, tour, et cetera. How do you juggle it all?

HCJ: Well, it seems like a lot when you look back over your shoulder, but I just had two weeks off and now I’m going out for a week today and then I’ve got another two weeks off and then I’ll go out a little bit in the Fall and then I’ll make a movie. Day to day, it’s not that much. It seems like a lot, but it’s really not that much.

MR: Let’s say it’s a day of acting for you; do things still stimulate and inspire your music and how do you deal with it in the moment?

HCJ: Yeah, sometimes. I’ve written whole records on movie sets before, and I’ve read scripts on the road. So they overlap, for sure, depending on what the job at hand is. If I was doing a scene or Broadway play or whatever that was particularly demanding, obviously, there’s more or less of music that creeps into my head. But like I say, I’ve done entire records in my trailer writing and orchestrating and then the day the movie wraps, I go and record it.

MR: You have this quote that came in your press release: “No rules, no limits.” It seems that in a way, you’ve done that not just for this album, but with your career as well.

HCJ: Pretty much. You have to be comfortable in your skin, which is a luxury and I’ve been very blessed to be very comfortable with who I am and with what I can do and what I can’t do. Obviously, if I’m on stage, I would like the people to be receptive and enthusiastic about the performance, but I’ve never really been that concerned with what people thought I should do. It’s a strange thing because performers act to make the audience happy and my job is to entertain them. But at the same time, if they don’t like it, I don’t care and I never have. It’s a strange thing, and I think it comes from being a jazz musician, because half of me really wants to entertain the crowd and the other half doesn’t care if they don’t like it. With the records I make and the decisions I make, you’ve just got to do stuff that makes you happy. You can’t read a review and say, “Oh, they don’t like me” or “This person thinks I’m not good.” I don’t care. I don’t know why I don’t care, but I never have. I just get up there and make the music I like to make. Some of the music I’ve made is, I think, really good and some of it’s not so good, but there’s never a lack of effort, I can promise you that.

MR: That’s pretty honest. Let me ask you, how does it feel to still be an honorary member of the amazing Marsalis family?

HCJ: Man, I tell you, those guys are my brothers and my heroes. You talk about not caring what the people think? They’re very strong, very talented people, all of them.

MR: Nice, beautiful. I guess that’s it, I don’t want to keep you, but I really appreciate your time, Harry.

HCJ: Good talking to you.

MR: You too. All the best.

HCJ: Thank you.

Recorded at Lisa & David Cohen’s House / Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne