A Conversation with Katey Sagal – HuffPost 10.30.13

Mike Ragogna: Can we take a couple of seconds and talk about Covered? The track list covers songs by Jackson Browne, Laura Nyro, Tom Petty and also amazingly, Tonio K. How did you pick the material and what was the album’s mission?

Katey Sagal: It was a long process. The last couple of records I’ve made, I wrote most everything on the record, so that was an easier process. I just wasn’t writing anything I really liked that much, to tell you the truth, and I thought, “I really want to make a record,” so Bob and I just listened through tons of music. Laura Nyro was somebody that I listened to as a kid and was incredibly inspirational to me, that’s why I taught myself to play the piano; I wanted to be Laura Nyro and I would write these very bad songs that mimic Laura Nyro. Then I was very influenced by soulful folk music, so I really wanted to have a roots feeling to the record. It’s difficult to say what the big picture was. I think it’s just that we wanted to find songs that had an emotional pull for me. All that music does. I’m a big Steve Earle fan, I would’ve done three or four Steve Earle songs.

MR: He’s amazing, isn’t he? And a Joni Mitchell song is on Covered, though you do a different kind of version of her “For Free.”

KS: The whole goal was to do different kind of versions. Bob [Thiele, Jr.] is an amazing arrange; it’s kind of what he’s done on Sons Of Anarchy. We take a lot of music and redo it. So with that in mind, I too wanted to find a different approach to things. That’s kind of why we put a clarinet on “For Free,” we tried things like that.

MR: Let’s get to your Jackson Browne duet on “Goodbye,” the Steve Earle song. It seems like you’ve got a connection to Jackson Browne.

KS: It’s funny, I know him socially because I’m from Los Angeles and I’ve been around and I was really around in the music scene long before I was an actor. I don’t even remember where I know him from, I just know him. I kept running into him right around the time I was making the record. When we cut that song, we didn’t think of it as a duet, and then we just did. I went down to see Jackson sit in at McCabe’s–he sits in with this band called Jack S**t–I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them, they’re really awesome, they’re great. Jackson was sitting in and he was using the guitar player and the violin player that I have on my track, so I was talking to him and said, “Will you just come in and sing?” He said, “Yes.” It just sounded beautiful, it was great. And his “For A Dancer” was the last song we recorded for the record. That’s just one of the better songs ever written.

MR: To me, it especially works because it closes the thought on what comes before, following the song “Orphan Girl.” And you cover Gillian Welch.

KS: Well, I’m familiar with that song from Emmylou Harris’ version. I just love the song, and then we listened to a bunch of different versions and kind of landed at it there, because there’s a couple of different ways to do the song. It’s funny, my mother was a singer, she was a yodeler, and she sang a lot of that Appalachian music. She’s the one who taught me how to play the guitar as a kid and taught me folk music. I think I’m just drawn to that type of music, so I really wanted to have a song like that on the record.

MR: Are you drawn to it to the point where someday you might do a project that’s more traditional, maybe even with T-Bone Burnett?

KS: I would love to do that. I love country music, too. I love all of that, so yeah, yeah.

MR: How different was the process of recording Covered from your other two albums, Welland Room?

KS: Well was when I was on Virgin Records, so it was a big professional record in terms of a big studio and big budget and all of that. I was working with Bob Thiele back then and I felt like the demos we made–because I wrote a lot for that record–I felt that a lot of the demos were better than what we ended up with on the big professional recording for the big labels. So that was a different process, even though I like Rupert Hine who was my producer on that. I thought he was great. But Bob and I started working together then, and my second one, Bob and I produced, and we did it at his house and he was just learning how to use the studio. [laughs] I think he self-professed about it, so we kind of bumbled our way through that, but I like that record. This record, I feel like I’ve matured in terms of being more committed to what I like and what I don’t like. I feel like I know what I like and what I don’t like and I’m not afraid to talk about it or say it so the process was really great, it was a really wonderful, not scary process, because it can be scary.

MR: Having a project and committing to the project.

KS: Yes.

MR: You’ve had a very busy career as an actor with successful series after successful series. It’s almost like acting got in the way of your music career.

KS: I got to a point in my life where I was making a living as a musician, but I was definitely living paycheck to paycheck. I remember thinking to myself in my late twenties, “I don’t know how to do anything else.” It’s like this or I don’t know what. I was really up against a wall, but I had acted over the years. I had tried to put my foot in that and thought about it. I thought, “Well, if I ever want to be an actor, I’ll do it later in my life” and “later” just got right then. So it didn’t really get in the way. The first five years that I was actually being a professional actor, I would still play music all the time because I didn’t really have faith in it yet. I didn’t know if that was something that I would really learn on the job how to do; I just had no idea. So it wasn’t so much that it got in the way as that it kind of scooped me up and showed me, “Oh yeah, you know how to do something else, too.”

MR: One of your musical stops was as one of Bette Midler’s harlots. That had to have been somewhat of a party.

KS: Well, I wouldn’t call it a party. I mean, it was a fantastic gig, but it was really hard. She taught me well. She has an amazing work ethic, so we traveled all over the world, but we rehearsed that show constantly. I remember rehearsing in the lobby of the hotel before we’d go to do a gig. Because that was involved with so much singing and dancing, you had to be sort of multi-purpose, so I was mostly just the singer. I had to kind of get another skillset with that job. But I wouldn’t really call it a party. The Etta James gig was probably more of a party. [laughs]

MR: Say more!

KS: Because I sang onstage with Etta, I traveled with her, too, but it was different. I traveled with her in a bus across the country, but that was awesome because she used to let me open the show for her. We played in all kinds of different places…we opened for The Rolling Stones. That was a really cool gig.

MR: And you’re on “Soul Kiss.” That’s my favorite Olivia Newton-John recording, love that recording.

KS: Yeah, I do to. I recorded that song myself. I think she found that song from a demo I had done; I think I was trying to get a record deal with it. My friend Mark Goldenberg wrote that song and when she found it, she brought me in to sing that background on it. That’s a good song. Another one, I sang “Treat Me Right” before Pat Benatar recorded it.

MR: No!

KS: I have a couple of those songs, where I just felt like everybody’s next thing and then something would happen and somebody else would take it.

MR: You also sang with Molly Hatchet and Gene Simmons.

KS: Yeah. When you’re a background singer, you sort of have to be a jack of all trades, you have to sing in different styles. That was the day when you’d do publishing demos, so publishers would bring you in to sing songwriters’ songs and they would have a particular artist in mind of who you’re trying to sell that song to, so you’d try to fit into that mold. I don’t know if that still goes on. It seems like now, every songwriter is also a singer. It used to be there were singers and then there were songwriters. Nashville still does that.

MR: You were there during the last days of the Brill Building mentality, before it switched.

KS: Yeah, I think so. I was sort of there right before it switched.

MR: Other than “Treat Me Right,” was there another major song that happened with?

KS: I did a version of “I Can’t Stand The Rain.” I cut a demo and the next thing I knew, Tina Turner’s producer… You’d shop your demos and then all of a sudden, I heard this arrangement. Tina Turner had come to see my gig with her producer and they went on to have a big hit with it. I didn’t write the song, they didn’t take it from me, but I was so trying to get to a certain place and I knew I had good taste in music. I was picking good songs and then other people would go on to have big success with them.

MR: Katey, you were Peg Bundy, you were in Futurama, and now you’re in the hugely popular Sons Of Anarchy. What’s that story?

KS: Well my husband writes the show, he created the show, and he said to me, “I think I have a part for you.” My husband’s a great writer, so I was excited that he would have anything for me. I think the character was actually formulated to not quite be as big a character as she ended up being. It just evolved into this thing. Even Married With Children was a real longshot; nobody really had faith in it. Sons Of Anarchy was like that, too. There was a lot of resistance putting it on the air because it was different. But it just kind of worked out that people responded to it. It’s been amazing.

MR: When you look at virtually every other acting role that you’ve had, including Peg Bundy, each is a fairly hard role to play. It all runs a little different than how Katey Sagal is, right?

KS: Oh yeah, it definitely does. But that period where I was not sure I was an actor, not sure that I was going to have to go back to my real job. I think I sort of consciously wanted to play a character that really had a different look than mine so that I could go back into my real job. I wasn’t sure what was going on exactly when I started that job. It was very different for me and I think a lot of that was intentional.

MR: Hey, what advice do you have for new artists?

KS: Well, I could speak about my children. They’re all in the arts and my son is an incredible musician, so I tell him all the time, just write, don’t censor yourself, enjoy it, and practice. The thing about show business that it does so well, I find, is that it makes it look very fun and easy. That is the job of it, to entertain and to not feel laborious. The truth is that there is a lot of hard work behind that relaxed front. You have to work hard; it doesn’t come easy to the artist. You want to put your best foot forward. If you’re a writer, you have to write all the time and if you’re a player, you have to play and you have to play all the time. I don’t care if that’s in your room or wherever. I come from a background of this sort of business. I just watched my dad and he worked very, very hard, so I think that’s important. My advice would be practice.

MR: I really appreciate the time and wish you all the best with the album, Katey.

KS: Thank you so much.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne