John Lawler was joined by Andy Platts and Shawn Lee of the U.K.-based yacht rock duo Young Gun Silver Fox for this exclusive Something Else! Interview:
JOHN LAWLER: So you’re in your own studios now. So that’s really cool. I think the new album was mostly recorded. Andy, in your studio?
ANDY PLATTS: Uh, a good half of it. Yeah, that’s where we really got our hands dirty, yeah,
JOHN LAWLER: So, did it start off mostly in Shawn’s studio with West End Coast?
SHAWN LEE: Yeah, we did both. You know, we worked on our own.
JOHN LAWLER: Oh, okay, stuff back and forth. Well, that’s kind of the thing about today, you know, it’s kind of a troubadour age. You kind of go where you need to, and if you have your own studio set up, and in the sense you’re trying to replicate the sound of the mid to late 70s in LA when they had all of these big studios, which are now closing or being bought by producers or whatever. I think Nashville really has probably the critical mass of studios these days.
SHAWN LEE: It must do. They must do. There were a lot of studios there.
JOHN LAWLER: So, yeah, it’s kind of amazing. In fact, it’s perfect that you’re both in your appropriate studios. So just as a way of introduction, Andy is lead singer and composer for Mama’s Gun, as well as Young Gun Silver Fox, so here’s your “young gun.” Shawn is a songwriter, composer, producer, engineer, so didn’t he mix one of the Mama’s Gun albums, possibly Golden Days?
SHAWN LEE: Yes, I was involved in the mixing of Golden Days with Pierre, who is my engineer. Pierre is manning the controls on all kind of stuff that I do at my studio, and so, including Young Gun Silver Fox.
JOHN LAWLER: So your studio is literally in the West End, right?
SHAWN LEE: It used to be the first album, right? Because it was in the West End. I moved about 10 years ago, over to a place called Finsbury Park, which is in North London, and that’s where I am right now. And seven PH, that’s the postcode, if you need to know.
JOHN LAWLER: So I’m interested in your journey starting off as kids. When did you first have interest in music, and when did that start? Did you come from a musical family or kind of your early background? So we’re, we’re going from basically Hong Kong and Wichita, Kansas, meeting in London eventually.
SHAWN LEE: Wichita, yes, Middle America, Bible Belt, yeah. I was born there, and I always loved music. I mean, I was always listening to the radio and buying records and always imagining that I was, you know, playing along with records. I was very drawn to music. It was like, it was like an escape hatch into another world. And I just would stare at records and read the facts.
JOHN LAWLER: Well, they were, they were rather like, they still are rather large, and they had album-oriented radio. So yeah, sometimes the DJs would say we’re gonna play side one of the Who’s Who’s Next. You might tape this side, like and that give them a chance to do whatever, go to the bathroom and get a hit or whatever.
SHAWN LEE: Exactly you know what’s up. So basically, when I was about 10, I started to play guitar, and I had a neighbor that was about, I don’t know, he’s about at least five years older than me, right? When you’re a little kid, that’s quite a lot, yeah, and he was a musician, and so he showed me a lot of my kind of first chords, and we would jam along, and he would hip me to records, you know, like things I wouldn’t have done from the radio. Like I remember him playing me Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow, the first Stanley Clarke album. Oh yeah. Love and Mahavishnu, and things like Airto and Flora Purim, this kind of stuff, you know, I heard from him, and so he was really influential. And then from there, I started to play in school, and I started to play professionally when I was 16, yeah, playing in clubs and bars and playing with all kinds of musicians. I was always a “young gun” back then. And so I learned a lot from a lot of people.
I was always fascinated by music and what came before and who did it, and all that kind of stuff. Then in 1988, I moved out to L.A. to pursue professional musical career. I wanted to make my own records, and I also was up for doing sessions and writing and producing, and I always saw all these different things as being something that you could do at the same time, that you didn’t have to choose one thing. I was playing different instruments, and I just had a lot of interest, so I started pursuing that in L.A. and that, of course, led to recording and doing sessions and playing gigs and touring and getting a publishing deal, and then eventually a record deal in London. Which brought me over here, and that was in the early ’90s, and then I made a couple of solo records. One didn’t come out, and then the second album came out (around) 1999, 2000 and all the time I was still doing sessions. I was still doing different things. Eventually, I came across Andy on myspace.com around 2008 or 2009, and by then, I was releasing a lot of records like as the Ping Pong Orchestra.
JOHN LAWLER: They are pretty eclectic. It’s kind of everywhere all at once.
SHAWN LEE: Yeah, exactly, so that that’s kind of, kind of how I got up to the precipice of the young gun, Andy Platts, who can’t wait to tell you.
ANDY PLATTS: Ah, yeah, Hong Kong. I was born in Hong Kong in ’79. That was a result of my dad being disenfranchised with the UK economy and deciding to get on a nomad bus and seeing wherever it would go. So he traveled through Africa, through Asia, and ended up in Hong Kong, which was then a British territory, still. And they had a problem with the triads and corruption, so they were hiring, hiring people all the time to be the police force. So he joined the police force. Ah, it gave this wild, untamed man some discipline. My mom’s from the Philippines. She was one of the first kids in her family to learn English. She wanted to get off the island. She grew up on this little island in the Pacific, opposite of volcano. But, you know, pretty poor, pretty underprivileged. And so she learned a typing shorthand, got English under her belt. Met my dad out there and, you know, they did the do. I was born in the late-’70s. So yeah, music came into my life pretty early thanks to my parents’ collection.
My dad was a big Elton John fan, Beatles fan, big on the Doors. My mom, she was more probably ABBA, and a guy called Jose Marie Chan who was this really slushy power ballad writer. I liked him because he used all the interesting chords, so jazzy chords. And then I started playing piano by ear when I was about seven years old, I just started to play what I could hear on the radio and kind of figure stuff out. That led to classical lessons. I got quite far with that, but then wanting to learn guitar intervened in my life. And I used to go to Scouts, and my old Scoutmaster said, I’ve got a guitar somewhere that you can have in the attic. And he brought this dusty, old early-’80s Washburn guitar, which I still have today. And this really old Marshall from the 70s, and I was in love, you know. So, yeah, rock and roll took over there. I started writing songs when I was about 10 or 11, I used to hook up all my guitar to my old Hi-Fi and my four-track and just make my own radio shows. That’s kind of, it’s kind of how I started writing tunes, writing jingles, pretend jingles for my shows.
SHAWN LEE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did the same. I made my own radio shows.
ANDY PLATTS: The jingles are the best bit, you know. But then you could put real music that you recorded off the radio to make it sound legit, you know? Yeah, started playing, gotten together in bands when I was eleven or twelve, so by the mid 90s I’m like fifteen, sixteen, then and then I went to the Liverpool Institute Performing Arts in the late-’90s, which is Paul McCartney’s music college. It was his old school that he put about $20 million of his own cash into. So that was three years of playing with guys from all over the world in like these unbelievable studios, just really spreading my wings, really, and just answering all my music kind of curiosity.
I got spat out of there in 2000 straight into being an MD for my now wife, she got signed to Sony in 2000 and so we spent two or three years going around the world, writing with people, making music for what would be a debut album, but such as happens to so many people, it got shelved before it even saw the light of day. So I kind of went my own way. I said, you know, I started to realize I wanted to do my own music a couple of years bumming around the London scene with various bands. I got my first publishing deal in 2004 and I was off, then. I was I was writing songs, I was wanting to be an artist, and slowly but surely kind of built a bit of a name for myself. Got my own band together, Mama’s Gun. Right somewhere in that time, I crossed paths with Shawn via MySpace.
JOHN LAWLER: Yeah, MySpace was a big thing.
ANDY PLATTS: You weren’t a professional musician, doing your thing if you didn’t have a MySpace page around that time. Shawn produced a couple of things that Mama’s Gun did. They didn’t work out. I don’t think they were the right songs at the right time, but I think something about that chance encounter laid the foundations for an idea that he would later have to do something in this musical vein in which we operate, and, in a roundabout the way that’s how we get to Young Gun Silver Fox meeting and doing the thing that we’re doing today.
JOHN LAWLER: So when you got the idea, Shawn, for West End Coast, did you start with some gear and say, well, we can do something with this a little bit more analog sounding.
SHAWN LEE: Well, I’m of the age that I kind of grew up in the analog era, and so my roots are in that. As technology changed and it advanced, and there was still a very analog methodology that I was always taking that forward into whatever was happening. And so I guess I saw myself as this sort of plowing my own field, you know, and doing things how I do things, you know, which is very much by hand using technology, but using it in a sort of caveman way sometimes and being analog in my sensibilities and what I’m hearing inside of my head. So I think even though I’m recording on a computer most of the time, I’m still thinking about the computer is being a fancy tape recorder with a lot of bells and whistles. So it is like a studio in a box, but it’s still about playing real instruments and, and it’s about like hardware and doing stuff properly in that sort of, you know, sticking to the old ways (because) technology will make you lazy. I think it’s important to remember how you know how you do it, and how it’s supposed to be done and keep that real and keep that vital.
The new album very much got back to people in a room, with a few instruments and conjuring something up out of the ether, you know? I think that’s the real human realness that is lacking in so much contemporary music. It’s really about the source, that’s where it is, you know, that’s the sweet. It’s kind of like really trying to continue to make music from that kind of space. Obviously, we’re doing it now and it’s contemporary. It’s not music of the past, it’s informed by music from the past. But then, everything is informed by the past; we’re building on these things. I think it was about using real instruments and, using things like the Fender Rhodes electric piano. There was a palette of instruments and sounds that were the primary colors of this music. And that’s where you started, you built your house on that foundation, right? And you knew that these things sounded good together, and, in a way, it’s really helpful to have that sort of instrumental palette when you go to make a record. I’ve got these primary colors that I’m painting with, and within that, that’s your springboard off and if you don’t have these things, like there’s no walls, there’s no roof, there’s no structure to decorate. I think it’s really helpful to kind of know what your building blocks of something are, and then you can push out from there.
JOHN LAWLER: So you can, you can be creative. So do you have, like, old school council consoles and you integrate into digital or just straight in?
SHAWN LEE: Yeah, we both do and (Andy’s) got one.
ANDY PLATTS: Yeah, I mean, right behind me. I’ve got a nice 1980s console, that we tracked everything we did at mine through – you know, it’s a part that thing that unifies all the elements that you put through it, and it adds that little, little something we’re recording onto a computer. You know, the thing about technology is that you always have a choice what you do with it. And I think one of the best things about technology and making music these days that it removes a chunk of the stuff that you would otherwise be laborious, that would be time consuming, that takes away from the creativity you only want it to enhance what you do? You know, once upon a time, painters would have to buy colored powder and mix their own paint, and it’ll be this thing, but, but there was a revolution where fucking paint was put in tubes and they could get on and get on with it. You want to, not dissimilar from that. It’s when it’s removing the distance between A and B, the path of least resistance. That can only be a good thing with letting your creative synapses fire.
JOHN LAWLER: Then you can focus on the creative side.
ANDY PLATTS: Exactly – and so we’re harnessing both. We’re writing music in the way they used to write music. We’re arranging it in the there’s the craft, the songcraft that doesn’t need technology for at its heart to be this beating analog living thing. We’re putting through analog stuff, but we’re capturing and we’re assembling digitally, and then after the fact, we’re able to send that back and forth. So you really got like, this is almost like the perfect time to be making music of this kind, actually.
JOHN LAWLER: One of the things I’ve kind of noticed is kind of a progression of your sound. I mean, it’s still kind of the same basic sound, and there’s no question that’s you – from the vocals and the Rhodes, which is a fabulous instrument. It really always sounds great. I almost bought one about 10 years ago but my wife said, “Where are you going to put that?” I’m like, “maybe out in the garage.”
ANDY PLATTS: Take away the sofa, man, and just – yeah, you know, you don’t need a sofa. Just play your Rhodes (Laughs).
JOHN LAWLER: It’s sort of interesting, because your journeys are very troubadour-like, and I think that’s the thing about musicians today. In order to make it, you have to do a lot of everything. So I think the progression started with that base you were talking about. And it’s kind of, I guess, built as you’re integrating your creativity and saying, Well, can we do this? Can we add something? On AM Waves, I noticed that, especially starting with, “Midnight in Richmond,” that it’s one of these things that sounds simple, but some of the chord structures reminds me the R&B and stuff I used to listen to back in the ’70s and ’80s and prog rock and jazz from the ’50s and ’60s, kind of a hard bop fan. So, tell me about that progression from AM Waves, “Midnight in Richmond,” and “Kingston Boogie,” the second song about Lenny, I think, right?
ANDY PLATTS: (Laughs) Lenny’s law, yeah.
JOHN LAWLER: One of the groups I really dug in the ’70s was Earth, Wind and Fire, because they sounded great. They sounded simple as like a singalong. But man, those chord changes were, wow, they were amazing. And they would modulate and change keys; they do all kinds of stuff. So tell me about maybe that progression from West End Coast to AM Waves. Or was it something you had in mind, or was it just, well, we’re just going to try something a little bit new.
SHAWN LEE: Well, we did West End Coast and this came out real nice. And then there was a moment before we started, AM Waves, where I was sort of like, can we better this? What do we have here? The very first track was “Midnight in Richmond” and once we did that song, I thought, yeah, we can do this, there’s not going to be a soft sophomore slump here.
ANDY PLATTS: Shawn, I still remember the text you sent me after you’d sent me the “Midnight in Richmond” track, and then I put my vocals on top of it, and then the day you mixed it, you got to the end of the mix, and you just sent me a text saying, “Oh my god, tears of West Coast joy.” (Laughs)
SHAWN LEE: (Laughs) I don’t even remember that.
ANDY PLATTS: Yeah, and we were off – yeah, sorry man, go on as you were.
SHAWN LEE: But that was, like, that was the tune that, like, you know, I think we both felt for a long time that AM Waves was a record that was just chock full of goodness. Every track, it was just so solid. It was always the record of ours that we were trying to beat, and you mentioned Earth Wind and Fire. I mean, I think that’s a group that, man, it’s like a magnet. It keeps pulling me back. It’s always the band I loved, and it was always the band that I thought is one of the best bands of all time. It just had, there was so much depth musically in that band. And obviously they made great singles, and they had great sing-along tunes, and they there was a positivity and a joyfulness that they had that really shone through, was real sunshine, feel good music, but really musically sophisticated and diverse.
And I think in many ways, maybe as a template band, there’s a real, synergy between Young Guns Silver Fox and Earth Wind and Fire in that thing that we also make music that’s feel-good and positive and makes you feel happy in the way the Earth Wind and Fire does. But it’s also has a lot of musical machinery involved, but it’s still nice tunes. And to be honest, that’s not an easy thing to engineer. It’s not like you can go, “Hey, I’m going to do this.” I think they were quite special because of that, and I think for whatever reasons, we’ve somehow been able to conjure that up. There wasn’t a recipe or a magical formula to do this, but there is just something about it that it operates on those levels. And so I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about how they made nice songs. But there was also great musical information in there.
ANDY PLATTS: Going from West End Coast to AM Waves, that’s an interesting one. I think if you go looking for them in West End Coast, you can probably draw lines to certain, certain spheres of influence, or even songs that have lived in Shawn’s musical imagination and, to some extent, mine. But I think the second, the second album, was really us. The shackles are off. We were doing our own thing. We realized, without being contrived in any way, that if I just do my thing, and he does his thing, and you put the thing together, this is what we’re getting. I’d love to tell you there was, like, hours of us researching, going, “Oh, look how they’ve done this. Let’s, let’s try and do our version of that.”
It’s absolutely none of that. It’s just instinctive music-making individuals, and then bringing it together. It just works. I don’t know what to tell you, and it’s just kept on working and AM Waves, I really feel was a was a high watermark, because I looked back at West End Coast in terms of the songwriting, like the lyrics and the melodies and what it was trying to say on that front, “I said I could do better than that. Got to do better than that.” So I definitely pushed myself more. And I know Shawn is always chomping at the bit. That’s his default setting. He’s set to go, he’s like a fucking bloodhound just ready to sniff it out and go find the truffles. (Laughs)
JOHN LAWLER: Well, that’s what you need. And so I was actually thinking about a couple of songs that had maybe a little bit more edge than the others, and I really like both of them. So from West End Coast, “Long Way Back” starts off as one of those slow soul songs, and then it kind of builds that guitar really is kind of digging in. And from Canyons, “Things We Left Unsaid.”
SHAWN LEE: Oh, yeah!
JOHN LAWLER: That one’s got a little bit of this Walter Becker angst in there, and on the second after the second verse, that transition – where did that come from? I wasn’t prepared for that. The first time I heard it, and it was like, wow, that’s a fantastic direction.
SHAWN LEE: It was a nice, simple, moody track, and it was one of the last things we did, yeah, on that record. And I just remember walking down the street with my iPod on, and some random Bobby Caldwell deep cut came on and I don’t even remember what song it was. It wasn’t really one that I knew that well, and it just made me think, oh, you know, I want to do like, a “deep cutty,” slow, languid kind of tune, just that kind of feeling. And so I kind of went in and that’s what came out. I remember when got the vocals back from Andy, I just thought, “This is one the best, ones that he’d done at that time.” I mean, there’s been loads of others now, but I just remember feeling like the vocal was really exceptional on that and it is a real proper, deep cut that track. So I’m glad, I’m glad that you like it, man. We never played that one live. I did learn it at one point, consolidate all my guitar parts into kind of one somehow and then we never did it but it’s a great track, man.
ANDY PLATTS: The thing I love about that track is that it’s kind of where I went with that lyric, “Things We Left Unsaid.” It’s got this unanswered question, something you’ll never be able to answer, that you’ll always hold on to, and you’ll always be questioning, whether that’s regrets or “what ifs” or “what could have beens.” It’s this kind of stuff, and that “A Long Way Back,” which actually come from places of quite deep pain, in terms of the songwriting, but without pain, you don’t get joy. There is pure joy in our music, but joy implies pain. It’s different to happiness. Happiness is just kind of sunny disposition, a carefree kind. A lightness. Joy is much deeper. Joy directly answers pain in in that way. So I think we actually straddle both in different ways, which makes it rewarding, makes you want to go back to it, to make more, makes you proud in terms of accomplishing what you’ve done. And I think has more spots in the music and in what we do for people to resonate with.
JOHN LAWLER: In 2018, both AM Waves and then Golden Days (from Mama’s Gun) were recorded; there’s 20 good songs, and there are no duds. But I think the whole band version of “This is the Day,” has got this really nice kind of groove that really fits a live band, even though – interestingly enough – it was just you and the piano originally on the album.
ANDY PLATTS: Originally, yeah, but I knew it was a really good tune, and it needed to live in a different setting. So, you know, just applying the kind of very simple, effective Marvin Gaye treatment gave it the space it needed to go.
JOHN LAWLER: That’s kind of a reminder about the vocals and harmonies you guys use. That is one of these things that there’s more and more of on virtually every album. So tell me about the harmonies, and you kind of focus there, because it’s obviously there and in Mama’s Gun, but now, to me, emphasized a bit more. That’s one of the things from back in the day that was attractive for some bands, like some of the early Little River Band, had these albums with these unbelievable harmonies. Can you describe how you make that sound?
ANDY PLATTS: Well, one of my big loves growing up was Queen. I used to love all those really early Queen records. I used to sit and try and work, work out the harmonies and stuff, and just, how are they doing it? How they getting that so thick, yet so tight, yet so clear, yet so musical. And it wasn’t just a case of, you know, just stacking it up. It wasn’t just a case of doing that. It was actually being really smart about what the melody was doing and showing the light and shade. So, I’ve been hooked on recording background vocals for a long, long time, probably since I started making music. It’s one of the core instruments in Young Gun Silver Fox, as you’ve as you’ve pointed out up there, with the with the Fender Rhodes and the phased guitar and the tight, dead drum sound. All these things come together. But if you think about backing vocals, I always imagine the chorus is sung with backing vocals.
It’s almost easier to write and grasp for certain songs. If I think about it just purely in terms of a single lead line, sometimes I can’t hear it, I can’t see it. But if I imagine it as a big, big like harmonic stack, I know what it, know what it should be. But yeah, I love recording. I use different mics to create the back of vocal sound. I like doing the Michael Jackson thing, which is recording a line, then taking two steps back, turn up again, record a line again, takes two steps back to record the same line. So you might record like 12, 14, takes of the same line. But because it’s different steps back, you get a really panoramic sound. You can really hear that on a tune like “Underdog” on AM Waves, you can really hear how lush and crisp that is. I was listening to “Blame It on the Boogie,” (by the Jacksons) and I want that sound, so I kind of went, went searching for it. It’s such a key part of what we do, but it’s the thing that makes it really lush, really inviting, really joyful, and allows us even more sophistication, on top of all the chords and stuff we’re doing as well.
SHAWN LEE: It’s another level. I think Andy’s an absolute beast at doing harmonies on another level. I’ve always, personally, really enjoyed stacking up vocals as well. I’m pretty good at it but he’s definitely on another level. It’s just a lovely, it’s kind of a rarefied thing as well. I think there’s not a lot of people that that do it really well. There never has been, it’s always been small groups that do it well. And it always sounds quite special, when the people that are great at it and so it, it really does give you a really strong identifiable dimension to what you’re doing, if you can do that and do that live, too. The people that can sing live and pull that off live is even rarer. When you see a band and they can sing, and they got the harmony game and all that, it’s impressive.
We’re not talking about like people that go up and have three backing singers, that’s another thing. But when you get the band, you know the core band that’s singing, (like) the Eagles or Crosby Stills and Nash, or the Beach Boys, there’s not many of those bands, so it’s really impressive. Singing together with other people is a tricky thing. And when people’s voices blend, and they make a nice sound, it’s, it’s kind of otherworldly. It’s next level. And it’s magic. It’s fucking magic (Laughs). And so, it’s a great thing to be, to participate in. It is hard, man, but when it’s done well, it’s something to experience.
JOHN LAWLER: On “Late Night, Last Train” when you’re singing harmonies, they’re really chords. So there’s one that Andy hits right before the guitar solo. It’s kind of dissonant. I’m like, “What the heck is that?” That’s that’s pretty awesome.
ANDY PLATTS: Oh yeah, that’s this one, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s just a D major on top of A, C major.
JOHN LAWLER: Nice, yeah. So you get that sweet and sour. So, I mean, that’s the thing about music.
ANDY PLATTS:
I was born in Hong Kong, man. (Laughs)
JOHN LAWLER: Well, you got eastern and western music, and when you put those things together ut’s kind of magic. So you’re talking about magic, simple imagination. So that’s like my Disney song, because that’s got everything. And as you guys are saying, really joyful.
ANDY PLATTS: Yeah, there’s a quick little story attached to that. During the pandemic lockdowns, Diana Ross’s people got in touch with me and said, “We’re looking Diana’s looking for songs in a Stevie Wonder vein.” She wants to do Stevie Wonder-like songs, right? So, yeah, I wrote that, going, Okay, this is pretty Stevie-ish. See what she thinks. And she loved it. And she had nine other songs she was going to cut the record with and she’s like, “Who is this guy?” Long story short, the pandemic, the lockdowns happened. Apparently, she just went away, locked herself and didn’t talk to a record company for two, three years. Emerged and said, “I don’t want to do the whole Stevie Wonder thing. I want to do this other thing now.” So she shelved everything. So it was too good a song just to let just stay on the sidelines. Anyone else really cutting it? So we cut it and turned out good.
JOHN LAWLER: On the new album I think Ticket to Shangri La is up another level from AM Waves, and then this one’s (Pleasure) even up another level in terms of the production and technology, while sounding natural, you can tell there’s a bit more there. It’s a little tighter. With that quantization and that type of stuff. So tell me about making the new album.
SHAWN LEE: I’m going to pass over to you, man, because you instigated this shit.
ANDY PLATTS: (Laughs) Okay, in the middle of December 2024, we’re back from a European tour, and the label tells us we’ve got to deliver the record by end of January ’25 so if you take out Christmas, we’ve got like four weeks to get to get it done. So basically, yeah, three, four weeks, and we’d got some tracks in the bag by then. We’d got the tracks just for Pleasure, “Greatest Loser” and “Stealing Time,” but didn’t have much else. And so I said, ” let’s just convene at (my studio), let’s do this in person, something needs to change.” Because even though we had those, those three tracks, I didn’t know what the album was, what was going to be, or what it should be, coupled with a classic kind of writer insecurity about being able to create anything of worth ever again.
So, two days before Christmas and two days and after Christmas, we got it done, basically. And Shawn came up, stayed over at (my studio). We had a really incredible first day of putting down “Stevie and Sly,” “Burning Daylight,” “Late Night Last Train,” all in one day. I would write the songs a bit later on top of those, but all the blueprint, template information and the way that we were going to make the record was there in that first day, and it was just cutting through the fat, just getting to what needed to be done, really concise. And I think there’s a tightness in the sound as well, right? Get from my studio, I think everything’s a bit more upfront in your face.
JOHN LAWLER: I kind of noticed that immediacy, but there’s a lot of separation between the instruments …
ANDY PLATTS: … but it works nicely palette wise with stuff recorded at Shawn’s studio. It gives it even more depth, actually, because you’re just giving a different kind of sonic hue when you’re listening to something done at Shawn’s.
SHAWN LEE: We played a lot of stuff together at the same time as well, we were playing in tandem, and so there was that performance aspect that we had, which was a different thing than laying parts down together. And I think that, right, there definitely was an added something that we didn’t have before. It really simplified being together, kind of like focused and simplified stuff. So everything was really purposeful and straight to the point, rather than when I’m working on myself by myself, I’m there’s that thing playing loads of instruments. It just takes however much time it takes to do that. But if there’s two of you playing at the same time, it’s kind of like you’re getting there quicker. And it also means you’re creating momentum and enthusiasm in the moment, which is like you get the wind in your sails, and so you kind of get to where you need to get really quick, which is very positive, especially that first day with what we got done.
ANDY PLATTS: I really feel like the fact that we were together, we were pushing that watermark, that quality level, really, really high up there with the best of the stuff we’ve ever done. But when the better stuff gets as well, the less you need to put on it.. It’s like the opposite of shining a turd. Whatever it is, I don’t know, right? Yeah, well, because it just speaks of itself. If there’s something so muscular and has got the quality, you really don’t need to do much to adorn it or enhance it just frame it in the right way and allow it to breathe with just the right flourishes.
SHAWN LEE: The space, the atmosphere, it allows your imagination to kind of fill in the blanks, and you can kind of dream. It’s like looking out into a meadow, or the vastness, and it pulls you into the landscape. When you have less stuff, it just gives you so much more.
JOHN LAWLER: So I noticed in the “Greatest Loser,” I think I saw a live clip and you said, “This is the simplest one to play.” So it starts off with the naked vocal and the piano. Then you have this great transition where the bass and drums come in, and then something else in the chorus, an old school big hook kind of chorus, and then the guitar solo. Do you guys start recording the rhythm tracks first, or is it just vary between songs?
SHAWN LEE: It depends on the song, but that one’s Andy. Andy started that completely on his own at his studio and recorded all his bits and sent that over to me, and then I overdubbed the drums and my guitars on it here. That’s how that one went down.
JOHN LAWLER: I noticed there are lots of colors in your music, so lots of different effects with the guitar, lots of different tones.
SHAWN LEE: There is a guitar that I favor for Young Gun Silver Fox, which is my (Gibson) 335 and I play it live. It’s a guitar I favor anyway, but, yeah, it’s always to kind of go to guitar. And then the other (guitars) become like additional colors. There’s a Strat on a couple of things here and there. A Tele on “Just For Pleasure” is all right. The Ovation acoustic guitar is on a lot of things. Some of the leads are played on that through the pickup, but yes, mostly the 335.
JOHN LAWLER: I may be wrong, but in “Greatest Loser,” it almost sounds like Skunk Baxter playing the 335.
SHAWN LEE: Well, I can tell you right now, it wasn’t a 335 and it wasn’t me because it’s Andy on that one nice job. Is that a Tele, Andy?
ANDY PLATTS: That’s me playing a Telecaster through an old Ibanez fuzz turned up to fucking god knows how loud.
SHAWN LEE: Yeah, he’s a pretty nifty guitar player, man.
ANDY PLATTS: A few solos around that I’ve done on records, not that many, but a little guitar on the “Simple Imagination,” that’s me on their little, clean guitar.
JOHN LAWLER: One of the songs, “Stealing Time,” is a really interesting one, because as you continue to listen to it, either over and over, or as the song progresses, it’s got more layers and it’s got anumber of unexpected changes, transitions, etc. So that’s one of the things that I kind of really are drawn to are those kind of changes and things that are a little different, that you kind of sneak in there, or change the way the song is going. So it’s predictable, but not very predictable at the same time.
SHAWN LEE: That was one of the ones that I did it in my studio in much the way that a lot of the previous albums were made. That’s me playing everything and figuring out all those little bends in the road, which kind of lead to those places, whereas when we would sit down to do something like “Stevie and Sly” we’re playing together, right? It’s more of a direct, point A to point B, whereas (“Stealing Time”) is a little bit more of a journey of discovery. It’s like the scenic route to get to the destination. And so it leads you to places which I think we needed on this album to get away from my musical meanderings a little bit. It’s all fine and dandy, but, sometimes it’s good to get to the chorus, right? Funny thing, you don’t want to make an album where every song is a deep cut. We can do that, and we will do that. But I think the idea to try to get the evolution of the game, in a way, try to get more concise, more efficient, more direct, and still have the sophistication and stuff. But it’s kind of like, you know, there’s art in supply, in simplicity, right? And the idea that simplicity can be complex in its own way. You can construct something that’s more minimal, but that has everything you need in it.
That’s a really high kind of art to try to achieve, and it’s always better. If you could do that every time you would be doing that, if you could lay down three or four tracks of music in a song and it sounded almost finished, that’s where it’s at. It’s really hard to do that. You can layer up loads of shit and conjure up all sorts of things and, you know, baffle people with bullshit and say “Hey, look over here. What about this? You know, that’s nice.” But to have something where it sounds like a complete idea, that’s the thing. When you listen to multi-tracks of old records, sometimes when you get to hear, like, the anatomy of a great song, right? And you hear every part together, how they lock together, and how it makes this glorious sound, and every part is perfect. It may not be perfect, but the way that they the way that they gel with each other, they’re perfect. It’s that kind of thing. It’s like some alchemy shit. You would live there and eat that every day for fucking breakfast, lunch and dinner, if you could, if you were that good. Rod Temperton was like that.
JOHN LAWLER: “Moonshine” (from Ticket to Shangri-La) is a really nice track that you guys did a number of years after Andy and Rod wrote it. So tell me a little bit about that one, that really is a nice sounding kind of old school meets new school kind of song, because it does have both elements. It sounds fresh, but at the same time you hear the stuff he would have recorded or written for James Ingram or Michael Jackson, etc.
ANDY PLATTS: Rod had that in his back pocket when I went to work with him. It was the constituent parts were there, everything, pretty much right down to the little hooks and what might be horn parts and that kind of thing. Just a really terrible sounding ’80s kind of demo. Owing to what he was used to working with since way back then, he never changed his ways with that. It’s got that classic Temperton thing about it. And so when we work together to create the melody and what would become the backing vocals and stuff, it was just more of that coming out of him and me adding my thing in there somewhere too. Everything (with Temperton songs) is like a Swiss timepiece. Everything fits together all around the melody and helps propel the song to where it wants to go. I’ve never known or worked with anyone like him. It’s just all there, and it needs to be there as well, otherwise it’ll be lacking. But Shawn, I think, took it up another level by producing that, in today’s market, today’s ways of making records and just his take on what it should be, and that’s where you get the freshness from it.
JOHN LAWLER: “Born to Dream” is that another one you guys recorded together live to start off with?
ANDY PLATTS: That was from the session where we were doing it face-to-face. I kind of got that song written before, and it was living on my computer for a while, and I’d been intending to show Shawn it for a while, and I just I played in what I’d done on it, and we decided we’ve got to do that. That was a case of tearing stuff out that didn’t need to be there. And obviously, Shawn just went in and played a single drum take, which is fabulous. As soon as we had that, it was just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s really, but lyrically, I like to think about me and him when I think about that song, because lyrically is it’s about the creative life. It’s about being wedded to it, enjoying the highs and then suffering the lows when they come. And anyone with a creative mindset will kind of get where that’s coming from, but it’s kind of a big life metaphor as well.
JOHN LAWLER: Yeah. So I think that’s kind of the interesting thing about you guys. You got this structure, and then together, you can breathe life into these compositions and send them to a really new level, I think, of excellence, and it’s consistent, but each song is different. They have different styles. So even kind of the more Rn B tracks, like “Burning Daylight,” “Holding Back The Fire,” “Just for Pleasure.”
ANDY PLATTS: I never thought about that in that way. But yeah, I know where you’re going with that. R&B is somewhere that me and Shawn love to spend time. We definitely cross over big time on that kind of RnB and funk and soul kind of things. You know that certain groups of people, I guess, would attach the “yacht soul” moniker to it. We’ve been embraced into that kind of whole side of things as well. So we don’t shun it, but we don’t get caught in it in that way. But, yeah, that kind of bluesy, soulful vocal sits great with sophisticated chords, big bass lines, heavy drums. It wants to live there, you know. People like Earth, Wind and Fire were masters of that. So in a track like “Burning Daylight,” you can hear (echoes of) “That’s The Way of the World,” that kind of thing.
JOHN LAWLER: It lends itself towards a lot of these call-and-response vocals that are especially in the choruses.
ANDY PLATTS: It’s great for live as well. When you build stuff into your music and you you’d be foolish to not have one eye on that. You need to think ahead about, “how will this sound live?” “How can we work this into a live show where it becomes a moment?” and there’s definitely stuff that’s really starting to work brilliantly live now, with the shows that we’re putting on. We actually want to play more and more of the songs on this record live, we know that we can’t just turn up and go, “Hey guys. We’re only playing the new record tonight,” because that would be a bit weird. But we definitely want to get some more of them out there.
JOHN LAWLER: What’s next for you guys, obviously, touring in Netherlands and then coming to the U.S.
SHAWN LEE: We’re going to be playing in all over Europe – Spain, Germany, Warsaw. We’re going to be playing our first Scandinavian shows, doing Copenhagen and Stockholm and also Vienna on that run, and multiple USA things. We’re sort of trying to conjure up a live album. We recorded one show, it’s Paradiso in Amsterdam last time we were there. We got some good, solid stuff from that. But I think we’re going to record a few shows from this, this next run, and we’re going to record the Troubadour show. I think if we can get some other songs, some good versions of that, then we’ll have enough to do a live album. We definitely want to get some of these new songs (from) the new album on there. The main thing is just to make sure that we have enough solid stuff to make a killer live album. There’s also a couple of sort of old school, extended, sort of disco reworks of a couple of songs like “Just For Pleasure” and “Stevie and Sly,” I’ve done those. Those would be some other kind of stuff that we’re going to release.
JOHN LAWLER: So when you get out there, I guess you get a new feeling for how this song kind of works and where it can go. And my guess is you probably don’t play the same solos each time …
SHAWN LEE:… well, with my solos, I tend to, because they’re sort of “you.” They’re like a narrative; they’re more like singing on the guitar. And so I feel like the solo is not like taking liberties with it. Just like when you write a vocal melody, and if the melody’s important, I think it’s important not to over-sing melodies and destroy like a nice melody with just driving around. So I think there’s a respect for what’s been written. You live with the occasional vibe here and there. But I try to play fairly close to the record.
JOHN LAWLER: So Andy, I guess I’ll ask you a little bit about Mama’s Gun, future plans, some tours or some gigs …
ANDY PLATTS: Well, there’s only one of me, so we have to work in this way with doing one than the other. Mama’s Gun is getting together to record most of what will be a new album in the middle of July this year, and we’re hoping to put that out before the end of the year or sometime in the winter, maybe, and then start touring after spring next year, so that, Young Gun Silver Fox can do all the touring it’s going to do. We’re coming to the States probably three times this year or next year. We’ve got it. We got like 11 or 12 shows in October, I think, and then we’re looking to do a West Coast run, maybe either end of the year or beginning of next year as well. So we really want to give this record the fullest kind of live campaign that we can but Mama’s Gun will be returning – have no fear.
*** Young Gun Silver Fox CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
- Young Gun Silver Fox’s Andy Platts and Shawn Lee: Something Else! Interview - July 2, 2025
- Young Gun Silver Fox – ‘Pleasure’ (2025) - May 2, 2025
- The Unforgettable Mamas Gun Gem Tucked Away on Their ‘Room Service’ EP - November 5, 2022
