Henry Hey goes in depth with Preston Frazier on ‘Big Party,’ the latest album from his band, Forq:
PRESTON FRAZIER: Your name came up a few weeks ago when I was speaking with Larry Klein about Walter Becker’s album Circus Money. You played on two or three of the songs from that album – but you have such a deep discography. This new album follows Forq 4, which was in 2017.
HENRY HEY: It’s been a good length of time. The pandemic got in the way and slowed the progress of everything, and just getting together with people and making a record requires, especially if you want a band concept, I think it requires a lot of people involved all at once. So not just in the recording time, but also in the conception and seeing how the music works with everybody.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Where was Big Party recorded?
HENRY HEY: It was recorded here at my studio. My wife and I moved from Manhattan after 23 years of living in a small apartment in the city out to sort of semi-rural Connecticut, mostly just to get more space and change of life is always useful. It afforded me the space to spread out with all my friends here, all these keyboards. Then I had this idea that maybe I could do the record here, and when I talked to my longtime engineer, Nick Hard, Nick worked on all the Rudder Records from the very beginning. He was a New York City rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter engineer, and I introduced Nick to Michael League. Nick Hard worked on Lucy Woodward stuff and he’s done four of the five Forq albums, so Nick came here and I said “Do you think we can record here?” He said, “Yeah, I think you can and I think it’ll work out just great” – and it ended up working out well. I got a lot of help from him and some other people and built a studio and it’s the first big project to come out of here.
PRESTON FRAZIER: The album has a lot of organic keyboard sounds as well as some unusual ones. Would you talk a little bit about your composition process for the new album and how you incorporated some of these instruments?
HENRY HEY: It’s evolved, but certainly, I have this idea that the music should be rhythmic. Rhythm is our home base and we want things to groove because if it’s not grooving – even if it’s really weird, if it’s not grooving, it doesn’t feel right, especially for this band. I like to write from melody lines. I think about composers like Wayne Shorter and the way that he wrote a melody that would connect things. Other modern composers do the same thing. If there’s a melodic fragment, then the melodic fragment can become material for the rest of the song too and you can build off that. I hope that it feels like the melody connects a lot of things and it doesn’t feel too self-indulgent because I love jazz, but if jazz just becomes this sort of “check out me playing chops,” then it loses even me. The other thing is that it’s just music, right? So, it shouldn’t be super-serious. We try not to take ourselves too seriously and hopefully it feels like some elements of humor or a lot of elements of humor are deliberate. So if things sound weird and funny, it’s on purpose.
PRESTON FRAZIER: You’re all wonderful musicians, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the finished product would be as fantastic as it is. But it does work as a cohesive album and the songs really work and work well – and it doesn’t appear at all over-indulgent. In terms of your writing process, do you start with piano?
HENRY HEY: A lot of times I write from some sort of concept. I think some years ago, I remember talking about this with bassist Tim Lefebvre. We just talked about how important the concept is, he’s certainly somebody who has a strong concept. If you think about other musicians that have a real sound or bands that have a sound, it comes from concept. So I guess I start the beginning of a composition and hopefully get some kind of a feeling around something. That might come from a groove or that might come from a melody fragment. Then I try to write it down. I have a bunch of voice memos and I drive around and I listen to a voice memo. Sometimes those fragments are worked into a song. I tell students to save their notes because you never know what could be the beginning of a song. I then think, “We start here, how does it blossom?” Is there a high point to it? Is there an apex to this? Does it introduce the entire melody and all the elements? Does it wrap back around? Is there a solo section that’s connected with the “A” stuff? I’ll usually put it into Logic so that I can start to see all the pieces work together.
I’ll just see how things feel. And if I’m co-writing, like I wrote something with my longtime Forq partner, Chris McQueen, we wrote a bonus track that will be coming up later. I started it. He had started something on Instagram and I said, “I love if you sent me that,” and so he sent it to me and I worked it into something and I sent him the entire file I said kind of nervously, “Do you think it sucks?” He said “Oh no, it’s great. I’m gonna do something,” and then he sent it back to me the entire Logic file again which gave me another idea that we flesh out together. We’ve written a lot together over the years. We both non-verbally feel the direction of where things should go.
My process includes using a basic drum as a foundation. I don’t tend to write a lot, especially for drummer Jason Thomas. I let him kind of take the basic drums and make it his own. I give him a drum program for his reference. He’s so studious that he’ll take it, and then I’ll say no don’t pay no attention to what I did, just take the beginnings of that and go off from there He’s got such a good instinct about music and groove. I try not to program too much for him, because I can’t program stuff that’s going to sound better than what he plays. I do write kind of specific stuff, but it’s hopefully not just to have a time signature change, but to give some sort of new energy. For example, the second single, “Song For Jim,” had this figure that went over everything. The guys understood it right away.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Thank you for mentioning “Song For Jim,” That was written about the great Jim Beard. I love your Fender Rhodes sound on that, as well.
HENRY HEY: I like all the old stuff. I like all the old sounds and I named it for Jim Beard. It was written before he passed. I realized what an influence he’s been on me and I miss him as a friend as well. He was a brilliant individual but I think not enough musicians knew of him. He was a giant composer and musician and those who knew him knew how amazing he was in terms of the tracking of an album.
PRESTON FRAZIER: We talked about Jason “JT” Thomas’ drumming. Did Chris McQueen do the majority of the basic guitar tracks?
HENRY HEY: He did maybe more than half and that’s partly because Chris McQueen has two beautiful little girls and he’s spending a lot of time being at home being a dad. Chris McQueen will always have a seat in this band but he can’t always be available. Chris McQueen is on about half the record, Kevin Scott is on bass a little less than half. Jason Thomas is on most of the record, but Josh Dion plays on two tracks. On guitar, Jordan Peters plays on two songs and Ryan Scott plays on two songs and he’s incredible. On bass, we also had Eli Menezes, Chris Morrissey, and the great James Genus playing on two tracks – and James is somebody I’ve known for a long time. I can’t imagine James coming on the road with us because he’s usually out with a little piano player who’s done OK for himself, Herbie Hancock.
PRESTON FRAZIER: The song “Eco,” with that slide guitar part …
HENRY HEY: That’s Jordan Peters. He’s amazing; he’s amazing. I tried to write to him when I knew that we were going to have the session. I had a song for Jim started and I said, “OK, these guys are going to kill this – and they did, because they’re so amazing. I listened to Jordan’s record and he has this beautiful record that’s largely ambient. And then he’s got one track where he’s playing slide and it’s just amazing. And I said, “Ah, that’s what I’m going to write. I’m going to ask him to play slide,” and he’s astounding. He’s a great musician.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Yeah, the variety is wonderful. Of course, the playing is great, and sometimes the music goes left when you’re thinking it’s going to turn right.
HENRY HEY: “The Grotto” is kind of an outlier for the record a little bit, but we’ve always loved kind of vintage ’60s, trying to incorporate that and mix that with modern sound. “The Grotto” feels a little bit like it could be out of a James Bond film, sort of John Berry-sounding ’60s transistor organ craziness. I tried to find music that would pair well with these amazing musicians. Tracks like “Kick the Curb” are something that was co-written with Ryan Scott. He’s amazing. Super greasy, nasty guitarist. And then of course “Into Bright,” the lead-off track of the album. James Genius at the top is just amazing.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Tell us more about “Dirt Cake.”
HENRY HEY: “Dirt Cake” was another one with James Genius. He’s such a beautiful spirit, and he lives an hour north of me in Connecticut. So he came down and hung out. He’s just also such a professional, a joy, and plays perfectly. He fit so well with “JT.” I’ve been trying my best to put them together at every opportunity that I have because they have such a good lock. Awesome.
We had fun with “Va” too. It’s the very first thing that Chris and I wrote. We wrote it a few years ago. I was in Houston. I was down there for a gig with Vanessa Williams because I’ve been playing with her for years. She’s a wonderful person and musician. And then I said, “Well, I’m going to go to Chris’s house and we’re going to try to write something.” We started writing this weird thing and we said, “Well, maybe this will go on the record. Maybe it won’t. It’s kind of fun and it’s weird.” And then when we got close to the record, I said, “Maybe this shouldn’t go on.” Chris said, “No, maybe I think it should.” And I said, “OK, if we just make it weirder and groovy, it could go on.” And then we said, “All right, if it’s going to go on the record, let’s just go hard and make it as weird as possible and as groovy as possible and leave no question about how strange it is and hopefully it feels fun.” The reaction so far people seem to think it’s fun so it’s wonderful. It’s partly a throwback to Sergio Mendez vibes and then some sort of Afro-pop feeling things in there too.
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