Behind the (Nashville) Scenes
The Elixir® Strings Interview with Mark Prentice

When it comes to the world’s best bassists, you may not have ever heard of Mark Prentice, but we can guarantee you’ve heard him play. Like the long-ago session players he most admires, Prentice can be found in happy obscurity laying down the grooves for some of pop music’s biggest luminaries and most recognizable songs. Indeed, it doesn’t take long for this modest Grammy-winning musician to start idly dropping names into conversation. Lyle Lovett. Elvis Costello. Felix Cavaliere. The list is as deep as the range of his countless accomplishments is wide. From his early days as a journeyman bassist in upstate New York to his current roost in Nashville, where he writes, produces, and continues to appear on recordings of every stripe, Prentice’s unique sonic journey has taken him down a road lined with surprising opportunities that have produced a resume worthy of envy if not genuine marvel. Recently, we spoke with Prentice from his home in Music City about how he got where he is today and the mileposts he’s marked along the way to one of the music world’s most remarkable careers.

Let’s begin at the beginning of the Mark Prentice story.

I got involved with music when I was pretty young. I started playing, really taking an interest, when I was 13 or 14. The first bands I had were just little bands in high school. I started playing with older guys right around the time of my 15th birthday. (The band) was called Almond Joy. It was a pretty wild time. I started playing in bars when I was 15 years old! With my parents’ permission, God rest their souls. They had no idea what they were doing! But I was really grateful to them for that.

Upstate New York was a pretty fertile area. I caught the late 60s sort of vicariously through these older guys so that was sort of when I came of age playing?in the late 60s and early 70s. And that upstate New York area was just a great area for that because we had no access to anything, and it snowed 18 feet a year and there was nothing to do much but sit around and learn to play.

I had started out playing bass and guitar and went on to play keyboards and other instruments, but the predominant amount of work that I’ve done over the years is on bass, and my session career has been almost exclusively on bass. Although I played piano on Lyle Lovett’s first record and odd things that have popped up like that. I was involved in a group up there that came real close to [success]. We were in and out of New York City and Elliot Shiner was going to work with us and it was a very interesting time for me [when] I was 17, 18 years old.

Were you playing the bass at this point?

I was a bass player and a guitar player at this point. I actually started out on guitar, but when the older guys hired me they needed a bass player so I learned quick. I went down to the store and bought a Gibson EBO and a Bassman and came home and started learning the songs. I think I played with them two weeks later.

So yours was a crash course in bass?

Well, it was an opportunity to be in a real band, and I was pretty excited about it. I was just turning 15.

Where did things take you from there?

Well, I played throughout the central New York area until I was in my early 20s. And I took a trip to Arizona and thought, “Wow… I don’t have to live like this!” So I [moved] to Arizona in the late 70s and kind of dabbled in and out of the music scene and got really involved again around 1980. That was the first encounter I had with country music. Where I grew up if there was such a thing, I never heard it. But the Arizona market was a really great market for playing live and making a pretty good living doing it. And I ended up playing at a place called Mr. Lucky’s with the band that eventually ended up recording all of Lyle Lovett’s first stuff. I was playing piano in that band. Matt Rollings, this unbelievable prodigy piano player, he was a kid himself at this time, and he left to go to Berkeley, and I ended up taking his gig. And sort of by default ended up playing on some of that first Lyle Lovett stuff which ultimately became the record. It wasn’t intended to be. It was demos and when MCA signed him they just remixed it, and that was the record.

What was the name of that band?

That band was called the Rogues. J. David Sloan and the Rogues, which was the house band at Mr. Lucky’s for, I don’t know… 20 years. It was a real education and a real introduction to Nashville. That was thing that gave me my introduction to Nashville because several of those guys had lived down here and worked in the studio scene.

At that same time, I built a fairly large business for myself doing production work out there both commercially and independent records and stuff, and did a lot of studio work in Phoenix.

So at this point you’re able to support yourself solely with music, whether it’s playing or doing the production work. Would that be accurate?

Yeah. I really kind of always have. I can’t describe to you how grateful I am for that. I had some really good education from those older guys that I first started working with. Like if you’re not early, you’re late. Don’t show up loaded. Show up knowing what you’re supposed to do and have a good attitude. Leave your bad attitude at the door. It was great. I was just a little kid, and I was scared of them, and it internalized. I have since spoken to that guy several times. He actually lives up in Massena (New York), and I don’t think he’s been in the music business for years and years, but I said to him, “You have no idea what a service you did me because I’ve always worked and made great dough and had great gigs because I knew enough to have a little bit of business skills to bring to the picnic.” And mostly that’s because he just instilled all that stuff in me. It was great.

Tell us who some of your earliest musical influences were, some of the things you were listening to that were influencing your sound back in the those formative years.

Well, interestingly enough, all the bass stuff that I got involved with, and what really turned me on to playing the bass, was three guys who none of us knew who they were. Because guys weren’t credited for playing on records back then. So the Aretha Franklin Muscle Shoals stuff, was mostly a guy named Tommy Cogbill, who was actually a great jazz guitar player but played bass on a ton of those records. “Respect” and all these really cool bass lines. And obviously James Jamerson from Motown and Duck Dunn from out of the Memphis scene.

You know, if you backed out of our playlist, if you took all the records that those guys played on out of our playlist, there were probably about three songs left! But none of us knew that at the time. None of us knew that there were session musicians. I just presumed that Aretha’s band played on her records, and I think everybody else did. So in terms of the influences on the bass guitar, the R&B soul thing was really the thing that drove me to that. As a guitar player, I was really a kind of rocker guy. I was a big Zeppelin fan. Richie Blackmore and Deep Purple. I was a big rock guy, but the soul bass thing really, really got me and that was what kind of led me down that road. And to this day the guys I mentioned, and a couple of others, Chuck Rainey and Willy Weeks, and those guys, I still think they just wrote the book. I now see it with the benefit of hindsight that they, Jamerson especially, just radically changed the role that (the bass) had in pop music. Kind of forever.

In what way would you say?

Well [Jamerson] created bass lines that were really, really musical and based around the chord structures and not just kind of playing roots, which prior to that was a lot of upright stuff, and it was hard to record. You can take some of those old Motown records and sort of take everything off but the vocal and him, and you know the color of every chord. Interesting enough, I play with Felix Cavaliere, who is the guy from the Young Rascals, and on those records, Chuck Rainey, who was a New York session musician, played on a lot of their stuff although he was not credited either. We were in Dallas once and Rainey was there and came over and had breakfast with us. I had the opportunity to sit and talk with him for a couple of hours about that whole period of time. It was really interesting. And if you know who Chuck is, he’s been on just unbelievable stuff. And he’s a real accomplished guy and certainly not any sort of a wallflower, but he said to me, frankly, he said to me that “I think Jamerson was the greatest pop bass player that ever lived.” And coming from him, that’s pretty heavy. He said, “I didn’t realize how much we all took out of his playbook.” But, you know, the electric bass was a new thing then. The L.A. musician’s union book called it Fender bass. They didn’t even call it electric bass. It was a new instrument. And Jamerson just?you know I hate to keep going on about him?but I just keep coming back to that. That stuff is timeless, and it’s brilliant. I have an 18-year old son who’s really involved with a lot of current pop and R&B and does a lot of programming and playing, and I just totally hear the influence of all that stuff.

Still even today?

Oh absolutely. You know, it’s funny because (with) the Zeppelin stuff, John Paul Jones actually was the guy in England that they would call to try and sound like, quote, “that Motown guy.” And you listen to the Zeppelin stuff and even though it’s obviously really blues-influenced, boy the bass lines, they’re soul bass lines in a lot of cases. He was really holding that thing down with a similar philosophy. What looked to me like a metal band back then I now realize that Bonham was a big Elvin Jones fan. You know, the influences were just so different because things were not categorized or segmented back then. People were influenced by what they were influenced by.

Let’s flash back again. You’re in Phoenix. You’ve got the production house going. You’re playing with the Rogues. What happens next?

Well, the production business took me to L.A. a lot. In a market like Phoenix, you do a lot of advertising work. I had partner out [in L.A.]. So we would do what we could do in Phoenix, but we would take a lot of that to L.A. for video sweetening or for using percussionists and different musicians. So I was over there quite a bit and developed some clientele over there and ran back and forth with that. And in the late 80s, maybe ’86, Hal Blaine, the legendary session drummer from the 60s, played on all the Beach Boy records and stuff, kind of semi-retired to Arizona. I ended up working with Hal a lot in Arizona, which first of all was a huge thrill for me, and I wouldn’t know how to put an age on Hal at that point, but I bet he was 60. And still just totally had this amazing concentration. And what we did in Phoenix were mostly custom record projects. They weren’t anything like the stuff that he made his name with, but he still brought this giving, caring, paying-attention kind of thing to it. None of it was beneath him. He was totally focused on the act. I think in all the time I recorded with him we maybe, maybe, stopped the tape one time.

It was all custom record projects. Some guys from L.A. came over to do stuff, but a lot of it was local. Whoever was going to make one. A lot of church projects, and odds and ends. And so I had this moment with Hal that was a really kind of defining moment. I had done the Lyle thing and at the same time I played for guy named Lewis Storey, great singer-songwriter, and he was signed by CBS in Nashville, and I played on his stuff. So I had two reasons all of a sudden that I was kind of coming back and forth a little bit. And I’d kind of seen this [Nashville] scene while I was doing this stuff with Hal. He just one day said to me, “Look… I can see that you’re busy here. The thing is that here you’re going to do a lot of recording. People do a lot of recording. But nobody makes records. You need to go somewhere where they do that. And what’s left is L.A. or Nashville.” So that was a clear choice to me. I’d worked a bunch in L.A. It was difficult. I didn’t really care for the L.A. thing. And I’d been to Nashville enough to see that there was a real scene, a real community thing. This all happens in a very small geographic area. In close proximity. I’ll often do three sessions at three different studios, and I’ve got time to stop and get lunch because I’m only going three blocks. It’s all right there. And it’s an incredible community of people that, again because of the proximity, you see them all the time. When I was in L.A., I’d work something in Studio City and try to get to Orange County in the afternoon, and that’s impossible. It’s not like you see people on any sort of regular basis.

I think this is the only place left where live musicians get together in a room and create music daily. Five or six guys, seven people in the room at the same time on a regular basis. And I think that some of that has to do with [the fact that] country is probably the last thing that’s going to end up something you do on your desktop. But that’s not all we do down here. It’s such a tremendous town. I’m more in awe of it every year that I live here. Because Hal was right. They make records here. It’s what we do.

So after you talked to Hal, you made the move to Nashville?

I started making the move down here. After he suggested it to me, I really took it to heart, considering who he was, and thought about it a lot. I knew there was a clear choice. So I began to make my way down here in the late 80s, and I started by coming three or four times a year, and then I would come five or six times a year. And then finally by ’90 I was actually sharing an apartment and trying to come down once a month. I had started working here, some sessions. I’m also a songwriter. I had formed some writing relationships, and I just hit that spot where I’d done all I could do from a distance. If I wanted to continue and expand I just needed to be present to win. So in ’92 I moved down here, the beginning of ’92.

Let’s talk about some of the projects you’ve worked on and the people you’ve played with since moving to Nashville.

I came here on the strength of the Lyle Lovett thing. That’s a real interesting story just because Lyle is not really a country artist, but that’s how he started out. And the majority of his success has really not been at country radio, but he’s still huge. He was the darling of the creative community down here as was this guy Louis Storey. Just before I moved here I had a call to come out and play with Ricky Skaggs, which I did for a couple of weeks. And that was an incredible experience because the band was really hot. Ricky, for whatever all else he may be, is an unbelievable musician. Oddly enough, those things all carried a lot of credibility down here, and when I moved, I look back at that and it was just really a combination of some planning, and a lot of really good fortune. I was just able to get myself into the session scene pretty early on. I was completely established within the first two years I was here.

A lot of the work that I have done has been with really, really gifted singer-songwriters, a lot of whom have gone on to have artists careers. The first of those was a guy named Marcus Hummon, who is a really prolific writer and got a record deal in the middle 90s with Sony, which didn’t go that well. But all the songs from that album have since been number one records for people. He continues to be an ongoing client.

I actually have to look because I forget (who else I’ve played with). And I don’t mean that in any sort of weird way, but you know we all sort of play with everybody and you kind of forget who all that you’ve worked with down here. But it just ranges really wide.

I produced a group called the Fairfield Four that were these venerable old black gospel guys and won a Grammy with that record. Elvis Costello performed on that record. So I ended up doing some playing with him.

What was that like?

Oh, it was amazing. He loved these old guys. And he just was so reverent. And we ended up playing a big CD release thing for them. I’ve come into contact with him a couple of times since. 

I’ve played on records in the last few years for some cutting edge new artists. I’ve also played on records for people like Patty Page and Charley Pride. I’ve played on things with Sam Moore and Billy Preston before he passed. So a lot of what I do is related to the country music business, but a lot of what I do isn’t.

Who are some of the more interesting characters that you’ve encountered and worked with over the years?

Well a lot of them are the songwriters. Without naming names, that’s a really interesting group of people. I love them to death, but they’re the epitome of creative folks. You know… they’re neurotic. It’s just really amazing. There’s a zillion ways to skin that cat. It’s really interesting to see the different personalities and the folks that do that. I’ve got amazing stories, just interesting little stories from working on this record with Charley Pride. Patty Page was a very interesting. For those people that have done this for years and really know what they’re doing, boy… there’s a level of professionalism and understanding that you just don’t realize is there. Playing with Felix [Cavaliere] is a dream for me. Where I grew up, the Rascals were the Beatles. So that’s just been amazing. We continue to do that.

Actually I just saw Felix the other night, and he’s talking about maybe making a new record this year, which I would be thrilled about. He’s like Steve Winwood or Mike McDonald or something. He’s never stopped evolving. He’s who he is today. He’s not the guy who had one hit forty years ago or something. And just a vital force. Still one of the very best singers in the world. It’s just astonishing. It’s great every single time.

I just came off a fall tour with Olivia Newton-John, which those are the kind of opportunities you get when you live in a town like this and work with a wide range of people. You just get a call. Somebody said to me, “How did you get that call?” I don’t know! But I’m really grateful to whoever put my name in that hat.

How was the Olivia Newton-John tour?

It was just amazing. And I sound like Pollyanna here, but I’m not just trying to put a [sunny] face on all this. It was just incredible. She’s astounding. First of all, her voice is amazing. If anything she’s singing stronger than she ever has. But she’s a really unique person, too. Unlike most artists, she’s exactly who you would imagine she is. She’s really graceful and respectful of everyone. She’s a breast cancer survivor, and she’s still out selling out shows. She just comes from this incredible place of gratitude and treats everyone in the band and crew and everybody just as well you could ever expect.

That’s a really neat energy to go on stage with, one where everybody wants to absolutely do everything they can do to make her performance great. I said this to somebody the other day; it was like a paid vacation. And it was. Not that touring is easy, but this certainly wasn’t hard. I had to show up once a day and play really good songs with a great band, and other than that had people treat me really great. You know I’ve said to my wife several times that the world doesn’t even call what I do “work.” They say where are you playing. What do you play? When I come home from a hard day’s work, I get very little sympathy at my house!

What would you say has been your high-water mark as a bass player?

Well, there are a lot of them. Certainly the experiences with Felix and Olivia are two of the really high-water marks. All of my experience with Marcus Hummon, who is probably a guy you don’t know, but he’s really well known down here, and he’s just such a creative person who’s also written Broadway plays. I ended up doing a two-week workshop on Broadway for him. I actually had an acting role, which was really bizarre. So my entire acting career consists of acting on Broadway! There will be no keeping me down on the farm now!

I’m going to leave people out of this because I just forget, but just this entire community down here really is a high-water mark. I’ve even neglected to mention I’ve got a great band with George Marinelli, who I know is another Elixir guy, and a drummer named Vinnie Santoro, we’ve got a little three piece called Air Parma, and that’s one the real high-water marks. We’ve made two records. I’m so proud of those. We don’t get to play much because we’re all busy, but when we do, it’s a real thing. It’s a real moment.

There was a record I did with Felix that Sam Moore ended up being on and Billy Preston ended up being on, and of course those people are icons to me.

What was it like working with Billy Preston?

We played shows with him right before he died. We played with him late last year, and it can’t be more than a couple of months before he went into a coma. But it was incredible. Other than Felix having told me, I wouldn’t even have known the guy was ill. Amazing energy. He sat down in the middle of his show, and did a version of Amazing Grace all by himself on the organ, where the first time he played it through it sounded like my eight year old. There was no trill. It was the simplest melody you could peck out. And three minutes later, he had shown you everything a Hammond organ would do. Ending with a 16th note chromatic run-down on the pedals. It was transcendental.

Shifting gears a little…How did you discover Elixir® Strings?

My first introduction was that I produced a record for a gal named Kate Wallace, who’s an Elixir person, and I played on a record for a guy named Michael Camp, who I think is an Elixir guy, and that was the first I had seen your guitar strings. Subsequently, I ended up producing an album for Mike Lille. I produced his Never Home to Stay record. He was part of that same camp. Sometime around that point in time, I think it was Michael Camp who gave me a couple of sets of strings, and those were the first versions of them. And I liked them, but I thought that they were a little too dark. I think he gave me some prototypes when you were just starting to do the bass string thing and asked me to comment on them. And I did. I also play a lot of acoustic fretless bass. That’s one of the little things I bring to the picnic. And they developed an acoustic bass string that I know I got prototype sets of, and that’s the best acoustic bass string I’ve ever found bar none anywhere hands-down no competition. Through my involvement with Michael and through the involvement with the band with Marinelli, that was when I became an endorser.

I’ve got this studio contingent of basses. There’s over 30 of them. Some of them I play twice a year, but I’ve got a bunch of guitars that in record dates I bring because you never know when you’re going to want a little flavor of this or that. Over time it just evolved, with the exception of the old Fenders and things that I use old dead flat-wound strings on. I remember telling Michael Lille once, “man I wish you guys would make a flat-wound set.” And he looked at me like I was insane. He said, “Look, we’re already making strings that last a year. You flat-wound [fanatics] want to leave them on there for 15 years!” He’s absolutely right!

Everything I took on the Olivia tour were endorsement guitars for the whole tour. (I had) every kind of bass there was. I had an active electric five-string, I had a passive electric four-string, kind of the Fender vibe. I had an acoustic fretless thing that Breedlove (Guitar Company) gave me. Really within minutes of playing all of those guitars, which all came to me brand new, I immediately restrung them. It made such a radical difference in all of them, touring in these different conditions. You’re driving into weather conditions. You’re indoors and you’re outdoors and yadda yadda. Those strings are consistent all the way up and down the neck. I’ve got a couple of guitars that I just never was quite able to get the intonation right, and Elixirs changed that for sure. And they’re obviously really durable. In my case, where some of these basses I play twice a year, I imagine one set of Elixirs is going to last me for 15 years. Once they went to the Nanoweb thing for me with the bass, the thinner coating, those strings sound incredible, and they last and they don’t deaden. I still change them in some regular interval, but boy, they’re just the best string that I have found bar none for what I do.

In addition to that, I will say that I also use the acoustic strings and electric strings, and I play mandolin some. I’m sort of a hack mandolin player, but I’ve ended up playing on people’s records and on all of that stuff just all the way around, it’s just a far more consistent string. Once you’ve seated them and stretched them, they stay in tune. I don’t have issues with any of that stuff. On every instrument. I’m just knocked out with them. I really am.

I’m spoiled. With these basses I haven’t strung anything with anything other than Elixirs in a long time. I got these brand new guitars, and I’m sure they had, you know, really good bass strings on them, but tone-wise and playability-wise, they just didn’t come close in my opinion.

What are your basses of choice these days?

I’m a big four-string passive Fender guy. I’m not a passive guy, but the basses are! But I’ve got precision basses and jazz basses, and an old Telecaster bass that I like a lot. But for this tour, Peavey, of all people, endorsed me, and they are really building some unbelievable guitars. I’ve got what’s called a Cirrus five-string. I’m not even a fan of five-string basses. I have a sort of philosophical objection to them

What’s that?

It’s physics. I don’t think they’re long enough to accommodate the notes you’re trying to play on the lowest string. In other words, it’s the difference between a baby grand piano and a nine-foot Bosendorfer. You can wind a string fat enough to get the principle tone, and have it sort of be in tune, but the sympathetic harmonic stuff is all wrong. I grew up not ever hearing those notes on the bass. I can kind of pick them out. So yeah, I own five strings, and I play them because people want me to, but I’ve never been too thrilled with them. This [Peavey] is a little longer scale, and I find all those low D-C-open B things are so much better. And it’s just a beautiful guitar. They’re handcrafted. I’m knocked out with that actually. People are making fun of me because they know I’m not a five string bass guy but I keep going, “This thing’s great!” That’s been a really good piece of the puzzle.

How would you describe your playing style?

I guess I’m a groove guy. I’m a vibe guy. I’m kind of not a chops guy. In other words, I have huge respect for John Patitucci and Gary Willis and all these guys that can solo and play all that stuff. I like being a support player. I’ve got the right personality to be a studio musician. I like contributing to the band. I like playing the pocket. I’m not necessarily concerned with stepping out in that sense. If we can get through a track and it feels great, that’s my reward. The guys that are my really long term idols were all just groove masters. Just make it feel great all the time and hopefully do something that’s kind of sensitive to the melody of the song. Add and support.

What elements do you think a perfect bass line should embrace?

I think it has to support the song. I think it has to support the singer. I think it has to stay out of the way of those things while still bringing out the emotional high points of the song and just sort of being part of the total performance. It’s an intangible that you bring to it. I’ve always thought that for whatever reason somebody tells you they like a record, they really like the way it makes them feel. And so it is a feel thing, and it’s what makes music a universal language. There’s a huge intangible. I think even when I say, “Wow, I love that melody,” I’m still talking about the fact that it makes me feel a certain way. So I’m a real believer in the alchemy of all this. I think that you hit these points where it’s a real synergy, especially in a town where you play with live musicians. When you hit those moments, there’s a real additive thing there that’s way greater than the sum of the parts. So that’s the moment that I’m going for. And it might be two bars long and it might be 32 bars long, but if I get it, I’m good!

And isn’t that something the audience is going for as well: That moment where the whole becomes something that’s greater than the sum of its parts?

Yeah. It’s something that transcends for them, too. They become a part of it in that moment. And they’re transcended by it. I think that that’s the nature of a fan.

Would you consider yourself to be a music fan as well as a music player?

Absolutely. I sure am. And again, in the studio player sense of things, one of the things I noticed pretty early in the deal, is that I’m a pretty big fan of an awful lot of different things. You know, musicians sometimes get into this space where if something is commercially successful then it’s kind of beneath them. I understand. I mean if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. But I’m a fan of a lot of kinds of music and a lot of them have really, really worked. I’m a big rock fan. A big soul fan. I really enjoy listening to jazz. I don’t aspire to play it, but I can listen to Bill Evans play all day. All musical styles sort of fascinate me, and I keep getting introduced to new things. I just ended up working in a production role with a girl I think is going to be a huge star from the Netherlands, and that was straight-up current pop stuff.

Who was that?

Her name is Eva Simmons. Keep your eyes open for her she’s really something. But I ended up employing my son and one of his friends to do all the loop creation because they’re all that age. They’re all 18-, 19-, 20-years old, and I took a bit more of a supervisory role and played a little bit of bass on it, but had them program a bunch of it. And it was just really interesting to open my mind up to that. So yeah, I’m a huge music fan.

What other artists are intriguing you these days?

There are a couple of guys in the modern gospel world that are killing me. There’s a guy named Israel Houghton that I would have never known about except my son plays (his music) at church. But it’s really sophisticated musically, really great songwriting. And then on the other hand, I’ve been deep these last couple of months into a Donny Hathaway thing. He died really young and didn’t leave a big body of work, but he’s just the most incredible singer-songwriter guy. I think he was maybe bipolar or something, He jumped out a window of a hotel or something. He was young, 26-, 27-years old, but he would have been another artist of the stature of Stevie Wonder or something. He had that kind of depth. So I’ve been way off into Donny.

It’s fun to rediscover some of this stuff because I learned to play some of that music at a time when I wasn’t as good a musician as I am now, and there’s a lot of nuance and subtlety to a lot of that stuff that I didn’t even hear at the time in my quest to just try and play the right chords.

How does being a music fan inform your work as a producer?

Well, I think that it helps you bring all kinds of elements to that. Without saying anything disparaging, you know there are all kinds of niche producers. There are great rap producers down here. There are great country record producers even old school guys. And then there’s the current hot guys like Dan Huff, who really are pop guys from L.A. but they’re creating this new thing, whatever it is, that’s country now, country singers with more of a production element. But for me just living the sort of wide and varied thing, like it was fun to bring all these other elements in on this pop project with Ava. It was just fun to have some frames of reference that these really young people didn’t have. But also to get their frame of reference, which I don’t have.

Do you find that getting some of their frame of reference then goes on to inform your playing?

Absolutely. I was just working on learning a line from a newer Stevie Wonder track that my son was playing me last night. It was a song I had not heard. It had this really hip line. And I thought, “You know… I haven’t sat down and figured out a bass line in 20 years. It’s about time I did!” I have the luxury of being able to create my own everyday. And no matter how good any of us are, I only know what I know so it’s fun to get out and try to know something I don’t know. So I’m fascinated by it, and I think that at this point in my life I’m more grateful than I have ever been that I get to still do this and do it to the extent that I do. My career is rocking, and it’s basically all I’ve ever done. I’ve been able to raise a family and have a really great life. There’s the old joke: How do you get a musician to bitch? You give him a gig. How do you get him to bitch more? You give him a better gig. I just don’t want to be one of those guys. I am really, really grateful that I get to do this.

My life is just filling up with stuff. I’ve got a couple of records to play on that I’m booked for next year. And a possible production project with this company from Brazil that I’ve worked for. So there’s a whole opportunity to open up to that market, which I’m really excited about. And the various elements of playing and producing, there’s a couple of production projects on the desk. I’ve had a good year as a songwriter. I had a top 20 hit this year with a guy named Rocky Lynne. It was called “Lipstick.” I’ve got a song on the new Sarah Evans record that may be a single. Good things are happening! So I’m just looking forward to more and better.