Finding Peace in the Valleys of Valhalla - Carpre Noctem™ Magazine,
Volume III, Issue 2, December, 1996

One of the nice things about running your own magazine is that you get to talk with people you hold in the highest regard. I was seventeen when I first heard of Gino Vannelli and was totally unprepared for the depth of intelligence carved into the grooves of the record. A hallmark of Gino's music is the effortless use of intelligent lyricism and a master's sense of melody. An amalgam of jazz, pop, classical and R&B, it possesses the depth of any Hegelian dialectic and the lyrical elegance of a Shakespearean sonnet. His songs speak of man searching for some glimmer of the Eternal Truths we all look for: love, understanding and coming to terms with who we are and what we stand for. His music is at once accessible and technically proficient. On albums such as Gist of the Gemini, A Pauper in Paradise, Brother to Brother, Nightwalker, Inconsolable Man and the latest release, Yonder Tree, Gino has spanned genres and broken molds. Gino Vannelli's music is probably not something you are used to hearing, but once heard, it is something to which you will find yourself continually drawn.

Who am I
To the rabble and the wise;
Am I just a young and shallow face;
That years erase;
Am I more than that;
Do they wonder?
How can I;
Bring the world beneath this guise;
In the silence of my languished soul;
Lies a truth unknown;
Yes, I am. I am just an ugly man
Alone.
- "Ugly Man" Gist of the Gemin

When you were growing up, what was some of the music you were listening to and what influenced you the most?

A series. Many styles of music. My father was a jazz and big band aficionado. Of course, we grew up with all of the pop music that everybody else grew up with. I myself enjoyed classical music very well and would try to attend as many school concerts or school sponsored concerts from the Montreal Symphony as I could. So, I would say that the elements of pop, jazz and classical were very strong with me.

Were you a part of the organized school band?

Oh yeah, I used to sing in the Glee Club. I used to always give concerts for classmates and what not, there was always something going on.

What about now? What are you hearing that excites you?

There's always something that excites me. It could be the song itself, the lyric, maybe the drum sound, or maybe someone's playing ability, maybe some singer's great voice. I mean I heard an old Ella tape the other day that was just killer. Who knows? It could be anything, but there are certainly plenty of classic works and classic composers and singers to get excited about still.

Stand by the window
Close to the edge
As the neon signs surrender to the light of day
I sip a bitter cup of coffee
and I fade away oh I fade away
There's a cross above my pillow
Curse words on the wall
What I'd give to write the pages of my life again
No, I can't believe this is the way
The story ends.
Oh is this the end?
Is this the end? I wanna run to the highest mountain
I wanna stand in the light of the sun
I wanna ask all this world to forgive
The man that I've become
And now I call on the angels above
Won't somebody hear won't somebody hear
My cry of love.
- "Cry of Love" Inconsolable Man

I know early on when you started to have hits with "I Just Wanna Stop," you were pigeon-holed into this "Canadian sex symbol" thing. Was that a difficult thing for you to shed?

Difficult from the stand point that people have a very narrow perspective of what it was and what I did. I think that clouded their vision, not that most people who thought that of me really had any good vision to begin with, because anybody who could hear anything would know that was something that was a misnomer or a misconception of me.

Was it something that, as soon as it started to happen, you tried to do damage control early on and tried to present as much of the real you as possible?

The thing that is confusing is if an artist is fighting just for recognition anyway-because recognition means you get to keep doing what you're doing and so, if you sell enough records you can make another record. It means you are artistically happy and you can eat. So, part of the whole scheme and plan of trying to make an artist successful is to try to bring as many attributes as he has out to the fore. And so, obviously, at one point, I'd wear my hair a certain way and wear certain clothes that I was just comfortable with and so, if a picture was taken that happened to look a little sexy or something like that and anyone from the record company or managers would say, "Well, that's a good picture. I think that's sellable." All of a sudden you find that a million people think you are a certain way that you are not. So, things happen awfully slowly in this business and sometimes they happen overnight. Things like that are really difficult to shed because people tend to think that anybody with any kind of physical attribute had to be empty-headed or lame-brained. The theory is disproven day in and day out.

I know artists like Mariah Carey run into that. People think, "Ah, she's just a look."

I don't think Mariah has anything to worry about. [laughs]

You were once quoted as saying, "My music comes from a search for something that's different in myself." Can you explain a little about that?

Well, the search for something different is really the search itself, because if you were searching for the same thing, you wouldn't be searching, right? As years have gone by I've realized I've been one who enjoys the search. Sometimes, the search is very painful, but always there is a short end to the search. There always is an end to the chapter and then the book keeps going. The search itself is the search for the perfect chord, the perfect word, the perfect title, the perfect vocal, the perfect meaning, the search for the perfect person to be your friend, or the search for the perfect vision of God.

There's no time to wallow in my cheer
'Tis mine to make my life a better place for my song;
Near my blues will be gone;
Bracing my joy till June.
- "There's No Time" Crazy Life

At a time when you are compelled by a deadline to deliver a product, are you ever completely satisfied? Do you ever walk away from a song and say, "That was perfect. Everything was where it should be?"

Sometimes. I do have that excitement level and sometimes I'll tend to over-do it and try to make it more than it should have been. It's a really hard thing to judge. Usually, I push it until it pushes me back. That's when I get to hate it a little bit, but then I know once I get to that point-it's done.

You were also quoted as having said, "My one objective is to be respected and successful." Is this still a major concern for you?

I must have been twenty-one when I said that.[laughs]

It was 1979.

Yeah... that's a typical twenty-five year old statement. You want to feel power, yet you want to feel loved. I suppose those are nice things to have, but over the years, my continuous and most obsessive objective is just to do my best and to do work that really pleases me.

Where am I going?
Have I gone too far?
Have I lost my mind?
Where are my eyes?
Oh, have I seen too much?
Have I lost my touch?
Losing directions from growing infections;
Poisoned desires of reaping life so young.
"Where Am I Going" Storm at Sunup

One of the themes I see a lot in your music is that of a man coming to terms with who he is and what he is all about. Are the songs, then, reflections of your own search?

Well, you know how the Actor's Studio touted their Method Acting, where the actor would become that person and the skill was the immersion and the actor would be the tentacle of this mind? With me, much of what I record-what I say lyrically-is sort of that Method Acting or Method Singing or Method Writing. When I really do become that theme and I really feel it in my body and I feel it on my skin. I'm not one of those singers or composers who can really write a skillful love song out of the blue.

More and more
Your kiss is like a half opened door
I can't get in
You stop me just before I begin
And it hurts to be in love
When you never get enough
Oh, it hurts to be in love
This endless urge
Keeps my body right on the verge
We touch and then
I want to do it over again.
- "It Hurts To Be In Love" Black Cars

One of the things I like about your writing is that, even in songs where the theme is as simple as love-if love can be simple-you manage to, with a turn of a lyric, make it an extremely personal statement.

I think that's where the power is. The power universal is in the personal. The universal love song is only really powerful when it shrinks down to the size of a head of a needle. Then, you can really see it, you can touch it.

During the 80's you went on a "spiritual pilgrimage." What was the cause of that? Was it something that you felt you needed to do, or were you searching for something bigger than yourself?

Well, you know, outer space is bigger than myself. Inner space is deeper than myself. I was expanding and contracting as much as I could. In order to really expand, you have to really go deeper. Simple observations were necessary because my life started to become ruled by the effects of the market place on my career. And then, when I wasn't as successful as I wanted to be, my life was falling apart, and I needed some things to be attended to, problems, growing up problems that I really hadn't faced until I reached thirty. I found myself incapable of expanding. It took me ten years to just realize, staring at a tree that its roots needed to be in deep as its head was high. So, I could not expand, have these visions of expanding my personal influence in music unless I knew myself better, unless I went deeper and dug my roots deeper. It became the search. The search for feeling. The search that I was always doing, but very unconscious of it. Then it became an all out search where it wasn't just something I was going to write about in a song. It became a "do-or-die," "all bets are off," "we need to find out what the truth is."

What role did your family play in that?

Sometimes a balancing role, just to remember how I was just a kid born on a certain city block, played on swings and played in the band, and all of that. Sometimes, very inhibiting, very limiting, very condescending, disbelieving, skeptical. And at times, like I said, very grounding.

You have described your outlook as that of a "Zen theosophist." Can you elaborate on that?

Theosophy is really a culmination of all of the occult arts. Zen, at its heart, is really an occult practice, although it doesn't have the academia that theosophy has. It's academia on the experiential side. Zen theosophy might as well be any kind of theosophy. Theosophy really comprises, at its best, all of these elements. Zen is a particular color of experience, of perspective, very dry, very transistorized. It's as the crow flies to the truth. It's unembellished. It's not like Tibetan Buddhism. You sit down and you scratch everything away until you're clear. It's not really based on ritual and trying to get a feeling through emotion. It's Karate versus Tai Chi. Tai Chi is a dance and Zen is the spearhead aiming for the bull's-eye. Theosophy is the study of it, the understanding of it. It is much more intellectually based than Zen is. It's very Westernized, but it's very good, because here in our Western society, we need to get to our intellect because we have very developed intellects. We ask a lot of questions like, "Why? What's in it for me? What's it gonna really do?" So, when you ask those kind of questions, you need theosophy or some occult art as that like Jewish Kabbala to really answer a lot of those nagging intellectual questions that you do have, to get you to the place where you can trust and go into the experience.

You have a unique ability to draw some of the top musicians to play with you. Is that a conscious thing where you say, "To perform my music to the level of which I want it performed, I have to pull in the likes of Dave Garibaldi, Jimmy Haslip and Vinnie Coliauta."?

Yeah, that's really what it comes down to. I'm doing three or four more R&B based songs on this new album that I'm recording right now. I'm doing them with Brian McKnight and I can say Brian McKnight's the best artist at what he does. He has influence with his R&B abilities, his singing ability and I don't really think I could make this come off without Brian's help. It's a question of you realizing what you need, you need someone to be able to fulfill those needs. It's as simple as it is.

So, R&B is a direction that you will continue to pursue...

You know, there is a funk R&B perspective that I'd like to put on this new album here. There's always a jazz perspective that I love and Brian's got a lot of those influences so it's really fun working with him because we can get something different. I can be influenced by someone very different than who I am and it brings a whole different element to what I do...the theory of getting a good producer to help you. [laughs]

Do you consider the more "rock" based music we saw you doing on albums like Nightwalker and Inconsolable Man a chapter closed?

Well, no, because I don't think that album's going to be all that way. The R&B cuts that are going to be on this album will be more geared towards radio, I suppose, and they're really good songs. There are a lot of other songs on the album that are not just geared that way. I do have my nine minute piece with this album. [laughs] I just spent the whole day orchestrating it with a piano player. It's quite involved. It's called "Heaven Denied." It's actually the story of Beethoven.

It's so funny, I just watched Immortal Beloved not more than a couple of days ago...

I've always been a fan of Beethoven and that movie-I saw it three or four times-all of a sudden, this whole melody and this whole theme came to me. The whole theme of "Heaven Denied" is basically, "Why can't I hear you?"

I'm glad you brought up film. Based on your orchestral work on Pauper in Paradise, have you ever considered scoring a film?

It's never raised its pretty little head. I've always been busy taking care of my career and doing what not. I started to have some calls. In fact, [there] was a call from a producer a couple of months ago and I was going to give him a song that was quite classical in orientation to help develop the whole theme of the movie around it. I found out that they had drug money involved. The whole thing fell apart. The whole twelve million of their budget just collapsed on them because the guy went to jail. So much for my movie career. [laughs]

As I was preparing for this interview, I was listening to some of the Pauper in Paradise album and that piece in particular just screams for a film.

The Oregon Symphony has asked me to perform it live with them and so, we're going to start there. I'll just fix up a few parts and re-orchestrate a few things and update it. I'd like to do that. I've written another piece, too. It's an hour and a half piece; it's more like an opera. I'll record it after this coming album.

So, you'll commit it to laminate. It used to be vinyl, now I guess it's something else.

You know I will, definitely.

Looking at your albums, Yonder Tree and Inconsolable Man, there is such a big break. Was this a desire to get into a more jazz-based kind of music?

Yeah, I've always loved jazz especially fifties-influenced jazz. I wanted to do an album that had that kind of bass to it. Shall I kiss the mouth, stroke the hair;
Undress her - do I dare
Or bite into the vein above her heaving breast
Ah, the sun best come up soon
There's no telling with the moon over madness.
- "Moon Over Madness" Yonder Tree

As the album progresses, it starts very "smoky room" sort of jazz flavor and then about two thirds of the way through, culminating with "Moon Over Madness", it's such a range that you almost see the range without noticing it.

I know what you're saying. "Moon Over Madness" is just one of those things where I struggled with the notion that it may have not been applicable to the album, but I just thought that the idea was so urgent that I had to put it on.

It's a great tune.

It really is. I enjoy it, too. It took a lot to personify the [character], but what convinced me to do it is that I have such a keen perspective on why Bram Stoker wrote it that I figured I had to really express this perspective as a man who is really torn and finally meeting someone that he falls in love with and he realized that he's just about to enlighten himself to love. Part of him realizes that if he does enlighten himself and draw himself to her love, that it is the end of him. Someone's gotta die.

It reminded me of the Louis character from Anne Rice's book.

A little bit. There has to be that. When you get a character that becomes sociopathic, to me, they're terribly boring.

It's that conflict.

Conflict is nothing more than polarity. Polarity is, like I say, the tree struggling to make it to the sun and yet its roots struggle to go deeper into the earth and the tension is beautiful. It makes music. That's what great music is all about, controlled tension.

You are doing some producing of other artists, such as Gianni Bella, Kudasai, and David Meece.

[Gianni Bella is] an Italian guy. I just did a duet with him. Do you have that record?

No.

It's very good.

Well, you're preaching to the choir on this one. I can't imagine a recording coming from you that wouldn't be good. Is that a direction you want to continue?

No. I really want to be an artist and continue to write. That's more of what I want to do, but sometimes a friend comes along, or someone from another country who just offers me a gargantuan amount of money to sit down. I go, "Well, ok, if that's what you want to do." And if the record is good, the song is good, the people are right and all of those elements come into play, I say, "Well all right. Let's do it."

I really liked the two pieces you did on David Meece's greatest hits CD.

What was that? Oh, "Come that Day" and "Seventy Times Seven."

The funny thing was, as I listened to the rest of that album, when you get to those tracks, even though he may be singing, you can see your thumb print firmly over the whole track.

Well, sometimes I run into problems with that. "I'm not you" and I say, "I'm sorry, I got a vision."

Have you ever considered doing a more ambient sounding recording?

No, my tendency is more toward intensified communication.

Which of your recordings do you think comes the closest to who Gino truly is?

I don't know. I'd have to pigeon-hole myself. I love "A Little Bit of Judas" a lot, but I also like "Pauper in Paradise." I think there are some cuts on Nightwalker that are really good. I really couldn't say. They're all facets of my personality.

I've seen highways in the rain
Waved good-bye to midnight trains
I seen sweet dreams disappear
All my life
I felt cold wind cut my skin
Waiting on ships that never came in
But I've never cried real tears until tonight.
- If I Should Lose This Love" Inconsolable Man

After Nightwalker came out, there was talk of an album called Twisted Heart. What ever happened to that?

Oh, it got shelved in battles with the record company. It was a terribly long battle much like George Michael's battle and it was terrible for me. I couldn't record for four or five years and it really hurt me.

What happened to all of the material?

It's just on a shelf and I'm just on to a whole other thing. Someday, I suppose I'll release it just for comedy's sake. [laughs]

I know so many people who want to see you perform live. Will you be doing any touring in the near future?

I just got off a tour seven or eight months ago. I did an extensive tour of the states, twenty three or twenty four nights and twenty two nights in Europe, twelve nights in Japan, five nights in Canada.

Have you ever played the San Francisco Bay Area?

I have not.

It's funny. I was in Los Angeles a few years ago and I had just missed you playing by a day.

I played the House of Blues there.

That was it. That was the gig.

It was pretty good.

[laughs] Thanks. "Here's some salt for your wound."

I had a really good band. Really good.

He's just rubbing it in.

It was more of a jazz-oriented band and we took a lot of the old material and revamped it, jazzified it, stretched it out. It was interesting.

Tonight I watch you in your sleep;
Wondering what dark secrets you keep
Away from me
A careless word falls from your lips
A time and place that somehow slips
From a memory
I feel my way through darkness
But I trust in where your heart is.
- Something Tells Me" Big Dreamers Never Sleep

I loved what you did to "Something Tells Me" on the live album.

Oh that. It's one of my better songs.

So, you're doing the new album and then, once that's completed you'll probably tour again.

No, not readily. I've got some other things that I really want to get done. I really need to finish this hour and a half symphonic opera that I'm working on. So, I don't think I'll get out until six months after the release of the album. I suppose, at some point, I will.

What is the new album called?

Geez, I don't know yet. I'm just in the stages now where all of the material is written. I have maybe three songs left to write lyrics to and we're starting to produce it within a month. I'd like to get it done for Christmas.

I work no day with self deception;
All that I am is one common grain of sand;
But the sun does rise for every man alive
And now my heart is clear
Cause I have from what I do
And I do just what I am.
O no man is born a starless sky
'Neath his naked hide
Lord yes I am, maybe I'm a lucky man
Inside
- "Ugly Man" Gist of the Gemini