Craig Chaquico made the shift from rock star to instrumentalist in the early 90s.  His solo debut, Acoustic Highway, became an immediate hit, and since then, he has created some of the most original contemporary instrumental music out there.  His fans have followed him from acoustic to eclectic to electric, and his presence has been missed over the five years since he released his most recent non-holiday album.  Follow The Sun finds him on a new label continuing to grow and create new sounds with a growing list of collaborators.  It is also a beautiful tribute to his parents – his dad passed 14 years ago, his mom early this year.  This conversation was somewhat lengthy but the stories he tells with words are as captivating as the ones he tells with his guitar.  To edit anything out would be depriving you, the reader, of a wonderful experience.  So consider it a beach read, or better, something to print out and read by campfire light while you listen to the CD and watch the constellations travel across the nighttime sky.  

SmoothViews (SV): The obvious first question.  It's been almost 5 years since Midnight Noon came out.  You did a holiday album but other than that why so long?  And what have you been doing between then and now?
Craig Chaquico (CC): Higher Octave had gone through some changes.  If you look at their website it says under construction, will be back soon.  And that is dated 2006 or something like that (laughs).  A lot of things were changing, and it felt good for me to let a few contracts run out and just wait and see what was going to happen before I put all that energy into a new album without knowing where it was going to end up.  It was a good time for me to chill out a little bit and redo my studio and upgrade that.  I hadn't had time between the mad dash of an album and a tour then another album and a tour.  I'm always trying to squeeze the family time in between and this gave me a chance to do a lot of that too.  It was a chance to recharge my batteries and write some new material.  My main focus had been on doing a live album.  We actually recorded one but after that.  We started adding new elements to the live show so that made the album feel obsolete or at least incomplete.  We started adding a lead singer who can sing some of the hits I wrote for Jefferson Starship, and he's become a big part of our new show.  And we have a Grammy nominated Native American flute player named Gentle Thunder. She has her own albums and tours and when she's not doing that she tours with me.  The live show has evolved a lot and that's kind of what we've been doing.  We're still thinking of making a live CD, but the opportunity came up to do a studio record.  I decided to put the live project on hold for a while and make a new album, I wanted the studio album to be an understandable evolution from earlier Craig Chaquico albums with a lot of the elements the fans enjoy, and I enjoy putting in my records, but with some new twists and turns too.

SV: Why did you decided to sign with a label instead of going the independent route?
CC: I noticed that a lot of labels were in a state of musical chairs, literally, with nobody knowing what chairs were going to be left and who was going to be sitting in them.  For an artist that's kind of a volatile uncertain thing.  I didn't want to jump into a project with an unknown game plan and not know where the label and staff were going to be once the album was finished.  A lot of artists abandoned ship and started doing their own projects and starting labels, which I think is a great idea.  My first inclination was to do it that way. I probably still will do that for the live album.  My thinking was that with Shanachie, which has some great artists and an eclectic roster.  They would have the connections in place to service radio and retail and get the music out there.  I thought the best situation would be one where I could do my part, which is the music, and then they could do their part, which is getting it out there as a label.  Then when I met the staff, I felt like it was instant camaraderie so it has been a good fit for me.

There's a lot of Latin influence on this CD, especially in the opening songs.  How did that come about?
CC: A lot of my songs have had that.  "Cafe Carnival", especially, and that one went #1 much to everyone's surprise, I think, because it had electric guitar in it and that had become a no-no for most radio stations in the format.  Live, that song goes over great, and we added a little more electric guitar at the end of the live version. So this time around, I wanted to feature more electric guitar.  I think having a Portuguese heritage gives me a little poetic license even though that's more European but my parents were very musical.  During the recording of this album my mom passed.  The first two songs are actually dedicated to my mom and dad.  Mom passed away peacefully and beautifully with all of us by her side on January 9th, which was the largest full moon of 2009.  She left us just before sunrise to follow the sun, which is the name of the album.  That first song is called "Lua Da Mae" which is Portuguese for "moon of the mother" because of the full moon that night.  Every time I see the full moon, I'll remember my mother.  She bought me my first guitar, and my dad bought me my electric guitar, and they were really proud of the music I did.  I think mom was really proud that I played with Santana a few times because when we went through her things I found these clippings of when Carlos would get on stage and play with Jefferson Starship.  I hadn't really thought back about that until I read the stuff my mom kept, so that Santana vibe is a tribute to my mom and her love for that style of music.  It's not a sad song, it's a happy song that celebrates the joy and passion that mom and dad had for music and for each other.  "Azores Lisboa" is based on the fact that the Azores Islands are just off the main land of Portugal and Lisboa is the Lisbon area on the mainland. The Azores are where my mom's family was from and the Lisbon area is where my dad's side was from.  Separated by the ocean and yet together. During World War II when my dad was in the Navy serving overseas, he was also separated from her by the ocean.  They had this thing where they would go to the water and touch the ocean wherever they were, she at home and him where he was stationed. Touching the ocean made them feel connected when they were separated.  They got back together after the war and were together for over 50 years.  Truly a love story there.  Dad passed away on Valentine's Day 14 years ago.  I did a song called "Autumn Blue" with Richard Elliot that was dedicated to him.  Ever since then mom kept his ashes near her and she wanted her ashes to be mixed with his and spread over the ocean - that connection again. So when mom passed so close to Valentine's day we waited until that day and put their ashes together and spread them over the ocean at this beautiful place called "wedding rock" on the coast of California. So Azores Lisboa is about them and now they are together again now dancing barefoot holding hands across the universe from seas to shining galaxies.

SV: You started out your solo career playing acoustic but you've been adding rock influences over the years. There are a lot of rock influences on this album and you're using a lot of different guitar effects like the Sitar sound and the "wah wah" effects on "Circus Beach."
CC: We've noticed that the rock stuff goes over well when we do it live, and of course my heritage goes back to almost 20 years with a major classic rock group. People asked me why I switched to acoustic when I did my early solo albums.  That happened because when my wife became pregnant the acoustic guitar was a lot more welcome around the house and I did the work on those acoustic albums right after my son Kyle was born.  Little did I know it would lead to #1 albums and Grammy nominations, that was a big surprise.  Now he's 18, he's got his own car and a girlfriend and a good sound system and he's playing loud music so I figure I get to break out the electric some more.  "Circus Beach" does have a lot of flavors.  There's a sitar, acoustic, electric, and the "wah-wah" is actually called a voice box. You put a speaker inside a box and take a tube out of the box and as the sound comes out of the box, you stick the tube in your mouth and get in front of a microphone.  Then as you play guitar you shape the sounds of the guitar with your lips and tongue like you would if you talked.  That was fun to do.  It was inspired by a jazz cruise where we wanted to do something a little different.  We were on an island and we asked a local guy to take us to a beach where the tourists don't usually go.  So we went to this beautiful beach and laid out our towels then we looked around we saw that nobody was wearing a swimsuit.  We were at a nude beach!  And when in Rome...  (laugh) so we did.  The song starts off with that wolf whistle kind of sound.  There are always characters at the beach, whether it's a nude beach or not, and each guitar part played the role of one of the characters on the beach.  Go to any beach and play that song while you watch people, the characters will jump right out.  I've seen them with my own eyes and you can see them with your ears.  

One of my favorite tunes on the album is a song called "The Coast of Orion."  I love getting away and going camping.  That's how I recharge and that's what inspired the song. Imagine camping at this Alpine lake with nobody else around on a moonless night where you can see the Milky Way and a billion stars and you are watching the constellation of Orion rise over the mountains and this beautiful lake.  You can see the three stars of Orion's belt come up in almost a vertical position as Orion starts to pivot and the waltz of the constellations takes you through the rest of the evening while you watch Orion coast through the nighttime sky.  That feeling of being outside under the stars is cosmic to me and I hope this song touches that place in your imagination and takes you out side. It also alludes to a science fiction theme. It could be about a spaceship off the coast of a new frontier.

SV: What inspired the lyrics to "Lights Out San Francisco."
CC: That was kind of in the twists and turns department because I wanted to do something a little out of the box.  That song had already been an instrumental hit on the radio and usually what happens is that there is an instrumental cover of a song that originally had a singer and lyrics, then the instrumentalist plays the melody instead. We did it backwards.  We already had the melody and the instrumental track so we thought we'd add the lyrics and the singer.  We took the basic track that had Peter White playing on it as well, remastered it, did some editing, and added the lyrics and a vocal by this incredible singer, Rolf Hartley, who has been a friend of mine for a long time.  We go back to working on songs for Starship. He's been in the studio with the guys from Journey, Sammy Hagar, lots of people. He's a terrific singer, keyboard player and guitarist and the two of us hit it off and felt like it would be a fun thing to do. He's been doing some of the Starship songs for the live gigs. We aren't overdoing that.  We do a little bit of the Starship and some Native American things. I think all my albums have touched on kind of a rock history and a spiritual Native American fascination I have that my song titles have reflected.  Now I can embellish those themes and make them more vivid.
Rolf wrote most of the lyrics with Ozzy (Ahlers) who has been on all the albums. I felt like the lyrics really reflected my heritage growing up in San Francisco and coming in on the tail of the Summer of Love, then recording with the Jefferson Starship in the 70s.  I think my first recording session was 1970 and I was 16 years old.  It was interesting hearing those lyrics written by someone who is much younger than me but it almost seemed like he was there.

SV: One of the coolest things about this album is that it doesn't sound like anything else out there.  None of these songs sound formula or copycat and they don't sound like each other. How do you keep that type of originality and push the sonic envelope when industry trends are toward a totally different sound.?
CC: It was a conscious choice to do something different.  Any style of music can become really popular then people are afraid to step out of that box because it is so popular.  When that happens it can become unpopular, because everything becomes so predictable that people get tired hearing the same thing over and over again. But obviously, people like that style, so musicians stay in that box.  But that can kind of become like the dragon who eats his own tail until there is nothing left.  The creativity is where it all starts from.  There were people doing these types of songs before there were radio stations playing it and that sense of adventure and doing something different is a thing that I try to keep alive with my music.  Not doing something that is so out there that nobody likes it, and I try to keep the elements that people do like but I didn't want to do the same thing over again so this album does take some 90 degree turns and if you take enough of those 90 degree turns you end up coming full circle.  I think this album does come full circle.  Hopefully it's like a good book or a movie that touches on all the different emotions that we have in common but it has a beginning, a middle, and an end so there are different scenes - different characters, different settings and different props and moods. When I make an album its almost like I'm letting people look over my shoulder and read my musical diary because I try to put a lot of emotions in my songs whether it's romance, mystery, or adventure.  These are all elements we share. I can write a love song about someone I love and someone else will hear the romance in the melody and think of someone they love.  Then it becomes personal to them. You have to play differently to hit that range of emotions.  This album kind of goes in movements. The first part is that energetic Latin feel.  The next part is three songs I wrote with a guy I don't usually write with who had done a lot of the Tower of Power horn section sessions back when they played with Starship so that part has a little more of an R&B horn section type thing going on, then there are the two covers - "Songbird" and "Lights Out San Francisco."  Those start to get into a romantic mode then those last three songs take that romantic mode and sound more like my earlier stuff. Those songs were written with Ozzy Ahlers, who helped me with all my first albums. I used some new and some old on the new team. Ozzy has been there since the beginning and there are the new guys too.

SV: "Organic" has become kind of a cliché as a descriptive word but this music has a very live and un-touched up sound to it. It actually has kind of a jam-band feel except the songs are shorter. Again, was this a conscious choice?
CC: I follow my instincts so I guess that's conscious on a subconscious level.  I wanted to bring the feeling of a live band to the project.  I've been told I over-produce on my albums and i didn't want to do that but I didn't want to hold back either.  I like the fact that live and studio sound different.  I love production - getting in the studio and adding all these trippy little elements and overdubs that you might not hear on the first listen but then you do and pick up on it.  I wanted to leave plenty of room for the band to jam and the guys to take solos and stuff.  I feel like the songs complete a circle. The last song is "Solar Wind" which completes the circle with the first songs that are about my parents because I played this song on the first guitar they bought me. If  you look on my web page you'll see this picture of me playing a guitar in the hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, broken foot, all from an accident I was in (see the original interview for more about this). That little guitar was a welcome companion through that stay and it got me started playing. So if it sounds a little tinier and brighter and lighter that's because it is. It's the first guitar I had back when I was ten years old.

SV: You recorded some of Midnight Noon with a lot of the music being geographically separated but connected via technology. Did you do that with this one?
CC: I did.  With all of us having our own studios and being able to be connected by the Internet you can do so much. I can send a track to a sax player who might be touring somewhere in Europe and he can turn around and record a track even on his computer in the hotel room and send it back to me then I can lay it right into the song. I did that on "Midnight Noon" with the keyboard player from the Rippingtons, Bill Heller, who did all the basic tracks, and he was in Spain and I was here when we did a lot of the recording.  We didn't do it as much on this one but we did some.  It's fun and it's great to be able to work that way.

SV: There are a lot more horn arrangements on this one, how did that come about?
CC: We started with it going back a few albums. Then I started using sax players. I had Dave Koz, Richard Elliot, Everette Harp, Boney James, Warren Hill, Jeff Kashiwa - all these guys who were so great to come play on the albums - then I added a sax player to the band so we could do those songs. For this one I had one of the guys who was with the Tower of Power horn section and he helped with some of this and Bill Heller can actually embellish the horn sections by using a lot of keyboard samples. We came up with a lot of cool horn arrangements that way and it's easy to pull off live with my sax player, who is actually one of the only guys I've ever seen who can play a sax and a keyboard at the same time and play harmonies with himself. The stuff on my albums is always due to the people who play on them and in this case it's Bill Slais and Bill Heller.

SV: Kenny G's "Songbird" got flipped from an easy listening song to a really contemporary chill groove. Where did that idea come from?
CC: Walter Afanasieff, who produced and wrote songs for a lot of the Kenny G albums, and I worked together back in the late 80s on "Nothin's Gonna Stop Us Now." He played keyboards on that and shortly after that he started working with Kenny so I've always loved his work and paid attention to what he did with Kenny. So 25 years ago they did "Songbird" and it was a big hit. I thought about how cool it would be to do that song at this point in time with an updated rhythm section, a chill vibe, maybe and some hip-hop flavor to it. Again my son has been an inspiration for my music even before I was born (laughs) and he's got a lot of hip-hop stuff with the low-end bass. A lot of these sounds weren't around 25 years ago so I thought about how cool it would be to take a classic song that was written for the sax and do it on guitar with all these new effects. I talked to Bill Heller about doing a real seductive track and we got enough of the nuances from the original but with plenty of new stuff. I play a lot of fast licks, not all the time but I use the flashy licks as kind of an exclamation point at the end of a melodic statement. As a guitar player I can listen to somebody shred all day but most people want to hear a melody. Listening to somebody play really fast can end up like watching somebody type really fast - like it's really neat that you can type so fast but what are you saying? Does it rhyme, does it touch me, does it bring a tear to my eye? In that song Kenny played some really fast runs but kept it emotional. When I tried to do it on guitar it didn't sound right so I decided to focus more on the melody
with a few fast passages. I  hope when Kenny hears it that he likes what we did with it. When you copy a song that's already an A+ you hope you get a passing grade.

SV: How do you keep getting ideas for new directions and new sounds over such a long career, and how do you get the "guts" to pursue them when there is so much pressure in the music biz just to re-do what you've already done?
CC:  When I left the Starship and started working on an instrumental record I didn't think it was going to be a career change and lead to any of this. I was writing songs from a total creative point of view. I remember when Jefferson Starship was having all those multi platinum records, none of us were thinking about that either. We were just following something else - that inner voice, that muse, that place in your soul as a musician that makes you want to write really interesting songs and play the best you can. Nobody in the band talked about that, we did what we do and we had hit albums. Maybe there's some guardian angel of music inspiration that when you follow your heart sometimes lady luck
shows up and you get a hit song. When I think about it less there are more hits. I think back to the first album and how different it was and how wonderful it was that people got into it. New Age was popular back then and when I took it to a New Age label they said they heard a little bit of new age but  also rock and blues and jazz and was too different for them to sign me. Then I went to a rock label and they said there was too much new age and blues, so then I took it to a blues label and got the same thing. I went around and around and the labels all wanted me to sound like more of one type of thing. Then Higher Octave put it out and it was the #1 album for the year on the indie new age chart. It was scary because everybody said no until the right person said yes. I love telling other artists that. Expect a lot of no's then you'll find the right place and the right time for your music and they will be telling other people that they need to sound more like you (laughs).

SV: Big fat question. A lot of instrumentalists that used to fall under the smooth jazz umbrella are getting back to  making music that has very little of the traditional smooth jazz sound. It's almost like back when the music got really exciting and started building a fan base in the mid 80s. It was in the process of being defined, there were very few boundaries and musicians were creating a really different type of music and contributing their individuality to the sound of the genre. Have we come full circle? Who would you say the audience for this album is? How will you get it to them?
CC: My audience for this album is anybody who can appreciate really good music. Music has always been about evolution and breaking the mold. Once you find a new thing it kinda stays for a while then it becomes the old stuff and it's time to find new stuff. Sometimes that is a full circle and sometimes something new may be something that happened decades earlier but with a different spin on it. I think music is like light for the soul. You can't see it but it fills a room, it touches all of us. I don't think musicians themselves are the light. I think all of us have the light and we all add to the cosmic symphony with what we do in our lives. I think what musicians can be is the light bulb that sends that light back in a way that we can reflect the emotions and feelings in a song then you, the listener, can personalize it yourself. If a musician makes a sound in the forest and nobody hears it did he make a sound? I think playing music is a team effort. What I do is is personal to me but that's only  half of the story. The other half is when someone else listens and is moved by it or gets off on it.

How do you it out there. You play it and have a lot of faith that someone out there will appreciate it. But then there are a lot of great musicians out there who are not appreciated as much as they should be. I've been lucky to fall into a place where people do let me know they like my music by buying it and coming to concerts. All I can do is keep making the best music I can and hope the stars line up and it keeps going as well as it has been. I hope people have as much fun listening to the music as I do playing it. I thank the listeners for supporting me and for supporting all of the musicians out there because if it wasn't for you we'd be in the forest and nobody would hear us.