Tom Keifer of Cinderella has just released his highly anticipated solo album, “The Way Life Goes.” The record was a true labor of love and an introspective look at his personal struggles. Having to retrain his voice due to a partially paralyzed left vocal chord, Tom had his shares of ups and downs as he learned to adjust. Being told that he would never sing again was a huge blow but patience and perseverance has paid off and he sounds better than ever. I had the opportunity to chat with Tom during a short break from his solo tour and find out his thoughts on the new record, the tour, and what plans he has for the future.
KE: Hello Tom! How are you today?
Tom: I’m doing well. How are you?
KE: I’m good thanks and thank for your taking the time to talk with us here at backstageaxxess.com today.
Tom: Sure thanks for having me.
KE: First of all, how are you feeling health wise? Are you fully recovered from your bout with pneumonia last month?
Tom: Yeah, I’m doing pretty good now. It took forever though. I was sick for about six weeks. I got my legs back here and I’m getting ready to go back out on the road at the end of this month.
KE: I’m glad to hear it. Now your first solo album comes out soon, “The Way Life Goes.” It’s been a long time in the making. How does it feel to finally have the project off the ground?
Tom: Oh, it’s really exciting. I’m obviously nervous about it too. It’s been so long coming and it kind of was a weird feeling to just let it go after working on it for so long and keeping it under wraps. I didn’t really play it for anybody you know. I produced it with Savannah, my wife, and a friend of ours here in Nashville, Chuck Turner, who’s an engineer and a producer and the three of us were working on it until we felt we really liked it and that it was right. Then all of a sudden it was time to let go of it and that was (laughter). As exciting as it was, it was also real nerve-wracking. I’m used to the concept now. It’s been out there. Some of the singles have been out, snippets and all and the response has been good so that’s what you hope for right?
KE: Absolutely. Now the title seems a good fit for the overall theme of the album, perhaps overcoming obstacles and your personal struggles. So this is kind of a personal journey for you on many levels, isn’t it?
Tom: Yeah, it certainly is and I’ve always approached writing that way. To me, my inspiration for writing is life and you know life experiences or observations. Not necessarily what I go through, but that’s how I’ve always approached writing and it comes to me usually a lyric first, a line or something that inspires a song. So a lot of it is very personal.
KE: If I understand correctly, the problem you had with your vocal chords is a neurological problem so there is no cure or surgery that will treat it but something that you have to continually manage?
Tom: Yeah, it’s a partial paralysis of one vocal chord and I was diagnosed with it in the early nineties. We didn’t know what it was at first. My voice just didn’t work you know. The onset was really overnight. When I was finally diagnosed with that, they told me I would never sing again because people who get that, well it’s a difficult thing to overcome. And the only way you can overcome it is to try to retrain your voice with speech pathologists and vocal coaches to do the right thing. It’s not an exact science and I have my ups and downs with it but over the years, particularly in the last three or four years, I think I’m starting to get a handle on it. With getting more and more consistent which really helps with my confidence, walking on the stage and it was not an easy thing to do being a singer and the frontman of a rock band to have a voice where you never know what’s going to come out when you’re up on stage. It’s gotten really strong in recent years and I’ve learned a lot. I keep working with different people and trying to learn different things and incorporate the techniques and stuff to try and make it work as well as it can.
KE: So it’s basically it was a whole retraining of the way you have to sing?
Tom: Yeah and continue to have to do. Now it’s a lot of experimentation with sounds and stuff too because voice is a complicated instrument and once you start it’s a domino effect. If one thing is off, it creates a lot of other problems. There’s so many muscles and coordinations involved with it that it really is almost impossible to untie all those knots once it starts from the paralysis and then the domino effect occurs so it’s challenging. It’s day to day.
KE: Well, your voice sounds great on the new record and the last time I heard you sing live two years ago, you sounded as good as you did back in the eighties.
Tom: Thank you so much! It’s nice to hear that. After everything that I went through, that means a lot.
KE: It must have been quite a struggle though. Were there times when you just wanted to give up and call it quits?
Tom: Oh yeah, of course. There were moments of frustration and throwing things in the studio and I broke quite a few pretty expensive microphones over the years. In the middle of cutting a vocal and the $2,000 mic took the brunt of it unfortunately. But you know that would happen and I’d start thinking about the alternative and doing something else. You know singing is what I’ve loved since I was seven, eight years old. So I couldn’t really picture myself doing anything else and that’s probably a good thing because it made me continue to work and try to overcome the problem. I didn’t feel like I had any other good options.
KE: Getting back to the new record, did you do all the guitar work yourself or did you have help in the studio?
Tom: I would say I did probably ninety-five percent of it. I had two guest guitarists on it. One’s a guy here in Nashville named Pat Buchanan who’s a really great guitar player and he played on three tracks I think. And another friend of mine, Gary Burnette, played a solo on one of the songs.
KE: What about the writing process for this record? Was it more difficult being spread out over so much time?
Tom: Well, all the songs were written prior to starting cutting tracks in 2003. All the material was written between the mid-nineties…I started writing for a solo record then when Cinderella had gone our separate ways in the middle of all the time that music was changing and we lost our deal with Polygram. I started writing then and I kept writing. I was thinking about a solo record and it kept getting put on the back burner. But when I actually got right down to it and decided to do it and started laying tracks in 2003, all the material had been written. I just picked like fourteen songs out of a whole bunch of songs that I thought felt like a record. And from that point on, the ten years between 2003 and today was just producing the record and recording, editing, arranging, mastering, all those fun things. The task then is just to get what you hear in your head to come out of the speakers in the studio. And it was a little challenging for this record. I don’t know why, it just was, particularly the mixing process.
KE: You wrote some of the songs with your wife. Was that easy or more difficult working with someone who is so close to you?
Tom: No, it’s easy. We approach writing the same way, always from the true inspiration, something from life, something real. She’s a great writer and we approach it the same way. We waited for things to happen and we started on one of the songs on the record, “ A Different Light,” and it took us a year and a half to write that song because we just couldn’t find the right changes and parts and stuff. Eventually we did and sometimes you’ve got to be patient with music. Sometimes songs just fall right out in thirty minutes and sometimes they don’t. Where you end up getting into trouble is when you just say well I just want it done (laughter). You know, let’s get this thing finished and then of course the music suffers for it.
KE: The record has a really great mix, hard rock, acoustic stuff, a country vibe, the blues.
Tom: Thanks. I tried to do that. I’ve always tried to do that on records. We kind of grew into that with Cinderella. The first record was more basic but right away starting with “Long, Cold Winter” we started introducing more of the roots that all of us had from the beginning. We all grew up on the hardrock music of the sixties and the seventies, a lot of dynamics and vibes and stuff. I just don’t like records that are all the same color, the same song over and over. I tried to carry on that tradition with this record.
KE: You’re doing a solo tour to support the album. How is that going so far?
Tom: Good, we had about three weeks that we did in February. We did mostly the northeast and a little bit of the midwest and then we took a break actually so I could go do the Monsters of Rock cruise with Cinderella. I actually got sick, the flu hit me in the middle of the solo tour in February and that’s how long I’ve been sick. I came home and had every intention of going on Monsters of Rock but I got worse and I ended up in the hospital and couldn’t go on Monsters. I actually just started feeling better like a week ago. So the second leg of my solo tour kind of got put on hold because I wasn’t getting better and they kind of held everything and maybe a few weeks ago started booking dates again. So we’re going back out again the end of the month starting on the west coast. It was really fun so far to do, the first three weeks. It was really cool. The show is about 50/50 new songs off the record and some old Cindrella favorites and it’s a cool show. It ranges much like the solo record does. There’s actually a sitdown acoustic section of the show that’s about four or five songs where I do something that’s a little bit different for me onstage. And that is I actually talk and I tell stories about how the songs came about and a lot of the fans really like that part of the show. And like I said that’s kind of new for me because I usually don’t say a lot on stage. The rest of the show is just a lot of blistering, paint peeling, high energy rock, a mixture of a couple of new tunes and some of the old Cinderella stuff. It’s been fun.
KE: Do you have to do anything special now to prepare vocally for a show?
Tom: I have had to for years. Part of it is therapy and exercises that you have to do and part of the condition is that it’s a very prolonged warm-up. I probably do a longer warm-up than the actual show is. It’s usually a couple of hours a day of what they call vocalizing or therapy and it usually takes longer than the show. And I’ve had to do that for years. I do it whether I’m on the road or not because you have to do it everyday to keep it in shape.
KE: Any tour plans with Cinderella or are you just concentrating on the solo tour right now?
Tom: We’re just taking a hiatus this year. We decided at the end of last year to do that because we had toured for three years straight and really burned it down in the last few years here so we thought it would be a good time to take a break. And that opened up a window of opportunity for me to put out this record so the timing worked out pretty well.
KE: Will you be doing a follow up to this record, another solo album?
Tom: I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. This one took a long time to make (laughter). I’m just gonna let this one do it’s thing and see what happens .
KE: A lot of your material is heavily influenced by the blues. Can you tell us who some of your musical influence were?
Tom: Well, originally I didn’t know what blues was. You know, Jimmy Page when I was a teenager. I loved that sound and eventually I figured out that he got that from somewhere. Then I started digging back the old blues stuff but initially it was the rock bands and hardrock bands of the sixties and the seventies. You know, Janis Joplin, Bad Company, Aerosmith, Zeppelin, The Stones, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Heart, Joe Walsh, Deep Purple. I could go on and on. The one thing that those bands have in common was their music was just steeped in American roots music from blues to country to gospel, and everything. And the records had a lot of dynamics. It just wasn’t one thing over and over you know. But Zeppelin, even sometimes in the same song, would go from a Celtic acoustic verse to a driving hard rock chorus and then back down. And I always loved that contrast that the bands I grew up on had. So I always tried to incorporate that in my writing and that was a big inspiration to me. Once I figured out what their roots were I went back and I started listening to Muddy Waters, James Brown, and Elmore James and Johnny Winter, and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and all that great stuff that inspired my heroes. I think that that’s a healthy thing to do as a musician and as a writer because then you get to interpret it maybe and put your own twist on it a little bit. I found that to be very inspirational, you know, to go and listen to what they listened to.
KE: You’re based in Nashville so you have some of the most talented musicians in the world right at your doorstep. Is there someone in particular that you would like to work with?
Tom: Gosh, well it’s funny, I would love to do something with Joe Walsh. I just saw his Crossroads tv show that he did with Brad Paisley and Billy Gibbons was on and Sarah Evans. Have you ever seen that show?
KE: Yes.
Tom: So his show was called Joe Walsh and friends and usually it’s two artists and they take turns doing each other’s songs. But it was pretty much Joe Walsh and a bunch of people came up and did his songs which was a little different than I’ve seen it done before. But man, I’ve always been such a fan of his and just watching this the other morning, I happened to catch about half of it and I was just blown away. His guitar playing and songwriting, he’s certainly been a hero of mine. I mean there’s so many people that I worked with that are heroes of mine but that’s just one that comes to mind that I would love to. And speaking of that, he was jamming with Brad Paisley who’s not too bad either. That guy can play guitar! I’d work with him any day too.
KE: You’re such a versatile artist, of course singing, but also the guitar, the piano and the sax, not to mention songwriting. Is there something in the industry that you haven’t done yet that you would like to try?
Tom: You know, a few years back I was asked to do something for the Monster Christmas compilation and I did a version of Blue Christmas. I did it very Chicago blues, like straight up blues and I got some great players here in Nashville. A great B3 player, Tony Harrelson who actually played on my record too and Greg Morrow was the drummer that played on my record, so I put together this really cool band and just went into a really vibey studio down on Music Row. The studio was actually called Vibe in an old house. We just set up live. Had a sax player live and all the musicians were live. We had a great engineer and did this really rippin’ version of Blue Christmas. It was more like a Chicago blues style and you know I love that music. I love that sound. And I remember after doing that I thought it would be really cool to do a whole blues album because it’s something that really comes naturally to me and I really like too. Some day I might do that. Rock is my heart and soul, it’s the kind of records that I’ve always made. It’s funny because I’ve heard in some place but it almost feels like some people are confused by my solo record. I don’t know why. They think it’s an acoustic record or a country record because I moved to Nashville maybe. But it’s a rock record. It’s definitely a rock record. It has some acoustic tracks on it and some ballads and stuff but there’s tons of rock on it.
KE: If anyone doesn’t think it’s a rock record then I don’t think they listened to it from beginning to end yet.
Tom: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s just I don’t know I’ve read some things online. But then people hear “Solid Ground” or they hear “Mood Elevator” or something and they go Oh wow, it’s not an acoustic record.
KE: From the early days of Cinderella to almost explosion of Night Songs on the scene and now coming full circle to your own solo record, it must have been one heck of a ride. Any regrets or thoughts?
Tom: You know, I don’t know. I try not to relive the past too much. I feel really fortunate to have lived the life I have so far and have the success of Cinderella. I try not to look in the rearview mirror too much. Hopefully you can learn some lessons from the past and not make them in the future but going back and changing things, I don’t know. I think making all those mistakes that’s how you learn. I don’t think I would change anything so much because I think that any mistakes you make are usually things you end up learning from.
KE: If and when you get any free time, what do you like to do when you’re not touring and recording?
Tom: You know, I just love being with my family. Savannah and I have a nine year old son who is just the light of our lives. Free time is few and far between so when I do have it that’s where I like to be. Here and just being with them.
KE: That’s terrific. Thank you so much Tom, it was a pleasure.
Tom: Thank you.
We would like to thank Amanda Cagan for setting up the interview with Tom. For more information on Tom and his new solo album “The Way Life Goes,” please go to: Tom Keifer.
For more information on Cinderella, please go to: Cinderella.
