It has been 54 years since The Doobie Brothers released their debut album. Between then and now, co-founder, singer, guitarist and songwriter has only released two solo albums and they were 46 and 44 years ago. To find out why there has never been a third Tom Johnston solo album, Noise11 asked Tom.
Watch the Noise11 interview with Tom Johnston:
Tom explains, “I still write. I haven’t really looked at doing an album again, pretty much because the band has taken up all the air in the room. We are on the road all the time. Last year we were out for six months. The last five years we have been going solidly from the Spring into the Summer into the Fall and maybe into the Winter. By the time you finish one of those you don’t feel like making an album”.
The new Doobie Brothers record ‘Walk This Road’ is an album of firsts. It is the first album with Michael McDonald in 45 years and it is the first album every to feature the three principal songwriters, Johnston, Patrick Simmons and Michael McDonald, on the one album. “This one came about, I have to say, because we were talking about it on the road. If you are talking about a solo record you are not going to sit around and talk to everybody about that. You are going to go home and do it. It is really down to time allotment and having enough songs to pull that off. I haven’t tried to do that recently. I haven’t thought about it because the Doobies has taken up all the time. I had a couple of years off when I did the first one and the second one was right after the first one, so I was in solo mode. That’s all I would do. The band was off doing its thing and I was off doing mine. Since we got back together in ’87 it’s just been non-stop”
Tom says there isn’t even a batch of ‘Walk This Road’ leftovers to base a third solo album around. “The funny part of that it, two of the three songs, one you just mentioned ‘Here To Stay’, which wasn’t originally called that, it was called ‘White Horses’, that was written a while ago. I was on a writing spree and I think I wrote 14 or 15 songs. Sometimes this happens and it just comes out of the sky. You don’t know what’s coming. To me, that’s when the best stuff gets written, when it just writes itself. It just flowed, rather than labouring and labouring over a song and it doesn’t really feel that natural. The other two, John (Shanks) and I wrote the other two. He had a big input on both of them, both ‘Call Me’ and ‘New Orleans’. He did that with every guy in the band. This was something new for us. There was an album previous to this one that Mike wasn’t on. It was called ‘Liberté’. We did do it that way for that. But apart from those two albums we’ve never done it that way. It is something new”.
The Doobie Brothers ‘Walk This Road’ is out now through Warner Music. Listen to the Tom Johnston song ‘New Orleans’:
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