Ric Neale: 'A lot of the songs reflect my relationship with time'
With an album, Swim Like An Eagle, just released and a Christmas EP also about to land on streaming services, singer-songwriter Ric Neale seems to be winding up – rather than down – for the festive season.
On December 4 the Wakefield-based musician, who also lectures in songcraft at Leeds Conservatoire, will be launching both at an evening called Ric Neale does Christmas at Leeds venue The Attic.
It is, he admits, quite a contrast to the “grief-based work” that he’s been doing for the past two years since the release of his last record, Parting Ways, written in memory of a late friend and self-produced. That album, he says, “opened a lot of pathways that I didn’t necessarily expect and when I’ve been playing those songs out and about at venues in this fair nation of ours, I’ve been amazed and moved by the times people have come up to me after a gig or they have messaged me afterwards to thank me for talking about grief and friendship in the way that I have, it was a way of opening out stories for lots of people”.
This time, he says: “I thought, let’s make another record where I do all of the production stuff but have less of the death.” Where Parting Ways was based on a single concept, Swim Like An Eagle is “a real mish-mash of themes” that Neale has encountered and ways that he feels about the world. “I turned 50 at the beginning of September and I think that a lot of the songs on this do reflect that to some extent,” he says. “They reflect my relationship with time, which I think has changed considerably.”
The song In Love With The Past is “about the idea of people continually going to see bands that they liked when they were 17 or endless rehashes of Superman or Ghostbusters and it’s actually quite difficult to feel like you are finding new information because you are continually pulled backwards”. Another track, Old Love, was inspired by his work with students at the Conservatoire. “Very often they are writing songs about their various heartbreaks and trying to find the one, or at least a one for now, and every time they are talking to me about these relationships I remember being that age and thinking I am way happier to have an old love, one that has stood marriage and parenting and some such things.”
Although “not a protest singer”, Neale felt compelled to write Can’t We Be a Little Bit Kinder as a plea for tolerance. “In a world where there is seemingly a desperation to separate each other, we should at least try to be kinder. Myself included, we should try to see the world through other people’s eyes because of their differences of gender, sexuality, race, politics, all of the plurality that makes – as far as I’m concerned – society as beautiful as it can be. Rather than getting excited about our differences, if we can just be kinder to one another then maybe we can see beyond them and hoepfully that cane be some kind of an answer. Basically I’m trying to solve the world’s problems in two minutes 50 seconds and too many chords.”
Neale concedes that “70s singer-songwriter is a big thing” for him. “I would not be doing this if it weren’t for having accidentally stumbled across a TV show where Billy Joel was playing in Russia when I was a kid – that turned me on to music very much,” he says. “Piano-based singer-songwriter, tell some stories, write some love songs really does definitely fit into that Billy Joel/Randy Edelman sphere of singer-songwriters which I’m very inspired by. I often try to contemporise that, but now and again it’s nice to really lean in.”
Holding onto the Summer was written on the first day in September last year “when you go, oh, year, I need my winter coat now, and you try to remain as relaxed and sun-kissed as you were in August but there’s that day where you go, it’s all over now”.
“That felt very autumnal and there is something autumnal about a lot of that music, so I thought I’d lean into that and I wrote it on a Fender Rhodes that Billy Joel played Just The Way You Are On. I really threw the kitchen sink on it when I got my friend Robbie Tabrett to play the clarinet on it. I sent Robbie a message about what I wanted to do but the only way I way I could describe it, apart from the notes, was I really want it to sound like the incidental music from Cheers. Man, did he know it.”
Neale’s four-song Christmas EP, called Regifting, came out on Monday. “This was me in a piano in a studio for three hours,” he says, adding that he “wanted to write fast and emotionally and worry less about logic, and even go into the studio without much of a sense of arrangement, just feel the arrangement in the room and let the emotion lean into it”.
“I lost my father in February and I hadn’t realised how much my dad is on this record. There’s a lot of bits that are quite specifically about my dad. Because I wrote it so fast, it didn’t even occur to me. It’s a fascinating record, it’s very different to Swim Like an Eagle but it does speak to where I’m at now. There are not many laughs on it.
“Here’s what I’m thinking: the kids are in bed, the tree lights are lit, one pours oneself a glass of port and has a little bit of a think about the Universe. That’s what the record is for.”
At December 4’s show Neale will perform all of the new Christmas EP and songs from Swim Like An Eagle. “But the real piece de resistance is thta I will be doing all of the songs from The Muppets Christmas Carol, all Paul Williams’s bangers – talk about singer-songwriters, man, that is a career I would love. And I’m going to get some very talented friends to come and perform it with me. There’s a spoken word artist based in Wakefield called Rob Reed, he plays the ghosts and writes these specific poems for them; there’s an artist called The Bleeding Obvious who is going to do a song; Katie Billes is going to sing; Ed Heaton and Paddy Garrigan are both going to sing as well. It’s going to be really nuts but really festive.”
Further dates will follow next year. On May 15 he will present Ric Neale Does Pet Sounds to mark the 60th anniversary of the Beach Boys’ classic album, while on June 18, it will be An Evening With Ric Neale – “That will be me doing my songs,” he says.
Also, on January 17, Neale will accompany Davina Da Campo, star of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, at the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds. “That is pretty damn glamorous,” Neale says. “I would say that we would mind our p’s and q’s and our behaviour will befit such a venue, but I know that that will not be the case.”