About Me
Recent BioSAUL ZONANA I edited my profile with Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4 One of the most gratifying experiences any music lover can have is stumbling across an artist who has it all: brains, heart, chops, indelible melodies, songs that actually say something and an album that hangs together as a complete thought. Which brings us writer/artist/multi-instrumentalist Saul Zonana and his new album, 42 Days (released April 19 on the independent label, 20/20 Music with distribution through Redeye). The album, Zonana's fourth solo CD, was co-produced by someone whose name will ring a bell: the brilliant guitarist Adrian Belew of King Crimson fame, a musicians' musician who has worked with such pantheon figures as Frank Zappa, David Bowie and Paul Simon. Working with Adrian was an amazing experience, Zonana says. But how did this talented artist get a living legend to produce? Simple: Zonana got a package containing Waves ( his previous CD ) and some rough demos of the new material to Belew, who was so taken with Saul's music that he immediately signed on. The two embarked on the production of 42 Days, and tour dates together over the past year in support of the release.Along with sharing production duties, Belew added his distinctive lead guitar work to three songs, including the album's dramatic centerpiece, the unforgettable Hey Now. On this track, Zonana's spoken vignettes about a 12-year-old he spotted in a Manhattan McDonalds sporting camouflage and a shaved head, another kid who dreams of being a fighter pilot and a woman whose endless prayerful mantra is Please come home alternate with shuddering rock choruses, and in the bridge the song's narrator laments, It's a shame how I'm moving sideways down. Like Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World, this song tells it like it is while it rocks like crazy.Although their Beatlesque settings are delectably tuneful and intricate a number of these songs reference the pervasive unease of contemporary existence. There's a reason for this, as he explains. I was writing these songs during the war in Iraq during the height of the presidential election, and you couldn't avoid hearing about it, so it was really on my brain. I have songs about inflatable dolls, so not everything I write is based in truth. I was in a McDonald's on West Third St., and I saw a kid in a camouflage uniform, and I thought, Wow, that's pretty deep.' It led me to think about the troops. So, for the most part, there's truth in these tunes, but I'll take it to some other place. Silver Jacket,' for example, is about this guy who's in the military, and he keeps getting called to go on dangerous missions, so he wears this jacket to remind him of her. But the idea came from thinking about this jacket in my closet that someone who'd passed away had given to me.The closing Heavy Metal Son, Zonana says, is about a recovering-drug-addict musician who's realizing that it's time to start taking care of himself because he's all his son has in this world. So for his son's sake, he's getting his act together.Run for It, a dreamy song about escaping reality, was recorded in the Upstate New York studio of Malcolm Burn (Emmylou Harris, Chris Whitley). The rest of 42 Days was cut in Belew's studio outside Nashville and Zonana's own tricked-out home studio in Westchester, New York. Among the contributors are drummer Aaron Comess, (Spin Doctors), guitarist Jack Petruzzelli (Rufus Wainwright, Joan Osborne) and bassist Jack Daley (Lenny Kravitz). But Zonana himself played the bulk of the parts electric and acoustic guitar, bass, organ, piano, Moog and, on one track, drums. He also compiled and edited the sound bites phone messages left on his machine, impromptu interviews with passersby on the streets of New York, a sales pitch from an Asian guy hawking cheesy keyboards that pop up between the tracks; it's a practice he's continued since the first album.-more- My first two records, Zonana says, were stepping stones for me to try to find my way to the third one, Waves, which was where I truly felt like I was discovering who I am as an artist. I took it from there, and had to make sure I did something more interesting on my next record. So I made sure I worked with great people, I made sure that I was able to not get too close and lose sight of what I was doing. We recorded it in various places and various ways so that every song got its due. It took 42 days scattered over half a year hence the title.Half Spanish and half Jewish, Zonana was born and raised in Bayside, Queens. He grew up listening to the record collection of his brother, who was eight years older, exposing him to the Beatles, his primary influence. His father, an old-school guy who believed in tough love, was 50 when Saul was born, and the two continually locked horns over the years about the kid's commitment to music Saul's shoulder-length hair didn't help, either. My father didn't understand how serious music was to me until later on in life, and when I stopped asking him for money then he knew I was doing all right.Generational conflict wasn't the only problem Zonana struggled with in the early stages of his career. I was very musically active very early on, he says, but I was never fully focused because the other half of me was worried about my brother, who was clinically depressed, and I wound up taking care of him later on because my parents were getting too old. It wasn't until 1999, when his brother passed away, that Zonana was able to devote himself totally to making music.Zonana co-formed 20/20 Music with several partners in 1999. Along with Zonana's albums, the label has put out three by the artist Nicole McKenna, with Saul co-writing and producing. In recent months he's produced an album by the Day Traders, while landing songs on ABC Family's television episodic Beautiful People, Lifetime's Network's Missing, the forthcoming independent films Will Unplugged and Crazy Love, and the Party of Five DVD.It's been extremely rewarding to build things at our own pace and on our own terms, Zonana says with obvious pride. We're getting the hang of this now, and it's becoming a lot of fun. I can't believe how far we've come. We just keep doing good things, and good things happen.
