McDonald Still Has the Voice--and the Heart

There was a time when that voice, recognizable in an instant, was virtually inescapable. Equal parts silk and sandpaper, Michael McDonald’s distinctive tenor was all over the map and the radio 15 and more years ago, as the key member of the Doobie Brothers and as a sought-after background singer.

Fashion and musical tastes change, and McDonald’s blue-eyed soul approach may have run at odds with the pop landscape of the ‘80s. His solo career, from a commercial perspective, has been an up-and-down affair, but McDonald has maintained a career driven by integrity and faith in his heartfelt brand of pop-soul. He arrives at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on Friday not on the heels of a hit or an album, but as a working musician with one of the finest voices on the scene.

His last album, “Blink of an Eye,” came out in 1993, and, whatever its commercial fate, the song set reaffirmed the singer-songwriter’s unique sound, his gospel-tinged passion and limber vocal chops. Gospel is a critical ingredient: McDonald’s amicably raspy voice always evoked Sunday morning inflected by Saturday night.

Until last year, McDonald were California residents. He and his family--wife Amy Holland and two young children--lived in Santa Barbara and then Santa Ynez for 13 years. But, feeling the urge to head east, the St. Louis native loaded up the truck and the family and moved to Nashville.

There, McDonald has been building songs and energy for a new album, which he hopes to finish this summer. In conversation from his home in Nashville, he exuded an easygoing sincerity and the resistance to show-biz glibness that shows in the burnished soulfulness of his music.

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What led you to Nashville?

I always did better when I was in places where I thought there was a real artists community. I just felt like Nashville was the place, and is about to be even more so. I hated to miss out on it one more time. When I came to California, that’s where things were happening. That’s where it was happening. Those were some exciting times. I’m just kind of looking for that same hit.

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Are you finding it there?

Very much so. I’ve never had so much fun, musically, than in my time here so far. It reminds me a lot of when I first moved out to California from Missouri. There was so much going on. Nashville is like that. It’s a town where music and songwriting have such a ferocious momentum going that it’s fun to be around that.

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The stereotype is that it’s a country music town, but that’s not your musical area.

Certainly, country music is a big part of it, although that’s not why I came here. Nashville is a town that is very multicultural, in a music sense. Some of the best gospel music I ever heard, even growing up, was in Nashville. I used to listen to a station late on Sunday nights that was a live broadcast from a church in Nashville. It was some of the most exciting stuff I ever heard. Nashville has many types of music and always has. It has everything Memphis has, except that it’s better known for and prides itself on the country-western end of things.

I grew up back this way and pretty much everything I learned about music--my style of playing, my style of songwriting--were things I learned growing up in St. Louis. For years, I always had that nagging thing in the back of my mind, wondering if I’d ever go back to where that music was and be around it again, be surrounded by the elements that I learned from as a kid.

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You always seemed a little bit of a fish out of water in L.A. Your stuff was never slick. Was there a part of you that never quite felt comfortable in Southern California?

I think there probably was, in retrospect, in the sense that, in later years especially, I was always striving for things that I was never destined to be. From the time I hit California, that was the story of my life.

I was kind of out of place with a lot of the contemporaries I had and worked with out there. So many of the guys I came up with were more musically articulate or more precise in their production sense on the records. I was always the guy who said, “Hey, it’s in tune enough. Let’s go for it. It’s close enough. Don’t worry about it. Let’s not beat it to death.”

Here, I’m having a whole lot of fun with it again. I show up, we write, and it’s not the end of the world. Music has a very earthy feeling back here. It’s not lofty, the stuff of the gods. Here, there’s a workaday mentality in the music business, at least in the creative community.

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Is there a part of you that thinks, “Well, I have to kick this thing called my career back into motion and get another album out”?

I’m taking it more in my stride, I hope. Albums always scare me to death. With every one, I’ve always felt like I was bloodletting or something. This time, I’ve just started it without officially saying that I started it.

We cut about three or four tracks that were only intended to be demos, among a lot of other songs I was writing that aren’t necessarily for me at all. But the demos sounded good as they were and have a certain charm. I think I can go in and, with a little bit of after-the-fact surgery, make a record out of them.

I do better if I don’t start thinking. If I start thinking, I usually think myself into a hole. So I like to write as many songs as I can, and then look at them when I decide it’s time to come up for air. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing down here.

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Would you describe yourself as a reluctant frontman?

Yeah, pretty much. There’s a part of me that is very comfortable in it, and another aspect of it where I always feel a little sheepish. All I do is get up there and sing and play. I find myself, throughout the evening, hoping that that’s all anybody came to see, ultimately. I never considered myself a great showman by any measure. I’ll never be a real theatrically clever performer.

I go out with a show that is fairly simple and the band is as good as I can possibly put together.

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It sounds as if, at this point, you have a pretty healthy approach to a music career, which can be a consuming and disorienting thing.

Well, I have a habit of talking really well [laughs]. It’s just not that important. I don’t want to completely turn over my insides every time I do an album, or every time one fails or does well. It should just be what it is at its best, which is a lot of fun.

Sure, there will be the pressure and the deadlines. That I can live with. It’s when you start to get that self-imposed pressure and deadline to do something really important because, for some reason, you’ve decided that you are important to the music business, then it becomes a nightmare. I’ve been there. I know how that is and how you get there. It’s an all-too-familiar road that I’ve taken before.

I like the pace of life back here and the attitude toward making music back here. It helps me think more clearly.

DETAILS

* WHO: Michael McDonald.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday.

* WHERE: Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd.

* HOW MUCH: Tickets $30-$40.

* CALL: 449-ARTS (449-2787).