Dan Rowe has a warning for listeners when it comes to the album he and his wife Charlotte Kendrick, performing as Goodbye Blue, released earlier this year.
“This is not hip, this is not cool, but this is us.”
Rowe laughs, and while he’s wrong, it’s a statement that bears explanation. The album, Worth the Wait, is not about Saturday night at the club, making it rain, or the feelings of young love. That doesn’t make it any less hip, it’s just that it’s an album about real life that any couple and / or parent can relate to. In short, it’s real, and what’s cooler than that?
“We said we’re going to make the best record we can make, and make it real honest,” said Rowe, who appeared to be on the road to big things with his bride in the music business over a decade ago.
“Charlotte and I were introduced because we were both musicians, and our whole relationship has been fueled by music,” he said. “I started producing her first album 13 years ago, and by the time we finished, we were dating, and we got engaged a year later. So music was always a big part of our relationship. And we went at it for three, four, five years early on, and then we had our first kid and her instinct was to really focus on that, and she wanted to put that first, and my instinct was I’ve got to make some money. (Laughs) So we never quit, but these other parts of our life started taking over and were more a focus of our energy. We still played, but we didn’t have the bandwidth, emotionally or time wise, to do a lot of creating.”
Gigs were reduced to maybe ten per year, ranging from house concerts to benefit shows at their kid’s nursery school. It wasn’t rock and roll for the New Jersey family, but they were happy with their new life. But as Rocky Balboa once said, “There was still something left in the basement.”
“Fast forward, all of a sudden we’ve got three kids, we’re living in suburbia, we’re getting older, and we had this crisis of faith around two years ago,” Rowe explains. “Yeah, we’ve got three beautiful kids, we’ve got a lot of things to be thankful for, but something just doesn’t feel right. I spent my whole life wanting to be a musician and pursuing music and now I’m not doing much of that at all. I certainly didn’t regret taking care of my family and I didn’t regret having kids – I love that – but there was something missing, and we said we’ve got to get this back. And as soon as we flipped that switch, it ignited the creative juices and pretty quickly we had a plan.”
Soon enough they had a record. Not just a bunch of songs cobbled together and recorded on the fly, but a real cohesive project that Rowe describes as “a history of the last eight years and catching everyone up on what’s been going on.”
And it celebrates and pulls no punches on what it’s like to be parents of eight, six and three-year-olds.
“We co-write but she (Charlotte) is really the lyricist, and she’s always written in a very autobiographical way, and now, because we’re sharing this life, it’s a shared story,” Rowe said. “I’m a little bit more linear in my thinking in terms of thinking about stuff. For her, a lot of it is just heart on the sleeve. It just comes out. When we decided to make the record, there was a conscious choice, which was that we were doing this for ourselves. We’re doing this for the sake of making a great record. And in the conception of it, it definitely started to take a cohesive theme, and that was very purposeful.”
But will it fly with the 20-something hipsters?
“There’s a very broad audience that can relate to this in some way,” he said. “We think much less about being in the cool crowd and much more about how do we bring this to an audience that’s going to appreciate it. And that audience may be in a different place than the audience we were going for 10 or 15 years ago.”
And hey, what happens if there’s an even broader audience ready for Goodbye Blue? Is the family prepared?
“We’re definitely not prepared,” Rowe laughs. “We’re hopeful. But it’s important that we want to do this, and we’re going to make it work, no matter how it plays out.”