In 2014, having just finished recording SOLITAIRE, his 14th album of original music, Frank Lazarus sat down with The New Amsterdam Press to discuss his life, his music and his place in the world today. The interview is printed in its entirety below.

 

TNAP: So how did Solitaire come to be?

 

FL: Well, this album came to life over the course of a few years, really. I’ve been so busy for the past few years with specific projects that a lot of the songs I was writing had no home. You know, doing the Cat Cosmai project took up close to a year of my life and required very specific things from me. We were shooting for R&B pop and so if I wrote anything that didn’t fit that mold it just kind of got pushed aside. One day I was just sifting through some of those songs and I realized their strength. In fact, stepping back and listening to all of them as a whole was a revelation because I couldn’t believe I sat on some of them for so long.

 

TNAP: Why did they get pushed aside?

 

FL: A few of the songs – “An End,” “Late Summer,” “No Matter What You do to Me,” and those – were contenders for Following Through. But that record was already 13 songs and I just stuck with the ones that fit that groove. But these songs were no worse – they just got pushed aside for a while and then I kind of forgot about them while moving on to other projects. That’s the truth. I just kind of forgot about them.

 

TNAP: It’s hard to believe that a songwriter can just forget about songs…especially good ones.

 

FL: (Laughs.) Yeah, I guess, but I think the songwriters out there will know what I mean. I was just onto different things. I tend to get into the mindset of an album and kind of stay there, so with the Cat stuff I was very, very into that whole R&B/soul scene. There were about 30 songs floating around that could have made it onto The Line, and that’s a lot of stuff to keep tabs on. Some stuff just got lost in the shuffle.

 

TNAP: So once you rediscovered these songs, what happened?

 

FL: I made the choice to turn them into an album. Early on, it went through a bunch of different incarnations. For most of the early stages, it was going to be called The Ghost of Howard Avenue and feature nothing but dark material. At the time, I was so disillusioned with my life that all I could find the strength to do was walk Howard Avenue, a street near where I lived, over and over; always at night. I was almost literally this sweaty white ghost, angrily walking this street up and down, up and down. I’m sure the people who owned houses there were scared to death of this tall guy in a hooded sweatshirt walking back and forth. I felt like a ghost and wanted to go that route for the album.

 

TNAP: How did it shift, then?

 

FL: Well, one thing I’ve learned over the years and have sort of perfected is letting the album come to me. I can tell inside me when an album is right, and when it’s not. Early on, although I loved the songs, The Ghost of Howard Avenue didn’t feel exactly right. It felt incomplete. It was too dark. Dark without light isn’t dark at all, really. You need one extreme to balance the other so that it all feels real. Not that I was looking to synthetically add light – I just felt like there wasn’t a complete balance to tell the story. And that was what I wanted to do most of all – tell a story.

 

TNAP: What story?

 

FL: My story. I’m not exaggerating when I say that my life fell apart. It completely fell apart and I just couldn’t function anymore. I was flat broke, depressed. Angry. I was gaining weight and losing hope. There were days I didn’t eat; nights I slept in my car. Nights I didn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t even rouse myself to walk Howard Avenue anymore. All I wanted to do was lay down. And in this smart phone era, nobody can lay down without scrolling away, so I found comfort in the card game solitaire. I literally would play for hours and hours a day. Even when Verizon turned my phone off, I’d play. I didn’t want to converse with humans – I just played solitaire.

 

TNAP: What happened that made your life fall apart like that?

 

FL: It was a perfect storm of things, honestly. I lost my job. I was going through a separation from my wife. I moved out on my own but then had no money because of the job thing and so I was evicted. I was basically homeless for a while. My car was literally just stuffed with all my stuff – my clothes, my suits, my guitars. It was grim. My family turned on me and I never really had any real friends I could turn to so I was left quite literally alone. And course, love stung me big time, so I had nowhere to turn. Which is I guess why I turned inward.

 

TNAP: How did you stay afloat?

 

FL: Who says I did? I did not. Believe me, in every way I crumbled.

 

TNAP: I mean how did you even write songs?

 

FL: That’s what I do, man. I think in song. I speak in song. Songs are always in my mind and on my tongue. I wrote a great many songs sitting in the park at midnight, or sitting in my car. I can write a song just in my head without an instrument and that’s what I did.

 

TNAP: It seems extraordinary that you could pull an album out of all this.

 

FL: I always want my art to reflect my life, and I don’t mean to sound clichéd in saying that. It’s just something I decided long ago – I want my art to be an extension of me, and I sincerely consider my solo music to be art. I guess the artist in me never dies, so even as I was sleeping in my car in clothes I’d worn for three days straight, I felt like there was an album in all this. The stuff I do with Cat is great because it’s poppier and more global – it gives me a chance to step outside myself sometimes to create music that isn’t such a direct reflection of me. If anything, it’s reflection of Cat. It’s very external for me and lots of fun, honestly. That allows me to use my solo music for my own purposes, which is straight art. That’s all I want it to be – art.

 

TNAP: What songs stand out to you from this record?

 

FL: Well, this is the first time in my life that I have an album with no clear-cut stud track. There are a few songs on the record that are too long or too gloomy to have any public appeal, but there are a solid 10-12 tracks that I would feel good about releasing as a single.

 

TNAP: Name one, though, that really captures this album.

 

FL: I guess “I am My Own Salvation” is one track I am particularly thrilled with. It’s a good example of me taking something that happened to me and then retelling it in a way that carries weight for a listener. Really, it’s a song about domestic violence and, I guess on a deeper level, the way people will go to any lengths to protect themselves. “Soul-Changing Love,” though, is probably the one track that best reflects where I was at the time, emotionally. Basically, it’s a song about broken promises – about realizing that there is no such thing as great love. I was promised “soul-changing love” by someone who ended up giving me anything but, and so you have to adapt by turning inward.

 

TNAP: What about “Prom?”

 

FL: “Prom” is another one that really captures the theme. My prom was in 1996 – I was 17. At the time, I wanted to take this girl Elisha that I was very, very into and who was very into me. She was tall and wild and just this amazing, beautiful creature – dark, red hair, pale skin. Just a gorgeous beast. I wanted to take her to my prom so bad; she even had her dress picked out – it was an army green, short-cut dress. She tried it on for me one day and I could have died. So amazing and off center and dead sexy. Man. I was in love. I wanted her to wear that dress and I wanted, for myself, to wear a royal blue tuxedo with an orange tie and white shoes. That was what I wanted – that girl, that dress, that tux and those shoes. Instead, I succumbed the pressure of my friends and specifically my mother and got a regular black tux and took a regular, boring girl. And that moment always stands out to me because I sold out; I gave in, and I wonder how it might have affected my life because so much of life since then has been me playing it too safe when I really wanted, deep down, to get out there on the line. The prom was a moment of truth for me, and I lied.

 

TNAP: Why did you decide to open the album with “December 8 into 9.”

 

Honestly, it was just a great snapshot of my life at that exact moment. I wanted the listener to maybe remember what he or she was doing at that exact time – near midnight, as December 8 turned into December 9 – and compare it to what I was doing, which was literally sitting alone and freezing and starving in my car, certain that I was going to die.

 

TNAP: But you didn’t. You made it.

 

FL: (Laughing.) Yep. I lived to fight another day.

 

TNAP: I find it interesting that next to all this doom and gloom are songs like “Be My Exception” that are so purely loving.

 

FL: Well, yeah, that was that light I was talking about earlier. Light and dark validate each other, you know? It’s also part of the story. The same woman “Be My Exception” is begging to be true and strong is the one who betrayed him in “Weight of the World,” abandoned him in “Doomsday Baby,” who hit him in “I Am My Own Salvation.” It’s far more powerful to have the full story – that this guy gave all his love to someone who then hurt him so bad. It’s all there.

 

TNAP: This guy is you, right?

 

FL: Songs are like dreams; they say that every character in your dreams is a reflection of you. Songs are the same way. It’s always me.

 

TNAP: How did the separation from your wife affect this album? What songs tell that story?

 

FL: And all during the separation from my wife, I wrote a great number of love songs for her. Not your traditional love songs, but songs of deep love and regret. Again, it’s all part of the story. Divorce is often spoken about as being so bitter, but it’s the opposite for me. It’s so tender. It just brought out all these delicate feelings in me that I’m still working out.

 

TNAP: What specific songs?

 

FL: “Before I Was Your Enemy” is one. I mean, I can’t hear that song and not cry. I took me dozens of takes to get through it without crying, it’s just so sad. You can hear me crying over the second chorus – my voice was cracking and I couldn’t get through it. How does love go from one point to another? I still don’t get it. It makes you question what love is at all. If it can go away like that, what could it even be? Um, “One Thing Time Hasn’t Touched” was a Valentine’s Day gift for her in 2010, I think. I wrote it because at the time we were in a bad place and I was trying my best to focus on the good – to remember the things that bound us, and to try and move our love into a new age. But it just goes away. Love is destined to go away, sure as you’re born.

 

TNAP: How does “When You Leave Me in the Dust” fit in?

 

FL: Well, that’s a bit of self-loathing in a way. I feel a lot of guilt and regret over the trouble my marriage encountered and “When You Leave Me in the Dust” sums all that up. In essence, I’m saying that I’m not worth it.

 

TNAP: Do you believe that?

 

FL: Yep.

 

TNAP: Listening to your music, really from the start of your career, most of the songs are about women and love. Is that a fair assessment?

 

FL: Yes, I’d say so. Just about all. I can only think of a few songs that I’ve written that weren’t love songs in some form.

 

TNAP: Why?

 

FL: I just write about what I know, and I guess I know love. Or I think I do. Not that I’m an expert, but it’s my focus. It’s where my heart and my mind always tend to go. It’s what moves me. Politics doesn’t move me. Angst and all that, it doesn’t move me. But love moves me.

 

TNAP: How is love reflected on this album?

 

FL: In motion. Its arrival and departure.

 

TNAP: Was it your intention to release such a quiet album amidst all the noise and pomp of today’s scene?

 

FL: Well, first of all, just because it’s sonically quiet doesn’t mean it isn’t loud. The emotions on this record are louder than anything you’ll hear on the radio. Even in the real tender moments, there is tremendous power. I made sure in the mix that all the little breaths and pops in my voice were left in. To me, that’s loud and heavy.

 

TNAP: Do you have any hesitation about releasing such a personal statement as Solitaire in the way you did – 15 songs, 65 minutes? Do you feel like it’s too much?

 

FL: I mean, I had some thoughts of scaling it back to 11, 12 songs if only to make it easier on me. I get your point about 15 songs being a lot to digest in the raw way they’re being presented. But I view music differently than most people. To me, I crave the story. Honestly this record could have been twice as long and still been right because there was a lot of story to tell. At points during this record there were 50 or 60 songs in contention that could have made the cut and that wouldn’t have lowered the album’s standard. Music was pouring out of me and it all fit.

 

TNAP: So what was it about the final 15 songs on the record that got them over the hump?

 

 FL: I went through about 20 incarnations of what the album was going to be. Some were as little as 13 songs, others as much as 30 or 40. In the end, I just chose all the songs that made every incarnation of the album. They were the ones that were never in question. There’s no greater science to it than that, really. They were the ones that I knew would carry the album, so they became the album.

 

TNAP: Are all 15 songs new compositions?

 

FL: Mostly. Most of them were written over the past year-plus

. I tried my best to not tap into old material, but “Wars and Warriors” was the exception. I first recorded that song for Midnight Movie in 2007 but I didn’t love the arrangement and always wanted to re-cut it. Solitaire gave me that chance. That’s the only track that was written outside of my emotional upheaval from the last year but it just fit. It’s probably my favorite lyric of all time as far as what I’ve written. “Leave the winning of wars to warriors. You’re too busy with your toys. You’ve never risen above. You pretend to love but you only destroy.” (Chuckles.) Happy stuff.

 

TNAP: Talk about the piano and now and what it means to you. You seem to have shifted away from the guitar a lot over your last few records.

 

FL: Yeah, I have. I think I just – not to say that I conquered the guitar, but I said so much with it over my career that I was looking for a different voice. The piano is still beyond my grasp so I have to really, really work at it to get it right. That makes me focus a lot more and brings out a different shade of my music.

 

TNAP: A lot of the piano work on this album is beautiful.

 

FL: Thanks, thanks. I just play what I know, which is my usual.

 

TNAP: Who were some influences on this album?

 

FL: Well, Gregg Allman is always the first influence, especially with this type of music. I’d say that David Crosby was a huge influence, too. He’s probably the most underrated figure in music history. His chords and jazz voicings and all are just stellar, man. They knock me out. John Lennon always creeps up in my music – just his melodies and the way he balances the tender with the savage. “Helen of Troy” is a good example of those three influences coming together. Gregg Allman is all over that one, vocally, but the jazziness of the verses is very David Crosby inspired, and the dynamic balance and the simplicity of the melodies is John Lennon all the way.

 

TNAP: That’s a pretty intense song. What is it about on a deeper level?

 

FL: What else? Love. It’s a veiled narrative about the dissolution of a lot of relationships in my life and the way a new one was formed. I’ve always been struck by the story of the Trojan war and how, in essence, it was over a woman. Forgetting the factual basis of that, it’s just a cool story and it always resonated with me. I felt like Paris at the time I wrote the song, just setting out to claim what he wanted and everyone else be damned. I knew I would be starting a war but I forged ahead anyway. But this is Helen’s story, really. I always wondered what the real Helen of Troy would have been thinking as Paris came towards her and they both knew the consequences of their actions but did it anyway.

 

TNAP: Care to elaborate on how it relates to your life?

 

FL: Not particularly. (Laughs.) I just went through a lot last year, a whole lot of romantic drama included. But it’s all there if you listen closely.

 

TNAP: So, what’s next?

 

FL: Everytime I answer this question and then look back at my answer I feel like an idiot. (Laughs.) I never stand by anything I say so what I’m about to say is probably meaningless. (Laughs.) But I am definitely doing the next Cat Cosmai record. We’re actually most of the way through writing it, and now are going to start cutting demos and just seeing how it all sounds. That should be a summer thing; Spring into Summer. After that, I’m working on something ambitious. I sort of like that; I like albums that are events, and my solo career gives me the chance to do that. Cat’s albums are all so focused and precise that it gives me the chance to be wild and expansive with mine. So my next one, as it stands now, is going to be a multi-disc set, just sort of my run through the many forms of American music. It’s still taking shape but it’s probably going to be an album of soul/blues stuff, an album of country/folk, one pop/rock and probably a jazz/instrumental disc. I just have such a back log of music and I want to get it out of the way. I am trying this whole “start fresh” thing in my life and I want to reflect in my music, too. I want to get all these songs out of the way so for my NEXT album, I can sit down and have nothing in front of me; nothing to lean on.

 

I’m looking at a whole lot of nothing in my future and I kinda like it.