Denver Post Interview
By G.
Brown ~ July 13, 2001
Denver Post Popular Music
Writer
Dan Fogelberg's heavily sentimental singer-songwriter style
has always
been more popular with audiences than with critics.
And what his devoted
following wants now is solo acoustic tours
- his current trek will bring him to
the Paramount Theatre on
Monday night.
"It's funny how things in your life occur and you just go
where it
feels right," Fogelberg said recently.
"It all grew out of a finger injury that I had back in '96
- I didn't
know if I'd ever perform again. Since then, my
love of playing acoustic music
has gone through the roof.
Most of the music that I've written in the last five
years is
all acoustic as well. I've reconnected with an appreciation
of what it
is to play and sing. It's such a pure experience."
Fogelberg never liked the star-making machinery of the
West Coast, so the
"quiet man of music," to borrow one of
his better-known lyrics, moved
to Colorado in the mid-'70s.
"Living far away from the madness of Los Angeles has
allowed me to
focus on what's real in life - so music is a joy,
a pleasure," he said.
"I've done a lot of hard work in the
last 10 years, but it hasn't been the
mainstream stuff I was
known for. I did a jazzy instrumental thing with Tim
Weisberg,
and then a Christmas album, and then a live album last year.
And the
boxed set."
That would be "Portrait,"
the 4-CD, 62-song collection of 1997.
"That was my baby - produced and compiled it, did the
artwork, the
whole nine yards. But we discussed eventually
releasing an updated greatest hits
on a single disc. Not
everybody's going to want to spend $60. There are more
casual listeners who say, "Well, I'd really love to have those
radio
songs.'"
So "The Very Best of Dan Fogelberg" has arrived in stores,
a
single-CD compilation that spans his 1974 debut hit "Part
of the Plan"
to the nine consecutive Top 30 hits he released
from 1980 to 1984 -
"Longer," "Heart Hotels," "Same Old
Lang Syne,"
"Hard to Say," "Leader of the Band," "Run
for the
Roses," "Missing You," "Make Love Stay" and
"The
Language of Love."
Is a rehash necessary? Yep - the material was digitally
remastered.
"They got into the original master mixes, which I didn't have
access
to for "Portrait.' I had worked hard to get the music to
sound good for CD,
but this is fantastic."
Fogelberg spent last winter in his home studio crafting his
first album of
original pop tunes since 1993's worldbeat
-influenced "River of Souls,"
and he hopes to finish it for
release next spring. It will sell well to a core
of fans,
but he knows his commercial appeal has evaporated.
"It's got to be tough for younger musicians now, because the
scope of
what's commercial is so narrow - radically different
than in my day, when
diversity was celebrated. It's so
conforming, stamped out of a press - the bands
all look and
sound the same, you can't tell one rap artist from the next,
and
the little teen divas are hard to distinguish. But these are
the biggest-selling
things by far.
"But I and Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt have cultivated
careers
where we don't rely on radio. We had our hits, but now
it's an educated audience
- they chose music, music wasn't chosen
for them."