Blue Sky Riders

“Emerging from an era when most successful bands’ members “went solo,” Santa Barbara’s favorite son, two-time Grammy winner Kenny Loggins, has “gone band.”

“Loggins has bucked traditional wisdom about the game plan for seasoned veterans in this “young man’s game,”braving the market as part of a new band called Blue Sky Riders, and launching a new label for their debut album. His co-Riders are singer/songwriters Gary Burr, the guy you’d want backing you up in a bar, musically and otherwise; and Georgia Middleman, the lady all the guys in the bar would be fighting over. Their album, “Finally Home” is a relentless surge of optimism outrunning skepticism, of dreams outgunning doubts, and tuneful parries of any voice that would inject a seed of doubt. (more…)

Now that Georgia and I are safely home from the tour it’s a good time to reflect and appreciate just how much fun we had this summer. Our last show (Just for a while. We’re not going anywhere so stop panicking. It’s embarrassing.) was in Baltimore and Baltimore made sure that we finished up with the proverbial “bang.”  There’s something about a last show that has great energy. You sing a little harder cause you know that you don’t have to sing for a while so if small bits of your larynx comes flying out on the high notes… you have plenty of time to fix it. You run around the stage a little more because you know you have the next day to sit on a plane and rub your knees and say to yourself “What am I? Ninety?” (more…)

One of the most fun parts of all this hullabaloo is being onstage and just riffing with the audience. Mostly we have no idea what we are going to say between songs. I really love that. The problem is that we occasionally say something that really kills the audience and then it’s hard not to want to do that “bit” every night in the same place. I always remember I saw a famous star perform and he screwed up the lyrics in a song and made a joke and everyone laughed and enjoyed the moment. Then a month later I saw the show again and he forgot the same lyric and made the same joke in the same place and the little boy in me that believes in spontaneity died. Then the audience applauded, and just like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, that little boy came to life again… only to die tragically later that same night in an industrial accident. (more…)

Back in the saddle again. Tonight we played the Strand Theater in York, Pennsylvania and it felt great to be back and doing our full opening show. We have been in NYC for the last few days but we have been semi-retired. Kenny had two nights at the City Winery but they don’t have opening acts at that venue so Georgia took another gig in Austin on Monday and flew away. I haunted the city like a sad lonely ghost and had a day and night of being a wandering tourist. I went to the 9/11 Memorial and looked up the name of a friend who died in the first plane. Later in the day (to go from tragic to ridiculous in one paragraph) I went to a terrific place in Soho that sells a million different favors of rice pudding, and I sampled several hundred thousand of them. (more…)