That night, Jason Sinay says, changed his life. When asked to play in a Monday night covers house band in Los Angeles under producer and composer Waddy Wachtel, one evening Sinay found himself onstage with Neil Young. “It was just a great scene, and you never knew who was going to show up,” recalls Sinay. “And I was in the middle of singing ‘Powderfinger’ and noticed him in the audience in the middle of the song.” Young came backstage afterward and asked Sinay to play a song with him, and the two performed Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere track “Down by the River.”
“You never know what’s gonna happen,” Sinay tells American Songwriter. “You never know who’s in the audience. My grandmother used to say, ‘You never know what’s gonna happen when you wake up in the morning.’”
Sinay, who had similar “run-in” performances with the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Jackson Browne on different occasions, went on to record a cover of Young’s Zuma classic “Cortez The Killer” at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles as he was working on his third solo album, The Mountain.
The album came after more than 20 years playing with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs and on two of the band’s albums, Wreckless Abandon (2020) and External Combustion (2022), when Sinay made the difficult choice to leave and work on his own material, just before they were set to play a series of shows with The Who in 2022.
The Los Angeles-based musician says he had more to say, not only as a guitarist but as a singer and songwriter. “Leaving the Dirty Knobs was not easy,” shares Sinay. “It was a really tough decision. I’d been with Mike [Campbell] for 20 years, under his tutelage, and he’s one of my idols, and was one of my best friends, and it was a very emotional and difficult time. I was floundering for a little bit, not really sure what to do musically.”
Videos by American Songwriter
Sinay adds, “When I finally made the decision to put a collection of songs together, I had a lot of internal pressure to finish them and to make them the best I could possibly make them. A lot of it was pressure I was putting on myself. I had a very high bar working with a guy like Mike Campbell. The guy writes a song a day.”
It’s part of the reason why Sinay also decided against including Young’s “Cortez the Killer” on The Mountain. “I’m such a Neil Young fanatic,” he says. “I just didn’t feel worthy putting that song on the record.”
Moving on from being a “side man” was new territory for Sinay, who has performed and/or recorded with Jackson Browne, Bob Weir, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lucinda Williams, Joe Bonamassa, Ivan Neville, and Jeff Lynne, among others. The Mountain was Sinay’s moment to transition into being the frontman and revisit the songs he had written, some dating back several decades.
On the album, Sinay jumps into family, his divorce, and overcoming self-doubts. The Mountain reads like journal entries of songs on heartache, loss, and self-reliance from the opening rootsier “It Was You,” an older track, and into “Play It Alone.” Don’t see the forest for the trees, when you’re down on your knees, Sinay sings on the latter, a phrase he’s related to most during the last several months.
The Americana-moving “History” was another song Sinay started writing decades earlier while in college. “I could just never really quite get it together and get the lyrics together,” says Sinay. “Post-Dirty Knobs, I started pulling all these songs that I’ve been working on and had fragments of, and just completed them. It was challenging to have a piece of music for 25 years, then try to write it again.”
“Picture Perfect” delivers a love song in its simplest form—My Little Firefly / You’re The One For Me / And I’m The One For You, Naturally / In A Frame We Appear—before the outlier harder rocker “Holy Mother,” through “Every Day Every Night,” a song Sinay says closes in on his divorce.
Throughout The Mountain, Sinay crafts a twang he can call his own that continues through the closing “High Plains Drifter,” a song about coming to terms with one’s good and evil sides—and inspired by Clint Eastwood’s 1973 Western High Plains Drifter—through “One of the Few” and the ending title track.
A double album, The Mountain takes a different turn on side two with acoustic versions of all 10 tracks. “I thought, ‘If these songs can stand with an acoustic guitar and a vocal, that means they’re probably okay,’” says Sinay. “So I just started doing it in between sessions. I would go into a different studio and do this acoustic stuff, and it was really challenging, but fun. I fell in love with the songs all over again.”
Sticking to the two-sided structure, Sinay has already recorded 12 more new songs acoustically, which he plans to bring into the studio in the next several months. “I’ve never had a prolific period in my career,” shares Sinay. “This is the first time that I’m actually really writing and getting songs done and feel really good about them. It’s very different than ‘The Mountain.’ They’re raw.”
Still, Sinay is grateful for the musical opening The Mountain has given him. “I’m gonna give the record every chance I can,” he says. “I’m excited that people are going to get to hear these songs, because they’ve been like history in my back pocket for so long. I want people to hear them and enjoy them, and I just hope it makes someone’s day when they hear it. That’s how I feel when I hear a good record. It makes my day.”
Photos: Jeff Stuart Epstein
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.