When John Oates originally wrote “Maneater” and presented it to Daryl Hall, the duo’s 1982 hit was initially a reggae song.
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“Back in the ’80s, I went on a trip to Jamaica and came back with that vibe,” remembers Oates. “I came up with a hook and wrote it as a reggae song. When I got together with Daryl, he convinced me that a different groove might be more successful, and he was right.”
Shifting toward a more Motown groove, per Hall’s suggestion, the song hit No. 1 where it remained for four weeks. Now, 40 years later, Oates revisited his original version of the song and traveled back to Jamaica to re-record “Maneater” with producer Wayne Johnson and a collective of reggae legends.
In Kingston, Oates recorded “Reggae Maneater” with Toots and the Maytals, guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith (who played with Bob Marley), the late bassist Chris Meredith (who played with late Wailer Peter Tosh and was a member of the Ziggy Marley and The Melody Makers and Stephen Marley bands for many years), and Sly and Robbie drummer Sly Dunbar.
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“It was like an all-star reggae rhythm section,” says Oates. “I spent a week down there recording with them, and it was a really crazy experience.”
“Reggae Maneater” is one in a batch of songs Oates began recording during the pandemic and plans to release digitally, one per month, throughout 2023. The singer has no intention of featuring the tracks on a final album.
Oates gathered a collection of singles throughout the pandemic. In between his two-man shows in Nashville with Guthrie Trapp and composing several songs for the 2023 Claudia S. Murray-helmed film Gringa, following the story of a troubled teen girl who flees Mexico in search of the father she never knew, he worked on the new music.
First releasing the uplifting “Pushin’ A Rock,” which was used to help bring awareness to World Mental Health Month in October 2022, the song also prompted Oates to grow back his mustache for the first time in 30 years during Movember, an annual event involving the growing of mustaches during the month of November to raise awareness of men’s health issues.
Rummaging through old song notes, writing new ones, and reconnecting with a number of classics during the pandemic, Oates reworked “Disconnected.” The song is a self-explanatory narrative of life during this locked-down period. When I think about the past / I think about love and life / Obsess about the things that went wrong from right / Hindsight should’ve been plain to see / Thought it never could’ve happened to you and me, sings Oates on the soul-filled track he recorded entirely on his own, including all the backing vocals, which were never rerecorded in the studio.
“I wrote ‘Disconnected’ during COVID, and the title pretty much says it all,” he says. “We’re all disconnected—physically, mentally, socially. It felt very timely and on the money.”
Recording most of the songs on his laptop using GarageBand, Oates later fleshed out his demos with an ensemble of musicians in Nashville. “There’s nothing worse than walking in the studio with musicians and trying to make them understand what’s in your mind,” says Oates, who brought fairly completed demos into the studio. “There’s nothing worse than saying, ‘Well, you know, if it had a purple field here,’ or ‘I see a sunset on the field.’ I’m just not that artsy fartsy, so I fleshed it all out.”
He adds, “I could play it for them and go, ‘Look, guys, this is the vibe. This is what we’re going for. Now, let’s make it real.’”
Befriending lyricist Joe Henry, who composed songs for Frank Sinatra and John Denver, the two were drawn to tell the story of the folk and blues duo of harmonica player Sonny Terry and singer Brownie McGhee. On “Sonny Terry Brownie McGhee,” Oates recounts the story of the pair, who performed together from 1939 through the ’70s, and their friendship, which deteriorated over time. Though they bantered like old friends on their 1973 album Sonny & Brownie, the two only communicated with one another while on stage, yet Terry’s blindness and McGhee losing his ability to walk over time forced both men to help one another on stage.
“They needed each other,” says Oates of his song. “One had to lead the other to get on stage, and they would play together. I thought, ‘What an amazing story,’ and it’s a metaphor for something greater.”
Keeping “Too Late to Break Your Fall” intact since he first wrote and recorded it in the late 1990s, Oates gave the decades-old track a musical refresh. “I recorded it, but it didn’t come out right, and I knew it could be better,” shares Oates. “I didn’t rewrite it. The song is essentially the same as the original version. I just played it better, and I got a better band.”
The plaintive acoustic ballad “All I Am” was co-written with Boston-based songwriter Adam Ezra. Here we are at one’s road’s end / You and me hand in hand … Stepping steady through shifting sand / In the end that’s all I am, Oates sings on the track.
The elevating “Get Your Smile On” was another track recorded completely on GarageBand. For the track, Oates overdubbed all the vocals and played each instrument.
In his storybook of singles, Oates also revisited Timmy Thomas’ 1972 soul hit “Why Can’t We Live Together.” When Thomas originally wrote the song, covered by Steve Winwood, Sade, Santana, and Joan Osborne among other artists, it was in response to his distress over hearing about the extensive loss of life—American and Viet Cong—during the Vietnam War. The title track of Thomas’ album, it was also the first record, historically, to feature a drum machine in place of a drummer. Thomas also melded organ, which Oates removed in place of added harmonies for his softer rock rendering, inspired by the war in Ukraine.
“That song is just as valid, if not more important today,” says Oates, “and a lot of people, especially the younger generation, don’t know it.”
John Oates (Photo by Juan Patino Photography)
Throughout his renditions are reimagined arrangements, including picking up the tempo on a bossa nova-style cover of the Bob Thiele and George David Weiss-penned “What a Wonderful World.”
“I recorded that in a very ’70s style,” says Oates of the Louis Armstrong classic. “It was done the way that Daryl [Hall] and I made records back in the early 1970s, with a very live rhythm section—live in the room—and I wanted to capture that vibe.”
Bringing in a jazzier swing, Oates co-wrote “When Carolina Comes Home Again” with Jim Lauderdale as an “old-timey” English ballad. “There’s no real chorus,” says Oates. “There’s no real verse. It’s a series of stanzas, which is a very old-fashioned format.”
Wendy Moten, the Season 21 runner-up on the television series The Voice who has worked with Oates over the years, is featured as a backing vocalist on his calypso-fused “A Place Called Love” and the more samba-driven “Dreaming About Brazil.”
Brushing on multiple genres, Oates says all of the new singles are also socially conscious. “I wanted to do something that had some semblance of social consciousness that was beyond ‘I love you, you love me,’” says Oates. “‘Pushin’ a Rock’ was about overcoming struggle. Everyone has a struggle, regardless of who you are, and where you are in life, and I wanted to comment on that.”
Dropping singles digitally was a natural shift for Oates, who after years of going the traditional, more tangible route of releasing new music, is embracing the new auditory transference.
“I learned my lesson carrying around CDs during my live shows,” says Oates of previous attempts at offering something more tangible to fans. “I’d go out on tour with boxes of CDs, and I’d come home with boxes of CDs. I’ve got a whole storage locker full of CDs, vinyl, and T-shirts. People just don’t want anything physical. The world has changed radically.”
Each track will be released without a physical product accompanying each single, but Oates admits there’s been a learning curve while navigating the digital music market. “It’s really fascinating for me to learn a whole new way of thinking, and break out of that old school record company paradigm where you’ve got the label and you’ve got radio,” he says. “That system is broken.”
In some ways, music has reverted back to the beginning, says Oates, when some of the earliest records, 78s, ran for three to five minutes on one side. “We’re going right back to the beginning,” says Oates. “It’s a singles world now.” Everything shifted around the first long-playing record, introduced by Columbia in 1948, recounts Oates.
“I go back to the earliest days of American pop music, which I define by the birth of radio and the birth of the record player,” he says. “When you think about it in terms of a timeline, it hasn’t really been that long. American popular music has been recorded, and you can’t really separate American pop music from technology. They’re one in the same. There is no American pop music without radio and records. They go hand in hand and it’s really interesting to see how it’s evolved.”
More than five decades since his 1972 debut with Daryl Hall, Whole Oats, and throughout the duo’s 18 albums together, multiple collaborations, and his own solo catalog, songwriting falls into two categories for Oates: divine inspiration and craftsmanship.
“They’re both valid, and they’re both necessary,” says Oates. “The divine inspiration is the thing that we all as songwriters hope and pray for. It doesn’t often come but when it does, you’ve got to capture that. And you’ve got to capture that unfiltered and adulterated.”
In the perfect world, there’s a completed song that flows out of you like magic, he says. “And other times it’s the seed, the core that you hang on to and go, ‘How am I gonna turn this into something greater than the sum of its parts?’” says Oates. “That’s where the craftsmanship part comes in.”
There’s something to the old cliché of “writing is rewriting,” according to Oates, when it comes to craftsmanship.
“I’m a big fan of rewriting,” he says. “I like to really hone in, lyrically. I want to make sure that I can get the most concise lyrics, especially when you’re working within the pop idiom—you don’t have a lot of time.”
Still humble, despite selling more than 40 million albums with Daryl Hall and the duo’s multiple No. 1 hits, Oates believes he’s a much better songwriter now. “I have more experience to pull from, and I’ve focused on different things now,” he says. “I’m more conscious of the melody than I’m singing, and of the keys that I’m writing in that suit my voice better. It’s all the subtleties, really.
“Overall, it’s still the same thing,” Oates adds. You hope for the divine inspiration. When it comes, you take advantage of it, and when it doesn’t, you just work really hard.”
Photo by David McLister
