Interview by Joan Harris

Extended Interview

[This interview is not yet published]

In this exclusive interview, Joan Harris sits down with David Rabinow to discuss the journey behind his latest album, the inspiration behind The Rabinettes, and the stories woven into his music. Gain insight into the creative process, the challenges, and the triumphs that shaped David Rabinow and The Rabinettes.

My Friend Parky was a deeply personal look at his journey with Parkinson’s disease. But, while the new album has a song tribute to Michael J Fox and another to Carly Simon and Linda Rondstat, it is decidedly not about PD. “Return” is a collection of fourteen songs that explore his most personal thoughts, often in a stream of  consciousness.The songs are performed in a variety of R&B and soul styles from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

I had the chance to visit with David via Zoom in his home studio.

 

Joan: I’ve been listening to your music on Spotify. It’s an impressive collection. To get started, your new album is called Return of the Rabinettes. Who are the Rabinettes?

 

David: That’s my band. It consists of 12 musicians who coincidentally have the same surname.

 

Joan: Seriously?

 

David: No not seriously.  The Rabinettes are my virtual band. I’ve given them the given names of my ancestors. I’ve been using that name for years.

 

Joan: You’ve said that your music uses Ai extensively. Is your work Ai Music?

 

David: No. I prefer Ai assisted music. When I did “Parky” I spent two years putting that together. I spent innumerable hours trying to replace the Suno tracks with my own guitar or keyboards or bass or whatever else I could create myself. And the poor quality of Suno, at that time, still comes through on the album.

 

Joan: And now. Is it “Ai” music?

 

David: it’s not. I wrote the lyrics, worked out the melody and recorded a demo track with guitar, piano, maybe drums, maybe bass and my vocal.

 

I upload that to Suno and then it’s Suno’s turn to collaborate. Suno doesn’t always do what it’s told. In fact, prompts to get a decent result are really extensive and still you need to run as many as a hundred iterations of the same song to get something good.

 

And then when I’m done I download the stems or tracks and put it into my DAW to mix and master it and if there’s a guitar solo, I record that. Unfortunately my guitar playing isn’t very good  these days. So what I do is record the guitar solo as well as I can, then upload it to Suno and Suno usually plays my guitar parts, only they clean up the mistakes and wrong notes. And usually also it adds a few embellishments that might not have played.

 

It’s kind of funny. Suno’s quality and capabilities have grown at about the same rate that my skills have declined. The quality right now is pretty good. It sounds really good in my car, on my TV, in my ear buds. It wouldn’t stand up under critical listening with studio monitors but I think most people will find the quality pretty good.

 

Joan: Your first album was about your experience with Parkinson’s. This new one doesn’t seem quite as focused on PD.

 

David: No I wanted to broaden my market a little. It still leans heavily towards baby boomers and some of the issues of aging that are also issues for people with Parkinson’s. But for the most part they’re just songs I like. And I hope you do too.

 

Joan: You’ve created a lot of music in the last few years. That’s very impressive and the new album has fourteen songs. How do you manage to do that.

 

David: Well they’re not all new songs. There are a couple from Parky that I reimagined to fit the style of this one. There’s also a song I wrote many years ago and two covers.

 

Joan: Covers?

 

David: A couple of songs that kind of fit this album and they’re songs I love.. Little Milton’s 1965 hit “We’re Gonna Make It”, is a song that was perfect to bridge the Soul music with Blues. It’s a great song and it’s been covered by a lot of people.

The other cover is a song by one of my all time favorite bands, The Fabulous Rhinestones. A tragically under appreciated band their first single “What A Wonderful Thing We Have” was their first single but it only got some regional play in the northeast but not enough to make the charts.

I was fortunate enough to see them in local clubs many times. Most of the members have passed. I wanted to do the song as a tribute.

 

Joan: You have a couple of Parkinson’s songs that are very interesting.

 

David: Michael J Fox is my hero. I love everything he’s ever done. Back To The Future, Family Ties and his four books are fantastic. And the Michael J Fox Foundation is an amazing thing. I think they’ve done more research on Parkinson’s than all the others combined.

Carly Simon recently disclosed her diagnosis. And somehow that made me think of the summer of seventy five. The album covers of Carly and Linda Rondstat. another person with Parkinson’s had a profound impact on a lot of young men that year.

That song is actually a song I recorded six years ago and it is totally reimagined by Ai. The guitar is virtually note for note but the arrangement blows my mind.

 

Joan Harris is an independent journalist who appears in Rolling Stone, Atlanta New and others.