Andy Timmons has done it all, rock stardom with Danger Danger, jazz fusion with Simon Phillips, and an instrumental solo career that has touched on a multitude of genres. He is back with a new solo record, Recovery, that is among the best work of his career. Andy recently took some time to talk about this ambitious record. I will note that there were some technical difficulties during the interview.
Please press the PLAY icon for the MisplacedStraws Andy Timmons interview –
On the origins of Recovery – This this is basically, an offshoot of the record I did with Josh Smith producing called Electric Truth. I called Josh one day out of the blue I got his information, and I was seeing him on YouTube and became a fan just reached out and we were having this really friendly chat, he said “Man, you should come out and record at my studio”. Most people go, “Yeah, let’s get together, buddy”, but I could tell he’s just kind of a no BS kind of guy. It really sounds like a great idea because I was a fan of his playing, but I was also equally a fan of the bands that he would record with, the bands I always saw him playing with, there was a certain feel and a certain thing that I really resonated with.
So, it was exciting to me. I’ve got my own band and they’re irreplaceable for what we do, but I’ve always been happiest going from Simon Phillips, Olivia Newton, John, I like doing different things because it pulls different things out of your playing. So, we agreed, “Let’s do a record” I thought, “Well, I’ll write some stuff”, and he wrote some stuff with me and for me. It just was a really joyous time. That was the record that became Electric Truth, with Lamar Carter on drums Travis Carlton on bass, and Deron Johnson on keyboards.
Fast forward to a couple years later Josh is coming through town with Joe Bonamassa and he’s got this thing, he loves to find the best barbecue places all over the country. He’s seen this thing about this place in Fort Worth. It’s like out by where the junkyards are and they’re only open two days a week. So, he’s excited cause he’s coming to Dallas. He’s going to get an Uber at seven in the morning to drive out to this place, cause you got to sit in line. They open at 10 and then when things sell out, that’s it. So, you gotta go early. I said, “Dude, you’re not going to take an Uber. I’m going to come pick you up. We’re gonna get barbecue”. Great. So, I pick him up It’s maybe it’s like 7 30 in the morning, Sunday morning. We’re driving out to Fort Worth, I had to pick him up in downtown Dallas. It’s gonna take us an hour to get there. Halfway there, we’re just cruising along. There’s nobody barely on the road, but there’s this guy, comes up from behind us, decides he’s missing his exit, pulls out in front of us, and I almost miss him, but I clipped, I clipped his rear left bumper. Both cars can’t drive. We’re on the side of the road. I’m like, “Great”. But my first thought was, “Josh, get an Uber. You got to get to the barbecue place”. That was literally my first thoughts. I just crunched the front end of my car. I was more worried about his barbecue, but we’re still, we’re still waiting for the police, and we give a statement, the wrecker comes and well, we’re, we’re both fine.
The other guy was undocumented, uninsured, but the police got him and he’s whatever, not a big deal insurance covered everything, but we’re fine. But the wife comes to pick us up and we’re like, “Well, the car just went to the auto repair place. Let’s go get the barbecue”. Anyway, we did. So, my wife drives us, and we get there in time. We had the barbecue, but as we’re waiting for the wrecker to come, I said, “Man, Josh, what do you think about making another record?” He goes, “Yeah, let’s do it”. So, after a car wreck, before barbecue is when the idea for Recovery, which is an appropriate title, was born.
He’s been so busy, if you know about Josh, he’s an incredible player in his own right, but he tours with Joe Bonamassa and they are also producing a bunch of records and they’re doing such a service for the blues community because producing records for Larry McCray and, and Eric Gales, just some of the great guitar, heroes we have in the blues rock world. But Josh found some time for me. We recorded at the same studio. Same band. It’s kind of Electric Truth part two, but this one’s a bit more, I decided not to cater as much to Josh’s world. I just wrote the songs that I thought would be cool for the band and it’s a bit more rock It’s a bit more my fingerprints as opposed to heading a direction out of intent. This is just let it happen, but with those players and really proud of how it turned out, so there we are. That’s the car wreck barbecue story of how the record started.
On what the title Recovery means to him – The beauty of instrumental music is it can kind of mean a million things to a million different people. That’s what I love about instrumental music, but Recovery is obviously a multidimensional term, and it means a lot of things personally to me/ Starting with, if you think about substance with alcohol or even pharmaceutical things that, might be prescribed to you over time that become very addictive. Sometimes are very difficult to recover from it. All those things were issues for me at one time in my life. I’ve been through cancer. I’m 11 years in the clear cancer wise. But I think it’s just recovery also means just healing. I think that especially people that are of a more sensitive level or have empathic nature, life is a little harder and they feel deeper highs and lows. I would be included in that, but everybody in life, there’s things every day that we’re having to kind of negotiate and recover from, be it whatever’s happening in the world. Certainly, it’s a heavy, busy time and in this atmosphere we live in.
I do like the fact that it is about healing and that refers specifically to my life in that, music has always been that for me. It’s always been kind of a healing thing. It can make you feel great and lift you up even when you’re already doing great. I love that about it. I used to put on the first Montrose record before every gig when I was growing up. Get me pumped up. There’s nothing better than that record, or the deep emotional stuff, be a Jeff Beck or Chopin and things that can just touch your heart in a real special way. Or the Beatles for me has always been kind of this big security blanket around my life. It’s always been there. I’ve always gone to it. I still do. When I’m writing music and especially also recording and performing, all that emotion and all the things that I’ve gotten from music throughout my life goes into it. People will say to me that they get certain emotional things from my music, I’m complimented and I’m honored by that, but I also understand it because it’s very much coming directly from that place for me/ The more that I write, the more that I play, the less the less distance there is for me in the instrument and the music, it’s just more of an extension, I’m not having to navigate it with much, as much difficulty in having that connection with the sound, the string and, and the emotional, intention. I don’t mean to make that sound a high and mighty or, or overly analytical, but it’s just the truth. It’s how Jeff Beck kept getting better and better over the years. I’m not comparing myself to him, but he is a guiding light in the way that he kept evolving and he kept improving and he kept finding ways of expressing on the guitar that that really hadn’t been done in that way. I think he scratched the surface of what’s possible. That’s the beauty of the evolution.
The electric guitar is a relatively young instrument, really just coming to the fore in the 40s and 50s. So, we’re still finding, finding things. The electrical part of it is part of the things that help get different sounds and finding ways of what does he want to express. For me, it’s the emotion of the touch of a single string, what that can do, but for some, it’s creating soundscapes and all these different ways of expression. So, Recovery, it’s meant to feed into that and hopefully provide that atmosphere to help with healing for myself initially, but all for other people to get the energy from tracks like “Recovery” or “Between Brothers” or to feel what’s going on, “Where Did You Go” or “Why Must It Be So”, or “Arizona Sunset”, which is very much a tribute to my family. I grew up in Evansville, Indiana, but I was born in Scottsdale, Arizona. So, I have Arizona roots till I was five, my earliest memories are there.
On his songs being more compositions than traditional songs – That’s a great observation. I appreciate that. There was a time I was a classical major my first two years of college in Evansville, Indiana. Not out of “I want to be a classical guitarist”. It was out of wanting to keep mom happy and stay in school That’s all I could find as a guitar major in my area. But it proved to be a wonderful experience because I got exposed to all this classical music that I hadn’t experienced any outside of Warner Brothers cartoons, “Minute Waltz”, that was my exposure, but if it wasn’t distorted guitar or jazz guitar, I wasn’t that interested. I did love the sound of the classical guitar and repertoire and learning, Bach violin partias on the guitar. But again, I was Mike Stern and Pat Metheny and all the rock stuff, Steve Lukather was what I was after at the time. But as you mature and your taste evolve, I started seeking out and very much got into Chopin in the last decade.
There’s a whole body of work that I’ve written called the “Outlier Nocturnes” and very much inspired by my love of Chopin’s Nocturnes. Not that I write as, I don’t know what’s the word, complicated and I’m writing shorter themes, but ones that draw very much from the emotion I get from those particular passages that Chopin wrote. “Elegy for Jeff” is kind of an offshoot for that. It was written as a solo piece, but then Jeff Babko, who I used to work with with Simon Phillips, really put some beautiful 70s-ish, did a beautiful job supporting what I had done. But there’s a whole body of solo work.
One, one song that’s gotten some traction online is called “Here Lies the Heart”, which I, I had played a version of when I was on That Pedal Show with Dan and Nock. I played this song, I was just demoing a sound with my Halo Keeley this piece called “Here Lies the Heart”, and I was just gonna play half of it. I look over and I see Dan just wrapped in what I was doing, so I kept going. I finished the piece, and he was in tears, and we had to stop filming. It was a very, very, very sweet moment because it had touched him, it was just the right music at the right time, and it just, it affected him. Now that people that watch that episode, they call it, “Oh, that’s the song that made Dan cry”. Nobody knows that it’s called “Here Lies the Heart”. But that type of, that type of writing, and it is, I guess it’s classical in in some ways, the romantic era that Chopin wrote in. But I just think of it all as music, like everything that I do, it comes from a lot of different places.
I’m primarily a rock guitar player, people would probably call me, but it’s hugely informed by all these other influences. Very non rock, especially all that I got from jazz and how that influences my note, my note choices and my melodic intention. Because you have to navigate all these chord changes instead of here’s shred in A, which is valid and it’s a great thing to be able to do. But the players that I was gravitating towards, when you think of the Lukather’s and the Carlton’s and the Ford’s and all the jazz guys, Wes Bentley and Joe Pass, there’s very much an intention to the line, there’s an arc to everything and there’s a pathway and that’s when I write and when I improvise, that’s the guiding factor.
It starts with great songs, meaning those songs I’ve learned from and try to write, but also, each solo is a composition within itself, whether it’s improvised or actually composed, it’s the same intent. We’re just trying to play or write what it is we want to hear/ I think as an improviser, I’m going to blame it on jet lag, but it’s probably not jet lag. It’s just I need another coffee. Your improvisation is the same as the composition. Cause it’s just, what would, what would we really like to hear? What would turn us on the most or be reflective of what we’re feeling in the time. That’s always the goal. If I’m getting some of that into the Recovery record that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do.
On if instrumental music is better received outside of the US – I don’t know. That’s, that’s a good question. I think there’s fans for this music everywhere. We have just tended to tour outside the States just because there’s been more opportunity and offers to do so. For me, it’s been the path of least resistance. I’ve never really had management or booking agents. It’s just people along the way that goes, “Why aren’t you coming to Italy?” “Well, book me some shows”. Okay. Ricardo Capelli is our talent promoter. He just started doing it back in the middle 2000s because why wasn’t Alan Holdsworth coming? Why hadn’t Eric Johnson been there? Scott Henderson? So, he started just booking tours for these people. He’s gotten very great at getting these grassroots kind of tours put together. The same with all the Asian stuff. I’ve got a promoter that’s based in in Croatia, but it’s facilitated a bunch of tours to those Asian countries, but I’ve been going a lot to Asia since Danger Danger. We first toured there in 1990. There’s been growing fan bases everywhere. What’s really been rewarding is just to kind of see that.
I very much kind of conducted my career on my own terms, meaning that after Danger Danger, I realized, “Oh, you know what? Being on a major label isn’t necessarily the Holy grail that we thought it was.” It can be a nice thing, but you’re a commodity and it’s a business and it’s a corporate thing. It had nothing to do with what I wanted to do with my life. I just wanted to be a better musician. I want to hopefully gain respect from my peers and my heroes and continue to grow. Some people get frustrated with me that I’m not always touring, but that’s not necessarily a healthy lifestyle. As I get old, I’m 61 now, like I said, we had a fantastic time in Italy and now we’re going to Southeast Asia and it’s an honor to be able to go, and it’s been really rewarding. I recognize each time I travel, there’s more and more recognition of my work and just me in general with the guitar audiences, and it’s because of all the, the presence on social media and YouTube, some of which I foster. I’m not a great self-promoter, but a lot of it’s just materials that other people are spreading and sharing my music. It’s been a really kind of organic thing over the years.
I always say that YouTube, that’s our MTV. Where we used to be on the radio, you used to have to be on MTV. I’m going back to ancient times, but when Danger, Danger, that was very much what was necessary, but now, the machinations of a big company with money can get things to a higher level and have more fame and money. But it’s never been about that for me. I’m happy that I figured out ways of making a living and it’s by doing a lot of different things, but it’s all based on the music that I want to produce and that I want to do. I’m eternally thankful that there’s enough people that care about it, that want to support it.
I think that’s all that any artist could ever hope for. I’m just very, very grateful. Then thank you, whoever’s watching right now, and thank you for doing the interview. This is all part of what I get to keep doing what I do and I’m loving it more now than ever. Getting back to touring versus actually recording and making music. I want to get out and do enough shows, stay out there. But I’m also aware of there’s a lot more music I want to be producing. I think that in the long-term is going to be more valuable.
