The ferry ride from West Seattle to Vashon Island only takes about fifteen minutes, but once there it feels like you're days away from the bustle of downtown Seattle. And there must be some kind of time warp in effect, because a recent lunchtime conversation with songwriter Danny O'Keefe was over practically before I knew it. It was as if time had stepped on a banana peel and slipped by quicker than one can say "Double cappuccino."
O'Keefe has been dancing with the muse for more than 30 years--it's hard to believe that his "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" dates from the early 1970s--and his reddish brown hair and weekend stubble are shot through with gray. His eyes, though, are incredibly alive and alert, and one senses there's nary a nuance that he doesn't pick up on. They're the clear blue eyes of the storyteller and songwriter, eyes that read emotions and hidden meaning like most people read street signs. And when he's passionate about the subject at hand, one swears that if the room were dark it would take on a bluish cast from the intensity of his gaze.
While convalescing from a nasty motorcycle accident in his early 20s, O'Keefe thought hard about what he wanted to do with his life. "I found that songwriting alleviates the day-to-day tedium," he says, "and satisfies that urge to be creative that many people haven't been allowed to explore, or have been told that they don't have--which is the biggest lie that gets sold to us by the system at large. Woody Guthrie said everybody should write a song."
Writing effectively from different perspectives is one hallmark of a seasoned songwriter, and a good example of O'Keefe's ability in this regard is the song "Only an Ocean Away" on his latest CD, Runnin' from the Devil (Miramar Recordings). "Sometimes you have to think of yourself through another--that's part and parcel of the creative process. That song is the result of many conversations I had with Vietnam veterans who still struggle with the emotions of serving their country in an unpopular war. A lot of them left children there, and that longing of not being able to find your child is what motivated me."
Of course, as a songwriter and poet O'Keefe also uses metaphor to provide fresh insights when writing about oft-plied topics like affairs of the heart. "Who's that woman? It's Magdalena. She's an icon, a metaphor for all other women. Maybe there's an element that's very real and personal, but she's Mary Magdalene. She's the sainted whore. She's that analogy that you'll work to death if you're not careful. But you can't help the use of metaphors. They're part of the archetypal set of structures that are the common language from which all other language is predicated."
"You need to invest metaphors with feelings from your own real experience," O'Keefe continues, "because it's the feeling that really counts. If you can invoke the feeling of a key experience that you don't have adequate words for, you'll make that connection with your audience--because that's what they're really there for. They're making their song up as you sing yours."
When asked about the difference between songwriting and poetry, O'Keefe says he thinks music fills something that words themselves can't. "Songs give you space, and within that space they give you emotional context. How do you describe something that's more feeling than vision? In the synthesis of eye and ear, the beautiful thing about the music is that it holds you. You can do things with a song that you can't do with a poem on the page."
Although long considered a solo singer/songwriter, O'Keefe wrote most of the songs on Runnin' from the Devil with other people. "When you're writing for yourself, there's a consistency to it. But when you write with someone else, for me there's something new musically, which is really great. It's like somebody brought a new color for your palette."
O'Keefe also likes to finish songs fairly quickly. "Once I get an idea, I usually charge through it. I tend to stay on it, because it's like something unknown that's revealing itself to me, and I want to see it." And as for the eerie experience many songwriters report of transcribing songs out of the ether instead of writing them, O'Keefe says he knows it happens. ""Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" is a classic example. It pretty much wrote itself in 45 minutes."
The guitar is O'Keefe's writing instrument. "I tried to learn piano, and couldn't get my hands to work independently--probably just an old-dog-new-tricks deal. But there's also something about the embrace of the guitar that makes it a unique instrument for writing."
At least two of the songs on Runnin' from the Devil deal with dreams and aspirations, including "Can't Outrun the Years" and "Never Got Off the Ground" (the latter co-written with David Mallett). Some have called O'Keefe's music haunting, fatalistic, even depressing. When asked, O'Keefe acknowledges such opinions "but I don't really think of my songs as sad. They're descriptions of life and living, particularly the songs on this record. Writing for me is a form of therapy, and I do exorcise demons with it. A lot of times the investment that you make in the performance of a song that's moving--not necessarily sad--generates a powerful enough emotion for it to become liberating. And it can be liberating for the audience, too."
O'Keefe has been strongly influenced by jazz music. "One of the most epiphanous moments I ever had was when I was, I think, a junior in high school, and some hip college freshman played Miles Davis' Kind of Blue for us. It was extraordinary. It connected me to all the jazz that my father had loved, which was really pre-1940s jazz, and it still does. It's a record that I have never tired of--and I can't really say that of anything else. I've also been influenced by Nino Rota's music from the Fellini films."
At the end of our conversation I couldn't resist asking O'Keefe about a song that has long haunted me. "Just Jones" (from the 1977 Warner Bros. album American Roulette) includes the lines:
The voice is a marvelous instrument
So is the heart and the brain
So's the fire and so's the wind
and especially the rain
Especially the rain
"There are masks that you use. My father's definitely in it, although it isn't about him. It's about the emotion of his death, but I don't know if I succeeded with that song as well as I'd have liked," says O'Keefe. "It was also about the older couple, looking up at the ceiling, not being able to speak to each other. That was Jones in the song, looking down at me, not being able to speak. It's that inability to communicate that walls us off from ourselves and others."
O'Keefe's name may not be widely known, but the fact that his songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Judy Collins, and Alison Krauss as well as significant songwriters like Jackson Browne and Willie Nelson is a testament to both his songwriting ability and his insight into the human psyche.