DAVID KNOPFLER: NAVIGATING HIS OWN MUSICAL STRAITS

Direktlink

Photo By Syd Shelton

By Paul Freeman [May 2013 Interview]

Singer-songwriter-guitarist-pianist David Knopfler, founding member of Dire Straits, has achieved a beautiful intimacy with his latest solo album, “Made In Germany.” It’s a captivating, acoustic, live recording, on which he’s joined by longtime collaborator, guitarist Harry Bogdanovs. The stylistic simplicity is as much a pragmatic choice as it is an artistic one. The naked approach showcases Knopfler’s finely honed songwriting skills.

Knopfler, born in Glasgow, raised in southeast England, began writing songs at age 11. Among his earliest influences were the Bob Dylan albums his older sister brought home from college. By 14, Knopfler was embracing Jimi Hendrix and the energy of rock ‘n’ roll. By the time he could afford to buy his own records, at 17, he was drawn to the songs of James Taylor, Randy Newman, Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Following college, Knopfler served as a social worker in a rough neighborhood, but his passion for music prevailed. He formed a band with flat-mate John Illsley, a bass player, and his own brother, Mark Knopfler. They added drummer Pick Withers and called the foursome Dire Straits.

Their 1978 debut album, ”Dire Straits,” which included the song “Sultans of Swing,” made the band a global sensation. After three years, Knopfler felt it was time to part ways with Dire Straits.

Exhausted, Knopfler took his time, three years, to be exact, before releasing his first solo album, 1983’s “Release.” A dozen acclaimed albums have followed.

Knopfler is accomplished in several areas. He has founded indie record labels and publishing companies. He has scored films and TV projects. A published poet and author, Knopfler is also a lifelong activist, long a member of Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

PCC:
I’ve really been enjoying the ‘Made In Germany’ album.

DAVID KNOPFLER:
It’s just a straight-off-the desk mix, really. It’s not a professionally recorded record. It’s a modern malaise record. The budgets of a 100,000 pounds to make records are, unfortunately, behind us.

PCC:
But you can also benefit from the simplicity and sense of intimacy.

KNOPFLER:
Yeah, you work with the limitations and you try to work them to your advantage as best you can. The last two professional studio albums I made had 25-piece orchestras on them. And obviously, those days are behind us, because we don’t have record companies anymore.

PCC:
But do you enjoy the opportunity to showcase the song in its bare form?

KNOPFLER:
Well, you know, it’s funny, isn’t it? I’m constantly surprised by what people want, because I didn’t use to provide these kinds of records at my gigs. And time and time and time again, the people who came to the shows, the audiences, were just nagging me to death about, ‘When are you going to record one that actually sounds like a gig, a live record, rather than all this polish, which we don’t really need or want? We want something that sounds like that show we just stepped out of.’ So it’s supply meeting demand, I suppose, at the end of the day, isn’t it?

PCC:
It must be gratifying that they do want it in that form.

KNOPFLER:
You know what? [Chuckles] If I could turn the clock back and have them want the grandiose, overblown, big recordings, I’d be very happy to go back into the studio and make those, if somebody was paying me to do it, if I’m absolutely frank.

To me, the studio is a kind of sacred space. And I, to some extent, mourn the passing of it. But it’s more honest this way, certainly. What you see is what you get. And what you get is what you see. There is a certain honesty to the whole thing.

PCC:
Certainly the business has changed over the years...

KNOPFLER:
Oh, unrecognizable, yeah.

PCC:
But what about the role that music plays in your life. Has that changed much, as well, over time?

KNOPFLER:
Well, I suppose the emphasis has shifted more and more away from the studio and more and more to live recordings. But I’ve been playing really live, more or less acoustic sets now for about 12 years. So it’s really not so different for me. I was one of the first to transition out of rock and into this rather more Americana style of performing.

I kind of feel you have to act your age. I’m 60 years old now. And I don’t really want to jump around on stage, screaming about adolescent issues.

PCC:
What about the rewards you get from making music? Have they changed?

KNOPFLER:
I don’t really think you do it for the rewards. I think you do it, because it’s what you’ve always done and you don’t know anything different. I started writing songs, when I was barely a teenager, 10 or 11, and I can’t remember doing anything else or wanting to do anything else. It’s the songwriting. At the end of the day for me, it’s all about the song. And what drives me, in the end is that I write these songs and I want to record them and perform them.

PCC:
Do you think much about the effect you want to have on the listener?

KNOPFLER:
I’d be lying, if I said I did. Obviously, you want your work to be liked and appreciated. But I’ve stopped trying... I used to try a little harder, when I was younger, to satisfy my requirements, so to speak. But I don’t anymore. I haven’t really bent myself out of shape for decades. I really stopped worrying about that stuff a long time ago.

For a little while there, in the ‘80s, I had a Filofax with 500 contacts to do that thing they called networking. And I burnt it, somewhere around the end of the ‘80s and started just really pleasing myself completely about what I was doing. And that way, when the phone rings, it’s someone you’re going to want to speak to. You don’t need to have the answer phone service anymore. And you just get things really stripped back to what’s essential, which is working with your friends, making music that you love.

PCC:
Was that a very freeing kind of sensation?

KNOPFLER:
Oh, yes, very much so. It was a real impoverishing thing, too. [Laughs] I mean, I probably reduced my income by about 75 percent, in the process, but I didn’t regret it. I’ve never really been one to be driven too much by that kind of stuff. You can’t bend your art out of shape for it, or you wind up with nothing. If you do that, then you do a kind of Faustian deal. And you know what happens with Faustian deals in the end.

PCC:
When you began writing songs at such an early age, was it a release? Or were you self-conscious about them?

KNOPFLER:
I used to play them in this local school folk club. And we had corporal punishment in our schools. I was born in ‘52. English schools back in those days, they had this thing you probably wouldn’t know much about, which was called corporal punishment, which meant, basically, that the teachers could beat you up, if they wanted to. They could hit you with anything they wanted. And they did, regularly, frequently. So when I started playing in the school folk club, I guess I was about 11 or 12. And I would say, ‘This is a traditional Irish song.’ Because, I’d be scared that, if I admitted it was my song, I’d be punished for it. Some kind of retribution would come down on me.

Everything in those days was done that way. There were no colleges for what you did. The general attitude was, unless you were into classical music, you were a reprobate. And so there were no existing footprints that you could put your shoes into, really, not many, anyway. And most of it was really making it up as you went along. And most of it was really to do with, you did it despite what was going on around you. You did it kind of in the margins. It was really part of a counter-culture that found full expression later.

PCC:
Coming from Glasgow, what was the music that first grabbed you and made you want to play?

KNOPFLER:
Well, I was born in Glasgow, but actually moved a bit further south, to the north of England, in a place called Newcastle Upon Tyne. And the northeast, at the time, was really big on music. They were really big on blues bands. Big blue collar, steel and shipping, manufacturing place. Something like some of the industrial heartlands in American in the ‘60s. So there was a lot of that went on.

But the biggest influence wasn’t that at all, really. The first influence I can remember is my sister bringing back Bob Dylan albums from college. She was about 17 or 18. I was about 11 or 12. Those records made a huge difference. But then, at 14, I remember seeing and hearing Jimi Hendrix and rock ‘n’ roll. And you couldn’t stop me after that. And then records I bought were a bit later on. I couldn’t afford records at that age. The first records I could afford, I would have been like 17 or 18. And they would have been things like the first Crosby Stills & Nash album, the first James Taylor album, those kinds of things. For me, the influences are so wide and varied. There was Lowell George, there was Randy Newman. I think for me, it was the songs more than the artists. I didn’t really follow artists. I followed songs. So I’d look for the author very often of the songs. I’d check them out and then I’d find out who else they’d worked with. There was no internet, of course, so everything was kind of done by process of painstaking deduction. You’d grab what information you could from the sleeve notes of the record and then you went hunting for other records that might have these people in them.

PCC:
Performing in clubs by age 14, had you already determined that this was going to be your path in life?

KNOPFLER:
Yeah. I knew I wanted to go be a student. Being a student back in the ‘60s was a pretty cool thing to be, because it was all to do with counter-culture and demonstrations and doing drugs [Chuckles], the whole vibe. And being allowed to have your hair long, finally, without being hit for it, punished for it, bollocked for it in general.

So I went to college and got myself a degree. But when the career adviser asked me what I wanted to do, I said I wanted to work in a guitar shop. I said, ‘That way, I’ll network with other musicians. And getting a band together would be really easy.’ And I said, ‘I think I’d like to do it in or around London somewhere, so I could be nearer to my brother, who’s a really good guitarist.’ And she just didn’t know what I was talking about at all. It just doesn’t compute, does it? In those days, career meant that you joined the civil service or you worked for a corporation. There was just no notion of following your bliss or following your art. That was a totally alien concept. I don’t think that gathered momentum until later than that.

PCC:
And what was the original vision for Dire Straits?

KNOPFLER:
Well, I moved to London, as I said I was going to. I took a job as a social worker in a place called Deptford, in southeast London. I’d applied. They interviewed me and gave me the job, much to my surprise. And I liked it, actually. I was actually pretty good at it, funnily enough, also to my surprise. I had some aptitude for it. I was a case worker for two years in southeast London, in what Americans would call a very bad neighborhood back then.

I was sharing a flat with a guy called John Illsley, who was later to become the bass player in Dire Straits. And John was playing in a really nasty punk band. That was all the rage back then, in ‘76, ‘77. The idea was, nobody should be able to play properly and everybody should be shouting, ‘My old man, he’s a blank!’ I didn’t really get it, because all my influences were American. I’d grown up with The Beach Boys and The Byrds and all that stuff. We had Dylan, we had Cale, we had Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt. All my influences were basically people that could play properly and have some native actual talent, which was much more of an American thing, whereas the British thing of the ‘70s was, it didn’t matter. You could learn three chords and just get out there and make a racket. And that was cool. I just didn’t get it, really.

I did get it eventually. Twenty years after the event, I could kind of see it historically. I could see what they were rebelling against, the sort of Rick Wakeman-esque pomp rock of the time. I could see why they decided that all this middle-class grandiosity had to be demolished. You know, in England, we use ‘middle-class’ in a different way than you do here. Middle-class in England, means you’re doctors and you’re lawyers. We’re not afraid of the term ‘working-class.’ We’re not even afraid of the word ‘socialist,’ although it’s becoming increasingly less fashionable lately.

And so I said, to my brother, Mark, ‘I happened to have come across this really good bass player.’ Mark and I were working as a duo at the time, playing acoustic sets. I said, ‘Why don’t you come down and meet him and see what happens.’ I said to John, ‘I know this really good lead guitarist.’ So I lined it up, really completely selfishly, purely to stop this bloody awful punk band from rehearsing in my flat. So there was no great, altruistic dream to it, although I was enjoying working with Mark. That was what I always wanted to do. Mark had a rare talent, the kind that doesn’t grow on trees, what he could do with a guitar. So that was it, really. That’s how it began. That’s what it was about, from my perspective, anyway. I’m sure Mark has me airbrushed out completely, like Trotsky. [Laughs] But that’s the nature of history, isn’t it?

PCC:
There was always a strong creative dynamic between the two of you?

KNOPFLER:
Yes, I think that’s right. Even when I was a student, 18, 19, Mark would come over on his motorbike and I had two acoustic guitars lined up so that we could play and write and practice. We just enjoyed playing together. We did have a very good organic chemistry. Although, I think a lot of good players who’ve worked with Mark subsequently, Mark has a rare talent for making good players feel like they’re great players. He has a rare ability to up the game for somebody, because what he does is so simpatico and complementary to what you’re doing, it automatically makes what you’re doing seem and sound better. If he hadn’t become a rock star, he could have made a very good living as a professional guitarist. Clearly, he had that facility.

PCC:
What made Dire Straits so unique? Was it the melding of various influences and perspectives?

KNOPFLER:
I think it was a combination of things. There was obviously unusual talent with Mark’s ability to play. Pick [drummer Pick Withers] was a very experienced session player. John had some managerial skills. And I was probably pretty good at keeping my ego out of the way and letting everybody else do what they did well.

It was a combination of things. There’s always an element of luck. There’s an element of the record company getting heavily behind it. And timing was great. All the other bands in London at the time were punk bands or New Wave bands. Visually, we looked like a New Wave band. But we sounded just like a lot of the Old Wave American bands. And so we were much more accessible to the radio stations and to the media to get their heads around, the older guys who were listening to that kind of stuff could relate to us, in the same way they couldn’t relate to the same stuff I couldn’t relate to either, which was all these bands that would come out with one single and then disappear and they didn’t appear to have any real meat to the potatoes.

PCC:
After a while, did you feel confined? Is that you why eventually left the band?

KNOPFLER:
It was my band for about five minutes. And then it was our band for another 10. And then it was Mark’s band. I mean, it’s just the nature of the beast. I thought of it as a vehicle for our collaborative work. And it became a vehicle for Mark’s own vision for what he wanted to do with his own songs. And there was less and less room both within the songwriting arena and, by the time we hit the third album, even the arrangements were something that was being moved out of the rehearsal room and more into Mark’s realm. You know, ‘Here’s the part that I want played.’ As opposed to, ‘I’ve got this idea for a song. What do you think?’

It was just an evolution of Mark’s confidence and talent, I think. By the third album, he was working more with the people that he was looking towards working with. We had Jimmy Iovine as a producer, we had Shelly Yakus as an engineer. It doesn’t get much better than that. He decided to make the record in New York. So there we were at the Power Station, spending $200 an hour, which, in those days, was a small fortune. And we’ spend five days getting a drum sound. I mean, the whole thing was a much more business-like, much more ‘80s operation, compared to what it had been. And I ‘d become a strummer for somebody else’s dreams, rather than the director of my own life. And I’m not very good at that.

PCC:
Was it liberating for you then, to go solo?

KNOPFLER:
I wasn’t in a hurry, to be honest. We’d worked so hard. The three years I’d been in the band had been so knackering, really exhausting. By that time I was really happy just to take a couple of months off, make some demos, chill out. I took my time. By the time I released my own album, I think it was about ‘83. Three years after the last album I’d done with Straits. But I didn’t think it was liberating, because I was still dealing with a few demons that were still preoccupying me. I honestly don’t think I really fully shed all the last remnants of the kind of rock megalomania that is celebrity, for a good many years after that.

I think I was probably on to about CD six before I really felt that I knew who I was and what I was and the relationship between me and my work was 100 percent authentic. It took a long time to gather. Some people are early developers. Some people are geniuses. The rest of us have to just dig away the best we can.

PCC:
At that point, do you redefine success, not think of it so much in commercial terms?

KNOPFLER:
That’s exactly right. I think that’s what we all do, don’t we? We all start off thinking we’re going to write the most important novel ever. And eventually you come to the much more moderated, more reasoned, more sane position of what it is that gives you satisfaction. And how much you’re willing to pay to have that satisfaction. What price are you willing to pay for it?

I was making these records. A friend of mine, who happened to be an A&R guy, said to me, ‘It’s about time you made a more honest record.’ At first, I didn’t really know what he meant. And then he slowly explained that I was kind of hiding behind a lot of this stuff and covering my lyrics up with indirection and with mystery that didn’t need to be there. And I just cleared my decks and got down to, ‘What is a singer-songwriter?’ ‘What is a song?’ And ‘What is it that makes a song work?’ In the end, I think I reached a trust the tale, not the teller sort of thing with the song. Either the song works or it doesn’t. It’s very instinctive. But it’s taken me half a lifetime to find it.

PCC:
Do you think about injecting into the songs things you’re passionate about, like politics and spirituality?

KNOPFLER:
It creeps in around the edges. I’ve only written one overtly political song in the last decade or two. It’s a song called ‘Underland,’ which rages a little bit about the fallout from the 2006-2007 economic meltdown, which was presidedly mastered by George Bush and his friends. Every year, the number of people losing their homes is a fairly staggering figure. Five million homes were repossessed in just that one year. And the next year, they said the figures were going to be even higher. And I thought to myself, that’s just really untenable. And I did write one song about that. But I generally steer a little bit away from grandstanding with songwriting.

It isn’t really what songwriting does best. You don’t want to wind up with this pedantic finger-pointing, lefty bollocks that really doesn’t work that well. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with sharing and posting lefty articles on that Facebook-y stuff, social networking stuff. I don’t have a problem with that. But I don’t really want to be going up on the stage preaching to people. Half my audience are going to be in complete disagreement with me before I’ve even started. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind anyway about what they think about any of it.

And I suppose, inevitably, some spiritual aspect comes through and political aspects and other aspects. They’re going to inform what you’re writing about. That’s inevitable. But I would say that 90 percent of my songs are in and around much more intimate and personal relationship things. I don’t plan it.

The most recent song I’ve written is called ‘Hard Times In Idaho.’ And on that, my vision was just an old boy, about my age, sitting up on his horse, in the 1820s, trundling over some freezing river. And generally feeling pretty grumpy about the whole thing. [Laughs] He’s almost reflecting to his horse, talking to his horse in it. And that, you couldn’t really translate as political. Although, maybe ‘Hard Times In Idaho’ does work on another level. But it wasn’t planned that way, really.

PCC:
So the songs just have to come naturally and take their own direction?

KNOPFLER:
They do. It sounds a bit pretentious to talk about it that way. But it’s like the analogy that sculptors make about their block of wood or block of stone, that they chisel away. And they say, all they have to do is chisel the stuff that they don't need out of the way. And the sculpture reveals itself. And to some extent, it’s a bit like that with a song, I think.

PCC:
Your involvement in different art forms - does one feed the other? It all helps the creativity?

KNOPFLER:
I don’t think it hurts. If I was talking to young kids, who were the young acolytes who want to be hit songwriters, if you go to art galleries, if you read good literature, if you want art house movies rather than blockbusters, you’re more likely to come up with something that’s going to have a unique quality to it, that’s all you, all about you.

You always start off doing somebody else’s dance, dancing in somebody else’s footsteps. Inevitably, the influences are going to be there. And one day, you just realize, to mix metaphors, you realize you’ve taken the safety wheels off your bicycle. There’s no longer any footprints in them mud and you’re making your own footprints. And you’re doing your own dance. Where that process takes off is hard to say... because eventually the influences become so unconscious that you’re not even aware anymore that you’re still sounding a bit like this or a bit like that, because it’s no longer an imported talent. It’s very much organically you, who you are and what represents you.

PCC:
You were really ahead of the curve, in terms of do-it-yourself recording, publishing, releasing. Did that come solely out of necessity or did it seem like an adventure, as well?

KNOPFLER:
A bit of all of it, I suppose. My Dad was always a great one for that. It can make it very ponderous, that first principle’s idea that you can figure it out for yourself. If you’d understood the algebraic tables, you wouldn’t need to go through all that painstaking process [Laughs]. If I had studied music theory, I could have saved myself an awful lot of over the years. But I probably inherited some of his doggedness about doing it yourself and figuring it out yourself. And, in a lot of ways, it helps. It’s probably the reason I’m still managing to make a living from what I do after 35 or 40 years. I must have been doing something right all these years to still generate enough revue to keep doing it.

So, yes, there were elements of necessity, elements of enjoying it. I think I probably got a bit of a buzz from some of the business stuff that went on in the mid-’80s. It was a pretty lively time. There were lots of independent labels. There were lots of independent distributors. You could make a record, basically on spec and license it to 20 different licensees around the world. It created a hell of a lot of paperwork and management issues. They’d be on three-year licenses. And you’d get the cost of your recording back times four or five from it. So you’d really be ahead of the game, before you had to go out and promote or play a note of it. And I quite liked that, because I didn’t tour. I didn’t need to. I toured a couple of times, but apart from doing TV, I didn’t do an awful lot of work, really, apart from being in the studio, from about ‘85 to 2000. I kind of got back onto the stage, really, in 2001, in a more serious and consistent way.

PCC:
On the ‘Made In Germany’ album, you’re teamed again with guitarist Harry Bogdanovs. You’ve toured with him for years. Is there an intuitive sense that’s developed in your playing together?

KNOPFLER:
We’ve gotten to know each other very well. After 30-odd years, it becomes kind of a business marriage. Harry and I worked together on my first album.But we’d worked together on a project before then, as well. We worked on project by a singer-songwriter I was producing. She wanted to work with Harry as a writer. So we kind of teamed up right there. And stayed friends. Most of us could name three or four people that we’d call our best friend. And Harry would be on that list. And we’ve been working together for more years than I can count. I suppose about 30, 30-plus.

PCC:
Will he be playing the upcoming U.S. dates with you?

KNOPFLER:
Well, he was going to be until very recently, but he’s had a medical complication. So I’d say it’s 99 percent certain I’ll be flying solo for these dates.

PCC:
Even more intimate then.

KNOPFLER:
Well, that’s right. [Chuckles] That’s exactly right. Some people actually like it better. There’s two schools, really. There’s those who really want you to be a rock band, who like the driving drum beat and the whole energy of a band. And there’s those that like the songwriter. In which case, to them, really, solo’s not a handicap at all.

PCC:
Where are you based now?

KNOPFLER:
Half my life is in the East Coast, upstate New York, and the other half is in England. I’d like to be on one continent, really, but it’s just personal stuff, I’m not able to do it. I’d like to be in California, actually. I’d like to be exactly where you are.

PCC:
Do you still have unfulfilled goals you’d like to move towards?

KNOPFLER:
I don’t really think about what I want to achieve much anymore. I mean, the question of I, me, has long since been lost in the mist of time, to be honest. I’m not that self-involved. I mean, when you do interviews, it’s ‘I this’ and ‘Me, that.’ You have to talk about it, because that’s the subject. But the discussion is very uncomfortable and uneasy and not a natural one for me at all.

Even when I’m making records, which is about as self-obsessed as you can be, I’m getting off on the fact that the engineer’s been given his first project and he’s excited about it. Or that the musicians coming in are having a great time and they’re enjoying their session, because they’ve been given the freedom to do what they’re gifted at. And, to me, you get a better result with collaboration anyway. I’m always open to everything. I’m doing some new stuff. And new stuff’s scary, but I still put myself into those positions. And I’ve done a lot in a lot of related fields. But songwriting seems to be what I’ve turned out to be best at. And I always suspected I was. That was my natural thing.

PCC:
So there is a new album in the works?

KNOPFLER:
There’s always a new album. [Laughs] Now if I just had someone with 60 grand to come help me make it. The problem is, there’s just no industry to support it. The infrastructure that came from CD sales , it’s gone. I mean, your best friend posts bootleg stuff, you know? Nobody anymore seems to give a shit about copyright... or think it matters. You’ve got to take your hats off to the facts. Obviously there still are people selling millions of CDs, younger people like Taylor Swift who are having hit records that are selling by the truckload, I suppose. But most of us, who were in the happy position I was in of being able to sell 50,000 to 100,000 albums, and make a living from it, without having to be on ‘David Letterman’ or having to be a public figure, where you could just appear for a month and then disappear for two years, that’s gone. All those margins have been shrunk too much now. There was always that healthy tangle of people, interesting people, too, a lot of them, who were making a living from their music, but wouldn’t be the first names to trip off the tongues of your average WalMart consumer.

And that’s rather different now. And it’s probably also reflected in the wider economic thing, the 99 percent/one percent dichotomy. The rich have gotten a lot richer in the last 30 years. And the poor have been marginalized more and more. There are more and more of us. The ‘we’ of the 99 percent , whereas once it was just a gimmick or a slogan, it’s now becoming something of a reality. I mean, 65 to 70 percent of the professors at universities are paid below poverty line, because of the full adjunct scam.

It’s not a First World proposition anymore. We don’t really live in the First World anymore. We live in something that pretends to be the First World.

PCC:
I guess that means a lot more time on the road for you.

KNOPFLER:
Yeah. [Laughs] Either that or you don’t worry about the fact that your car is 11 years old. You have to decide what your priorities are. My priority is figuring out how to earn enough to be able to live a Transatlantic lifestyle. Virgin Atlantic take most of my profits. But, at this point, what can you say? I feel my life has been very blessed compared to a lot of other people’s. I’ve been in hospital once in my whole life. And that was just for a broken arm. You never know what’s around the corner. But I’ve had some very lucky breaks. And I’ve earned some good brownie points along the way. But it is what it is. It’s just life, isn’t it? Same as it is for anybody else.

DAVID KNOPFLER: LIVE AND ACOUSTIC IN CONCERT

THURSDAY - MAY 9th – Space, Evanston IL, USA

SATURDAY - MAY 11th – Dosey Doe, Woodlands, TX, USA

MONDAY May 13th - The Triple Door- Seattle, WA, USA

WEDNESDAY - MAY 15th – Black Oak Casino, Tuolumne, CA, USA

THURSDAY - MAY 16th – Club Fox, Redwood City, CA, USA

SATURDAY - MAY 18th – Kuumbwa Jazz Club, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

SUNDAY - MAY 19th – Center for the Arts, Grass Valley, CA, USA

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JULY 2013
Concerts in Italy

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OCTOBER 2013
German Anniversary Band Tour