Full Transcript:
AJ:
I was blind for six years, from the age of four until ten.
Pete:
He was dealt a tough hand.
AJ:
The events that led to my blindness were even more traumatic than the blindness itself.
Pete:
Like so many of us, he faced obstacles.
Jeff:
I used to call it jumping over shadows.
AJ:
That’s exactly what it feels like.
Pete:
And significant setbacks.
AJ:
I remember seeing in stereo. And then I remember not.
Pete:
As it turns out, he had almost all the tools that he needed.
AJ:
I do have a car that can do that, but I try not to drive at all.
Pete:
A unique perspective on his craft.
AJ:
I had chills because listen, my dad played these songs. I never heard him perform. Never heard him play.
Pete:
He has a song-
AJ:
Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Pink Anderson, Sonny [unintelligible], Brownie McGee, Mississippi John Hurt.
Pete:
He’ll sing it loud.
AJ:
And I think that had I not jumped at the chance to play when I did, I don’t think I would’ve had that opportunity.
Pete:
And now joining Jeff and Pete in the Blind Abilities studio, our guest AJ Croce.
AJ:
All right. Well, there’s your first lessons on rock and roll piano.
Jeff:
Drive safe. Drive safe.
AJ:
I won’t be driving, but I appreciate it. Thanks.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson.
Pete:
And I’m Pete Lane. Our guest today in the Blind Abilities studio is AJ Croce. AJ is a singer-songwriter, killer piano player and guitarist. He’s been a professional entertainer for more than 30 years with 10 studio albums under his belt and more than 20 top hits spanning the charts in multiple music genres, ranging from blues, jazz country and Americana. And that is a mouthful. AJ, welcome to Blind Abilities. How are you today?
AJ:
I’m doing well. Thank you.
Pete:
Great. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, AJ is also visually impaired. Many of you will recognize the name Croce as AJ’s dad Jim was a huge international star in the early 1970s. He had a series of hits that captured the ears and the hearts of folks all around the world. But AJ, the name of the podcast is Blind Abilities. So if it’s okay with you, we’ll explore your vision issues. And maybe a little later, if we get a chance, we can talk a little bit about your music and maybe even your dad’s music.
AJ:
Absolutely.
Jeff:
AJ, explain to the listeners what your vision is like today.
AJ:
Well, now I’m partially sighted. I can see with my glasses out of my left eye. I was blind for six years from the age of four, until ten. And because of that, there are some curious things that I have with the vision that I currently have. I have trouble seeing contrast. The damage to my vision was optic nerve damage. And so one of the hardest parts of sight for me is contrast and obviously depth of field. So if things are the same tone, say a dark green tree and the shadow that the tree is making, I can’t tell sometimes where the shadow is and where the tree is. And that’s like, my brain works it out now, depending on the light and the contrast and I wear glasses that help with creating greater contrast. They don’t remove my vision very much. It’s a little bit clearer, but it’s mostly clear and they’re slightly tinted. They remove a lot of the blue and it allows me to see contrast a little bit better. Not a lot, but every bit makes a difference.
Pete:
Oh yeah.
Jeff:
I wore those skiing once and it helps with the- you can pick out the shadows from the snow, the brightness.
AJ:
Exactly. Yeah, because you can’t tell sometimes with a shadow, whether it’s a divot, you know, it’s hard to tell.
Jeff:
I used to call it jumping over shadows.
AJ:
That’s exactly what it feels like.
Jeff:
I’ll take that a little high step, and it’s just a shadow.
AJ:
Exactly. Exactly.
Pete:
Sounds like a song title, jumping over shadows.
AJ:
Yeah, I like it. So that’s pretty much it, in a nutshell, you know, depth of perception is a challenge and the contrast is a huge issue, which is, you know, just your brain working on trying to figure out what you’re seeing and how you’re seeing it. I can legally drive, although I try never to drive, I just don’t have the confidence, you know? So I don’t know if that’ll change in the future or not/
Pete:
Where you’re in a self-driving car, I understand.
AJ:
I do have a car that can do that, but I try not to drive at all.
Pete:
Same with us.
AJ:
Let other people drive.
Jeff:
Self-driving car. Wow.
AJ:
It works well in certain circumstances, but it’s not reliable enough for my taste. Someday. I think not far off.
Jeff:
Well, yeah, I mean, it’s like someone driving and closing their eyes. How long are they gonna keep ’em closed? Six seconds maybe?
Pete:
That’s pushing it.
AJ:
That would be a lot depending on how fast you’re going.
Jeff:
I think my roomba should get four wheel drive and let me ride around the house before I get out on the road.
AJ:
I know, I know. Hither and thither, you know, it doesn’t make any sense, but sooner or later you’ll get to the kitchen.
Jeff:
So at age four to ten, that’s huge in education. That’s when you start education, your education was quite different than what a typical four to ten year old experiences.
AJ:
You know, I never went to a school for the blind. I sat in the front row. I knew that my left eye was coming back slowly. And it came back peripherally. If either of you have had peripheral vision, or if you can see light or you can sense what’s happening at the periphery of sight, then you know what it’s like. I learned to read at a young age, I was about three, three and a half when I learned to read. So that was fortunate because it was really hard to read. And so I had this pair of glasses with basically like a telescoping lens that a doctor might have or a surgeon might have. And if I sat in the front row, I could pick out some of the stuff that was on the blackboard with that, but the center of my vision, which would usually be clear for sighted people was really like looking at the periphery. And so I would have to turn my head and try and find that sweet spot where I could see through the telescoping lens. So that was a challenge and I didn’t learn braille. It would’ve been really helpful, I think, but that was just, you know, how I did it.
Pete:
Yeah, you probably discarded the idea, even the thought of learning braille, when your vision improved to a certain level, I would imagine.
AJ:
Yeah. You know, eight, nine years old, I was legally blind, but I could see some things, you know, and glasses didn’t help. It wasn’t an eye issue or farsighted, nearsightedness. It was optic nerves. So it just sort of came back slowly and kind of got to be the best it was gonna get when I was in my teens or maybe early twenties.
Pete:
Now you said you went blind at the age of four. That’s a traumatic event no matter what age you are, but at age four, I don’t know. That’s a long time ago. Do you remember thinking about what you’re going to do? Did you ever think about, you know, long term effects? Like how is your life gonna be without vision?
AJ:
I’ll tell you, the events that led to my blindness were even more traumatic than the blindness itself. After my father had died, about a year, year and a half after that, my mother started dating this guy who was a sociopath, real sociopath, and was very abusive. It was really torture for a year. It was incredibly barbaric and cruel. So the only way that my mother could- after about a year of that, ‘cause she saw it happening. She saw the abuse, but was afraid. The only way that she could get me out of there was to send me to a school, a boarding school. And I was really young to do that. I was, you know, just about to turn four and right at the beginning of the school year, I’d been having an ear infection that wasn’t treated. I was in Arizona. I was away from my mother and the people at the school did not deal with it either. So right around my fourth birthday my mother came to visit me and realized that I had gone blind and took me to the hospital and, you know, saved my life really, ‘cause the infection had gotten so bad that I had, you know, basically brain tumor syndrome, which was like a brain tumor, so much pressure, and the spinal fluid wouldn’t properly drain. And so it caused me to go blind.
Pete:
Yeah. Wow.
Jeff:
Oh, wow. So after age ten, and you gained some sight back and you aimed towards your future and stuff, being the son of Jim Croce, it wasn’t programmed into you that I should be a musician. What were your goals as you were going through high school?
AJ:
Music was always part of my life, since I could walk. And the piano in particular was my refuge. And I got turned on to blind piano players, keyboard players like Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder and Art Tatum, these amazing musicians who had trouble in a similar way. And I thought, okay, I can do that. And it was just a refuge. My dad’s record collection was great. And I couldn’t really see which records they were, which artists they were, but I would go through his records and the ones that I loved, I would put over on the left side. And so I knew that there was a certain point on the left side, that that was where all the good music was, whether it was Ray Charles or Sam Cooke or Otis Redding or the Stones or Little Richard or Bessie Smith-
Pete:
They’re all on the left, I’m guessing.
AJ:
They were all over there on the left. I’m lefthanded, so that just made the most sense to me. So, you know, it was a natural thing. I never really thought that it was an impossible thing to play music. Both my parents played music, they recorded together before my father had a solo career, and my grandparents had played music. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a professional piano player for a period of time, and so was my grandfather, my great-grandfather was an opera singer, so it was music in the family. And even though, you know, my father’s family didn’t really embrace the idea of him being an entertainer or a musician for a living, there was always good music in the house, you know? So yeah, I mean, I thought I would go to school. I would study cultural anthropology. I would study history and archeology and religion and all those things that fascinate me and that just didn’t happen. I was 12 years old and someone asked if I would play at their daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. I got paid $20 and I thought if I practice every day and work really hard at this, I can do it. I could do it for real.
Pete:
Let me jump back into your earlier childhood just for a moment. I want to catch up on something. Did you ever experience or try to engage in, I don’t wanna say normal activities, ‘cause music is certainly normal, but you know, outside and playing baseball and all that stuff?
AJ:
Yeah. Absolutely. I got hit a lot by the baseball and you know, the team didn’t seem to mind because I always walked. But I was no good in the field. And I don’t know if I, I don’t think I ever hit the ball, but I did play. I was a terrible player, you know, I think it was a socializing thing and not my strong suit.
Pete:
Do you think you migrated to the piano and over to music because that didn’t go so well?
AJ:
Well, I think most people sort of gravitate towards the thing that they excel at, or that makes them happy. The shortest way to finding happiness is doing the thing that makes you feel that way as much as possible.
Jeff:
You know, AJ, when you said that $20, that seemed to make you happy, that you got paid for it. At what point did you realize that you were making it, you were starting to get gigs, when did that all start?
AJ:
So when I was 15, I was playing about four nights a week, five nights a week. I was making good money playing in jazz clubs and blues clubs, played with a couple bands. I did solo stuff. Right around that time my mom opened a jazz bar and I would play there in the happy hour. And there were a number of other clubs that I played at. So that was like a kind of seminal period of time. I also, around that age, traveled to London and played for tips at pubs around London. You know, obviously I loved to travel and it was a little bit scary at that age to be doing it alone. But also I felt like I could really do it. You know, I’d come out with a hundred pounds in tips, that was amazing.
Pete:
At age 15 or 16, for sure.
AJ:
Yeah, absolutely. And then when I was 16, there was a gentleman named Floyd Dickson who was a blues piano player, sort of part of the Central Avenue scene in Los Angeles. And he had written songs like “Hey Bartender” and “Wine, Wine, Wine,” and “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer.”
Jeff:
George Thoroughgood, yeah.
AJ:
yeah, yeah. Covered his, and the Blues Brothers covered his songs. Anyway, he really sort of took me under his wing and we would play shows I would open for him, then he would play his concert, and then I would sit down with him and we’d play four handed boogies, like old Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis stuff. And then after the show he would, you know, have a drink and he would, you know, impart all of this wisdom to me, you know, always dress up for the audience and always get paid in cash. And if he had another drink, he would start telling me great old stories about growing up and playing with different folks. And told me about a night on Central Avenue with Sam Cooke. And he and Sam Cooke had had a few drinks too many, and they didn’t wanna drive. And they got Ray Charles to drive them home, which they did by tying two strings, one string to each wrist and they got in Floyd’s Cadillac and they just said, okay, you got it. It’s a green light. You got it. You’re solid. You can speed up a little bit. Yeah, that’s great. And then, okay, it’s gonna be a right turn. And Floyd was on the right side and he would pull his wrist. And years later, when I was on tour with Ray, I asked him about it and he said, yeah, it’s true. It’s true. And they got home safely.
Pete:
You drive, I’ll steer.
AJ:
Yeah. Yeah.
Pete:
Oh, that’s great. So, how would you characterize your vision now? You said it increased in your left eye. How’s your right eye?
AJ:
I can’t see anything out of my right eye. If I close my left eye, I can see a little bit of light, but that’s about it. Not much. It’s been relatively stable, but I have to say that the issue with contrast has become more pronounced to me. So when I see something black and white, like an eye chart, I can read it okay with my glasses on, maybe 20/40 or something in my left eye with the glasses on, 20/35 even under good conditions. That’s an extreme contrast of black and white. And once there are other elements, whether it’s stairs or a crack in the road or a sidewalk or things like that, then it can become a little bit more challenging.
Jeff:
You know, I was looking at some of your stuff online and the bios and all this stuff and some of the musicians and some of the bands that they’ve been with and the producers and all that. It’s like my lifetime in listening to music and the way they interweave and stuff. It’s really neat. I started a record collection by reading the liner notes and, oh, this musician, where’s he playing, and seeing the people who played with you is like a whole catalog of different styles of music from way back and to the present.
AJ:
Mm-hmm, absolutely. That’s how I put my collection together was mostly through liner notes. You know, I would find out that Ray Charles liked Charles Brown and he liked this musician or that musician, this gospel singer, that gospel singer. And it was always those liner notes. And then also, you know, with the older stuff, like Ellington or Fletcher Henderson or something like that, I would look at and see who all the players were because they were so wonderful and had careers of their own, you know, and so whether it was through the swing era, the jump era or the bebop era, those players all sort of came into their own at different times. And it really informed me.
Pete:
There’s always connections. One step takes you to the next.
Jeff:
Kinda like the sixth Stone, the piano player, you know.
AJ:
And that piano player, you know, changed, the sixth Stone, you know, was initially Ian Stewart, but Ian McLagan was also a huge part of it.
Jeff:
Oh, yeah. Faces, small faces.
AJ:
Mickey Hopkins played with them a lot. And so yeah, all those players made a difference. You know, I grew up listening to the radio, listening to the Stones and their stuff through the ‘70s. And I had a little transistor radio by my bed. If I would hear a song that was great, I would go to this upright piano we had, run to it. See if I, you know, had enough of the song to try and play along. And it could be ELO or, you know, this is in the ‘70s, so it was what was on top 40 radio.
Pete:
You know, I told my son that I’d be talking to you today and asked him if he had any questions that he might want to ask. And he said, ask him if he still, after all these years, sits down to practice to improve your skills, or do you just practice to learn while you’re writing a new song-
AJ:
Every day.
Pete:
Every day? That’s good.
AJ:
Absolutely.
Pete:
My response to him was that you’ve been an eclectic, multi-genre musician from the get-go. You have always branched off into different types of music, starting with the piano, even into different instruments, picking up the guitar at age 30. And so you’re always trying to improve yourself.
AJ:
To me, it’s really important I take what I do seriously. Even though I’m not likely to be, you know, the greatest Latin jazz piano player anytime soon, I wanna learn how Jobim made chords, what kind of scales he was using, what was his influence in creating something or, you know, a great Cuban piano player like Gonzalo Rubalcaba or Argentinian player. That was one great thing about lockdown. It was like the most expensive vacation of our lives, you know, but it was really wonderful for being able to practice. Most of my life, I’ve been in this cycle, 18 month, two year cycle, where I write, I record, and then I tour. Even though I’ll practice to learn new things, it’s hard when I’m needing to prepare for a particular concert or I’m preparing for an album, or even just to sit in with someone and learning someone else’s song for a recording of theirs or a concert. And so having that time was completely amazing. And I learned all these different Raga scales, Indian scales on the piano and guitar, figured out how to make them work on the piano because they’re working with this 12 tone scale, completely different, how do I create these kind of sitar-like drones on a piano, all of those kind of things. I’m not doing it because I wanna play Indian music per say. But I wanna learn from the great artists that are out there and have a wider vocabulary of music.
Pete:
Sure, different techniques.
Jeff:
You know, you mentioned Meade Lux Lewis, Merl Saunders, and Tatum and stuff. I started collecting 78s for a period of time, and that’s where I found Meade Lux Lewis and Louis Jordan, and yeah, Albert Ammons. Yeah. I was listening to that and I said, this is the music I like.
AJ:
Yeah. It’s raw. I love it. I’m doing this show in the fall to celebrate my father’s album You Don’t Mess Around With Jim. It was his first, you know, solo album and in doing so I think a lot of people in this modern day would probably like play along to a track, have Pro Tools set up, have it all to a click. And that is the most uninteresting idea I could think of. You know, obviously I wanna have a basic idea of the tempo, but I have that in my head, the band knows the tempo of it, and being able to have that raw aspect, that organic nature makes it so much more soulful to me.
Pete:
And I think on the listening end too, autotune and click track.
AJ:
Mm-hmm, oh, absolutely. Mistakes are human. And when you remove the mistakes, yeah, there’re types of music, genres of music, like electronic music where, you know, that’s fascinating. You can make it quote unquote perfect, but it loses soul. You know, mistakes will give things soul. And that’s what I’m looking for, regardless of genre, doesn’t matter whether it’s a Jobim-inspired thing, or whether it’s rock and roll, Little Richard, it’s the little mistakes that make it wonderful.
Jeff:
You know, a few years back, Bob Dylan won album of the year. He couldn’t be there, but he was on video and he said, we do it just like Buddy Holly did in The Crickets. We’re all in the same studio we play.
AJ:
That’s how I do it.
Jeff:
And the Foo Fighters came out and said, if you can’t play your bass all the way through the song, we don’t want you. We’re musicians. We play from the beginning of the song to the end of the song. We don’t dub. We don’t do all this other stuff. And you mentioned analog before the podcast, your analog guy, he brought in a, I think it was a 16-track or 32-track tape. And they recorded that album. I like, like I said, garage, I like real playing.
AJ:
Yeah, me too. And I like to record the tape. I’m not against recording to Pro tools or digital recording, certainly for demos, it’s faster, it’s cheaper. It’s easier. And mixing like that is wonderful, but you know, I think you guys will really understand the fact that people, especially engineers and producers have stopped listening to the music, and they’re looking at the music, they’re watching it on the computer as it goes by bar by bar. And they’re looking to see if they see a mistake instead of listening to it and saying, oh, that feels good. That sounds good. That feels good. Whether it’s perfect, quote, perfect or not just doesn’t matter. Everything I think we all love has imperfections.
Pete:
I really like your approach to music and everything we’ve been talking about here. And I’m thinking your latest album released last year in 2021, By Request?
AJ:
Yes. By Request.
Pete:
Yeah, that’s a compilation. And you’ve described it as sitting in your living room, sitting at the piano with a group of friends, many of whom are musicians and some aren’t and you just say, hey, what do you want to hear? You’ve combined like a dozen tunes of old favorites. Just something where your friends would request from “Ooh Child” to the Beach Boys. I’ve listened to it and it’s dynamite.
AJ:
Oh, well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. You know, it’s funny. I don’t know if they were all necessarily my favorite songs by many of the artists, you know, there’s other Randy Newman songs I love more than the song I recorded, but it was because it was about the feeling of the moment. And it was the memory of the evening that we were all together. And I think that was what was more inspiring than just playing my favorite song by a particular artist. There was something I read about where you did a promotion, was it Japan, where you sang your dad’s song “I got a name?”
AJ:
Oh yeah. It was originally for a Goodyear commercial. I hadn’t really intended to release it as a single, but there’s a lot of interest in hearing it. So, you know, I did that, but you know, it’s not a song that he wrote and yet it’s one of the only, in fact, the only song, I think that was a hit of his, that he didn’t write, yet I think he identified with it so much, and I did of course, as well, in a different way, sort of multilayered connections there, you know, it’s kind of interesting how that happened.
Jeff:
I was also reading that you went through all his reel-to-reels and stuff of him doing stuff that didn’t get published. Was that kind of neat to get to know someone no one else probably heard before, but it was your dad?
AJ:
Absolutely. I got to know my father through a lot of that. Not just his record recollection, but through all these tapes that he made, you know, his career was very short, really, his professional career was about 18 months, less than two years that he wrote, recorded and toured those three albums. And so in listening to these kind of rehearsal tapes, he recorded everything, some of it on an old woolen sack. And then when cassette recorders came out in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, he got one of those, and I listened to one particular recording. He was practicing for a Friday night gig and every song on there I had played, never heard him play it.
Pete:
Amazing.
Jeff:
Oh, wow.
AJ:
Every single song on there was something I had played, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Pink Anderson, Sonny [unintelligible], Brownie McGee, Mississippi John Hurt, just all of these and not the famous Fats Waller Bessie Smith songs. They were these like deep cuts, you know, it wasn’t “Ain’t Misbehaving or “Honeysuckle Rose.” It was “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew,” which I had recorded on my first demo for Columbia Records when I was 18 or 19. I had chills because I’m listening to my dad play these songs I never heard him perform, never heard him play. I was simply trying to archive this music and in the process found that we had something in common that was really deep and personal.
Pete:
Yeah. That’s very chilling, that that was on your first demo.
Jeff:
That is really neat.
AJ:
Yeah. All of those songs were songs I had played. So hearing him do it, you know, play it on guitar and hearing his voice sing that was really special. And I have a lot of those recordings.
Jeff:
What was it like? I mean, there’s probably been a lot of expectations. Like we want to hear “Bad Leroy Brown,” we want to hear these songs, photographs, memories or stuff like that. What was it like when people hired you for you? I mean, yeah, you had your 15 year old jobs and stuff, but what’s it like today playing with all the musicians that you do play with that you’re AJ?
AJ:
Well, I think it’s important to have your own identity. It’s why I didn’t play any of his music until, you know, maybe four or five years ago. I never touched it. I wouldn’t talk in an interview about my father unless it pertained to the legacy of the songs. You know, I’ve been managing the publishing for more than 25 years, and I had had experience working with my own publishing. And so there was that connection and I felt good about being behind the scenes with his music and keeping the legacy alive from that position. But I didn’t feel that there was any integrity in doing that when I hadn’t really made my own mark yet. After I had, you know, 15 or 16 songs that had charted and, you know, pop charts and blues and jazz and all that, it kind of felt like I had an identity of my own. People knew me as a piano player. They knew me as a songwriter and singer and so forth. It gave me a sense of personal identity that, you know, gets taken away when you are the child or relative of a person of renown. Your identity disappears because it’s nearly impossible for people to think of you without thinking of another person, especially with someone they think they know, or they’ve listened to the music and they feel like they really connect with that artist. They feel like they know you because of that. And it’s a curious psychological aspect of us as people. I think it’s natural, but not always easy. I just did all those late night shows and didn’t ever talk about my father. And at a certain point, I think around maybe 10 years ago, I wanted to pay a little tribute. It would’ve been his 70th birthday. And the audience reaction was so wonderful. Also, you know, picking up guitar later, the music was not as interesting musically, it was not as interesting to me playing it on piano. When I started playing guitar, all of a sudden I found that it was a lot more challenging musically on guitar than it was on piano. And so that opened up a new sort of exciting aspect of it.
Jeff:
You mentioned you played with Ray Charles. Wow. I mean, to me that’s iconic. I mean, Ray Charles today, you know, he’s an icon. Not just a blind musician, but a musician.
AJ:
Oh yeah. An icon, an American icon for sure. A world icon. I think I was really fortunate. I was like the last generation, you know, I’m 50 and I was the, you know, last generation to be able to go on tour with, you know, BB King, to record with Cowboy Jack Clement, to work with Allen Toussaint, to tour with Aretha and James Brown, and a lot of these artists, the Neville brothers, and I worked a lot with them in the early ‘90s-
Pete:
What an incredible list of names. My gosh.
AJ:
Absolutely. And I think that had I not jumped at the chance to play when I did, had I not taken that leap of faith, I don’t think I would’ve had that opportunity.
Pete:
When you picked up the guitar, you learned it masterfully. I was just listening to you doing your dad’s song “Operator,” which is a fairly intricate picking.
AJ:
Oh, thank you. It is, there’s a lot of chords in that song. That’s always the most beautiful thing about a song is you think you know it, I’ve obviously learned to play by ear. I could hear where the chords were, but then it’s the little things that are different that make it wonderful. I was at my father’s induction into the songwriter’s hall of fame in New York in the late ‘80s. I was 18 years old. That’s where BB King heard me play and asked me out on the road with him. And I was backstage. I was walking down the hall with this legendary songwriter named Sammy Cahn. And I said, do you ever feel like you’re writing a song you’ve already written? Do you ever feel like you’re repeating yourself? And at first he kind of took offense to it. You know, that, what’s this young kid know about writing songs and he said, no, no, never. And then he softened up a bit and he said, you know, it’s not the fact that this song and that song have a similar chord progression. It’s the chord that’s different. It’s the thing in there, the melodic turn that’s different that makes it so wonderful to continue to write, because you’re always looking for that little thing that’s different, and it changed the way that I thought about writing. Yeah, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants. There’s no one that’s come up with a new thing in forever. There’s new interpretations of things, and how we interpret it is really the interesting part of each individual artist.
Jeff:
I think that’s like what you said about playing live, playing real, making mistakes, that it leads to something, it’s part of it. You’re part of that moment. I like the moments.
AJ:
Yeah, me too. And that’s why practice is so important. More or less, all that tricky stride stuff and the boogie stuff, the early stuff from the ‘30s and ‘40s, it’s all muscle memory. I think of guitars as having my fingers in certain shapes, you can just move up to the next fret, you’re a half step up, you know. With piano, every chord is a different shape of your hand. And so, I don’t know, I feel like making sure that you have that muscle memory for a new idea. It might take six months of throwing it in during practicing or practicing a song that already exists that I’ve written or someone else has, and all of a sudden I’m like, okay, I’m gonna try this live, ‘cause that’s the only way to really know if something works and playing it live, it completely changes everything, ‘cause the adrenaline and the excitement and then you just need to forget everything you practiced and just do it.
Pete:
Have you ever written a song about, or referring to your vision?
AJ:
I think I’ve written a lot of things that relate to it, but I would say more metaphorical, sometimes, it’s conversational. It’s-
Jeff:
It’s you.
AJ:
Yeah. I mean, it’s how I relate to it. It’s just part of life, as you guys know. And it happened to me when I was really young. I remember seeing in stereo, you know, and then I remember not at all. I’m grateful for what I have. And it’s like, you know, when you’re a kid and you experience that, you don’t really know any different.
Jeff:
Yeah. That’s the thing. If you’ve gone through life and you’ve had it all the time, and then all of a sudden you lose it, you really have a huge loss. But if you acquire something, when you’re young, it’s part of you. A characteristic rather than- it doesn’t define you, but it’s just something that’s there.
Pete:
I know you’ve been touring like crazy in recent months, but what’s on the agenda in the near future? Any new albums coming out, any national projects?
AJ:
Well, there’s always stuff on the horizon. I have an album, more than an album’s worth of songs I’ve written over the last couple years that’ll end up on a new album. Right now I’ve been so focused on the 50th anniversary and putting that concert together because it’s a larger band and arranging for it and working with some new players sort of augmenting my band. That’s been a full time job, though I have a project that’s been sort of on the back burner for six or seven years now, which is all about origin stories. And I really touch on a lot of world music as well as American roots music and the process of telling these origin stories, 10 origin stories. And so I look forward to being able to complete that album in the next year, year and a half.
Pete:
Do we have a date and a venue for the concert?
AJ:
All of these 50th anniversary shows, they’re all over the country. The first one is taking place in Nashville, where I live, at the Country Music Hall of Fame, the new CMA theater there. And then I’m off to North Carolina, I’m at the Carolina Theater in Durham, I think that’s on the 8th. On the 9th I’m in Wilmington, North Carolina. I mean, there’s shows in between, some are just, you know, my music, some are the Croce plays Croce that aren’t focusing on the 50th anniversary. And so the best thing to do is to check out my touring schedule at ajcrocemusic.com or on social media @AJCroce on Instagram or Facebook or something.
Pete:
Great.
Jeff:
That sounds great.
Pete:
We’ve been speaking with AJ Croce. AJ, it’s been an absolute pleasure. We really appreciate you taking time to chat with us today.
AJ:
Oh, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it.
Jeff:
Thank you so much for taking the time and doing this. This has been very enlightening and looking forward to your concert.
Pete:
Very much. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
AJ:
Well, thanks guys. Take care. Have a good one.
Pete:
Appreciate it, AJ. Have a great day.
AJ:
Absolutely. Take care.
Jeff:
Drive safe.
AJ:
I won’t be driving, but I appreciate it, thanks.
Pete:
Jeff and I want to thank AJ Croce for taking time out of his busy schedule to chat with us today. And you can find out more about AJ, ticket sales and his touring schedule on his website. That’s www.ajcrocemusic.com. And of course he’s on social media @AJCroce on Instagram and Facebook. And of course, for more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check out our website at www.blindabilities.com. As usual, thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Pre-ETS Program and Transition Services Manager Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
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