Interview: Kyle Vincent (Pt. 1)
I’ve been a fan of Kyle Vincent for as long as he’s had a solo career, although at the time I first discovered his music, I didn’t realize that he’d had a career prior to that as the lead singer of the band Candy. Then again, most people didn’t realize that, owing to the limited amount of promotion their album Whatever Happened to Fun? received upon its release, but we’ll get to that shortly.
Now, it is quite possible that you might’ve heard of Kyle’s work as a result of his single “Wake Me Up (When the World’s Worth Waking Up For),” which - even though it wasn’t a huge hit upon its release - got a fair amount of airplay at the time and has continued to pop up here and there over the years, most recently through his new re-do of the song.
That new version can be found on the expanded version of his latest album, 2020’s Whatever It Takes, and over the course of the two parts of this interview, which we conducted over Zoom, you’ll discover that we discuss that album as well as everything else in his solo career, including his tour as Barry Manilow’s opening act, his time with Candy, and much more.
Read on, won’t you?
Good to talk to you again!
Kyle Vincent: Same here, man!
And to actually see you.
Yeah, well, I don't know if that's a good thing. [Laughs.] I was just out working in the yard, so I'm a little disheveled! But I didn't wimp out. You got it raw: no hat, no makeup...
I'm honored.
And I see you're recording! That's a good sign. I just did a long interview with these two guys, and they were wonderful, asked really good questions...and they forgot to record for, like, the first 15 minutes. And they were, like, "Can we try to redo it and just recapture that?" [Laughs.] I said, "Well, we can try, but it's just gonna sound rehearsed!"
Well, one good thing about Zoom is that when you set up the link, you can set it to record automatically as soon as the meeting starts...and thank God, because I've been in a position before when I thought I was recording an interview, only to find out after the fact that I wasn't, most notoriously when I interviewed Tom Jones. I basically had to recreate the entire interview from memory, which I did remarkably well, I have to say. Like, to the point where the publicist praised the end result. But that was years ago. I could never do it now.
Oh, wow. I was just reading a couple of your interviews, by the way. The ones with Diane Franklin and Davy Jones. Pretty cool!
Thanks! Yeah, it's fun doing this site. It's a way to indulge my love of longform interviews when I can't find an editor who wants to indulge me. And thank you for continuing to fight the good fight of pop music. I'm not even going to try and define what kind of pop it is, but it's most definitely pop, and I love it.
Well, it maybe doesn't have a lot of power to it sometimes, so I don't know. "Power poop," maybe? [Laughs.] It is what it is. I also gave up trying to define it. It's kind of a no-win for yourself, and it's a no-win for anybody else. It is what it is. Sometimes I listen to it and... You know, you cringe and you go, "Oh, why'd I do that?" But usually nowadays, I'm just kind of... [Pauses.] You kind of just do it for yourself. So if it's right at the time, how can it be wrong, right?
True enough. I will say that I put on Whatever It Takes in the car last night, and my daughter was, like, "I like this!"
Yay!
She's ready for a Kyle Vincent playlist, so now I've got to put one of those together for her.
Oh, that's awesome! That's great, man. Can I ask how old she is?
She just turned 16.
I'm lovin' it! My fans are dying off. I need some new ones! [Laughs.]
I'm trying to raise her right and give her a broad music sensibility.
Well, you know, I'm one of the only people who's not afraid of a major seven - you know, that was kind of the dominant chord in the '70s, a very wistful, mellow, beautiful; sound - and I just love them, but they're so taboo. Now I just use them to kind of piss people off. I mean, to please me, but also the evil side of me is, like, "Yeah, I'll throw this in there because it'll really bug people!"
She's a big fan of epic chord changes, and when I found that out, I was, like, "Lemme introduce you to a fella by the name of Barry Manilow."
There you go. And Ron Dante! Those two kind of created the thing. Yeah, I love chord changes. I think the structure of a pop song is all about building. Life is emotional building. It's ebbs and flows. So I learned a lot from those guys, for sure, as far as how to structure a pop song.
Well, let's start from the beginning. I think most people first came to know you through the band Candy, but how did you find your way into music in the first place? What led you down that path? Were you musical from a young age?
Yeah, I was, from a real young age. I would sing to the radio. Luckily, I - and you, I presume - grew up with wonderful melodic music with the pop songs on the radio. I was glued to Casey Kasem. Glued to AM radio. KFRC and KYA in San Francisco, and I always had my little transistor radio with me. Always. I'd go to the playground, I'd have it with me. All the time. Playing kickball or capture the flag or kick the can... There's my radio! So it was just building in my brain. Of course, at the time, you don't realize song structure and chord changes and lyrical rhyming schemes, but it's like listening to a foreign language 24/7: eventually I just learned it!
And when I had the opportunity, I think, in fourth grade... Kids in the '70s grew up with recorder lessons, and always with a really grumpy old man, for some reason. [Laughs.] But I actually liked it! I was, like, "Oh, 'Hot Cross Buns,' that's kind of cool. So if I put my fingers here and here..." So that was the very beginning, I'd say...although you mentioned Tom Jones, and one of my earliest memories is imitating Tom Jones! Because I remember watching his show, and these ladies were throwing their panties and whatnot, and I'm, like, "This is the coolest guy with the coolest job..." And I'm... I don't know, five or something! [Laughs.] But at that time, I guess I was a pervert, be cause I was, like, "Yeah! Ladies throwing things at you? I like that! Let's do that!"
"All in!"
Right! [Laughs.] So I would jump on the table in front of my family, and I'd hold the mike like he does. I'd get... I don't know, a magic marker or something, and I'd be holding it and singing. I don't think I've ever told anybody that. There's your exclusive!
Yay!
So that was early on, but then I started playing the saxophone in fourth grade, and we had a very innovative jazz program. We were lucky, because I grew up in Berkeley, which is a very innovative town. We were the first city in the entire world to have mandatory bussing for integration. I'm mixed culture myself, but I grew up in a pretty white neighborhood, so my friends were very middle-class white people, and all of sudden it went to people of all colors. It was incredible, and that really helped not just with learning how to get along with people but also with the musical diversity.
So Berkeley had a jazz program taught by some pretty famous jazz musicians. For the first half of the class, it was really intense music theory, and for the second half it was improvisation. I'm eight and a half, nine years old, and I'm learning improv from some pretty cool jazz cats. And I was fully in. This was it. My three older siblings had tried conventional violin, trumpet, clarinet, whatever, with stodgy old men yelling at them for playing the wrong notes. Sadly, they didn't have the same experience I did. My experience was just wonderful. They quit, because what kid wants to do it so structured? But if you make it fun, it works. And so many famous, successful jazz musicians came out of that elementary school program in Berkeley schools. I mean, Grammy winners. Loads and loads of famous musicians.
But I kinda got jazzed out when I was eighteen or nineteen. I couldn't take it anymore, because it came with a little bit of smugness. And I liked the more free-spirited stuff. It wasn't the pop music I grew up on, so it was great for awhile, but I wanted to go back to what I really loved, which was three-minute pop songs. So I started for a short time a punk / new wave kind of thing with our mutual friend Elliott Kendall, because he and I were friends from when we were little kids. And then a schoolmate of mine, Jonathan Daniel, he moved to L.A. to go to UCLA, I stayed in Berkeley to go to Cal, and he called me up and said, "Hey, you wanna come down and be the singer in our band?" "Okay!" So I did. [Laughs.] It was that easy, actually. I mean, I did a reconnaissance mission first to see if I could get along with L.A., because I'm sort of a nature boy. And for a time, it made sense, because it was so much flash, and girls throwing panties onstage. I was, like, "Wait, I remember when they did that to Tom Jones..." Full circle!
Speaking of Jonathan Daniel - and to jump past Candy for just a second because I don't want to forget to mention this - I'm a huge of his band The Loveless.
Oh, yeah, The Loveless! Wonderful band! Yeah, I really liked them. They did Electric Angels after Candy, which was...okay. It was still kind of '80s / '90s rock. But The Loveless, I thought, was a terribly overlooked band. They were like R.E.M. with better melodies and... I don't know, just more fun! I really liked that band a lot. So I agree with you!
I'm completely blanking on where I first heard them - probably a mixtape or a mix disc - but the song was definitely "The Return of the Ex-Girlfriend." One listen and I was, like, "I am so sold."
You know, I think I sang on the outro on that song.
You may have. You're credited as being on the album [A Tale of Gin and Salvation], but I don't think it offers credits on a track-by-track basis.
Or maybe it was... [Singing.] "If I only knew then / What I know now..." I think that's it. Or maybe I'm on both of them! But I thought both of those songs were smashes!
I believe my copy of the album is a Japanese import. That's the only way I was able to track it down.
Whenever it's great music and we can't believe it hasn't happened here, it's always some kind of financial thing. Money or a record company's lack of promotion. Something like that.
Anyway, I just didn’t want to forget to mention The Loveless, but having done so, we can jump back to talk about Candy. How did Candy come together in the first place?
Well, Jonathan moved to L.A., and they started thinking about forming a band with a few people, and he put together something called Bang Bang. I didn't really care for that name. But there was a band in the Bay Area called Candy, and I told Jonathan... [Starts to laugh.] See, you'll never hear this story from him, because he claims it's a different story, but this is kind of the evil side of it.
So there was a band called Candy in the South Bay of San Francisco, and they were actually pretty popular, but when I came to L.A., I went, "Bang Bang? Ugh! You know, what about Candy?" "Isn't there a band in the Bay Area..." "Yeah, but we can tell them to change their name!" So we wrote this letter on, like, fake record company letterhead - you know, fancy New York management or whatever - saying, "Cease and desist! There's another band by this name!" You know, nice guys finish last, I guess, but we were teenagers and we thought it was funny...and, lo and behold, I think they broke up, so it was okay anyway. So we took the name. And we started practicing, we started playing shows in front of one or two people, and...it seemed to work!
Certainly, the Whatever Happened to Fun? album is fantastic.
Yeah, Jonathan was an interesting lyricist even from a really young age. He and I were playing in Berkeley in my mother's garage. He had bought a Fender Rhodes, so we were trying to form a band. The idea started back then, so Candy was just kind of an extension or natural outgrowth of that. Usually the way the songs would happen was that Jonathan would have a lyric and kind of bang something out on guitar, and I'd go, "Well, I think there's a song there..." [Laughs.] "...and I think you're trying to do this." So we'd kind of form the structure, and there would be the song.
I think the title track is probably the song that most people know from the album. Is there another song that you would've picked as a single?
Oh, definitely. I wanted "Weekend Boy." I thought that was a stronger song. I actually thought that "Whatever Happened to Fun?" was maybe the fourth strongest song. I thought "Electric Nights" was better. I thought "First Time" was better. But, you know, that was kind of the most mainstream, up-tempo, easy-to-sell song, so in retrospect it was probably the right choice.
I've always thought of it as the most definitively "power pop" song on the album.
Well... [Long pause.] Maybe. I guess.
Maybe not. I probably say that because the first place I ever heard it was on a power pop compilation. So the context had a lot to do with it.
Right, right, right. Yeah, that whole album is quite power pop. It's right down the line power pop, except for maybe two or three songs that you can tell I probably influenced a lot. [Laughs.] Where it's less power and more pop! There was constantly that push and pull. It was always friendly, but it was definitely there. And it's a miracle when you look back at it. We just discussed this the other day, the guys in the band, as we were having a little email string going back and forth. In '93, the guitarist in Candy is touring in Guns 'N Roses, and the singer in Candy is touring with Barry Manilow! How we were ever in the same band... It's really weird!
But somehow it worked. For that little time period, it worked. Again, we were really young, and I was definitely obnoxious and probably wasn't the nicest guy to be in a band with, because I was just, y'know, "Why can't you guys sing in perfect harmony? And why are the guitars so loud?" It was just endless. But when we hit the stage - and we did live together, so we kind of had to make up quickly - it worked.
Because of the differing musical sensibilities, was it always inevitable that you'd end up making a go at a solo career, or was it a gradual decision for you?
None of this has ever been inevitable. No, really! Because when you ask how I got into music... I mean, it's a true story, but I have to really keep reciting it, because it never was the plan. It just kind of happened. It's not like I said, "Well, I'll be a veterinarian and I'll have a family and live in upstate Minnesota." [Laughs.] I don't know. I still have this weird thought that something like that might still happen! But the music... I just keep writing songs, and I keep getting asked to play shows, so I do it! When that stops, I guess then I'll become a veterinarian in upstate Minnesota!
So it wasn't a plan to be a solo artist, really, But L.A. changed, and when it went from big hair rock to heroin rock, I started to tune out a little. And Guns 'N Roses and all that stuff was a big change. It really changed starting in the mid- to late '80s. And we were struggling anyway. Our record company was kind of bailing on us, and our A&R guy was fired, so they kind of dropped everybody. Our album was pretty much stillborn. It had no chance of promotion. So you had to search to find it. That's why I cherish the fans of Candy so much: because, my God, what you went through to find that music. Thank you! [Laughs.] So, yeah, I started to think, "Well, I definitely feel like I can rock, and I love the energy of running around on the stage..." But there were those major seventh chords inside, and the whole band structure, I was kind of done with it.
It's exhausting, it really is. As much as you can be best buddies with them, it's still tiring, because you have to take into account four lives, you know? And they all have their own things. I was loaded with my own things, and everybody had their own little things, and you have to learn to live with it. I mean, how bands stay together for so long... I think you have to live completely separately and come together just for tours. That probably works. But we were all confined to this one little two-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, and I think it started to kind of implode, and then losing the record deal, and then the changing music scene... All those factors together, and I needed to just break out on my own.
The first place I ever heard anything by you under your own name would've been when you turned up on one of the Yellow Pills compilations.
The first place I ever heard anything by you under your own name would've been when you turned up on one of the Yellow Pills compilations.
Yeah, that seemed to be kind of my introduction to the solo world. That was "Just a Matter of Time," one of the first songs I'd written with Tommy - Tommy Dunbar, from the Rubinoos - and Tommy... He's a great songwriter, but he's a phenomenal guitarist, and in every genre. It's truly unbelievable. People just don't know. He can play classical, jazz, pop...everything! So he's always my first call to play on my songs. Not just because he's a friend and co-writer, because he's damned good!
So we started writing every single day...and Tommy lived in Eagle Rock and I lived in Hollywood. With traffic, that could be an hour - or more! - and he didn't drive, and I had this old jalopy. But every day I'd drive out there, pick him up, because I had the baby recording studio, bring him back to Hollywood, write all day... I'm not kidding, we did it every day, five days a week. The significant others had us on the weekends, but we were our significant others during the week! [Laughs.] And it was amazing: we just wrote and wrote and wrote. I loved - and still love - writing with Tommy. It's such a joy, because we're so at ease with each other.
Well, the self-titled debut - which, of course, features several co-writes with Tommy - still holds up as a classic.
Thank you! That's really nice of you to say.
Although I seem to recall that one of the songs that's a favorite of mine wasn't necessarily a favorite of yours: "Austin Eyes."
Oh, that's cool that you like that! You know, I wrote that as a... [Hesitates.] You want to hear a quick little anecdote about that?
Always.
Okay, because if I'm talking too much, just shut me down. [Mock sobs.] I got nobody to talk to, man! I'm so happy to talk to someone! These cats don't answer back!
Look, if you're not related to me, I'm thrilled to talk to you.
[Laughs.] Well, there's a long version of this story that's all about how I got the deal for that album, but the story about the song itself... I was in Austin, on the shuttle back to the airport after having had a successful South by Southwest trip. I had snuck into parties, I had met certain people, I had left demos, and eventually that led to that record deal.
So I'm feeling really good coming back on that shuttle, and there's another songwriter next to me, and somebody... [Pauses.] I don't remember how... Maybe I looked at somebody and said, "I'm gonna remember those Austin eyes." Something like that. And he said, "Well, that's a good title." And I said, "Yeah, it is! Hmmm... I could either copyright it right now, which I really can't do, or...let's have a challenge: let's both go home and write our own version of 'Austin Eyes' and see what happens." I have no idea who that person was. Never heard from him again. Maybe he has his own "Austin Eyes." But that's how it started: a songwriting challenge!
One thing I noticed in the credits of the album is that you've got Gerry Beckley and Robert Lamm on backing vocals.
Yeah! I knew Gerry - he's one of my top-10 favorite singers - and Parthenon [Huxley] knew Robert, and they're buddies. And you know what's cool? I just found photos of them arriving at the studio! I'll have to put some of them up. They showed up in some fancy-ass convertible sportscar, wearing sunglasses... It looked so L.A., but they are so not L.A. And they went into the studio, and I'm at the board, kind of playing engineer that day while they're doing the background vocals. And I recall one of the parts they were singing, I didn't really think it worked on the song.
I had one of those moments which I've had many times in the studio with people I admire so, and I turned to Parthenon and said, "Okay, how the fuck do I tell these guys, these legends, these guys I so admire and worship... How do I tell them, 'I don't like that vocal'?" But I did. I just found some humorous way of telling them. Like, "Yeah, that sucks. Why don't we try..." [Laughs.] And they cracked up, and they said, "Okay, let's try something else!" There was no ice to break, but...it's daring and it's a little frightening. I've had that "oh, my God" moment so many times, where you're so in awe of this performer, you're lucky that they're blessing you with their talent, but...if it isn't working for you, and you're the producer, and it's your song... Well, you've gotta get tough! And I learned quickly how to do that, and humor is usually the way to do it.
How'd you hook up with Parthenon Huxley?
I went to see one of my finds at the time: E. Not "one of my finds" as in I discovered him, but I discovered his first album, A Man Called E, and it was the only CD in my car at that point. I know every word on that album. I love that album.
Oh, yes. "Hello Cruel World."
Oh, God, that song, and "Mockingbird Franklin," and... I mean, every song on that album is a gem. God, I love that album. So liner-note nerds that we are... [Laughs.] Parthenon Huxley? Who or what is that?! So E is playing at Cafe Largo in L.A., a very cool, hip club, and I go there to see him...and there's the producer, Parthenon, onstage with him, with half of his head shaved and half of it not. It was, like, some weird sideways mullet. So still I wondered, "Who is this guy?" And after the show, which was wonderful, I go up to him, and I said in a very funny way, although in print it'll sound pompous, "So... I will be McCartney, you be Lennon, and let's go write some songs!" And he looked at me like, "Who is this pompous freak?" But he said, "All right, let's do it." I guess he had heard of me or something, or else he did some quick research.
So I went over there, and we wrote "Arianne" the first day. I was playing bass, he was playing guitar...or maybe it was the other way around. But we had two mikes set up, and I just started singing, "I miss Mary Anne." "I had a bad experience with a Mary Anne. Let's change it." "Once I was on an airplane with Arianna Huffington, and she was kind of cool. Let's try 'Arianne'!" So that's what we did. And then we wrote "Wake Me Up (When the World's Worth Waking Up For)," and...we wrote a boatload of songs. He even has a co-write on this new album. If we're in a room... Like, I flew down to Maryland a couple of years ago, and we wrote five songs in two-and-a-half days and recorded most of them in that time, too. We work very fast together.
Is that him singing backing vocals of "Arianne"?
Oh, yeah. He's all over that album, absolutely. That was such a fun album to make. And we both suffered kind of heartache during that album. Certainly mine is completely miniscule compared to his. I lost a beloved cat during the recording of that album, which is sad, but he lost a wife. So all that stuff kind of brought us together, and we had a wonderful record company that was really behind the album until the record company imploded. The people really believed in it, but there were just changes at the top. Still, we had some success, we went on tour, we played at hundreds and hundreds of radio stations. It was incredible.
Hollywood Records really was great up to a point.
Yeah, they were. They were good. You know, it was all about synergy at the time. In the early days, before that was a buzzword...or maybe right as it was. Disney owned Hollywood Records, so it was, like, "We're gonna funnel your songs into the movies!" And the actual boots-on-the-ground people were just unbelievable. I'm still friends with them, if that tells you anything. In fact, my new Universal deal was through one of those people. So, yeah, I'm still buddies with those people, and I just have nothing bad to say about that label. When it came to the music, they were really good.
So what was the sequence of events that led you to release Wow & Flutter the way you did?
Well, Hollywood Records lost its president through some weird stuff or whatever. It was being run by a lawyer, and "Wake Me Up" was bubbling under and was poised to be a huge national hit just as things were falling apart at the label.
So the plug was kind of pulled, and that kind of went away. Then the new president came in, he kind of dropped everybody, and... Well, again, you're always on one part of the wheel as an artist: you're either up, you're down, you're struggling, you're coming up, you're writing, you're not writing... So we had to just regroup again.
I'd done it so many times. First Candy was signed to Curb, then to Polygram. Then Candy fell apart, and the label fell apart. I was signed to a subsidiary of MCA, I had an album called Trust which was really my first album, I went on tour with Manilow, they couldn't get the album into stores... It was just a nightmare. And that was a really strong album...and they spent a boatload on it - I mean, like, half a million bucks - and then didn't even release it. It was incredible.
And then I went to Hollywood, and then that kind of goes away... I mean, you just have to keep going. What else are you going to do, you know? I had - and still have - too much music in me. So I wrote another bunch of songs, mostly with Tommy on that album, and...let's see, what did happen with that album? [Laughs.] I guess I released it on my own, and then Varèse Sarabande picked it up. So it got out there, it did pretty well, got a little airplay. It's one of my favorite albums that I've done, actually. I really like that album.
Agreed. And with one of the songs, my wife's name is "Jennifer," so that was a nice added bonus, since it came out pretty much right as we started dating. If it wasn't on the first mix tape I made for her, it made the cut extremely soon thereafter.
That was so contrived. [Laughs.] Literally, I mean, we were sitting in Tommy's apartment in Berkeley, and I'm, like, "Yeah, we need a girl song. You know, we need to write one about a name that's very common around the planet, because I figure it'll sell more." "How about Jennifer?" "Okay, let's do Jennifer!" Because the problem with "Arianne" was that there weren't enough people named Arianne! So it was between Jennifer and, like, Mary or something. But we went with Jennifer...and it's about nobody. Well, no, that's not entirely true. The inner story is kind of about somebody. But there is no actual Jennifer.
Well, as it happens, I'm also partial to "She's Top 40," too.
Oh, yeah. I've written a lot of songs about my love for the radio and disguised it as a love song for a girl...or sometimes vice versa!
That’s it for Pt. 1 of the interview, but don’t worry: Pt. 2 should be popping up within the next 24-48 hours. (I’m on a roll now.)
And, hey, if you like this interview and the others on the site, why not consider upping to a paid subscription? The more support I get, the more time I can focus on doing - and subsequently transcribing and posting - interviews for That Thing They Did!