Smitty:  No doubt. You’ve got some great vocalists on here too:  Hil St. Soul on “Smile to Shine.”  That’s a great track.  Her voice is just made for what you guys do.  I mean, it’s like she just walked in the room and just fell right into that groove.

SW:  Yeah, I worked with Hil St. Soul on the Crazy Vibes and Things album that I did when I was on Verve and she did the track “My One and All,” so I had worked with her before, but this track that she’s singing on this time is slightly funkier.  It’s got this whole rawer groove.  What I usually do is I’ll do the music and then I’ll send her the track, and I basically let her write the vocal parts on top.  She even titled it “Smile to Shine” herself. So I left all that side of it up to her because I thought, well, I didn’t want to get in the way of her creativity.  I just wanted her to feel the music and write the song that she felt fitted the music rather than me interfering, so in that way we sort of split the music in half.

Smitty: It’s tight.

SW:  Like yourself, I really feel that with my music and then her vocals on top, the two seem to work really, really well together and that she’s fantastic to work with.  She’s a great vocalist as well.

Smitty:  Yes, man.  The track just has that club groove, you know?  All of this music, really, this’ll make your grandma wanna get up and bust a move, you know?

SW:  (Laughs.)  Well, basically, in a sense, what I have lived with, I’ve always listened to the funky groove stuff and I’ve always gone to the funky clubs and then I’ve always gone to see the funky bands, so basically this CD is the true me and the true music that I love.

Smitty:  Yes, man, and what about Corrina Greyson, what a great track, “Shake It Up.”

SW:  Oh, “Shake It Up,” yeah, yeah.  Corrina, she came to the studio here and I basically had this rough vocal part written out, so she basically had sung it, but she’s the girlfriend of—there’s a guy called Neil Cowley, who I work with on keys—he has his own jazz trio that he does and the drummer, Irvin Jenkins—Irvin Jenkins’ girlfriend is Corrina, and I’d heard about her and I’d had this impression of I wanted this like sort of real edgy, bluesy type vocals on this track, so I went to see her.  She runs events where she has DJ’s and bands playing on stage and she features her own band and her own act, so I went to see her sing and I knew instantly since she sung that her voice was the right voice for this track.

Smitty:  Start to finish, this entire project has just a funky groove.  I mean, it doesn’t slow down, it doesn’t stop you in the middle, it just says continue the groove, let’s party all night.

SW:  Absolutely. What I’m trying to make when I do an album, I’m trying to make each track as strong as the one that you just heard.  That’s partly because I buy a lot of what we term as rare groove over here.  It’s the real hard to find old funk albums and stuff like that, but you’d buy it on hearing one track, this amazing track.  You’ve gotta buy the album, but then the whole of the album wouldn’t be as good as the one track you’d heard.

Smitty: I’m there on that.

SW:  So I thought, well, I think it’s important to basically tell a story with each album when you do it, but also make each track as strong as the others so you don’t end up with what are termed as album fillers.  I think it’s important so that when people listen to an album you don’t want them to fast forward between tracks; you want them to listen to the album from beginning to end.

Smitty:  Exactly! You also said that every album that you’ve done with Down to the Bone has been a learning process. How has it been a learning process?

SW:  Well, basically, because I’m a non-musician, I don’t come from a musical background, I wasn’t taught music at school, so in a sense I threw myself in at the deep end.  All I knew was what I loved and I knew that the tracks have to tell a story and have a beginning, middle and an end, and all that sort of stuff, so I had this idea that I really wanted to start off, but I didn’t have any of the contacts, I didn’t know how to run a studio, I did not have a music business then, so all the musicians that I work with now I’ve had to find and then you build up a rapport and then you’ll do an album one way and you think, oh, yeah, next time I’ll do it differently because you learn through your mistakes.  Well, one of the most important things to me is communication because I have to tell the musicians what I want from them and I have to understand what it is exactly that I want.  If you have to take too long about it, then you waste so much more time and money, so you learn how to communicate quicker and you learn how to not do things in the mix and stuff like that, so a little bit you learn through experimenting like I have done.

Smitty:  Right. Just listening to your music over the years, the learning process that you are experiencing is a very cool one.

SW:  Good.

Smitty:  Because all of the projects that you cats have done have always been super cool and this one is just at the top of the pile, you know?

SW:  Excellent.  Well, rather the top at this stage than at the bottom, otherwise I’m going the wrong way.

Smitty:  (Laughs.)  Oh, man, yeah.  Now, this one comes out, what, June 19th?

SW:  June the 19th, in America.