Smitty: Yes. Well, talk to me about how different it was coming from Canada. I know you mentioned that you had to really jump in and pull your britches up, but was there anything distinctive about growing up in Canada and then coming to the lower U.S. and doing your thing here that was so distinctively different?
RS: Yeah, I think so and I can definitely say stylistically, especially when I was younger and I was looking for things to play, R&B, all of that, urban or soul music was really not even played on the radio that much, unless it was maybe Motown or something classic. You didn’t find bands like that unless they were U.S. guys coming in to play. So you had to really look for that stuff. You had to find somebody over the border who was bringing in those records. That’s the way I found it. It was more of a surplus of jazz or fusion where I grew up. I spent twenty years in Montreal and in that town fusion was a big thing. The group Yusef, Alain Caron, I mean, I knew this guy when I was like twelve years old and my brother bought me a Yusef record when I was twelve. I used to listen to him and Stanley Clarke and a lot of other guys because that was really what was popular there. If you didn’t play fretless—and that was a big difference too—if you didn’t play fretless if you were doing jazz or fusion, well, you weren’t doing anything.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
RS: When I came to the States, that was more of a rarity than a normality.
Smitty: Mm, yeah.
RS: And guys playing slap and all that—and I don’t even know if you call it slap anymore. I don’t. It sounds like such an old word.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
RS: But thumb technique, all of that stuff, top bottom. That’s not something that people did. That’s not something that people did around me. That was a rarity and generally when I saw it when it was somebody who was from Canada, it wasn’t done very well. Or it’s not even a question of the technique; it was more a question of the feel. I didn’t feel like a lotta cats were really feeling it and I still see some cats that I question, although there are certainly a lot more. Because of the Internet, a lot of things have changed. Music is everywhere now, music is universal. You don’t have to go and buy physical records anymore, try to listen on the radio or get a tape of something.
All of that stuff is old. You can just go to iTunes or you can just go on the Web and find anybody’s music from around the world, so that’s a wonderful thing. It’s opened up things but stylistically it was completely different and technique-wise, so when I came to the U.S. at first, I was more adapted to jazz fusion, fretless, that type of stuff, and that’s what shifted for me when I got here, and I think that is a really great thing in someone’s life because when you are artistic, I think it is a blessing if you can be put in a situation where you have to strive to bring a quality about yourself that maybe isn’t as good as something else that you do and so you’re able to raise that up to where the other stuff is, and I think that was great for me as opposed to just sticking with the styles or doing the things that I was more familiar with and advancing with that I was more put into a situation, God willing, to have no choice but to work on the things that were my weaknesses.
Smitty: Yeah. So then you decided to do Intellipop. Talk a little bit about that record and why you were inspired to do that record.
RS: I always loved to write, Smitty, always, and music for me is the same thing. It’s like art. I just wanna stick it out there. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. But it’s gonna get an expression out of you, but it was just songs that I liked. I liked that particular style. That’s me. It’s a little different and that’s fine to me. That’s just a little different than some things I wanted to say and I wanted to start my first footstep coming out a little bit like that and trying to put bass up front. I was always taken back and definitely always in awe of pioneer dudes like Stanley Clarke, who put the bass up front. I mean, he’s like awesome to me. And Stanley, that was so deep what that guy did. It was just amazing.
Smitty: Yeah, and it’s still deep, you know?
RS: It’s amazing and there’s just not a lotta musical situations that you can find to put bass up front. You gotta make it right because it doesn’t fit everywhere, and sometimes I hear bass records from other people that some are okay but some I don’t really like because after a while, after a couple tunes, I’m like eh. I can’t take a whole album of this or a bunch of overplaying. I know you can play, I know you got chops, but I don’t wanna sit at the house and hear the same thing over and over for like an hour.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
RS: Like I’m in a music store, you know? I mean, gee.
Smitty: Exactly. So when you talk about the bass up front—because I often wonder about this because there are some instruments that have been traditionally sort of in the rear or the rhythm section and it’s just not up front, and the bass being one of those traditionally for years, and now you see it just busting up front and some of it is pretty good and some people are doing some pretty wild things, as you mentioned, but in your case, was that something that you had to just really push in front of people or was it something that you said, like you mentioned, “I’m putting this out here, this is how I feel, this is my heart, take it or leave it, here it is”?
RS: I’d say yeah to the latter pretty much. Here it is and I’m gonna build on it. Hopefully down the line’s gonna be a second record with some more exploration, some more growth. Maybe down the line’s gonna be a third one. I definitely wanna make a statement and a sound, you know, that after a collection of things is a sound that people can recognize. That’s the other thing, too, that is very compelling for a lot of players. It’s really hard as a bass player to come out doing records and people can hear you and go “Oh, that’s blah-blah-blah,” even though they might not know the name of the song, but they know the sound. Guys like Marcus and Stanley, I mean, hats off to them. That is an accomplishment in a world of billions of people where you can pick up an instrument that’s the same as everyone else’s.
Smitty: Yes.
RS: But your finger and your mind give you a different sound. That’s important to me too, to try to have my own sound. I think that’s really, really cool, and try to use all of what I have as an instrument. Voice, too, is an instrument, you know?
Smitty: Yes, and you have a great voice.
RS: Oh, thank you.
Smitty: You’re so welcome. And you feature that so well on your latest record, which is a nice segue to RS2. (Both laugh.) I love this record because you mixed it up so well with your voice, with the bass, and with the great players that you have with you, and I know one of your favorites is Mr. Joey Sommerville, which is a cat that I know.
RS: If you didn’t say his name, I was gonna have to say it, so that’s my boy.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
RS: I love Joey Sommerville. He has a vision, he’s been such a great friend of mine over the years and always, always saw my vision and always encouraged me to do it. He’s a wonderful producer, wonderful writer, just a wonderful guy. A great trumpet player too.
Smitty: Yeah, I was gonna say. A monster trumpet player, yeah.
RS: He’s a monster.
Smitty: Yeah, man, I tell ya, on stage, I often say that Joey doesn’t need a microphone because he can blow that horn into the next county. (Laughs.)
RS: I’m sure there’s been at least one occasion where he’s gone up there and the mic hasn’t been on and he just said “Whatever,” knocked it over and just started playing, because that’s how Joey is.
Smitty: Yeah, well, you know, it’s funny you say that. I was in Atlanta on one occasion when that actually happened. (Laughs.)
RS: Wow, I’m not surprised.
Smitty: And, you know, he did not miss it and the crowd didn’t miss it. I mean, he said “All right, forget that. If you can’t get it to work, watch this.” And let me tell ya, he blew that crowd away. I mean, it was just incredible what he did with that horn, yeah.
RS: He’s great and his record’s great. That’s another amazing musician that people need to support. He’s got a great record out. He’s always had great records out. I’m a big fan of Joey Sommerville.
Smitty: Yeah, he’s a great guy. You know what else like? This record is so stylish to start with and you know you’re gonna hear something great just looking at this album, and I gotta tell ya, Track 9 is just my favorite.
RS: Awe.
Smitty: Man, I could just groove to that all night long.
RS: (Laughs.)
Smitty: That is so cool and I often hit repeat when I’m listening because it’s like “I gotta hear that again, I gotta hear that again.” (Both laugh.) I love this entire record and I love your voice on here because I think it’s an incredible mix with your bass playing and the rest of the band, but talk to me a little bit about RS2 because it was quite a leap from your past record in coming to this one. So you were thinking, you know, here’s the next level of Rhonda Smith.
RS: Totally, and you know what? I had just finished the Musicology tour, which was a big year for us with Prince. We went all over the place. It was a really successful tour. And I felt like I had some things that I wanted to say personally and he has always supported me wonderfully too and actually he’s on this record too, which was just a great gift.
Smitty: Indeed.
RS: And going back to No. 9, that’s an interesting thing that you would say that because that song is called “127 Walton Street” or “127” and that is also one of my favorites, but the story behind that song is that’s a childhood home that I grew up with and that music is the reminder of that house and that era, the six years that we lived in that house, so that’s a very special song to me.
Smitty: How ‘bout that?
RS: It’s always kinda magical in the story that it says because I see that red brick house and it’s about a house. It really is. That’s an address and that’s where I grew up. Interesting that you would say No. 9. That’s one of my favorites, but I like a lotta different stuff. I like a lotta fretless too, which is another thing that’s kind of difficult but I love the instrument and I wanted to use a lot more fretless in this record because a lotta people don’t know that I play fretless also. The other thing about the instrument is that every fretless player has a different sound unless they’re trying to clone someone else. I don’t think in particular that I sound like anybody. I think I sound like me.
Smitty: No doubt, yes.
RS: There’s a lotta things with fretless. There’s no frets, so there’s no boundaries. It’s open, it’s all about your emotions, and I always had a feeling that when they got a particular woman out there who was gonna put her emotions into it and her vibrato into it, it would be quite interesting and I was glad that I was able to do a couple of things and have a different fretless sound out there so that hopefully when people hear my fretless too, they’ll go “Oh, that’s Rhonda because she doesn’t sound like Alain, she doesn’t sound like Jaco, she doesn’t sound like Marcus. She’s got a different sound.” I don’t sound like [John] Patitucci. It’s a little different. And all those guys are bad to the bone, but we’re just all different.
