{"id":8167,"date":"2015-08-12T05:30:52","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T09:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=8167"},"modified":"2015-08-12T05:30:52","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T09:30:52","slug":"shuggie-otis-the-music-keeps-calling-him-back-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/08\/12\/shuggie-otis-the-music-keeps-calling-him-back-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Shuggie Otis: The Music Keeps Calling Him Back (Part 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Continued from <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=8165\">Part Two<\/a>&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Shuggie Otis:<\/strong> But the songs kept calling me back. A song would be really good, and I&#8217;d think about it, and realize that I have to face whatever it is that&#8217;s bothering me about this song. It might be something personal. It&#8217;s not not necessarily that the song has anything to do with real life, but what the song is saying. I guess when the album comes out, you&#8217;ll know more about what I&#8217;m talking about. I&#8217;m happy with the songs now.<\/p>\n<p>I was playing the guitar for hours last night, coming up with new ideas; all kinds of stuff. At one point I went and listened to some of the stuff I&#8217;m working on. All of the ones that I didn&#8217;t want to be on the album are going to be on there after all! I came back around and realized, \u201cThese songs sound like my fans would like them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/shuggie_otis07.jpg\" class=\"alignright\" width=\"280\" height=\"422\" hspace=\"20\" vspace=\"20\" \/><\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s not just my fans I&#8217;m thinking about. The songs have to please me first. And that&#8217;s what the problem was before: \u201cI don&#8217;t want to use that song; it bothers me <em>personally<\/em>.\u201d I had to detach myself and say, \u201cWait a minute; forget that. Is the song any good? Do you think somebody else might like it? Forget what it&#8217;s saying, because not everybody cares that much about what [lyrics] you&#8217;re writing!\u201d If the music&#8217;s good, you have to ask yourself, \u201cWill this work? Do you want to put this out?\u201d And I thought it was kind of funny how many times I&#8217;d keep shelving these songs. But now, okay, they&#8217;re coming out.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong>Bill Kopp: <\/strong><\/span><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">Where does your music come from? Do you sit down and say, \u201cOkay, time to write a song,\u201d or does it happen some other way?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>SO: <\/strong>I can&#8217;t do that too well. I <em>can<\/em>, but I don&#8217;t ever accept what comes that way. Because I know it won&#8217;t come out they way I&#8217;d like. I mean, it has to come to me. Believe it: I&#8217;ve come up with ideas that I thought were great \u2013 just recently \u2013 and then a few weeks go by, and then, \u201cNo, that&#8217;s one&#8217;s going away forever. And that one, too. And that one.\u201d But some of them call you back. And once they come to me, <em>then<\/em> I&#8217;ll stay with them for hours. And days. Weeks, however long it takes.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m trying to step on it now, because I don&#8217;t want to hold up the record company and just take my time. That&#8217;s not the [goal] at all. What I&#8217;m trying to do is work with a quick pace. When I&#8217;m in the studio, I pretty much go at it without taking a break. And I&#8217;m very, very happy to get into a <em>studio<\/em> again. Because I had been working out of my home studio. And that&#8217;s great, but to get back into a real studio is something extra special for me. That&#8217;s something I haven&#8217;t done in, I don&#8217;t know how many years.<\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/shuggie_otis03.jpg\" class=\"alignnone\" width=\"425\" height=\"282\"  vspace=\"10\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a very special time for me. And I&#8217;m just praying that everything goes right. We&#8217;re all really excited. I have a band of great musicians, really great guys. We&#8217;re happy to be playing together, and to be getting such a great reaction. And I&#8217;m not going to let anything get in the way of this. If I can help it, we&#8217;re going to just keep on playing. Keep on playing, and don&#8217;t think too much about the business. Because focusing more on the business surely does hurt the music.<\/p>\n<p>Before, I had that wrong mindset; I was thinking about, \u201cOh, how the record companies are treating me bad!\u201d And I couldn&#8217;t get past that anger. Now, I think to myself, \u201cIt was a natural reaction; you&#8217;re a human being.\u201d Because for years I felt for the most part that I wasn&#8217;t wanted in the business. And perhaps that was the truth. But you can take something like that and stretch it into a big, crazy notion. It shouldn&#8217;t have to run your whole life, but it can affect a person.<\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/shuggie_otis03.jpg\" class=\"alignnone\" width=\"425\" height=\"282\"  vspace=\"10\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>So my case was kind of different in that I couldn&#8217;t get a record deal even though I was so well-known. Still, it didn&#8217;t affect my life in a really bad way; I still had a good time. My life was okay; it wasn&#8217;t all as dreary as it might sound. I felt like I had been in the business since I was a kid, with my father, his band rehearsals, and that kind of thing. I was right there with show business even as a little child. So I did feel at the time that they didn&#8217;t want me, that my time would come back around. And it <em>did<\/em> come back around. I look back now, and I think, \u201cWow. I must have a lot of patience!\u201d I&#8217;m very fortunate. And blessed. So I&#8217;m just going to try to give back now.<\/p>\n<p>And hopefully there&#8217;s no ego trips any more. I&#8217;m not saying that I&#8217;m all the way there, that I&#8217;m perfect. Every day can be a challenge. Maybe every day <em>is<\/em> a challenge. For me, I see something happening that&#8217;s so good. So I don&#8217;t let those things bother me.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=8169\">Click here to continue&#8230;<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/the_musoscribe\">Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on <\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/the_musoscribe\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/icon_twitter_small.jpg\" alt=\"\" name=\"graphics3\" width=\"18\" height=\"18\" align=\"BOTTOM\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"1\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/the_musoscribe\"> Twitter<\/a> and get notified<br \/>\nwhen new features, reviews and essays are published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Continued from Part Two&#8230; Shuggie Otis: But the songs kept calling me back. A song would be really good, and I&#8217;d think about it, and realize that I have to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,41,57,60,62,69],"tags":[1953],"class_list":["post-8167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blues","category-interview","category-psych","category-rb","category-rawk","category-soul","tag-shuggie-otis","cat-9-id","cat-41-id","cat-57-id","cat-60-id","cat-62-id","cat-69-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}