HITS ON HIS LIST

During the ‘80s, you couldn’t flip on your car radio without hearing a song by Daryl Hall and John Oates—from “Maneater” and “One on One” to “You Make My Dreams,” and “Kiss On My List.” But while those may be his best-known songs (the radio will do that), Oates has never stopped making music, some in collaboration with Oates and some on his own.

Oates will be bringing his considerable talents to the Genesee Theatre in Waukegan on May 25. It’s an intimate, strippeddown show; just Oates with an acoustic guitar and a percussionist he’s performed with for a long time.

He started releasing new singles last November—songs composed during the pandemic. The releases were his way of adapting to the new realities of how music is distributed and consumed, which has undergone a complete revolution since he and Hall were releasing their hits in the ‘80s.

“As a way to get (the songs) there, I decided I’d give it a total digital distribution since people aren’t really buying records or anything physical, like CDs,” Oates said during a phone interview from his home in Nashville last week. “I’ve never done that before, so it’s a whole new world for me and it’s been an education for me and interesting to see how I can recalibrate my old school musician’s mind into the new reality.”

Oates is now 75. He was learning songs at the age of 4 and has been collaborating with Hall since they both were in their late teens. Now he’s says it’s time to do something different and to refresh his creative juices. He wanted to challenge himself and also do something that amplified the essential set of skills that a musician should have. Hence the intimate setting for his current tour.

“There’s no better way to showcase that than to strip everything away and just appear with your instrument and your voice, and that’s what I decided to do,” he says. “Sometimes I bring another guitarist with me and sometimes, in this case, I’m bringing a percussionist with me, a guy who’ve I played with for many, many years. It’s about as real as you can get. The concept was to bring what I do in my living room onto the stage.”

The solo shows give Oates plenty of freedom to tell stories or change the set list on a whim. He says he can adapt to the evening and do anything he wants because it’s all on him.

“It’s really a great challenge and it’s really satisfying to be able to do this. It’s hard to find the type of performance and the type of live show that gives (the audience) something different, something maybe they don’t expect, and also gives them an insight into how songwriters think,” says Oates. “About where these songs come from and what was some of the inspiration. A lot of times the stories are very unusual and not perhaps what people might think.”

Oates has been on the road for a while now and he says what he’s found is that if you tell the back story and you set up the actual new songs with a context, people hear them differently, almost as songs they actually already know.

“It’s really an interesting thing and something I discovered in the process of doing this show. So, that’s what I do,” he says “I do get to play a lot of new material and I play some hits as well, but it’s really satisfying. You know the old cliché, ‘What’s the last thing you want to hear at a classic rock concert? Here’s a song from our new album’.”

One of the questions that always pops up with musicians that have been in successful bands—or duos, in this case—is the difference between collaborating with others and having the freedom to produce music on your own. Oates says he doesn’t prefer one over the other.

“There’s nothing more satisfying than to have an inspiration. You get this inspiration for an idea and to be able to actually make it come to life on your own, all of a sudden there’s something that comes out of nowhere and you go. Wow’,” he says. “But when two people are really in sync … when two people really are going for the same thing and on a roll, feeding off each other, there’s a real energy and a beauty to that as well.”

Oates’s parents were the World War II generation, so he grew up in the swing music era listening to big-band records. His own inspiration is pretty old school. He opens the current show with that song he sang for his parents when he was just four, “For Me and My Gal,” which was written in 1917, but made famous by Judy Garland in 1942 in the film with the same name.

“I open the show and I just say, ‘Look, this is the first song I ever learned and I’m going to play it for you’,” he says. “It kind of sets the table for an interesting evening that perhaps they might not expect.”

John Oates plays Genesee Theatre in Waukegan on May 25. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit geneseetheatre.com.