Playing acoustic is hardly alien to
Peter Frampton -- "Baby, I Love Your Way" from
Frampton Comes Alive, anybody? But it did take him awhile to wrap his head around the idea of doing a whole album that way.
"People have been trying to get me to do it for years, and I just didn't want to try it," Frampton -- who releases the 11-track
Acoustic Classics, premiered
exclusively below, on Feb. 26 -- tells Billboard. "I now think it was
just stubbornness and fear -- or fear and then stubbornness because I
was scared."
Frampton put those fears aside to record
Acoustic Classics in
his Nashville studio, playing acoustic guitar and bass and a bit of
piano on "I'm In You." Regular collaborator Gordon Kennedy joins on the
lone new song, "All Down To me," but the album is mostly populated by a
combination of favorites --- yes, even "Do You Feel Like I Do" and "Show
Me The Way," the latter complete with Talk Box -- and lesser-known gems
such as "Fig Tree Bay," the first track from his 1972 solo debut
Wind of Change, "Sail Away" and "Penny For Your Thoughts."
"When
I started the CD I thought, 'Ha ha, it's gonna take me a couple of
days,' and yes, was I wrong," Frampton says with a laugh. "I have such a
high standard of my own output that when I did two or three tracks, I
came into the control room and listened to them and I was just, 'It's
OK. It's good. It's fine,' but I wanted more. So I spent a few months
going in every day doing different performances of different songs until
I found the ones that worked for me and I thought people would like. I
wanted it to be like, 'Hey, sit down, I've just written a song' and I
sit down and play you 'Lines on My Face' or whatever and you were likely
drawn in 'cause you're the only person in the room besides me, and
that's how I look at it, like a one-on-one experience."
Frampton
acknowledges that given the iconic epic it is as a live piece, he
initially did not consider including "Do You Feel Like I Do" on
Acoustic Classics."
But towards the end of the recording process changed his mind. "I
thought, 'Look, I've done all the others. Let's give it a go,'" Frampton
recalls. "I think the most important thing for me was that the
instrumental portion of the beginning came off well. It's just a
different take on it, y'know? It's an acoustic 'Do You Feel.' I can
understand if some people just won't listen to it because they only want
to hear the other one, but for me, going from 'I can't do that' to
'Yeah, it's not so bad,' it works for me."
Frampton, Kennedy and
Frampton's son Julian toured acoustically last fall and are headed out
for another 13-show run of the west coast on March 9. In addition to the
Acoustic Classics, Frampton also performs
Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue," the
Beatles' "Norwegian Wood," material from his
Humingbird in a Box EP and a couple of
Humble Pie
tracks -- and, he notes,"We talk a lot between songs." One of the show
will be filmed for broadcast on AXS later this year, and a live release
and perhaps a second acoustic album are under consideration. But
Frampton, who plans to be on the road with his full band this summer
doing dates with
Lynyrd Skynyrd and
Gregg Allman, is also looking forward to plugging back in for his next album.
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"I
need to move forward as well; I don't want to get stuck right there
(acoustically) too long," he explains. "I want to move on to something
different and then maybe the album after that might be a live acoustic
show. Some people in this industry have said that the more senior
artists like myself, no one wants to hear new music from them, so don't
worry about it. I get it. But that's what I do, you know? You can't just
stop. So even though new music from me isn't going to leap to the Top
40 stations or streams or whatever, it doesn't matter because it's what I
do every day. I'm always creating. Whether people want to hear it or
not, I'm gonna do it."
Frampton's mind these days is also on the passing of good friend
David Bowie, who Frampton has known since school days in England and played with both then and as part of Bowie's 1987
Glass Spider Tour Band.
"It's hard to talk about for me, still," Frampton says. "He was a
great, dear friend, and as an artist he was totally unique. We grew up
together. We went to the same school, so obviously it's hit me very
hard. That was a tough day -- for everybody. I"m not saying I'm special,
but it just so happened that I knew him all my life so it was hard. It
still is hard. I miss him greatly."
