While daylight savings time may be the practice of advancing clocks so darkness falls at a later time during the summer months, it also served as the title and inspiration for Steve Forbert’s newest studio album of the same name. Pulling up on his 70th birthday on Dec. 13 means mortality and aging served as a major inspiration for the veteran singer-songwriter as he was recording these 10 songs that make up “Daylight Savings Time.”
“These are songs I wrote over the last couple of years and that’s what I’m feeling,” Forbert said. “A lot of the record has to do with an appreciation of nature and the feeling of that oncoming autumn thing in this time of life. It’s not unlike appreciating daylight savings time as that time in the summer where you’re getting that theoretical extra hour of daylight.”
Fans can expect these tunes and more when Forbert and a trio rounded out by keyboardist Rob Klores and bassist Todd Lanka take the stage at My Father’s Place on Saturday, Dec. 7. Given his deep canon, the Mississippi native plays it rather fast and loose when it comes to what he plays from night to night.
“No two shows are the same and I don’t really follow a set list,” Forbert explained. “I start off the same way. This season, the shows are starting off with a song I bring out for autumn pretty much every year called ‘Autumn This Year.’ Then of course, we always end with ‘Romeo’s Tune.’ That’s simple logic there. The in between is really down to the moment. The show sort of starts on its own flow and you want to vary the rhythms a lot and keep the keys shifting around just so it sounds interesting and doesn’t get samey. That’s the truth of the show. Everything else is of the moment and like I say, I might get requests from the crowd and I’m free to respond to those. It’s not some big show following a set list. That would be very boring.”
To know Forbert’s career path is to follow the trail of a music-loving kid born in Meridian, MS, who got his first musical experience being encouraged to sing Peggy Lee’s “Fever” when he was a toddler. And while he admits the influence The Beatles had on him and his generation was considerable, it was The Byrds who really drove him to become a musician.
“When I heard ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was when I decided to pick up a real guitar,” Forbert recalled. “There was something embedded in that record and I stress by The Byrds. That sound, that feel and the fact that Bob Dylan wrote it meant that it was obviously very poetic and it had some folk undertones, roots and foundation.”
Forbert’s yearning to scratch that musical itch led to his decamping to New York City, landing in Manhattan in June 1976, where he quickly discovered the CBGB’s scene. For him, the timing offered endless possibilities, which he recounts in great detail throughout his 2018 memoir “Big City Cat: My Life in Folk-Rock.”
“At that time The Ramones and Patti Smith’s first records had come out and it wasn’t like I was trying to emulate those artists or going there as it were,” Forbert explained. “But it was clear that New York City was putting out some different new exciting stuff. There was so much variety between The Ramones and Patti Smith so I could see that there might be room for the kind of thing I wanted to do. I wanted to play and word was that in New York City you could sing in the streets if it came to that. And I wanted to play and it did come to that.”
Between busking on the street and playing at CBGB’s, Folk City and Kenny’s Castaway, it wasn’t long before Forbert was signed to Nemperor Records. When his 1979 sophomore bow Jackrabbit Slim dropped and its smash single “Romeo’s Tune” was turning heads, Forbert was the latest singer-songwriter to be hailed as the next Bob Dylan. Plowing through the hyperbole, Forbert instead clung to self-improving as an artist, a single-minded goal that’s rewarded him with a creatively rich career.
“Regardless of the fact that you can make recordings in your basement with the greatest of ease, I always felt it best to get out in front of real people and play in what we’ll call real time,” he said. “You want to see what you’ve got to deliver and see how people respond to it.”
Steve Forbert will be performing on Saturday, Dec. 7 at My Father’s Place at the Roslyn Hotel, 1221 Old Northern Blvd., Roslyn. For more information, visit www.myfathersplace.com or call 516-625-2700.
