Big Blue Hearts

One listen to Big Blue Hearts’ new album, Here Come Those Dreams Again, would be enough to convince anyone that frontman David Fisher was raised on a steady diet of Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers. But it’s not true. And he can’t really tell you how he came to channel those early-rock-and-roll spirits.

‘I was in a band in San Francisco,’ he says by way of explanation, ‘but I was really frustrated with the way things were going. So I started going down to the studio at night ‘ unbeknownst to the band ‘ mic up all the stuff, and play their instruments. I’d always been a singer and guitarist and lyricist, but I’d never really written music. But then I picked up the guitar and started playing these chords, and this sound just came out. It had that classic feel. It was weird, but these songs were from me, from my heart, from something I didn’t even know was there. They were all very personal; they were about lost love and desperation, stuff I equate with my growing up. I had that aching thing in my voice. But, to this day, I have no idea where it came from.’

More recently, Fisher has found ‘home’ in a larger sense, having married and become a father. ‘Lovin’ You (Is the Right Thing to Do),’ the one-listen-catchy lead track on Here Come Those Dreams Again, is ‘definitely autobiographical,’ he reveals. ‘I’m full of hope these days. I’m really comfortable in my own skin; I like who I am and where I’m heading.’

But things weren’t always so rosy in David Fisher’s life, and much of Big Blue Hearts’ new album, defined by the singer’s fearlessly intimate vocals, feels like tear-about-to-fall heartache. He says of the song ‘Love or Something Like It,’ on which he sounds like he could break down at any moment, ‘It’s about wanting love so badly and not getting it. That kind of loneliness puts you in a very dark place.’

Fisher was born in Portland, Maine, but his family moved to Springfield, Va., when David was two. By the time he was four, his parents had divorced and his mother had married a man she’d met in AA. Despite his stepfather’s best efforts, however, the family suffered from financial difficulties.

David’s mother didn’t work outside the house, so the family went where David’s stepfather could find employment. Rather than withdraw into perpetual new-kid shyness, though, David relied on his natural instincts as a performer. Still, the constant moving and other family issues made David prone to anxiety.

David is nonetheless grateful to his mother for playing Marvin Gaye and Motown around the house, as well as singer-songwriters like Carole King, James Taylor and Carly Simon. He credits a friend’s mom, who was a DJ at Baltimore’s WHFS, with broadening his horizons.

When he was in fourth grade, a friend of David’s mother gave her an acoustic guitar, which she gave to him. One of her friends showed him some chords, and over the years he went from playing ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘Blowing in the Wind’ to songs by Minor Threat and the other seminal punk bands on the Washington, D.C.-based Dischord label. He also got into English bands like the Exploited and cut his hair into a Mohawk.

It was around this time, when Fisher was 16, that his desire to sing reached critical mass.

Fisher put an ad in a local paper that declared, ‘I’m a singer, and I want to sing.’

The next chapter in Fisher’s musical life was ushered in by a bad acid trip, which actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Shortly thereafter, Fisher’s father became the band’s biggest booster, buying them new equipment, setting them up to record in a warehouse he owned and urging them to complete an album.

Though nothing ultimately came of the album, the experience of making it ensured that Fisher would pursue a career in music. There were other songs and other bands and an eventual relocation to San Francisco. After he began mining the rootsy pop twang that would come to characterize Big Blue Hearts, he recruited players to help him flesh it out. Sharp-dressed men in tailored black suits, the band started playing open-mic nights and, incredibly, were signed to a major-label record deal without having recorded a demo.

In 1997, they released Big Blue Hearts (Geffen Records), which earned a devoted following and impressed critics. Fisher was mentioned in the same breath with Chris Isaak and the Mavericks’ Raul Malo as an heir to no less than Roy Orbison. The future looked bright ‘ until the record company was swallowed up in an epochal corporate merger. Big Blue Hearts continued to tour and record but, after months of uncertainty, were cut from the reconfigured label’s roster.

This could have been enough to send him back to the bottle, a bad habit he’d given up only months before.

Fisher sought out new creative partners, including Douglas Soref, who would co-write some of the material on Here Come Those Dreams Again, and the rhythm section of bassist J.B. Burton and drummer Greg Sobol, who are now official members of Big Blue Hearts. Fisher and Soref’s collaboration was so fruitful that they were able to pitch several songs to a music publisher, who has placed them in television shows (including ‘The O.C.,’ ‘Summerland,’ ‘One Tree Hill,’ ‘Without a Trace,’ ‘The Real World,’ ‘Ally McBeal’ and ‘Party of Five’) and films (‘White Chicks,’ ‘A Cool Dry Place’). Fisher also formed a production company, working with other artists in his Hollywood studio. For the most part, Big Blue Hearts lay fallow.

Not long afterward, Fisher began to feel there was, in fact, a lot more to say as leader of Big Blue Hearts. The composition of ‘Feels So Right’ confirmed his feeling that a new record was in the offing.

He approached his studio collaborators Burton, originally from Phoenix, and Sobol, a native Detroiter, about joining the band. Much to his relief, Burton and Sobol both responded with some variation of ‘Hell, yeah!’

Rounding out the group is lead guitarist Scott Minchk, whom Fisher aptly likens to ‘a redneck Mark Knopfler.’

As producer of Here Come Those Dreams Again, Fisher saw the opportunity to remedy some things he did not love about the first Big Blue Hearts album. Here Come Those Dreams Again finds Fisher realizing his creative vision.

This derives not only from his technical mastery ‘ working over the years on tracks with T-Bone Burnett and Roy Thomas Baker didn’t hurt ‘ but also from his maturity as an artist, which allowed him to embrace a certain imperfection. For a prime example, cue up the standout cut ‘Don’t Mind Messin’,’ which Fisher calls a ‘Jerry Lee Lewis/Sun Sessions thing.’ The record’s overall warmth, part of its organic nature, can be attributed to the producer’s extensive use of analogue equipment, which, of course, would have been the only gear available to Sam Phillips when he recorded Lewis, Orbison, Presley and Carl Perkins back in the Sun Records heyday. The spirit of those performers greets Big Blue Hearts every time they take the stage.