MusicsWeek: How did you get started in music?
Rockaway: I have been interested in music since I was young. My father managed rock music radio stations and gave me access to contemporary music while I was growing up. I began taking drum lessons when I was twelve and have played that instrument ever since.
MusicsWeek: What inspired you to become a musician?
Rockaway: No different than anyone born in the 50's who came of age in the era of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, it was the most exciting form of expression, and I wanted to be a part of it, though it wasn't until I was in my 60's and wanted to write my own music that I taught myself to play the keyboard.
MusicsWeek: What genre of music do you identify with, and why?
Rockaway: I write songs that are now labeled 'yacht rock', which was popular in the late 70's and early 80's, but the tinge of the 1960's music that I loved in my teen years creeps in from time to time.
MusicsWeek: How would you describe your musical style?
Rockaway: I like to call it 'adult' rock because there is content to it lyrically, but it has a beat and hopefully some hooks to engage the listener. I write about what life has taught me in the course of my 72 years of living, so I might have more to say than some younger writers.
MusicsWeek: Who are your biggest musical influences?
Rockaway: Brian Wilson stands out as my favorite writer, because of his incredible use of melody and harmony, but I've only been able to capture his spirit in one song on my first album. He's a challenge that few writers have been able to approach. I love other songwriters, including, of course, Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Webb, Holland, Dozier and Holland of Motown fame, Tom Petty and Stephen Bishop, among others.
MusicsWeek: What's the most challenging part of being a musician?
Rockaway: Writing a song, which combines, ideas with emotion, is one of the hardest artistic feats, to accomplish. Each song takes you on a special journey, hoping that you can bring the elements of lyric, melody, and rhythm together in a form that is pleasing to the ear and engaging enough to want to listen to over and over. As others have said, it's hard to take ownership of the good ones because they almost seem heaven sent when they arrive.
MusicsWeek: What inspires your songwriting?
Rockaway: Mine can come from personal experience, particularly in the area of love lost and found. I write many from passion about our politics and can see a scene in real life that jogs a thought. The best example of that was seeing a four-car funeral and trying to imagine what led to so few people there to celebrate a life. The song that resulted is simply called "Four Cars." On our first album, I read an obituary about the city editor who launched the careers of famed Watergate journalists, Woodward and Bernstein but was never given the credit he deserved for guiding them throughout the story of a lifetime. The song "Barry Sussman" attempts to correct the historical record. On a lighter note, I can hear a phrase that I think would make a great song title and I go from there, sometimes with success, other times not.
MusicsWeek: Can you give us an example of a song where the lyrics were particularly challenging to write?
Rockaway: On this album, two come to mind. I included a three-song 'suite' in honor of my wife and, after a medical episode involving two surgeries in 2024, I had to find a way to thank my wife, Carmelita, for her incredible care. I felt some pressure to make it just right. So, "The One Promise" in a very approachable way thanks her and assures her that while going through all of that, I made a number of bargains that I ultimately would not keep, but the one promise I planned to keep was to keep on loving her. The other song "What's Wrong with Everyone" attempts to describe the isolation and loneliness epidemic that has overtaken America in the wake of the pandemic but had been simmering well ahead of that for many reasons. I'm very proud of the message in this song, but also some of the songwriting tricks that I used which were new to me.
MusicsWeek: What challenges did you face early in your career, and how did you overcome them?
Rockaway: Actually, music has always been a hobby. My actual career was broadcasting. I still do a podcast on emerging issues in our politics and society. It's called America Trends Podcast(americatrendspodcast.com). I've been a disc jockey, a talk show host, and the chief programming executive for the statewide public television system in my home state of Connecticut. I was blessed to find a good deal of success in approaching all of those positions. Perhaps, the greatest challenge was trying to describe my career in a book I wrote in 2021, called "No Dead Air." In it, I described how after having brought Barney the Dinosaur to television it was left to me to save it when PBS, unbeknownst to most people, had canceled the now iconic children's series early in the first season.
MusicsWeek: What accomplishment in your career are you most proud of?
Rockaway: Bringing Barney to television left the largest footprint, but our impact on the growing popularity of women's basketball, given our early association in the 1990's with the most successful women's college basketball program ever, UConn, was the ultimate game-changer for the PBS system I programmed in Connecticut and changed our relationship with our audience in profound ways. In closing, though, I'm really proud of this album, and the one before it, proving that old dogs, working with young ones, can still find purpose and meaning in some creative form, like songwriting.
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