August 1, 2019

Interview: Postmodern Jukebox’s Aubrey Logan Is A Triple Threat

She sings, she write songs and…she plays the trombone! Is there nothing Aubrey Logan can’t do?

The LA-based musician will make her first appearance in New Zealand when she performs with Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox for 8 shows around the country.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Aubrey Logan a short while ago, just as she was about to his the road with sax player Dave Koz. Aubrey gives Marty the lowdown on the upcoming Postmodern Jukebox show and her own, brand new solo album.

Click here to listen to the interview:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

M: So, you’re on your way to New Zealand in a little while with Postmodern Jukebox, but my understanding is you’re on tour with Dave Koz at the moment?

A: Yeah I am, we actually just finished our rehearsals just now and we leave on Thursday to start the tour.

M:That must be exciting.

A: Yeah it is

M: So I assume you’re going to be presenting your own music at that point and doing your own thing.

A: Yeah I will be. I just came off of my solo tour, so I did a lot of that just now and this tour with Dave Koz is a collaboration tour between five different artists including myself, so we actually play pretty much the whole show together. There are a few moments in the show where we each take solos and do stuff from our own albums, but then the rest of the show we actually play together and it is so much fun. I have a cool life, I get to do three very distinct type of shows. I get to do Postmodern Jukebox, which is Woo!, which is very much a thing, and then Dave Koz and then my own tour, so it’s a really cool thing. I have it made.

M: Now I know this Postmodern Jukebox has been here a few times, have you been here with it before, or is this gonna be your first time?

A: No, it’ll be my first time and I’ve never even been in New Zealand, I have been to Australia but I’m ready to come over to the cooler one of the two, or so I hear.

M: That’s right, Australia doesn’t count, just ask anybody in New Zealand.

A: Exactly

M: So let’s see, this Postmodern Jukebox tour is something about Welcome To The Twenties 2.0 Show, so maybe you can enlighten us as to what that’s all about?

A: Ok, so Scott Bradlee the creator of Postmodern Jukebox, my good friend Scott, he obviously got famous for making new music sound old. And not only does he make new music sound old, he initially, the original Postmodern Jukebox songs, if you Google the earliest videos, they are in the style of the 1920’s and the clothing, the flapper dressers, everything, he tends to match that in Postmodern Jukebox. So of course we are in the very last year of the teens in 2019 here, so the 20’s are coming and Postmodern Jukebox is celebrating and we are ending our teen years with a bang and entering into the era of the 20’s yet again, so that is what it’s all about.

M: I see, so are you going back to the 1920’s or are you thinking ahead to the 2020’s as far as music goes?

A: Well of course, as Postmodern Jukebox is concerned, we are not going to be playing electronic anything on that stage. Everything will be played by human beings, but of course we’ll be playing the music that you are hearing on the radio now so that’s what we’re gonna be doing.

M: Since you’re doing so many different tours and types of shows, what do you have to do to prepare to go on the Postmodern Jukebox thing?

A: Well we have a collaborative effort making a set list and I will be doing songs I’ve done before and a few new ones. Believe it or not, even though we’re playing vintage music, we still use Dropbox, and we still use e-mails so I will indeed be getting a set list and music e-mailed to me before I show up at rehearsal. So no we are not preparing the same exact way everyone did in the 1920’s, we will indeed be using our iCal and our Dropbox to sync up and organise together electronically before we meet up, so that’s how we prepare. My life is a living Dropbox.

M: I see, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. And then how much actual rehearsal goes on between you guys?

A: I’ll be about three days and I’ll be driving down to San Diego to finish off the Dave Koz rehearsals from Los Angeles, about a two hour drive, for all those three days because I’ll be rehearsing with Postmodern Jukebox and then finishing up the other tour. Luckily that other tour is in California, so it’s about a two hour drive everyday for me for that, but that’s what we do, and then I’ll be on a long flight and I won’t have to drive anywhere for six weeks.

M: Do you have any input into the Postmodern Jukebox playlist, what’s gonna actually be chosen?

A: It’s kinda given to us but the initial input has already been done because It’s a collaborative effort to even do the songs in the first place. So any song that I do as a feature, I already had collaborative input on, so I’m just gonna show up and sing those and I can’t wait.

M: In addition to singing, is there a certain amount of trombone playing that’s gonna be going on as well from you?

A: Absolutely yes. I will be welding the trombone for sure.

M: Is it difficult to travel with the trombone?

A: No it’s not, it sits in the overhead, it’s really light it’s not a saxophone, those are heavy. Seriously It’s not. The difficulty is when flight attendants don’t think it will fit in the overhead, which it very easily will. When I’m asked if they’re my golf clubs or my ammunition or whatever it is that I’m carrying around, sometimes that’s difficult, but for the most part, it’s a piece of cake.

M: Oh good, that’s a relief, because I guess it comes across as more of an unwieldy instrument than maybe even a saxophone or a trumpet or something.

A: It’s truly a long tube, that’s what it is, it’s pretty simple.

M: All right. So you’re kind of a triple threat in that you sing, you play the trombone and you write your own songs as well, so how do you think of yourself in those terms, what comes to your mind when you describe what you do to other people?

A: That’s a cool question. Well to me, I think of myself as it’s all one, I mean it’s all the same. Because when I’m writing it’s the same brain playing the trombone as it is singing and it’s the same brain writing the songs, so to me it’s one unit. Now, to an outsider who’s never seen me before, they will come to do the shows and they will hear what I would think is a singer-songwriter or a sanger songwriter because I sing real loud sometimes, and then they’ll just see me play the trombone, and they’ll initially think, oh that’s weird, she plays the trombone and sings or that’s unusual or I’ve never seen that before, but then I say you know what, you have seen it before cause you know, everybody knows Louis Armstrong, so yeah you have seen a singer play a brass instrument before and then they kinda go, oh ok.

M: Although Louis was probably before a lot of folks’ time.

A: He was but I still have yet to meet, even a young person, who doesn’t at least know him by his gravelly voice so there is a timeless element to music that I know obviously because Postmodern Jukebox captures, which is why I think we get along so well.

M: I know that you studied music at, was it Julliard?

A: Berklee

M: Berklee sorry, one of those high falutin’ music schools.

A: Yes it is, I did yes.

M: But for your own enjoyment, what kind of music do you listen to?

A: Well, I actually just had an interview with someone else and they asked the same question.

M: Sorry about that

A: No it’s totally cool and what I’ve noticed is, I think of many artists would answer the same thing, I mean today, I’ll just give you an example, I listened to Dolly Parton, and then I listened to Kendrick Lamar in the span of ten minutes, and when I talk to any other artist who does this for their life, none of them think that’s weird, none of them think that it’s strange. So for enjoyment, to be honest, the music I listen to is in most cases the direct opposite type, or a very different sound than whatever it is I’m rehearsing for. So today was all classic 70’s back beat things with Dave Koz, rehearsing all day so I ran into my car and put on Debussy

M: Excellent. And maybe just talk to me a little bit about your new album, Where The Sunshine Is Expensive. That’s an interesting turn of phrase and I believe there’s a line in a song where you sing ‘Talk is cheap and sunshine is expensive’, so maybe you can elaborate for folks who aren’t that familiar with L.A ’cause I assume that’s what you’re referring to, what’s going on there?

A: I am. The album is sort of a theme about Los Angeles and really I wrote the songs kind of about my journey of disappointment followed by hope again, when I was a young artist moving to L.A to become a big star, being met with the reality that it doesn’t work that way and it doesn’t typically work overnight and the general public might think that there are overnight stars but really even those overnight stars, they didn’t become stars overnight, they became stars as soon as that person heard of who they were. And that sort of fantasy land is something that many people are disappointed that it doesn’t really exist this way and L.A sort of is this gritty, grungy, dirty in a good way, kind of a place and at first folks might think that it’s glamorous and cool and awesome but then turns out it’s not. But then I turn around and admit later that in the end that’s not so bad. That’s the theme of the record, but what made the record special is I’m singing about a town that’s known for being fake and yet the record’s full of paradoxes, my band and I played the entire album live in front of an audience.

M: That’s right, you recorded in front of a live studio audience

A: Yeah, in the least fake way possible, because I was born in the wrong decade and I should have been a teenager in the 70’s and that’s my favourite music, so we recorded it the same way they would have in 1974 and that’s what it’s about.

M: How did the audience react and behave when you were actually recording the record in front of them? Were they attentive?

A: They were awesome. I mean, they stayed with us the whole day and we were gonna release them, we were gonna actually let them go after a couple hours just because who wants to stay longer, and we actually kind of took a survey and was like do you guys want to stick around and they were all like yeah, ‘we don’t want to leave’, and so they ended up staying. W made it so that they did not applaud until we pushed the record button off, cause we really did still want a record in a controlled environment and they were so… I mean they had this smile on their face and they wanted to clap, but they all were like no we’re participating in this, we’re gonna be a part of it, it felt like they were working with me, and it was really cool.

M: It is difficult to restrain yourself when you’re listening to somebody perform and watching them and not to immediately leap into applause especially if you feel like you really want to and you have to hold yourself back from it, so good on ’em for being able to restrain themselves like that.

A: They were so cool, and we released applause at certain points and as soon as they saw the red light go off they applauded, but really it felt like they were professional.

M: Professional audience.

A: Yeah, they each had headphones on, everybody had a pair of headphones on, it was really cool.

M: Great, that’s very cool. So with the Postmodern Jukebox, maybe you can leave me by just telling me one song that you’re gonna perform that you’re really looking forward to singing?

A: They can count on the fact that I will be singing my very first Postmodern Jukebox video debut song which is Bad Blood by Taylor Swift and believe it or not, Kendrick Lamar. They can count on it.