With a new album, the punningly titled Teas n Seas, now out, it was the perfect time to sit down with Marc Teamaker and find out all about his musical journey, the new album, and what the future holds in store for him.
Before we discuss the new album, could you tell me a little about your musical background and the journey that has brought you to where you are today?
Marc: Ok.. In February of 1964, I was four years old and we were at our grandparents’ house when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. I vaguely remember being very excited. I somehow communicated to my parents that I wanted a guitar.. I also requested a six-shooter, but that’s another story for another day.
But it wasn’t until I went to my first concert, at the age of twelve, that I knew I wanted to be a musician. It was the summer of ’72, and my friend’s uncle took us to Gaelic Park, in the Bronx, to see Humble Pie. Also on the bill was The Edgar Winter Group, and a group called Ramatam, that had Mitch Mitchell on drums, Mike Pinera on guitar and vocals, and April Lawton on lead guitar. But it was mainly Steve Marriott, from the top-billed Humble Pie, who had me mesmerized. I was about as gobsmacked as a 12-year-old could be.
Up until that point, most of the music I listened to came from AM radio, which consisted of mostly a lot of great soul music. It pretty much dominated the Top 40, as I recall. The first single I bought as a kid was The Jackson Five ’s, “I Want You Back.” My two older brothers turned me on to Santana and Led Zeppelin too, but at the time I was mostly into Motown, and Stax, etc. It seemed to go along with my love for basketball, which I played pretty well. But Humble Pie was the turning point.
I had had an acoustic guitar that I banged around on, but after witnessing my sheer exuberance, after that show, my Dad got me an electric guitar and a small amp that came with it. It was a Harmony from Sears. I also had some lessons, but that didn’t last. However, I would spend hours listening to the radio and playing along. Some serious ear training there. My two best friends, Donald, whose uncle took us to the show, and Paul, were both into music, and we started a garage band. Donald on bass, Paul on Drums, and me on guitar and vocals. We played covers and the odd original that I would come up with.
Around 74/75, I started to really write my own songs and kind of went to school on the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters. I also started playing acoustic gigs in bars. I was fifteen, but I was gigging regularly on weekends. Making some decent money. Most of my repertoire was covers of The Eagles, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne. Throw in a few Beatles and Stones tunes. That type of thing.
I graduated high school early, at the end of 77, and got a job in an Art Store so I could save up for my dorm room at Berklee College of Music, in Boston, where I was to attend in September of 1978. Up until this point, I was self-taught. While I was never a good student, just being at Berklee became another eye-opener. Here is where I was able to take my songwriting to another level, mainly because my harmonic abilities grew exponentially. Chords and more chords. “Jazz chords.” Lush voicings.
And by this time, I discovered Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan. I remember the first day in harmony class. Paul Dioguardi, the teacher, in his raspy New York City accent, said, “Put away the book, you know all that stuff.” He then proceeded to write out the score to Joni’s “Paprika Plains” on the blackboard. We were off!
At that time, I was also reconnecting to what I was always listening to as a child. Soul music. Marvin Gaye. Sly Stone. Stevie Wonder. The music that dominated my early adolescence. And this is also where jazz crept in. So the late 70s and early 80s became a training ground for a more sophisticated sound.
Of course, I went the synth, drum machine, portastudio route for a bit, but towards the end of the 80’s I started to gravitate back to the singer-songwriter thing…which dominated the 90’s for me. I had put together bands and played the Greenwich Village scene. The Bitter End, Kenny’s Castaways and CBGB’s. That sort of thing. But at the end of the 90s, I was doing more solo acoustic shows. I then started to put out solo albums.
I started to do my own engineering with the help of some of my friends. Namely Myles Cochran, who found my ad in the Village Voice for a guitar player for a band I was putting together with my first wife, Gina DeSiena, who sang harmony. Ultimately, Myles and I fronted a band called the Powder Monkeys. He was a professional engineer at the time, working out of a studio in Norwalk, Connecticut. He later introduced me to his drummer friend, Ray Herrmann, who was also very knowledgeable about recording. He later became the main drummer for my solo work. These guys were my mentors who helped me cut my teeth as an engineer and producer. I also wound up building my own studio in the house I lived in Greenwich, CT. From that point on, I have been producing my own records.
The late 90s saw me starting to tour the Northeast, doing mostly the coffeehouse scene. Lots of feature spots at open mics. Around this time, I met Meg Griffin, who was originally a DJ at WNEW FM in New York, and at this point in time was at WFUV, the Fordham University station in the Bronx. She took a liking to my music and started to play me a little on the radio.
One thing led to another, and I started opening for some named acts like Steve Forbert and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. I even had a small deal with a label out of Saranac Lake, NY, called Hive Music. My first two solo albums, Lust for Wanda and Ping, were with them. I also started hosting an open mic at the Town Crier in Pawling, NY. I started sitting in for a friend, Scott Sylvester, whom I met on the coffeehouse circuit.
It became a regular gig, which led to more opening spots for people like Graham Parker, Freedy Johnston, and Annie Haslam from the group, Renaissance. It was through Scott that I met Jared Nixon, a drummer who also played bass. We hit it off, and he joined me as a bassist with Ray Hermann on drums. We became known as Marc Teamaker and the Soul Shop.
We played mostly the New York/ Connecticut scene, but we also toured the UK…which I had started to do around 2004. I had a little bit of a following over there via the very new internet and people with a mutual love of the Small Faces and Paul Weller. This time was pretty chaotic, as I was splitting up with my wife and going through what I guess was the obligatory midlife crisis. But I kept playing in the States and going to the UK too.
Everything changed at the end of 2010, when I met Kathleen… Kathleen White … through a mutual friend and musician, Lou Hallwas, out of Chicago. This is where Kathleen was, too. Albany Park, Chicago. She took a liking to my music, and we became Facebook friends and then telephone friends. And then we fell in love on the telephone. And then we met on Christmas night 2010 at O’Hare International in Chicago. See the song “Green Coat” on Teas n Seas. I had a gig booked in Chicago, with the help of Lou, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. But I beat it out of the Tri-State Area early on Christmas night because of an impending snowstorm. I just made it out, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Kathleen and I got married in August of 2011 and lived in Albany Park until 2016, when she passed away. But those were the six best years of my life. We were pretty much attached at the hip. We actually wrote a whole album together. You can find it out there under Albany Park Wirephoto. The album is called Random Acts of Commandment. I am very proud of that work and hope to re-issue it at some point. But Kathleen was the love of my life, and I am so blessed to have been with her for that short time. There is nothing that I can say that can do it justice.
So from 2016 until now, with the help of Jared Nixon, I have put out a double album, “all the little mornings,” and two single albums, Leaf Day Boys, and the current Teas n Seas. Also, a number of singles. So here we are. My journey. I know I left a few things out, but who’s really counting?
And who would you say are the influences, musical and otherwise, who have guided you on such a journey?
Marc: That would be a very long list, so I will try to streamline it as well as I can. Joni Mitchell, Burt Bacharach/Hal David, Brian Wilson, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jimmy Webb, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Small Faces, Humble Pie, Traffic, Steve Winwood, Paul Weller, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Steely Dan, Jackson Browne, CSNY, Stephen Stills, Carole King, Todd Rundgren, Nick Drake, Wilco, Bill Evans, Miles Davis and Pat Metheny.
Some authors who have influenced my work and my life are George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, Charles Dickens, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Italo Calvino, and Thomas Jefferson.
But the most important influences in my life would be Jesus. My two daughters, Eve and Kai, my mother, father, four brothers, and Kathleen.
Teas n Seas (great title, by the way) is a very personal album. Can you explain the concept behind it?
Marc: Thanks! Yes, it is a bit personal. My dear friend, and sometimes musical collaborator, Robert Baird, gave me the title, which usually means a challenge of some sort. He likes to do that. He’s been a great champion of my work since the early 2000s.
After putting out my previous album, Leaf Day Boys, I started writing again. I think I had Green Coat and Winterweed before Robert gave me the title. But as the press release says, “Teas n Seas is a series of love songs for my late wife Kathleen, both experienced and imagined. It’s a kind of conversation with her on various road trips. She’s gone, but I’m still batting around ideas with her, and it’s like we are writing the songs together.”
My head was very much there, and our time living in Chicago together was. So I knew I wanted the songs to generally take place in the Midwest, especially the Upper Peninsula and Lake Superior, where Kathleen spent time as a child fishing with her Dad. There’s the reference to Thunder Bay in the title track, and Whitefish Bay in the closing track, “Pocket of Blue.” If you listen to the album as a whole, you’ll find it’s really just loosely a concept album. There is certainly a good amount of reference to travel (see North Dakota), water, and dreamtime landscapes. But I’ll let the listener decide.
Is it hard to put such personal thoughts out there on public display, or is songwriting a helpful way of processing such feelings?
Marc: I would say it’s the latter mostly. Although I would be lying if I said I don’t occasionally get a little self-conscious when asked about it. But I generally like to write about what I know…what is close to me…even if it’s draped in imagery, and a good amount of hyperbole. That’s what songwriting is, or certainly can be, in my case anyway. And yes, it’s a good way of working things out.
Musically, where would you say you and this album fit into the musical landscape?
Marc: I would say it’s a classic pop-rock record, and I’m a singer-songwriter, steeped in the tradition of pop music from 1965-1973, roughly. A mish-mosh of mainly Pop Rock, along with Folk, Jazz, Country, Blues, and Bossa Nova influences.
Raised in The Bronx but now calling Stamford home, how much has changed in the way you make music and even why you make music, if anything, over the years?
Marc: Well, first off, I’d like to correct the record. I was born in the Bronx and raised there for a while, but then my family moved to Yonkers, NY, which borders the North Bronx. Now… I guess when I first started making music, as a youngster, I wanted to be, like most young musicians, a famous rock star. I would try to imitate the music I was listening to. Fortunately, I liked a lot of different styles of music, and I believe that led to my ultimate ability to develop my own voice.
After attending Berklee in the late 70s, my musical ability grew exponentially, and it helped me immensely in the craft of writing songs. While I was still following some of the trends, by the early 80s, I started to record my own songs, at home on a 4-track Porta-studio. At this time, I was also putting a band together, and I eventually made my way into a “professional” recording studio for the first time. It wasn’t until the mid to late 90’s that I really was starting to develop a voice.
One that was certainly based on the “mish mosh” I described earlier. I was doing a lot of solo acoustic performances, and that really helped to hone my singer-songwriter style. At the same time, I really got into home recording and actually built a studio, with the help of Jeff Oehler, from Hive Music, in the tandem garage below the house we were living in. It had a control room and two tracking rooms. My first album was recorded in the same house, utilizing the bedrooms and the hallways for natural reverb.
But after that, I was doing all my recording in the new studio and also started producing other local artists in Connecticut and New York. I also think the good distraction of starting a family, at the same time, kept me grounded and forced me to concentrate on just making music, concentrating less on the “music business,” which I must confess I’m not very good at. Children will keep you very humble.
So after all this, and up until now, I make music because I absolutely love to. Really, for no other reason. Sure, I want to be recognized; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here rambling on about it. Ha! But I just want to keep writing, recording, and releasing music. While I don’t have the studio anymore, the current technology has allowed me to take my recording rig to various locations to record and produce my songs.
And beyond this latest album, what does the future hold, and what plans do you have musically and personally?
Marc: One thing I plan to do is put a set together and start to perform again. I will start by doing the solo acoustic thing, hopefully, and eventually, put a small band together, with Jared Nixon on drums this time. He’s such a talented and versatile musician. He’s been doing all the drumming on my work for the past 15 years. For now, we’ll just keep working Teas n Seas, but I plan to release a song or two at the end of the year, or beginning of 2026. Then I will make another full-length album.
From a personal standpoint? I just want to spend more time with my family and small circle of friends… and of course, Stax, my 13-year-old whippet… philosopher, poet!
Thank you so much for taking the time to let me into your world, and best of luck with the new album and all your other endeavours.
Website
Teas n Seas album
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