Jake Shimabukuro is still pinching himself. And Mick Fleetwood is grinning from ear to ear.
This is how the two feel as they make out Blues Experiencea collaborative album that finds the ukulele virtuoso and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer exploring the blues on nine tracks – one of which is a moving tribute to late Fleetwood Mac bandmate Christine McVie.
“I'm really excited about this project,” says Shimabukuro Bulletin board via Zoom from Hawaii, where she lives (and where she met Fleetwood, another Hawaiian). “It's such a departure from anything I've ever done, but I love that because I really feel like I learned a lot from this experience. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that this album would one day exist. And I love these things… the most unlikely collaborations or combinations that come together to make something very different and unique.”
Fleetwood — who has about 40 ukuleles hanging on the walls of his home as decorations — adds that the appeal for him was working with someone he calls an “explorer. He is fascinated with music. He comes from a very traditional musical background, but he's done an extraordinary amount of work with anyone from Neil Young to Bette Midler, all this weird, weird, super eclectic stuff that obviously interested him on his journey. That's what led to 'What can a funny old drummer — me — do with someone like that?'”
Fleetwood and Shimabukuro had met many times over the years, forming a friendly relationship. “We basically spent the night for years, always saying, 'We've got to do something together,'” Fleetwood recalls. Meeting again at a Shimabukuro show in Maui in early 2023 put the idea on the front burner for both of them, and by March they were in a studio Fleetwood has near his home, with “no pressure, no agenda, just to get in there. to see what will happen.” Four songs in four days—”recording everything live and just experimenting and having a lot of fun,” according to Shimabukuro—proved that they were creatively in sync. Shimabukuro was even happy to plug into a vintage Fender Princeton amp that helped him create a sound that “really seemed to work well for this genre and this style.”
Playing the blues was a no-brainer, even if it was something Shimabukuro hadn't done much of before. “First of all, Mick is the iconic blues drummer,” he explains. “I've always loved that style of music, that style of playing the guitar, that kind of phrasing. I mean, one of my favorite Jimi Hendrix songs of all time is his version of “Red House” when I was young. That's how it was in me.”
Shimabukuro also acknowledges the playing influence of “Uncle” Joseph Kekuku, the acclaimed inventor of the 19th century steel guitar. “I don't play slide on my ukulele, but this album kind of brings it back to what he did and what I learned from it. It's a kind of throwback but at the same time it's progressive.”
Fleetwood says his team “was very knowledgeable about the pedigree of early Fleetwood Mac and Peter Green. So that kind of became the pattern of the conversation, or at least the outline. He is very passionate about what he does and anything that has passion about it, in my quiet opinion, is associated with the blues. He's an incredibly technically skilled player, period, and he has a whole other world of seeing things in a different way, where you really pay attention to where the blues are coming from. So this album ended up being a combination of his natural self, which is a huge catalog of technical abilities, and what I do.”
Blues Experience Not strictly blues, mind you. there are renditions of Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale', for example, as well as Neil Young's 'Rockin' in the Free World'. But most of the set goes like this, including the Shimabukuro original “Kula Blues” and the Stevie Wonder, Jeff Beck popular “Cause We've Ended as Lovers,” a personal Shimabukuro favorite featuring Sonny Landreth. on slide guitar. Keyboardist Mark Johnstone from the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band plays on some tracks, while bassist Jackson Waldhoff and keyboardist Michael Grande play throughout the album.
The album's most impressive moment, however, is its close, a rendition of Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie's signature song 'Songbird' followed by a spoken word coda from Fleetwood, mourning McVie's death on November 30 2022. It is a musical elegy with three horses. , although Fleetwood says “that wasn't the intention”.
“'Songbird' came out of the blue and we couldn't not include it,” says Fleetwood. “It was around the time that Christine had passed and we found ourselves doing this song, which wasn't preordained. For me this was very moving. I was very pregnant with the loss of Christine, and the fact that we were singing it but not singing it reminded me of Peter Green. he had a great natural voice, but he also sang through his instrument. It was very emotional and also in those moments it was a prayer, for sure. Christine was a huge loss to me and to millions and millions of people.”
Saluting McVie on a blues album was also fitting, adds Fleetwood. “She was a blues player,” he says. “He came up through the ranks, playing with Freddie King. And she was an extremely passionate songwriter. just when you thought he was on a trip into the pop world, he'll come out and lay on you something like “Songbird” which is really a lament… which of course is associated with the blues.
“Before we lost Christine there were some intentions that Fleetwood Mac would have found a way to say goodbye… but we didn't. It was unthinkable for (the band) to do more. Stevie (Nicks) has been able to do that in a number of ways on the big tour she's been on. was able to do what Fleetwood Mac was not. It was all like a kind of tsunami of emotion as we made this song. But it was also very healing and a kind of closure.”
Fleetwood and Shimabukuro played some of the Blues Experience songs live at the We Are Friends — A Maui Wildfire Benefit Concert on the island last year, and both express a desire to perform together again. They're also ready to collaborate more, though Shimabukuro claims that “I would never want to be greedy and ask him for another project like this — but if he brought it up and said, 'Dude, let's do another one,'” kidding are you doing God, that would be a dream come true, like winning the lottery twice.”
However, the odds are better than that. “If Jake knocked on the door and said, 'I'm not actually on the road,' I'd always be open to doing something,” confirms Fleetwood. Meanwhile, he's working on an album of his own, collaborating with an “interesting” body of other artists (he specifically mentions Girl In Red) and even using some of those off-the-wall ukuleles.
“It's petrifying,” Fleetwood acknowledges, “but it's actually turning out to be really interesting. I'm having so much fun doing this and my heart says “you need to do more”. Doing this (album) with Jake was really good for me. It was really the “you can do this” trigger. It's very healing, and I've actually learned to express myself in little areas that I never knew were there, and it doesn't matter anyway. We just need to do it and then we'll see what it leads to.”
