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Pear Duo Have No Boundaries |
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Pear Duo comprised of pianist / composer and arranger Curtis Brengle and
singer / songwriter and musician Julie Ragins recently released their
new album No Boundaries, a
wonderful and diverse collection of songs that are a mix of original
tunes and cover songs. The husband and wife singing combo bring a wealth
of musical experience painted across a vast genre palette to this
recording. Their combined history has seen them perform with The Moody
Blues, Chaka Kahn, Sheena Easton, Pointer Sisters, Ray Charles, Sergio
Mendes and numerous other stellar artists. The affable couple sat down
with yours truly and Riveting Riffs Magazine recently to talk about
their new album.
Curtis notes the fact that they do have such a vast genre palette to
choose from is what led to the title No Boundaries for this record.
“We are not going to limit ourselves to a particular style,” he says and
Julie adds, “Much to the chagrin of every platform on the internet that
wants to pigeonhole you in a single genre.”
Our conversation wanders in another direction for a moment as we ponder
whether or not the music industry still wants to pigeonhole artists into
specific genres.
Curtis Brengle adds, “They have a collection of genres that we have to
choose from, so we can’t even make up our own.”
The song “Where Do We Go From Here?” written by Julie Ragins takes us
through that journey of grief and finding new beginnings. It is both
reflective and poignant.
Julie says, “It is me remembering back to when my father passed away. It
was a very difficult time for my family. We are very, very close. I had
an idyllic childhood growing up. The song is about the memories of all
of us dealing with our grief in our own way. There is also the
realization that everything is going to move forward and be exactly the
same and yet nothing is going to be the same ever again. Even though my
father died twenty-two years ago it is still kind of raw for me every
time that we do it.”
We segue easily into Julie talking about the song “7 Fairway Drive,” and
a transition period in the lives of the members of her family.
“I wrote both “Where Do We Go From Here,” and “7 Fairway Drive,” around
the same time period and again it really is about loss. I lived in the
same house since I was five years old and my father died when I was
thirty. I still had my bedroom in the house. There was still my little
room, with my trophies from soccer when I was a child and all of the kid
paraphernalia that you accumulate over decades.
Our house was this place where
we all would go to and it was a rock, it was consistent and it didn’t
change.
After my father died, my mom made the decision to sell the house. It was
very strange to one, lose my father, but we were also losing this place
that was such a safe haven and it held so many memories for us. There is
a line in the song, “It is not
these old walls / It is the love that was inside,” I think that is
what we all took away from it. When the house was gone, it was just a
structure. All of the feelings, all of the emotions and all of the
history, it still lives on. Ironically the house that my mom purchased
in its place in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, halfway across the world feels
very much the same (Editor’s
note: Julie Ragins grew up in Alaska).
She filled it with the things
that were in our old house and when we gather there it still has the
same feelings in a lot of ways. I think people get very attached to
houses. It was a bittersweet time and it was captured in that song.”
Julie Ragins tracked her own background vocals for the song “7 Fairway
Drive.”
Curtis Brengle
contributed his original and complex instrumental “Six Eight Tune,” to
the album No Boundaries.
“The name was a temporary working name for a song that was in 6/8 (he
counts out the beat) and I just didn’t think of a different title
for it. There was no intent on my part to try and express an emotion and
I wasn’t trying to express a time in my life. I just wanted to write a
composition in six eight and that is what I did. Sometimes I will start
things and I will get about eight bars into it and then I will go what
happens after this? I have a lot of pieces of music with about eight
bars on them that I started and I will come back to them and mess around
with them, but nothing really happens. With this one I probably had it
done in two hours. It was one of those pieces that wrote itself.
That is the history around that tune. I love Jazz of course and I love
listening to Chick Corea and I love listening to Herbie Hancock. Those
people were influential in my musical life,” he says.
The mood changes with “Soul Refill,” another song written by Julie
Ragins.
“It could be anywhere and whatever that place is for you and that helps
you to reboot. For us it was a place called Joshua Tree, the high desert
in Southern California that is north of Palm Springs. We both loved it
out there and we went out there a lot. We camped and hiked and we got
married out there.
Anyone who lives in the city and especially one that is as intense as LA
or New York or Chicago (Curtis adds or Vancouver) you get bottled up.
There is a level of energy and intensity that at some point, at least
for me that you have to release. The best way always for me to do that
is to go to nature and to let all of that go. That is what “Soul Refill”
is all about.
The sprightly “Texting and Driving,” with songwriting credits going to
David Ferguson Tull and David Tull is vocally and instrumentally a fun
tune, but the lyrics have a very direct message and the three of us muse
about the tremendous possibilities that exist for this to be used as a
public service announcement about an ever increasing problem on the
roads despite laws being passed in just about every jurisdiction.
Curtis provides some background for the song, “Dave is a drummer friend
of ours who has written a couple of records and all of his lyrics are
like the “Texting and Driving.” It is hilarious. It is ironic. He
happens to be Barbra Streisand’s drummer at this point.”
“When we heard “Texting and Driving,” we were literally falling on the
floor laughing,” Julie says, with Curtis interjecting, “It has an
element of truth in it,” and we really wanted to make an album that had
a strong diversity of music. We thought what better way to bring a
straight up fast Jazz song to the Popular music culture world. Bring
them some Jazz that is harmonically interesting, lyrically hilarious and
is challenging. That is not an easy song to sing or to play.”
“It is not an easy song to sing for sure. Then we had to change the key.
He originally wrote it in the key of C, which is okay, but then it got
to be the key of A Flat, so Julie could sing it. It was a finger twister
in some of these areas. I had to practice it,” he says.
“We (singers) are always changing songs and making them harder on
everybody,” says Julie.
The couple describe the song as a parody and one that they firmly
believe people will learn from through the humor expressed and that may
just stick with them when they are driving.
Our ears perked up when we heard Julie say “We singers are always
changing songs and making them harder on everybody,” because earlier in
life she did not give much credence to singers.
“I started off as a saxophone player in a fourth grade school band and I
played saxophone through college. I started to play the piano when I was
twelve. I remember in junior high school, high school and college I
never wanted to sing. I never liked singers. I didn’t think singers were
musicians. They just sang and they didn’t know anything about harmony or
theory. They couldn’t read music and they couldn’t play an instrument. I
really dismissed them as musicians and it wasn’t until I was much older
and in my early to mid-twenties that I started singing. I realized that
so many of the best singers out there are amazing musicians, as well,”
she says.
Curtis says, “The first gig that I had I was seventeen years old and
that was working with a singer. I always worked with singers throughout
junior and senior high choirs. My view of singers has always been it is
the only instrument that is connected to your body. The trumpet isn’t,
it is an external instrument. Piano is not. Singers have to produce
sound with their throats, their bodies and all of the physical things
that they have. I have always respected singers and I know that they
have different fish to fry. They have a whole deal about enunciation,
pitch, breathing and style, so they don’t necessarily focus on theory,
like I might.”
The Ronnie Shannon and Jimmy Holiday song “Baby I Love You,” has a quick
tempo and really showcases both Julie Ragins’ vocals and Curtis
Brengle’s piano playing. Julie’s vocals are at the crossroads of Blues
and traditional R & B with a nice sprinkling of Soul.
Curtis says, “It was definitely fun to record and all of these pieces
were fun to record. Julie changed up the background vocals to make it a
lot more interesting. We added a tambourine on there. We added little
things, but we didn’t want to add a lot, because the point is how much
music can you get out of the piano, voice and the guitar? We have always
focused on that even with our first record and this song was just piano
and voice. We wanted to do as many styles of tunes as we could just
using two instruments and not a band. That is what we ended up doing,
although for “Baby I Love You,” Julie (also) played guitar. We added
some percussion things and some tambourine. It is always sort of an
experiment. Before, we choose tunes we sit down with them and we play
them then we ask how is the tempo? How fast it is going to go? How much
syncopation am I going to do, especially with guitar and voice? If I do
a whole lot of syncopation is that going to distract from the tune? We
have to work these things out and to talk about them. We say things like
I think it ought to be a little slower or I think it ought to be a
little faster. That has everything to do with the singer. They have to
be able to breathe and they have to be able to spit the words out. They
have to be comfortable in delivering the song.”
Julie continues, “This is a song that I have sung a lot over the years
and over the decades. It was a song that I never grew tired of and when
Curtis and I used to do duo gigs locally in Los Angeles we would play it
for fun. It was one of those songs that just kept sticking. It evolved.
We enjoyed the fact that it is a cover song and it is Aretha Franklin’s
tune, but at the same time we bring something to the table with it that
is fresh and different. Hopefully we have something different to say,
even though it wasn’t a song of ours.”
The second song on No Boundaries
is the Edwin Lucie song “Lay My Head,” and if you close your eyes you
can hear a bit of Ray Charles in Curtis Brengle’s piano playing. Julie
Ragins souful vocals enhance that mood.
The album is published by their own publishing company Ginsky Music a
nod to Julie’s father whose last name was Raginsky when he immigrated to
America from Russia.
So just how did this incredible musical husband and wife duo meet? Well
that depends on which one of them you ask.
Julie begins, “If you ask me I hired Curtis for a gig in January of
1997. I was doing a project with a friend of mine and we needed a piano
player for a gig that we were doing at The Baked Potato in Los Angeles.
He agreed to do the gig. If you ask Curtis…
Curtis picks up the story from here, “I remember this a little
differently about how we met and Julie really doesn’t remember (this
part) at all (Julie pipes in and
repeats “at all”). There was a club in Chatsworth, which is a suburb
of Los Angeles and there was a place called Skoby’s
and every Monday night there was a jam session. All of our friends
would go. Everybody would stand in and you traded cards, you talked shop
and you met new people. In this case a friend of mine introduced me to
Julie, as she was walking into the club from the front door. We sat
there and yapped and she said I have to go now, because my father and my
brother are here. I need to go sit down with them. She wandered off to
visit with them. I was single and I thought I wonder if I could marry
this girl.
A year later she calls me up on the phone and she says hey do you want
to do this gig? I can’t pay you much, but I can buy you pizza. She
identified herself as Julie Ragins and I didn’t recognize the name. It
had been a year and I had spent maybe two minutes with her. I got to the
rehearsal and went oh yeah it’s you (Julie
starts to laugh at this point in the telling of the story). That is
how I remember it, but Julie just remembers hiring me for the gig and
doesn’t remember the stuff from the year before.”
Back to you Julie, “I do remember being at Skoby’s because it was the
only time my father and brother were ever there. I do remember that
night; I just don’t remember Curtis (they
both laugh).
As for the name Pear Duo that came about mostly out of marketing
necessity explains Curtis, “First of all Pear was really a play on
words. The Duo part came about, because it was a domain problem. Anytime
you look up pair somebody owns that. We decided to go with Pear Duo,
because there was no domain name and therefore we could make a website.
It was really a practical solution to a problem.”
“You could find us in a Google search that way. If you typed in Pair we
would never be found,” says Julie.
As for the story behind why they decided to form the duo Julie says, “I
had been touring since 2005 with The Moody Blues and in 2014 Justin
Hayward their lead singer and guitar player decided he wanted to do a
solo tour, so I joined him on that. He allowed me to sell my merch on
his tour. That is quite incredible. I had an old CD that I did years ago
that I pulled out of the garage and I put a new picture on it and I
started selling it. I thought maybe I could fit my car back in the
garage again one day. People really warmed up to it (the CD) and they
were buying it. After a few tours people started saying hey I have that
one, do you have another one? The idea behind trying to create another
album was overwhelming, so Curtis and I came up with the idea of
recording songs that we like in our studio in our house. We did a ten
song album with one original and the rest were cover songs that we did
in different ways. People really liked it and after a while people
started asking where they could see us play live.
We thought if we are really going to make a go of this we should make an
album that is more original music and to try and create something that
artistically is more our own. We spent a good while thinking about what
kind of songs we wanted to do and where we were going to get them from.
We ended up reaching out to some
friends of ours in LA who are wonderful songwriters and who contributed
songs to the album.”
Curtis continues, “In Los Angeles we were working with a whole bunch of
different people. We didn’t see each other on gigs that often. One day
we looked at each other and we said you know what, we have a piano in
here and I have recording equipment. We went out and bought Julie a
microphone we just started recording. That is really what happened. We
decided to make a record and after the record was done we thought what
are we going to do with this record? We started selling it and tried to
get gigs with it.”
Julie picks up the conversation from here, “It is difficult to maintain
a high level of working in Los Angeles. As you get older it gets harder
to get gigs. This gave us an opportunity to create something for
ourselves instead of working for somebody else. That is very intriguing
to us.
I had an epiphany a couple of years ago. We just finished performing at
the Hollywood Bowl with The Moody Blues for their 50th anniversary of
(the album) Days of Future Past.
There was a sixty piece orchestra and it was an epic gig. There were
18,000 people. It was sold out. I noticed there was probably thirty feet
between me and the front row and I couldn’t see past the third row. I
had my in ear monitors on, so I couldn’t hear the audience at all. Once
the sun went down the whole audience was just a blackout. I realized
what a disconnect there is in most big venues today. You don’t have much
connection with the audience. Afterwards there was a handful of people
who were invited to come backstage and they were friends of the main
guys or they were a few famous people that they let in, but not fans,
never fans.
About three weeks later Curtis and I were out doing some house concerts
for our duo project. I was about ready to walk into somebody’s living
room where there are maybe thirty people in the room and I was nervous.
I could feel it in my stomach. My mouth was getting kind of cottony and
I realized that you are so naked in that environment. It is a visceral
connection and you are only a few feet away. People are looking you
right in the eye and they are really listening, so you better have
something to say. It just made me realize how disconnected from an
audience large venues had made me feel.
I found so much joy with connecting with the audiences (in the house
concerts). Then afterwards being able to have a chat with every single
person who came to the show and have a beer or a glass of wine and have
a little bit to eat. You just get to meet everybody. It is a little bit
hard to explain, but that personal connection made everything so much
more special to me. It is like when you go to a big party and you don’t
talk to anybody and you don’t meet anybody. You go home feeling a little
more empty than if you had just stayed home in the first place.”
Curtis adds his thoughts about smaller settings versus large venues,
“Like Julie says when you are up on a big stage like that what you see
is (maybe) the drummer next to you and a big fat light coming down to
you from the lighting guy. It is almost like a wall of black in the
audience. You can’t see anybody and you are not interacting with the
audience. Like Julie said backstage it is not like a whole lot of people
are coming back there. Actually, I don’t want them back there. Everybody
is changing and you have things to prepare and to talk about.
When you are in these really intimate environments it is a lot of fun.
You get to connect versus when you are doing a (big) show and you don’t
have a chance to speak. I am sitting there running a keyboard rig or
playing piano or conducting something, so it is definitely (in the
smaller environments) a joy to be down there in the trenches.”
Julie adds some final thoughts to this part of the conversation, “Curtis
has a great sense of humor. He tells little stories about how we met or
a little anecdote about being on the road or sometimes he talks about
harmony and theory and stuff, the little education parts of our show. He
is really funny. That is something that neither one of us ever really
got to do before, because we were always hired by somebody else to do a
job and that job is to support the artist that you are working for and
not to call attention to yourself.”
We learned two things from this conversation, one it does not really
matter if you agree on when you met, but what is important is you fell
in love and you stayed in love. Secondly, to quote an old cliché that
you make good music together and Pear Duo, Julie Ragins and Curtis
Brengle certainly do that.
Please take time to visit the
Pear Duo website and buy their new album
No Boundaries. You can also
follow Pear Duo on their official
Facebook page here.
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Julie
Ragins says, “The first question everybody asks you is what kind of
music do you play? They want an elevator pitch answer. They want to hear
Country. They want to hear Blues; they want to hear Rock and Roll. They
do not want (to hear you say well we are a group that is kind of rooted
in a fusion of Jazz and Pop, but we also have a lot of elements of Soul
and R & B, Rock and Americana. I think in some ways it is as bad as it
ever was. If you want to load single songs up on Spotify sure you can
have every single song be in a different genre, but if you want to load
an album up on to Spotify you can choose one genre and no subgenre for
an entire album. If you listen to our album you will notice there are
straight up Pop songs, there is some Southern Rock, there are straight
up Jazz tunes and we are not allowed to choose separate genres for each
of those songs, unless we upload them as singles.” 
We
didn’t have a following and we had never actually done a gig (as a duo),
so we came up with the idea of doing house concerts. We booked thirteen
or fourteen house concerts across the country in 2016. We crossed the
country and played the concerts with no idea of what was going to
happen. We made money and we did it again. We drove seven thousand miles
in our little sedan.