The August 2017 issue of the UK’s Blues Matters magazine has a fantastic new interview with Doug MacLeod titled “I’m an Entertainer Not An Artist.”
I hadn’t seen acoustic- bluesman Doug MacLeod play for a while when I caught up with him on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise of the Caribbean earlier this year; then I was able to hear him three times in four days! Californian-resident Doug is no stranger to the UK, nor to mainland Europe. A singer-songwriter, whose compositions have been recorded by the likes of Albert King, Albert Collins, Joe Louis Walker and Eva Cassidy, Doug refuses to play the role of moody, enigmatic poet. He is only too pleased to set his songs in context and often the introductions are longer than the songs – and twice as funny! His audience will inevitably spend as much time holding their sides as they do tapping their feet. He is very clear – he’s an entertainer not an artist.…
…I’ve always imagined that being on the road as Doug often is would be a fruitful time for song-writing. “You never know, just never know. Sometimes, I could be in a sauna and the idea comes for a song. Let’s say you’re really tired and you think it’s time to sleep and a song idea comes and you think ‘That’s a great line, I’ll write it down in the morning, I’ll never forget it – yes you will! You’ve got to get up and do it because if you don’t the song is going to say to itself ‘Well, MacLeod doesn’t want it I’ll go over to Chris Smither tonight and he’ll take it!’ Doug had enthused, onstage, about his latest project. “I’ve a new album coming out in 2017 that’s very special. It’s called Break the Chain and my son joins me on this – he’s a singer-songwriter, too. There are two things about it – Break The Chain is about abuse. I was abused when I was younger and when I went to therapy about it I found that abused people can become abusers. So, I remember when my boy was so little he could sit in my forearm, I’d hold him and I’d say, ‘No way, no way!’ so you break the chain. I don’t know how far back that chain goes with my family but I know where it finishes. So, the song, he and I wrote it and he joins me on it.”
See the full interview in the August 2017 issue of Blues Matters
In the interview, Doug MacLeod selected his Top 10 Albums. We’ve put as many of them together (with a couple of compilation substitutions when the album wasn’t available) as we could in a new Spotify Playlist! Listen Now: