Let's Just Call Jeff on the Jeff Phone: A Conversation with Piano Man Jeff Kaale This feature is part of our What Does Piano Man Say? series, which features conversations with men, fathers and sons, brothers, husband and wife, and friends of the Piano Man, talking about what Piano Man says (in the best sense) to them and how it makes a difference in their lives. On a beautiful, lazy Saturday afternoon, Jeff Kaale invites us into his home studio to ask the questions he is most frequently asked about music, songwriting and life: how did you start your career as a musician, what’s your method for crafting those beautiful piano melodies? Jeff is a bit of a character and it’s the first thing we talk about before even introducing ourselves. He tells us he has been asked if he’s related to Michael Jackson and then invites us to hear a demo of a new song. For those who haven’t heard him, he reminds us, “That’s because he doesn’t have a piano in his house and he doesn’t record anymore. When he played at Madison Square Garden, we were in the front row with the kids… We were like, ‘Can we go up on stage and play with Michael?’” We start with Jeff’s early years. Growing up in South Carolina, Jeff and his siblings were given a used piano by a friend of the family and he fell in love with the instrument. By the time he was 18, Jeff was giving lessons and performing in the region. He would often work a show at a local night club which led him to write songs with his father and stepfather. Jeff credits his early experience performing his father’s songs with allowing him to develop his own songwriting voice. Talking about his journey to Nashville, Jeff reveals “The first place I lived in Nashville was the worst, I lived there from the year 2000 to 2004. And there was so much happening at that time… I moved from a three-bedroom apartment to a five-bedroom apartment in 11 months. I was living out of the trunk of a car.” He moved there when he was 19 years old after graduating from high school in North Carolina. As Jeff describes it, he “was living with a guy that was making money and didn’t want to work, but couldn’t afford to live in Nashville.” After realizing that Jeff was living out of the trunk of his car, he gave Jeff his old apartment and Jeff took over his lease. “Jeff is really a modern poet and a modern storyteller.” We were curious about how the move into Nashville influenced his songwriting. “I began to write more in third person and from a different perspective because all I could do was live from my perspective. I was 20 and I’m not trying to act like a 30 year old man,” Jeff reveals. “I still wrote about relationships and love and emotions… But I wasn’t writing from a different perspective because I was sitting in a trunk living out of a car, I was writing from a different perspective because I was living from the perspective of all the stuff that was happening in my life.” He spent some time writing songs in the traditional style with “the piano in the middle, just you and the song. And I’d never written songs like that. So all of a sudden I found myself having two different styles. And that made me start to think more about songwriting. So when I went out to New York to record my first CD in 2003, I spent about two weeks up there trying to write my most vulnerable and real songs. I had never been in a big city like New York before, where all of these songs were being written. And after that, I just knew. I knew what it was about. It was about love and heartbreak, it was about fear and anger, it was about God. I wanted to write about all those things because the country songs I’d been writing and singing about had been pretty dark and had been sad songs, but now it was just like, wow! This is my chance to write songs about life and the world.” Jeff took a few trips from Nashville to Los Angeles, where he had written songs that he felt could work with American Idol and other country singers. He found his breakthrough in 2007, when he toured with Chris Young. The night he got the call about his song being chosen, Jeff was in the middle of a tour, sleeping in a bunk in the back of a van while the other members of the band were performing in a country band. It was clear that Jeff was doing something different than the bands he’d been performing with, so he told his bandmates that his new music was going to be more like ‘A Star is Born’, more folk and less rock. “I didn’t come up with that until Chris Young walked into the room. ‘Cause Chris is a big country guy. And I said, ‘I’m gonna try to make my song not sound like a country song.’ And he was like, ‘What? You want to be a folk singer? You want to do folk?’” Jeff laughs. “And that was a total 180 for me. I walked out of the meeting and he wrote a song with me called ‘Lucky’ and it’s all about love and heartbreak. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is what it feels like to make a country record!’” Since then, Jeff has had his songs recorded by Carrie Underwood, Martina McBride, Chris Stapleton and Chris Young. He is releasing his first album as a country artist on May 3rd. “There’s nothing else like it. People say a lot of funny stuff about me, but there’s nothing else like it.” We were interested to find out about how his songwriting changed when he started writing in a different style, so we asked him about songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. “Oh, it’s always going to be about writing about the world, because that’s what I’ve always written about and that’s what I’ve always been a fan of. People talk about Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, but those are not my favorite artists, I’ve loved those artists for decades. It’s just that they were so much older than me and have these great stories that you can tell over and over again about how they got inspired by a time or a place in their life and they got this idea of what it was about. And then they sit down at the piano and record it all and tell a story. There’s nothing else like it.” Jeff is really a modern poet and a modern storyteller. That was evident in our conversation when Jeff was telling us about meeting a homeless couple, who were staying in an abandoned hotel at the time. He was drawn to them and felt like they should get a record deal. One night, Jeff talked to them for awhile and gave them some money to record at a studio. “I gave them a list of producers that I thought were good for them, so I could work with them, but none of them were right for them. And they said, ‘You know, we can’t work together. We don’t want to work with you.’ And I said, ‘Okay. So then who would you want to work with?’ and one of them named me, so I was like, ‘Okay, cool!’ I went over there and ended up writing a whole album with them. And I just thought, wow! This is what it was about. This was an art form.” Jeff’s story about the couple reveals the inspiration behind one of his most influential songs from his debut album. “There was a song called “So It Goes” that was inspired by my experience with the couple and we did a music video that I don’t know if you’ve seen it. There’s a homeless couple that I helped and wrote the song “So It Goes” with, and that was all they would talk about. The video just said, ‘And that’s how it goes.’ There was a homeless couple that I helped them get to a record deal and then ended up loving them so much that I gave them more money to help them make an album, that was the song. And now I’m not sure if you have the song, but I wrote a whole album about it. It’s called “Just What I Was Looking For.” But if you listen to the song “So It Goes,” you can see how it all came together in that song because it was about the homeless couple and their love for each other. It was all about how I was trying to help them and that was the only thing they wanted.” Jeff’s new album includes 15 of the 19 songs Jeff said he wrote for “So It Goes.” The song includes this line, “My whole life’s been one big misunderstanding. You can’t run from the truth, cause that’s when the lies start.” And then we asked Jeff, “Can we be honest about how we’ve misinterpreted you in the past?” “Maybe we’ve just gotten a little creative and made up things to talk about that are true or just make us feel better, but the bottom line is this. There’s a lot of people that have been trying to make up stories about me and none of them are true. So they make up stories and I just write songs about the world. And if it makes them happy, then let’s all be happy