Transcription of Lyle Divinsky for the show Soul Music #214
Lisa: In the studio with me today. We have Lyle Divinsky, who is a native of Portland by way of Searsmont. In the past three years, Lyle has continued to prove that he owns any stage that he walks his bare feet onto, his contagious comfort breathes love and light to any crowd, bringing even the most sterile crowd to group sing-alongs filled by love. He has been featured on national television as one of FuseTV’s artist to watch and was awarded the songwriter’s hall of fame, Abe Olman scholarship of which John Legend received in 2002.
Your bio goes on and on. It’s pretty cool that you’re this kid from Portland and you’ve worked with, I don’t know, here’s some people on the list. We got Bobby McFerrin. We’ve got John Scofield, Raphael Saadiq, Joe Cocker. There are some names on that.
Lyle : A little note is that those are the people that I work with, or people that worked with them. I’m working my way there. Degrees of separation, eliminating degrees.
Lisa: You’re pulling them, okay, that makes sense.
Lyle : Yes.
Lisa: I’m interested, you call yourself an unsuspecting soul man. Is this because you didn’t suspect you’re a soul man or because other people would not suspect that you’re a soul man?
Lyle : Well. I guess the general appearance of overly hairy flannel wearing man from Maine wearing Bean boots, you don’t necessarily think about singing songs that are influenced by a Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield and now Donny Hathaway and things like that. Trying to get a little bit of a surprise in that sense.
Lisa: Why did you become interested in that type of music?
Lyle : I grew up around, my dad is an amazing singer. In my opinion the best singer, ever, and there’s absolutely no bias in that statement. I grew up listening to him singing, he would sing me to sleep with a guitar and when I was a baby and was playing in bands as I was growing up, so I was always around it.
Lisa: You didn’t come to singing yourself until somewhat later in your childhood?
Lyle : Right. Like every kid you kind of rebel against your parents a little bit. Even if their things are really cool, so I thought I was going to be a basketball player and then realized not quite hitting the six foot mark and only being able to jump about three inches off the ground. It was definitely time to get away from that and find something new.
Lisa: Yet this is how this all started, you were telling us before you came on the air that you one day were joking. You were joking with your coach about singing the national anthem and he actually called you on it and you did, you sang the national anthem before the basketball game.
Lyle : Fell in love with it right there. It was pretty funny. A hilarious song to fall in love with performance with. Yeah. It really turned things around for me.
Lisa: How old were you then?
Lyle : I was 17.
Lisa: Junior, senior?
Lyle : Junior. Yeah.
Lisa: At that point you still had some time to actually take advantage of being a high school kid and getting some musical education.
Lyle : Definitely. I didn’t really get much on the academic education until I went to college. I fell in love with it and I was friends with a lot of musicians around. I got experiential education pretty immediately which I’m very lucky for.
Lisa: Tell me about college, what did you decide to study?
Lyle: I went in, I took a year off in between high school and college, traveled a little bit and played a little bit around town and then when I got to college, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep music the hobby or the side passion and not the business, just to keep it pure and everything. I quickly realized the more that I was trying to involve myself with other things, that the only thing I wanted to do was play music. I ended up studying music and English literature. It was pretty expensive but very influential and a wonderful way to play music and read books.
Lisa: Well, tell me about the English literature piece of this. As a singer-songwriter, I would guess that it actually wasn’t that far off.
Lyle : That was amazing. It was really amazing, getting a chance to work with incredible professors, reading incredible novels and poetry and being able to discuss it at such an intense level, it was a really really wonderful experience in being able to fall inlove even more in language, and the way that you can say a lot with a little or how if you are paying attention you can say a little with a lot. It really got to me, it made me fall inlove even more with being a lyricist.
Lisa: You had a little bit of a wanderer thing going on with you. You were in Brooklyn and you actually earned a living according to our audio producer and fellow musician Spencer Albee. You earned a living on the streets, singing and playing.
Lyle : Yeah. I worked at coffee shops for three days and that was terrible. I went down, played in the subway and made twice the money that I had made in the three days at the coffee shop just hanging out in the subways and playing. I was like this is nice. It was also nice talking about people watching and discovery and getting to talk to people that you would never ever run into, it was amazing. It was kind of a sociological study, in a lot of senses.
Played down in the subway and then as the time went on, the above ground gigs started to allow me to get out of the subway more and more. It was fun, because a lot of the places in New York, you’d play for pass the hat until you can pack a club. I would play a bunch of gigs but I had to basically pay to play in one senses, because I had a band and they’re all working musicians and got to make sure that they make their money.
I go down in the subway and make enough to pay the guys. The couple days leading up, and then slowly but surely, it got to the point where I could pay them and I didn’t have to do the subway. It got to the point where I started making money. I was like, wait, I don’t think I have to do the subway anymore, this is cool, but I still did it every now and again, I got a little tired by the end but it was a really incredible experience. It’s an amazing community down there.
A lot of talent, sometimes troubled talent and sometimes being world famous musicians that were just there for a couple months and wanted to make a little extra money during the day. There’s a really incredible community.
Lisa: I think that it would contribute to the sense of creative openness that you’re describing, that you go down there, you have yourself and you play. You sing but then you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Some days you’ll make some money, some days you won’t, some days you’ll meet some fun people, some days you don’t. To do that for six or seven years.
Lyle : Well, I did that for about two and a half years. Yeah. Towards the end I definitely got burnt out on the you never know what’s going to happen. Granted the music … Any art as a profession consistency is not necessarily the word associated with it. It got to be a little too much down there where some days you go and you get spot that you were hoping for right away and you make great money and then the other day, you go and you spend four hours looking for a spot.
They’re all taken and somebody says they’re going to hold it for you and then they don’t. You don’t make any money but you’ve been out for four to five hours or something like that. You walk home empty handed. Yeah. That was definitely a huge motivation as well to get more gigs and to find more ways of making a living without having to compromise, but then the creativity aspect that you’re talking about, I think it was huge for me.
Because I think about the first time that I went down to the subway and it took me about an hour to finally play because I was so nervous and I got down and I stood at the place, because I was like okay, this is the place that I’m going to play. I put my guitar case down, I’m about to undo it and then I was like, this is weird. I don’t know if I can do it. Finally, I brought my guitar out and I started, I strum the chord and somebody looked up at me.
I was like, no, I don’t know if I can do it, and finally did it. It was awesome and then slowly but surely, the nerves that I had about always wanting to be perfect when I sing. Always wanting, never wanting to mess up and never wanting to do anything that wouldn’t be touch-notch, started to fade away because I realized that it was a safe place to try things because seven minutes after I sing this right now.
The subways are going to come and clear out these people. It’s almost like hitting the reset button or you lose a life in a video game but you get to hit continue and get to try it again and so then you constantly get to learn and try this and this song, and that didn’t work, well, I’ll try it again. Okay, I guess it doesn’t work and then move on and try something else. It was a really good learning experience and also humbling in a sense of just bringing me down to reality and thinking it’s okay to mess up because that’s how you learn.
Lisa: That’s an interesting thing that you’re talking about because performance is a conversation between yourself and the audience. You want to be able to put yourself forward as having the best possible conversation but in order to get to that place, you actually have to have had prior conversations where you weren’t really putting yourself forward in the best possible way. You need to have that. You need to have that practice space, but practicing by yourself doesn’t give you what practicing in front of people gives you.
Lyle : Right. You have to be comfortable with vulnerability.
Lisa: Right. I think most people aren’t.
Lyle : Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that that’s grown to be part of my live performance, the interaction with them and I’m not always there and those are usually the ones that I’m … The performances that I don’t dig. I think that that’s the … Just like any conversations one on one, if you’re not willing to open yourself up and you’re closed off and your set in your own ways, then how are you going to grow from the experience because you’re just going to be right where you started at the beginning. It’s not necessarily going to be a valuable experience for anybody.
Lisa: No, it’s true. I think you’re talking about something that I think a lot of people who have things that they would like to explore creatively. That’s one of the big mind blocks. That’s one of the things that they actually have to move past in order to get to that exploration. It seems like it’s a type of thing that happens over and over and over again. It’s not like I moved past it, it’s like I moved past it and now I’m back again. I’m going to move past it again and now I’m back again.
That’s the nature of living but then on the other side of it, you could choose something safe. You could choose to not be a singer-songwriter, not perform, not write. You could choose to go work in a coffee shop and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Lyle : It’s what works for everybody.
Lisa: Right. It’s interesting who decides to and I’ve seen this in talking to musicians that seems like there’s a willingness. Whatever it is about music that keeps the spark going, there’s a willingness to keep showing up and recreating and performing. I wonder what that is about. I don’t know. I don’t want to say all musicians are the same but I wonder what that is about an artist or a musician’s personality.
Lyle : Yeah. Thinking about it, I don’t even know if it’s necessary or willingness. I think it’s almost the need when it comes to it. I think about this often what I would do if I wasn’t a musician. If I didn’t have the opportunity to perform. I have no idea. Because at this point I’ve been doing it long enough and it’s a thing that I know and a thing that I love. I know that if I go for a month or more without performing, it’s like a fix in a sense which is so interesting to think about.
Where it’s like … I guess that gets me thinking about the reasons for it, but I think that it’s also, I think what it boils down to is it’s about having stimulating conversations and transference of energy. It’s like if you were locked in a room for a month, you’d be going crazy. Granted I’m not saying that the only way to achieve that is performance but it’s something that I’ve grown attached to in a lot of sense, is in something that I absolutely love and that I learn from and that it’s become a need, I think, which is really interesting to think about.
Lisa: Well, it’s interesting too because you’re talking, there’s a one on one conversation. If you’re talking about as a musician performing, the crowd energy is so different than just, if just you and I are having a conversation with microphones between us. It’s almost like this specific group of people who got together on the specific day, specific time, creates the specific creature that you’re communicating with. To see to how that changes over time. That must be very interesting.
Lyle : Sure. That’s why there’ll never be a show that’s the same as the other. Even if you have a super rehearsed show. Even if you’re playing a top-level act that has every part and every piece of the show just down to a tee, there’s always going to be little things that come out. If you think about a show that you play at a club. You go over the music and events and play show for a couple hundred people.
You go and you play an acoustic show for 20 people, you play a house show. Those are going to be two very very different experiences and two very different conversations, you’re vulnerable in different ways. When you have a bigger crowd with more, there’s more energy but there’s not as much of an articulated energy in a certain sense, because then when you’re playing a house show you’re looking at people right in the eye and you can see their reactions as you’re singing.
You talk about messing up a little bit if you hit one little note. It’s part of the reason why I close my eyes pretty much every time I play. I think I’m still a little nervous about that but I don’t know. It’s really interesting, just the different environments and the different shows and numbers of people. Whether it’s a theater, basement club, a house or whatnot, or sitting around a campfire, it’s a completely different thing. The same song can mean so many different things and bring about a lot of different learning.
Lisa: In your latest album, Lyle Divinsky, uneven floors, you have a song called the way which we’re going to play for the people who are listening. Tell us about that.
Lyle: It’s honoring a lot of the music that I grew up with a lot of the old soul, the Motown, Al Green, that kind of stuff. It’s also a song that’s all about love and I think that when I listen to a lot of music and I think about a lot of the music that I love. It’s so easy to write or so much easier, I’m not going to say so easy because it’s so hard. It’s so much easier to write when things are bad because you have this stuff that you got to get out, you got to shake it off.
It’s I feel like it’s difficult to write a song about love and about just cherishing somebody without going into cheesy, and I’m not even saying a love song like, baby be mine. Just it was my attempt at that at writing a fun song that’s all about love and all about being happy. It’s actually funny because it stemmed from the day before I was playing therapist to four different friends who are going through breakups. I think that it was actually a need and desire to put some balance and equilibrium to the spectrum of happiness and sadness.
Lisa: We’re going to play this for people right now and I’m sure that after having heard this, they’re going to want to get your album, uneven floors. You’re going to tell us afterwards how to do that.
Lyle: Sounds great.
Lisa: Lyle. Where can people find uneven floors?
Lyle : Right now it’s the album has just released physically, and so it’s not digital until the beginning of November. If you’re local, you can get it at Bull Moose in Portland, South Portland, Scarborough. You can also, if you’re outside of Maine, go to my website, lyledivinsky.com and you can order it, and we’ll send it to you and I might type a whole thank you note to you.
Lisa: Do you have any fun performances coming up?
Lyle: Well, I’m playing every Monday playing over at Portland House of Music and Events. I have a couple other weekly things that are just ending right now but then I’m having my New York City release on November 6th and then I’ll be trying to get out on the road and playing for as many people as I can. If you go to Lyledivinsky.com, then I’ll have them all listed there.
Lisa: Lyle, your dad ever come along?
Lyle : Yeah. I get him out every chance I get. He’s a teacher over at Pats. It’s tough to get him to travel during the school year but he’s getting close to retirement so I might be bringing him on the road when I can.
Lisa: Lyle, encourage people who are listening to go to your website to find out more about your live performance but also to buy your CD. I think that sometimes we forgot how much effort goes into creating the music that we listen to and when you actually have a CD in your hand, it causes you to remember again that there’s a lot of soul in here. It’s probably worth, yeah, I don’t know, whatever it is, $15 for people.
Lyle : Only $10.
Lisa: My goodness, now it’s a bargain. Exactly. We’ve been speaking with Lyle Divinsky who is a local singer-songwriter more than local, I guess we’ll say national, New York.
Lyle : Working our way.
Lisa: Working our way up to the International scene, I’m sure we will see you on the International scene. Thanks for coming in today and thanks for sharing your music.