Pop-Culturalist.com

Frank Musker, Elizabeth Lamers, Jeff Hull, and Marty Walsh are four of music’s most prolific songwriters. They’ve written hits for artists including Queen, Linda Ronstadt, Chaka Khan, Supertramp, and John Fogerty.

More than three decades ago, the four friends recorded an album of original music, which was lost due to their success as songwriters. Rediscovered in 2019, the supergroup has proven their lyrics and topical themes have stood the test of time.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to reconnect with Frank from World Goes Round to chat about the band’s debut album being released on vinyl.

PC: With your self-titled album being released on vinyl, it opens the door for more listeners to discover the project. How did this come to fruition?
Frank: It’s no secret we’re of a generation where an album meant vinyl. Then along came CDs, MP3s, and all the rest. But there has always been something so special about vinyl as an artifact. It’s not just about the music.

I remember buying the Revolver album and looking at the cover art for hours. The same with any of the Santana albums, like Abraxas. I appreciate CDs, although they’ve fallen out of fashion as well. But there’s nothing like the artwork on a piece of vinyl.

When we were doing the artwork, we had this fantastic young crew of designers on board. They were a hip bunch of kids. Jeff [Hull] and I were talking about Side A and Side B. I could see them scratching their heads. They were like, “What do you mean Side A and Side B?” I was like, “Actually, it’s a record. You play five songs and then you turn it over and play the other side.” They’d never listened to music like that before.

We’re living in an age of cherry-picking where everybody wants singles. They don’t listen to an album as a complete listening experience. When it came to deciding the order of the songs, I thought, “Well, the best thing we can do is pretend that we’re doing a live gig. How would I imagine the setlist in order to get the maximum attention from the audience?” That’s what the running order of the album is about. I hope that whoever buys the album will listen to it as a piece, as one thing. Even though there are a lot of singles and standalone songs, I wanted it to be a thematic experience where they come out of the other end being like, “This has been an experience.” It’s a different approach, but that’s what I grew up with. Whenever I listen to an album, I’m listening to the LP.

There are technical reasons why vinyl is very interesting. Vinyl will never give you the clarity of digital—the precise crystalline quality. But my God, it’s got some thump to it. If you want to hear bass and drums really moving you the way that they do in a live concert, you have to listen to the vinyl. It’s why DJs love vinyl: because they get so much more bottom out of it.

It’s also been mastered by Bernie Grundman, who is an artist in himself. Bernie Grundman is on every amazing record that I’ve ever bought. He’s the guy who they take their album to be mastered onto vinyl. So that was an honor to have Bernie do that as well.

PC: Has anything surprised you in the months leading up to the release of the album and the vinyl?
Frank: I’m surprised it’s finally out there. [laughs] The biggest surprise of all is that it’s finally available. It was supposed to be available in January. As you know, there is a worldwide supply chain crisis with just about everything including vinyl. Fat Beats kept coming back and saying, “We’re really sorry. We have to push it back.” It became the impossible dream. It was like, “When’s the vinyl coming out?” They were like, “We don’t know.”

What’s really nice is that during the delay, the album had time to percolate and reach people. People have been watching the videos and leaving comments. The CD also came out in Japan because it’s one of the few territories in the world where they still like CDs. No one else wants CDs anymore, but in Japan they love them. So now we have two physical products.

I’m surviving in a digital age, but I still like the artifact because it’s more than just music. When you bought an album, the experience of buying an album was part of the experience. There have been some fabulous artwork through the years from different records. The artwork is iconic. The chance to be iconic is much better with a one foot by one foot square piece of cardboard. You can barely see it when it’s a thumbnail on a computer screen. It’s a different experience.

PC: What do you hope listeners take away after they hear the album? If you had to choose one song that best encompasses who this band is, which would it be and why?
Frank: It’s a really, really difficult question because there are ten songs and they all explore different facets of our musical personalities, including Elizabeth’s lead vocals, which are half the record. She sings so beautifully. She has so many wonderful lead vocals on the album. But if I had to pick two standout tracks for what they’re about, one would be “Big House.” That was a breakthrough track. That one was literally mastered off of a cassette because we could never find the multi-track. It still sounds bloody amazing. It’s just a powerful track.

That’s an important track because it’s talking about important things. The inspiration behind “Big House” was that I had just come back from Brazil in 1989 and was struck by the Amazon and the beauty of the place but also keenly aware of how delicate it is as an ecosystem and how quickly it’s being destroyed. Thirty years later, it’s worse than ever. There’s a line in the song that says, “In the time it takes to sing this song another thousand acres will be gone.” When it’s gone, it’s gone because it’s not rich, fertile soil. It’s sand. This is a rainforest that took millions of years to be created. It’s been destroyed for the stupidest of reasons: to raise beef. They don’t need to raise beef there. There are other places where you can raise beef if you have to have beef. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s pointless.

I’m very sympathetic towards people of the younger generation like Greta Thunberg. The truth is that they’re right. What the hell have we been doing for thirty years? This should have started a long time ago, but there have been too many vested interests, too many arguments about money and this, that, and the other. But now, we’re staring this reality in the face. It’s not something that’s down the road. It’s a few generations away. This is the next five to ten years, and it’s your generation and the generation before you who are going to change this because you’re the ones who are coming into your power right now.

The world leaders have to start taking notice. They can’t keep kicking the can down the road and saying, “We’ll deal with it in 2050, 2060, 2070.” It’ll be gone by then. This will be the world that you guys inhabit. I’m afraid it’s down to all of you. So in that sense, “Big House” is very important. I had this metaphor of a load of people living in a big house up on a hill, enjoying themselves. Down below in the city, everyone’s drowning in filth and pollution. That seemed to me like a good metaphor for the west at the time. But it’s not just the west. It’s the whole of mankind. It’s China. It’s Russia. It’s India. It’s all of these places now.

The other track that I wanted to talk to you about is “Put It On The Line,” which I think is a bit of a revelation because “Put It On The Line” was one of the tracks that we had to fish out of the archives. When the record company said they wanted an album, we went back and we looked at what we had from that time, and one of the tracks was “Put It On The Line,” which I wrote with Marty Walsh. The only thing that we kept were the lead vocals that I had done at the time. Everything else was pretty much recorded new. It’s a snapshot of both 1989 and 2020.

“Put It On The Line” was mostly recorded during lockdown. Jeff Hull and Tommy Vicari produced it. They did such a great job. The transition between the thirty years is seamless. It sounds like one listening experience, yet there has been a thirty-year lag in between. It’s really weird. It’s like we went to sleep for thirty years and we woke up and we were making an album.

“Put It On The Line” is a really important record. It acquired importance during the recording of it because it was right in the middle of the pandemic. It’s about ordinary people, ordinary heroes who get up each day and go to work. We’re talking about frontline workers: hospital workers, firemen, postal people, police officers. The people who have to keep going when the whole world is shut down. It’s a tribute to them, and it’s about overcoming fear and doubt and doing your job and making sure you do it right.

PC: The last time we spoke, I asked you what’s next for the band. You told me to ask you again in six months. It’s been a year now. So I have to ask, what’s ahead?
Frank: Baby steps. What can I tell you? [laughs] Everything takes much longer than you think it’s going to take. But my impression is that we will carry on promoting the record. As you said, the fact that there’s an existing vinyl has opened a door to a whole new market. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

We’re very open to everything, but we’ve all got busy lives. We’re all doing music still and life goes on. It’s getting back to normal, but I don’t think it’ll ever be completely the way it was before the pandemic. The pandemic has changed things a lot. But the next step is to keep an eye on the weather and what’s going on. Like the songs say, it’s about putting down the roots and planting the seeds and watching the changes in the weather to see what happens. We’ve planted some good seeds, so I hope that maybe we’ll be talking to you again in another six months about some other aspect of this.

I certainly think there are more tracks available that we might put out on a special edition album or something. There are three or four that need to be heard!

To keep up with World Goes Round, follow them on Twitter and Instagram. Pick up their self-titled album on vinyl here.