The name of the album is Bringing It Down To the Bass, so you know darn well Tony Levin is going to deliver some seriously killer licks on electric bass and the Chapman Stick. And you can bet there will more than a few tricky time signature changes and swift genre shifts.

Start to stream or spin the album and you’ll find songs of wit and whimsy and songs of power and profundity. Mostly instrumental tracks, a few others with vocals and spoken word. The sonic stew includes prog, jazz, thrash, a wee bit of classical, a whiff of barbershop quartet and you won’t be sure what’s around the corner.

And while it’s called Bringing It Down To The Bass – and that’s no lie – it’s not all about that bass. Levin’s seventh solo album, and his first since 2007, is a autobiography of sorts, with the themes drawn from Levin’s musical life. It features a myriad of collaborators from his half- century-plus on the road and in the studio with Peter Gabriel, King Crimson and many, many others.

“It could have been done a long time ago, frankly,” Levin says, of Bringing It Down To the Bass, “but it’s because of a problem I have, which is a very good problem to have. And that’s that I have a lot of touring and that’s what I love to do, playing live. It just didn’t give me much time at home to work on finishing the album that I’ve been working on for five or six years.”

“But,” he continues, “a year ago May, I looked at my schedule and saw a lot of touring with Peter Gabriel for almost a year and then in December 2023, there was a Stickmem tour – that’s one of my other bands – and then in January a Levin Brothers tour – yet another of my bands, with my brother Pete – and I said to myself, ‘If I take March, April and May off from any live playing and maybe even any recording for other people and really focus on this, I can finally get this album out.’ It could have happened ten years before if I had the gumption to turn down tours.”

Ah, yes, all those tours. (More later about one of those coming up this fall.) And albums. He’s played on more than 500, including 15 with Gabriel and 18 with King Crimson, counting live, studio and compilations.

Bringing It Down To the Bass was not, as you may have gathered, put together during one big session. It was stitched together – both live in the studio and done by sending tracks back and forth via email – over the past half dozen years. “Or maybe more” says Levin, trying to do the math. “I have not calculated but some of them are pretty darn old. Frankly, there were many more tracks than the 14 that were the final ones and gradually, as you do, I honed it down to the ones that I thought appropriate to this album. so somewhere along the line I forgot which ones were written when. Some of them, though, were written very recently. The duet with Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, on ‘Uncle Funkster,’ we finished two weeks ago.” (Meaning late May, 2024.)

So, what was appropriate for this album?

“I had pieces very much in the prog-rock vein and I had pieces that were based on the bass,” Levin says, “and somewhere around the middle of the record I made the difficult decision to toss the prog stuff – well, not toss it exactly, save it for another album – and the more I focused, I chose the kind of pieces that had to me a sense of unity to it in that it’s about the bass. Not songs with singing about the bass, but each song is either based on a bass riff or a bass technique that I then invited some great rhythm sections to play on.

“My basses do sound different. I wanted to write at least one piece with the funk fingers and I did that fingernail way of playing that I featured on one piece, and hammer-on technique on that first piece, ‘Bringing It Down To The Bass.’ I used to use that a long time ago and I hadn’t used lately since I got the Stick, which is designed to play with the hammer- on technique. That’s also a piece that has a rocking, really hot rhythm

section with Manu Katche, from Peter’s band. Also, maybe two or three times in the piece it breaks down and stops to just the bass playing different riffs and then Dominic Miller, from Sting’s band, comes in and solos or Alex Foster solos on sax.”

So, who is the audience?

“I never really gave it a thought,” Levin says, with a laugh. “It was ‘This is the album I want to make and I sure hope everybody likes it,’ but I never thought about who it would appeal to. I have fans who follow my music who are mostly or completely from the prog-rock genre. I think bass players would be interested in hearing it. And because I have an amazing assortment of great drummers, seven, so I would think drummers would be interested in hearing it.”

Some of the key tracks, discussed by Levin: What Tony says is in italics and my interjections or introductions are Roman – JS

Road Dogs

Usually, I have a musical plan and that’s the way the piece comes about but, in this case, not at all. I had this instrumental piece, this little guitar-like melody at the beginning and it went in different places and it went into a shuffle feel. It just wanted to go there and I was in that mode of writing where I’m letting the piece go where it goes. And while I’m playing bass on it and putting that together, a sound I always to use but hadn’t for a while was the fretless bass through a vocoder – a vocoder is a device where you say words and play an instrument through them – think Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do?” I thought “This is the chance to use it and I’ll mouth ‘road dogs.’ I thought I’d sing it where I’d try to sound like the bass with the vocoder. I spent time subsequently trying to get a good sound with the vocoder and it was terrible. I couldn’t get a sound where you could understand the words at all. However, there was a vocal I had done so I just left the vocal with undertones of my voice in a silly way.

At that point I added a few even sillier words about what we do on the road – “Ain’t nothing but lighting & rigging & soundcheck & gigging, packing & loading & driving & roading … Trucking & bussing & rigging & trussing, fixing & tuning & mixing & crooning.” I had the word schlepping in there too, but I decided to take that out because it’s so hard to understand. There’s a lot of consonants in the word schlepping. My bio title could be: Schlepping Didn’t Make the Cut.

Boston Rocks

It speaks, musically and lyrically, about the city I’m from. There’s very much two sides to the town. It’s a rugged, rough town in a way, especially revolving around the sports teams. A lot of success nowadays, not so much when I was a kid growing up. Yet, it’s home to universities and a rich history.

This is not one style of music. It begins with heavy rock and then I went into a progressive style, a B-section based on the Chapman Stick, where I tried to recite some poetic stuff about the historic, much more cultured side of Boston, and, frankly, I used quite a few JFK quotes that he had given in Boston. I enlisted Mike Portnoy to give me heavy drums – we’ve been in a band Liquid Tension Experiment for quite a while – and I love Earl Slick’s playing – we go back to John Lennon’s records and David Bowie stuff – and he really can rock out.

To wit, Levin shout-sings about Scollay Square (the old red-light district), Hah-vahd Yahd, the Garden, Fenway Park and Gillette Stadium, but also speaks this: “Born on the tide, midst the fens and reeds that wash and waver in still salted Back Bay, an audacious dream of a nation bound by common threads, fisherman and farmer, Yankee and immigrant, born to awaken the future that city upon a hill on which has never settled the dark dust of centuries.” The song moves from screaming metal skronk to a dreamy and idyllic pleasure zone.

Could it be a hit?

I tried to combine things a way musically that to me made sense but it’s exactly what you don’t want to do if you want to have an accessible single.

Floating in Dark Waters

Robert Fripp donated one of his distinctive soundscapes to this moody instrumental. I play sparse melody on the NS Electric Upright, and Jerry Marotta joins on percussion at the end. How did it come about? OK, way back when we toured with King Crimson a lot, there were a few tours this century where Robert would play a looping soundscape he would create before the show and the audience would hear it as they came in. He would make up a different one every day, maybe a half hour. Some nights when we were about ready to go at 8 – we always started at 8 – Robert said, “Tony, go out and play bass to my soundscape.” These soundscapes were often atonal, but sometimes they were tonal. We played many on stage, every night for years and it occurred to me then that it would make a very interesting piece on an album, just bass and soundscape. At some point I asked him for a soundscape, I don’t know how long ago. I put my head into the soundscape and played whatever notes came out of the bass.

Fire Cross the Sky

I wrote it a really long time ago. In the ‘70s, I used to live on the Upper West Side in New York, not far from Café la Fortuna. I would go have a coffee with my journal and I’d look up and see this shrine to John Lennon with all his pictures on the wall. And the idea for this poem came from all those coffees I had. Once in a while, to write, especially journals or poetry writing, I need to get away from home, But I don’t like to do it on the road either, so I’ll make a trip somewhere and I’ll just go to cafes and write.

I was on such a trip in Berlin for five days. I had the Stick with me and I was coming up with this very cool musical idea, which you hear in this song and somehow in the middle third of that, I was fiddling around with the chords and how I’m playing, it occurred to me what song would really fit well. Musically, it went into a quote from a classical guitar piece that I knew from a Paraguayan composer, Augustin Barrios, Una limosna por el amor de dios. Why that had to happen can be figured out when they open up my brain.

Usually, when I have those kinds of things, I’ll change it later or take it right out because I don’t want to be quoting a classical guitar piece, but it just seemed right and I thought that’s gonna stay. There are three elements to the song. I think it’s interesting harmonically; it’s an interesting Chapman Stick solo piece; and then when I attached it to the poem I wrote and I wanted to go into this beautiful melodic piece at the end.

In “Fire Cross the Sky,” Levin sings, “They could write his name in fire cross the sky, I wouldn’t mind / But it’s there inside his music I find the pieces of his soul he left behind.”

And then … in 1980, I ended up playing on John and Yoko’s Double Fantasy album.

On the Drums

It’s a name-dropping tribute to some of the many great drummers I’ve played with over the years. An utterly unique piece: An a capella male chorus – that’s multi-tracked me – sings a fascinating composition using names of the drummers. I tried to be brave and said, “Ok, I’ve got this song about drummers and it’s nothing but my voice.”

It starts with Jerry Marotta (repeated several times) and, among those I caught were Ringo Starr, Carmine Appice, Nick Mason, Phil Collins, Steve Gadd (also repeated several times), Andy Newmark, Lenny White,

four more Steves – Smith, Jordan, Ferrone and Martell – Bill Bruford (repeated several time), Billy Cobham, Mike Portnoy, Russ Kunkel, Manu Katche, Kenny Aronoff, Stewart Copeland, Rich Sullivan, Richie Heywood, ending appropriately (bookending, really) with Jerry Marotta’s brother, Rick Marotta. Oh, and listen for the nod to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody’ when Terry Bozzio pops up.

How long did it take to patch together?

One doesn’t’ count the hours because one would question what one is doing. But I would guess, over the space of a year. I got that idea years ago and at some point, during the lockdown year, there were pieces of paper all over my large studio, little scraps of musical ideas of two drummers names who rhymed or who could fit somehow in the same kind of music, dozens of pieces of paper. Tying it together, that took a long time. And it was an act of love and respect.

The only words aside from the drummers’ names are the last three words “on the drums.” It was great fun. My stress in doing it was that I was going to leave out a drummer or two who are very important to me, who I played a lot with through those years. What you have to do often when you’re making a record like this is you have to take a deep breath and be brave and say “Ok, if I forgot somebody, I’ll apologize but I’m going to finish this piece anyway.” Frankly, I did a video of the piece, an early mix, and at the end I thanked the 20 or 30 drummers I forgot to put in.

What follows are (mostly) the notes Tony wrote about the remaining songs, songs not mentioned or annotated by the quotes above. Not sure, of course, how many of these songs you want detailed beyond what’s ^. – JS

Me and My Axe

An instrumental ballad, re-uniting some Peter Gabriel Band alumni, Steve “the Deacon” Hunter on guitar, Larry Fast and Jerry Marotta on drums. Melodic lead lines are shared by guitar and fretless bass.

Espressoville

Instrumental with Steve Gadd on drums, and a horn section, it starts out (and ends) with my espresso machine grinding and growling. A notable fingernail style bass solo in the middle, and a strong Gadd-driven shout chorus at the end.

Give the Cello Some

The NS Electric Cello is the centerpiece of this whimsical rocker, and the few lyrics speak about the cello, and my brother Pete on organ. Jerry Marotta is on drums.

Side B / Turn It Over

A barbershop quartet, singing about the experience (vintage now) of discovering the second side of an album. I’ve always liked barbershop quartet – I love the harmony – and when I was a kid in Brookline High School I had a working barbershop quartet. We would actually sing the morning greeting on the PA system at school. (I coaxed Peter Gabriel into using some barbershop arrangements on his first album and tour.)

Beyond the Bass Clef

Things change up after the “Side B” song. This almost classical instrumental features L. Shankar (Shakti, Peter Gabriel) on violin, Gary Husband (from John McLaughlin’s The 4th Dimension) on keyboards, Colin Gatwood (from the Houston Symphony) on oboe and me on cello, bass and Stick.

Bungie Bass

I got a rubber bass sound from my NS Electric Upright, and am joined on this instrumental by David Torn (from Everyman Band) on guitar and Pat Mastelotto (from King Crimson) on drums. I had played on Torn’s distinctive Cloud About Mercury album.