Dave Stewart, Jon Stevens
Troubadour
10/03/2016 07:30 PM PDT
$25.00
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Dave Stewart
Acclaimed songwriter, musician and Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart is recognized as one of the most respected and accomplished talents in the music industry today with a music career spanning four decades and over 100 million album sales.
Stewart co-wrote and produced each Eurythmics album in his world-famous duo with Annie Lennox, and has also produced albums and co-written songs with Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, Gwen Stefani, Jon Bon Jovi, Stevie Nicks, Bryan Ferry, Katy Perry, Sinead O’Connor, Joss Stone and many others. Along the way, his work has garnered numerous awards including 4 x UK Best Songwriter and 4 x UK best Producer, Golden Globes, and Grammy Awards.
Stewart has scored films for several directors, including Robert Altman, Paul Verhoven and Ted Demme, and has written and produced the title songs for many hit movies and together with Mick Jagger, he wrote and produced the score for Alfie, starring Jude Law, which won the pair a Golden Globe for Best Original Song.
Stewart along with songwriter/producer Glen Ballard wrote the music for the musical adaptation of the 1990 Jerry Zucker film Ghost, which opened to rave reviews in London’s West End July 2011, and premiered on Broadway April 23, 2012. Ghost is now on Tour throughout ten countries including, the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Australia.
Beyond his creative work as a musician, Stewart is a renowned film and TV producer, author, photographer, and entrepreneur. Stewart has established Dave Stewart Entertainment (DSE), a "media company for the new world" (The LA Times), linking creative ideas to a host of projects in music, film, television, books, theatre, and new media. As the creator of content for DSE, Stewart has married his passion for music, film and television by creating a number of high profile projects.
In 2013 Stewart joined Talenthouse as Creative Director of Marketing. Talenthouse is a community of professional creatives that provides a platform for artists to be seen, heard, and compensated. Comprised of independent artists from all over the world, Talenthouse gives direct access to creative briefs from leading brands, agencies, and entertainment icons.
Stewart signed a deal as advisor to media giant Bertelsmann in 2014 and oversees creative partnerships for BMG, the world’s fourth biggest music publisher and the first new global player in the recording business in decades. Representing over 2.5 million songs and recordings, including the catalogs of Chrysalis, Bug, Virgin, Mute, Sanctuary, Primary Wave and Talpa Music, as well as literally thousands of artists and songwriters, BMG is a new kind of music company.
Stewart has created the next big hit for NBC - Songland. Teaming up with the producers of “The Voice,” and under NBC’s helm, Songland will pull back the curtain on the song marketplace and the multiple avenues in which songs can generate revenue. In a “Shark Tank” setting Songland will take us on a journey in search for America’s great songwriters, with filming commencing in Spring 2016.
Stewart is the creator and Co-Founder with Microsoft Paul Allen of The Hospital Club, a highly successful multimedia creative center and members club in London.
Stewart along with Michael Philipp co-founded the innovative startup FAB, a mobile financial management platform for the creative community
Along with co-author Mark Simmons, Stewart released The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide ( Financial Times/Pearson), a highly regarded business tome now available in fifteen languages.
In February 2016, Stewart released Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: A Life in Music with a forward by Mick Jagger. For the first time, Stewart shares the incredible, high-octane stories of his life in music: the A-list collaborations and relationships, and the creative process that brought us blockbusters from Eurythmics like “Here Comes the Rain Again” and “Would I Lie to You,” as well as Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” No Doubt’s “Underneath It All,” and many more.
Stewart is an acclaimed public speaker. He regularly advises corporations and businesses on creativity and innovation.
“Captain Dave is a dreamer and a fearless innovator, a visionary of high order, very delicately tractable on the surface but beneath that, he’s a slamming, thumping, battering ram, very mystical but rational and sensitive when it comes to the hot irons of art forms..” - Bob Dylan
“Jack of All Trades Master of All of Them” - The Sunday Times
“He’s the musician’s musician.” – Rolling Stone
Jon Stevens
What’s missing from music today?
Passion. Intensity. Call it whatever you like, it’s in critically short supply.
Which is why the world needs Jon Stevens more than ever. Many of his peers have lost their musical mojo. Newcomers to the pop spotlight seem driven to conform to trends rather than to start their own. Stevens stands virtually alone in this dispiriting scene, with a raw vocal power that won him attention first as a teen idol and now as a veteran singer and songwriter. Time has toughened his delivery while tapping into his emotional wellsprings more than ever before.
He’s got the pedigree: a record-smashing debut at age 16 with two consecutive No. 1 singles in his New Zealand homeland … huge hits in Australia as lead singer with Noiseworks … a 21st-century liftoff to worldwide acclaim at center stage with INXS … an iTunes featured release with his latest band, The Dead Daisies, whose debut single featured the legendary Slash on guitar … critical raves in three productions of Jesus Christ Superstar, most recently on an international arena tour …
Rather than wear him down, Stevens’s grueling routine only amps up his energy. The proof is all over his new album: Starlight bursts with a soulful artistry and honesty that’s always been rare and borders on extinction today. Vivid lyrics fuel his performance on “Feel Like Letting Go,” which depicts his love as “wild as the wind … in broad daylight, always hiding from the sun … a genie with a loaded gun.” The pain of loss sears through every moment of “Scars.” “Devil In My Heart” probes dark pits of anguish, where love-shattered spirits make desperate confessions.
There are lighter moments too: a playful flirtation set to a steamy soul beat on “Something ‘bout You,” a promise in “One Way Street” that “I’ll always be loving you … leave the light on and I’ll be there,” a life-affirming sing-along anthem with “People,” extending hope to the hopeless with a reminder to not “be afraid of the shadows in the night. You’re gonna wake up in the broad daylight.”
Different as they are, each track on Starlight overflows with feeling, with candor, with an exuberance that comes from being plugged into life. Everything Stevens has survived, learned from, mastered and made leads to this album …
And yet it might never have been made, had his path not crossed with Dave Stewart, co-founder of the Grammy-winning duo Eurythmics.
“Dave had heard some stuff I had done and expressed interest in working with me,” Stevens explains. “Of course I jumped at the opportunity. I have always been a big fan of his work as a songwriter, producer and musician. As I was coming in from Australia and stepping into Dave’s world in L.A., I left it up to Dave to line up the studios, musicians and so on. Also, working with someone as esteemed as Dave, who has sold over 100 million albums, you kind of figure he knows what he’s doing.”
Once they cemented their connection and got to work, Stevens says, “the process was simple. All of the songs on Starlight stemmed from the minute when Dave and I first met in the studio in L.A.,” Stevens explains. “We started from scratch and just channeled the collision of the music flow between us, which was instantaneous as soon as the first chord was struck. It even continued after our first martini. …”
If Stevens had had any concern in advance of meeting Stewart, it was that collaboration might compromise the depth of the music he wanted to make. “it’s always interesting and sometimes terrifying when you are thrown together with someone you have never spent time with or worked with before to write songs,” he admits. “Music is such a personal expression. But I always seem to thrive when I’m being pushed. And Dave is such an open creator and a great communicator. Like me, he doesn’t like procrastinating too long on ideas. If it’s not feeling right, we move on to the next idea.”
Working with Stewart was like raising a window and grabbing ideas as they fly in on the breeze. One after the other, Stevens conjured characters that feel like people we’ve all known — or perhaps we’ve been them ourselves: a “sexy lady” whose obsessions destroying her life on “F.U.C.,” the person that “everybody loves but nobody knows” on “Starlight.” Why do they seem so real? Partly it’s because of the conviction that Stevens pours into his vocals. But maybe it also has something to do with writing in the heat of the moment.
“Strangely enough, I never set out to write about a specific thing,” he muses. “I always let the mood of the song direct me. I get pictures or a word or a title, or sometimes whole sections will appear in a moment. The trick is to capture that instantly, before it disappears. Dave understands this. In fact, we both work that way without thinking. I never learned to read or write music, and I believe that has helped me plug into a different part of the brain, where you feel more than you think.”
Like tea sippers treated to their first shot of Highland whiskey, those who will hear Stevens for the first time with Starlight may not know quite how to react, though they will sense there’s something potent in this experience. And those who have savored his music and followed his story for the longer haul will find a different kind of satisfaction here. As Stevens demonstrates, his song titles alone are a roadmap to the hills he’s had to climb.
“After a pretty crazy 2015, culminating in me writing what was upon reflection a very personal album called Woman, I feel that making Starlight with Dave has been cathartic in every sense of the word. I’ve regained my spirit through music, with ‘Starlight’ breaking through the shadows when I ‘Feel Like Letting Go.’ We keep collecting ‘Scars’ as we all travel down that ‘One Way Street,’ singing, ‘“Oh Lord,” I see you coming but I’m still trying to “Hold On’’ when you can’t escape the “Devil in Your Heart” and nothing seems to make you ‘Happy.” You scream “F.U.C.” but then you meet someone, the sun comes out and you say to yourself, “‘There’s Something ‘bout You,’ baby.” And you realize that for all of us to survive on this planet, it’s really “All About the People.”
“That’s what I reckon anyway,” he sums up. And he’s right … right as starlight just before the dawn.
Venue Information
Troubadour
9081 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90069
http://www.troubadour.com/