Fogerty Factory

COSMIC FACTORY

The Psychedelic Odyssey of the Brothers Fogerty

BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH

WHILE MOST MUSICIANS ARE CONTENT WITH a few well-intentioned living-room livestreams, Shane and Tyler Fogerty have buoyed the pandemic by releasing an incredible debut album and accompanying their legendary father - Rock and Roll Hall Of Famer / Creedence Clearwater Revival founder John Fogerty - on a popular series of You Tube videos. Hearty Har is the sly band name for the brothers’ arrival into the world’s collective consciousness. Their recently released album, titled to honor their Radio Astro studio, is a kaleidoscopic swirl of baroque, late ‘60s-style pop, fused with vibrant, Morricone-inspired cinematic landscapes. The collection is driven by garage rock (“Don’t Go Looking for Me”), hallucinogenic blues (“Waves of Ecstasy”) with unapologetic doses of Brit pop (“Fare Thee Well”), highlighted by a complex instrumental (“Canyon Of The Banshee”) stretching the band’s reference points far beyond the usual Beatlesque leanings of their peers. Guitarist-vocalist Shane, a member of his father’s band since 2011, and singer-songwriter-producer Tyler also comprise half of their dad’s pandemic-born Fogerty’s Factory, a widely popular You Tube video project. The series earned the group a plethora of views. A recently issued audio collection features their renditions of some of John’s greatest hits, packaged with a cover that cleverly revisits CCR’s classic Cosmo’s Factory album - again photographed by their Uncle Bob - to fully complete the familial circle. INsite spoke with Shane and Tyler by phone from their recording studio in southern California.

It’s always interesting to see how artists have been handling the pandemic. We definitely know one project you’ve done during the shutdown, but what else have you been working on? Tyler: A lot of just listening to music and working on some gardening stuff. I’ve started growing gourmet mushrooms, actually. I’ve also been reimagining the studio because I’ve been putting it off for a long time, but I think I’ve made it easier to work in here. Shane: I’ve been doing a lot of gardening and listening to music as well. Like everybody else, I started making bread at the beginning of the pandemic. I still have the sourdough going. I haven’t bought bread since last year! I’ve just been taking time to get my writing space in order. I hadn’t had free time to do much of anything because of Hearty Har and touring with our dad. It’s been fun to do a lot of dog walks and spending time with the iancé.

You have the bases of the pandemic covered: baking, gardening and music. And like a number of artists, you have new music on the market. Two very different projects. Shane: Yeah, getting our album out has been a long process. Tyler: It’s taken a while but we were on what we thought was the traditional band trajectory, we were doing shows and went into the studio to record. It was ok but it just didn’t turn out the way we thought it would. It took a while to figure out why it wasn’t what we wanted. It was four more years to get a studio going and finally transition into what we were actually looking for. Then we kinda sat on this album for a while. Shane: We didn’t want to just put it out there and then nobody would hear it, especially after working so long on it. Tyler: Yeah, we did that with our first album that we eventually pulled down from the internet.

Radio Astro pre-dates the pandemic, obviously. Shane: Most of it. We did one song this past June. Tyler: I think it was good timing, because we’d been holed up in the studio for most of the past couple of years. I wrote the last song on it with a drum machine because we couldn’t have any people coming over. So while I was in here all alone, I had to figure out how I could orchestrate it by myself. It turns out that it really worked. experienced that. We wanted it to be just homebrewed, from us. Our vision.

As you know, it’s not easy to be in a band with your brother. Tyler: That’s true but I think it’s easier for us. We share a common musical language and it always seemed like other people didn’t quite have that same bar or something. So it created problems. Not personally, but just artistically. I think it’s actually easier for us to create together than to work with other people.

The more people in the mix, the more diluted the vision. Shane: When we were doing other people’s ideas, it didn’t quite fit right. You can only concede so much and then the whole thing becomes a compromise. Why even listen to that? You have to serve the song and do it right. As an artist, I think that’s your duty.

The album is all over the place stylistically, EVER SINCE WE STARTED yet it still sounds like a band effort. That’s not easy to accomplish. IN 2012, WE DIDN’T WANT Tyler: But it all starts out with the same TO LIMIT OURSELVES TO JUST BE THIS OR THAT SORT OF BAND. WE mentality, throughout. Ever since we started in 2012, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to just be this or that sort of band. We weren’t trying to fit into a mold at all. WEREN’T TRYING TO FIT INTO A MOLD AT ALL. It’s a little bit of everything, which is the very definition of psychedelic music. But how do you categorize it? Tyler: I think it’s rock and roll at its core. I think the whole late ‘60s Abbey Road sound is the pinnacle for me. We love that kind of baroque, orchestrated pop. Including an instrumental is a bold move. “Canyon Of the Banshee” is an unexpected highlight. Tyler: When we were nearing the end of the record, I felt like there was another side of us that we hadn’t really explored. It was really concise but we wanted to add a kind of a sound odyssey / western thing to it. Shane: I think it shows a lot of our influences because it’s like three different songs in one. You rely on each other in the studio, but how can you replicate some of these sounds in a live setting? Even the Beatles couldn’t play some of their later stuff as a four-piece. Tyler: With the band that we had before the pandemic, some Right, it wasn’t diluted by band decisions and compromises. Shane: Yeah, that totally changes things and we’ve definitely of the songs were just too hard to do. So many layers and orchestral things - so we may have to expand when we go out on the road. Shane: We have some stuff in the vault now, but I think the next thing we want to do is get out and play because we never actually toured as Hearty Har. We want to get these songs in front of people and see how they connect with an actual audience. We’ve been in the studio for so long, we really haven’t experienced much of that live side of the band yet. Actual shows for actual people!

Tell us a bit about the origins of the Fogerty’s Factory pandemic band. Shane: I think it started with just our dad doing “Have You Ever Seen The Rain” all by himself. It got a really good reaction from everybody stuck at home and online. Then the next week, we were all at the house and our mom asked us to play “Down On The Corner,” and our sister Kelsy joined in on it. That was the first time she’d really jammed with us as a family. It seemed to really catch on.

The productions got bigger and bigger as time went on. Shane: It did and we’d spend the week rehearsing with our dad then we’d usually film on a Thursday and then it would be released by that Friday. It turned out to be a nice little family tradition to have, spread out over last summer. Just getting together with the family and playing music. It was fun and I think it shows in the videos.

What was it like to do “Centerfield” at centerfield in an otherwise empty Dodger Stadium? Shane: I think they were just setting up the Covid testing site there that week. So it wasn’t completely empty but just walking out on that field, it’s pretty hard to describe. We’d been to a Iot of games there and it was just crazy to do that song there and hear it echoing back at us. Tyler: (Laughs) And we got yelled at for walking on the infield.

As we discussed, Hearty Har is a true collaborative effort but did Fogerty’s Factory ever become a democratic band as well? Shane: Well, those are his songs so he was definitely calling the shots. For us, we just wanted to play the best we could so it wasn’t a collaborative thing, really.

You didn’t take over and go, ‘Ok, next week we’re doing Hearty Har songs and here’s your part’? Shane: (Laughs) I can just imagine the look on his face if we’d said that.