Greg Spero is a rock star, but you probably don’t know his name. His resume includes a few trips to the Grammys, a Chicago Music Award for Best Jazz Entertainer, five albums, and he was even mentored by Herbie Hancock and Robert Irving III. The Los Angeles-based musician has toured Europe and often travels to New York, Chicago, and other parts of the U.S. That’s not the Greg Spero I got to spend time with, however. The warm, welcoming pianist invited me to his grandparents’ home in the suburbs of Chicago where he stays when he’s in town. He pushed—albeit not too hard—a plate of pancakes, eggs, and bacon on me, making the interview feel more like two friends catching up over a meal. As we noshed, we discussed his most recent Kickstarter-funded album and his philosophies on music and life.
Ethan Kaplan: What is your first memory of music?
Greg Spero: My first memory of music?
EK: Well, I can vividly remember being in my mom’s car with either The Beatles or Carly Simon playing as we’re driving.
GS: I would say my first musical memory isn’t music. The first things—the first experiences that resonate for me in a musical way—had sounds but they didn’t have actual music in them. One of the first memories that I have in the creative sense is actually one with my grandpa.
GS: We’d walk down the Green Bay Trail, and we’d have LATEOTT, which is an acronym for light at the end of the tunnel, and we would walk along the trail and look for golf balls. I remember walking hand in hand and looking for light at the end of the tunnel and all the emotions that are mixed up in that for a young kid (I was probably four or five years old). Experiences like that resonate with me with musical qualities because I feel like that’s what music is describing; emotions and experiences that we have in that realm. I think that’s true even more so than sitting down with an instrument and making a tone because the tone that you make is determined by the human experience.
EK: And you’ve played the piano since you were three. Was that your parents just thinking you should play an instrument?
GS: Well, they never actually encouraged me to get into music. I don’t ever remember my parents telling me to play the piano in any way. They are both piano players, and they know how hard it is to make a life playing the piano.
EK: With any instrument, really.
GS: With any instrument, exactly. The lifestyle of a musician is one of the most challenging ones that you can choose because it’s so fun, and it’s so in demand. But the competition is huge, and the value in society, certainly American society, means it’s not a highly valued commodity. It’s not valued as much as it could be given the effect that it can have on people and given the profound nature in which it can affect this world. That’s a long way of saying they never told me to get into it. But I saw them playing it. I grew up watching my dad’s band, and I was inspired by it. I saw them doing this thing that was so amazing and so profound. They were expressing ideas to the world that then resonated with hundreds of thousands of people. I didn’t see it as this (at the time), but I saw the nature of how music can affect a human being. It inspired me to want to do more of it.
EK: When did the light bulb come on for you? Do you remember that moment? My parents always enjoyed that I played music, but I think to them it was always a hobby. Design was a way for me to express myself creatively, but also to pursue a career. Do you remember when you first thought you could do this for the rest of your life?
GS: I do, and it actually came late for me. I wish it had come earlier. The environment around us does not encourage risk because with risk can come great failure. The people that care about us don’t want us to fall off a cliff. I spent a lot of my life with that thought in my mind. That risk of failure inhibiting me, preventing me from what would eventually make me happy. Though I had been playing professionally with my dad and other groups since I was 14, it was only when I was about 24 (that I realized this). I was not worried about the way I was playing; it was just for fun. At the same time, I was working on start-up companies, one of which had the potential of becoming really big, but it didn’t and I’m glad it didn’t because if it did that’s what I’d be doing right now, and I’d been rich, but I wouldn’t be happy doing that. In college, I was a music major but working on start-up companies in my free time. After college I spent a few years floundering trying to make these businesses work and playing gigs at night, never really satisfied with any of it because I wasn’t making enough money and I wasn’t fully vested in any of it. Eventually there was a point where I went to my mentor and said I need to make a change in my life, I’m not happy with what I’m doing right now. I think the thing I want to do is seek out the greatest possible scenario that I can musically.
EK: So what would you say to young artists who are afraid to go down that path or don’t even know that there is a path?
GS: I guess I would say don’t believe anything, including what you think. You have to question everything and experiment with everything to find what actually works and to find the best path. Even the wisest people around you are operating from a limited perspective. We’re all human beings, we’re all right and wrong and we all make mistakes. Within the context of your own path, seek wisdom and knowledge for different things. Wisdom is timeless: it can help us discover our own paths.
EK: You just put out an album called “Electric.” You ran a Kickstarter campaign for it. Why go to Kickstarter when you’ve had so much success on your own? I imagine you could pretty much record anywhere you wanted to.
GS: So the record story is quite interesting. There’s a great producer in Los Angeles at [Redacted] Studios, and we started talking about a year before we did the recording. I was going into meetings when I was in LA (I wasn’t living there at the time). He gave me a budget and I asked some friends for some money, and I had $50,000 promised to me to do the record and promotion for it. The long story short is that at the last minute the producer decided to double his price. I had the choice of trying to get my friends to put in that much money or go a different route. I had moved to LA to do this recording and then the deal fell through. I talked to my guys in Chicago and we came to the conclusion that we should do it on a smaller level where we’d only need $10,000. I didn’t know if it would work or not; if the people around me would actually want to put up money so that I could create this thing with them (I think about it as a collaboration because I couldn’t have done it without them). It was affirming to me to know that I could be supported by this whole community of 210 people that wanted to see me do this thing. And then it turned into a community project. I gave people updates as we were in the studio and got people’s opinions on which tracks to use. It became this amazing communal experience, which reflects how I want my music to work in the grand scheme of things. It turned out to be this amazing exchange that I couldn’t have possibly gotten from $50,000 and using people that weren’t invested in it. And that’s the experience I want to keep having with my records—to be an intimate human-to-human experience with both the people who are supporting the record and the people who are creating the record. That’s the best way of doing it.
EK: What are your thoughts on Infused?
GS: I think this application is really important because it’s the first application that will allow people to create a local community of art using their digital devices.
EK: What does it do for you as a musician?
GS: Well, most of the music that I write is attached to a specific idea, and that idea often includes a place. Like my song “Hills” has to do with this one area of Thailand where I had the experience of biking through the hills of the most beautiful place. It was a moment in time in a certain space, and I wanted to share that. If I was able to do that in that location, that would be a phenomenal connection that my audience wouldn’t get any other way. It’s the same with local places in my hometown. Often I was inspired to write a piece when I was at a certain building or intersection or place; a place that has to do with where I grew up. I feel that if I can share that with people based on their experience of that place, it will add an entirely new dimension to the experience of the art.
For more about Greg Spero and his music, visit http://gregspero.com/.
