Shlomo Franklin grew up on a farm milking cows in Bethel, New York. He soon developed his own style of music inspired by the neighboring grounds of Woodstock. His musical influence includes Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Nirvana and Johnny Cash. Shlomo Franklin is favorably recognized by his smile, kindness and warmth he sheds onto every person he meets. AHC: What has this journey in music, so far, been like for you, the highs and the lows, and what life lessons do you feel you've picked up along the way? Deciding to pursue music essentially means you are dedicating your life to dignity and beauty. Being a musician means you are striving for the possibility of greatness rather than settling for guaranteed mediocrity. Being a songwriter means you're constantly harvesting diamonds from dirt, it means you're on the prowl for an amplified version of the mundane. It's putting your pain under a magnifying glass and analyzing it, finding the beauty in it, dealing with the troubles, and then moving on. As for the highs and lows; A high would be every time someone says that my song helped them through something treacherous or perhaps every time I see a familiar face at a show and when people keep coming back to see us live. A low would've been driving twelve hours to a random town in Maine and no one caring at all about our music. They just wanted to watch the football game. That was sort of a high too actually. I left that tour feeling like I had succeeded in something, I'm not sure what but I know I succeeded. AHC: What first drew you to music and what was your early musical environment like growing up? Were there pivotal songs for you then that just floored you the moment you heard them? My sister bought a guitar when I was about nine years old and used to sing me to sleep. I had trouble sleeping as a child and still do so she used to try to calm me with her songs. I used to sneak into her room when she wasn't around and would mess around with the strings, didn't know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to do what she was doing. What I was after was a guitar lick, it was a blues lick although I didn't know it at the time, all I knew was that it sounded like the earth was shattering, it sounded like a tree falling, a flower blooming, and an atomic bomb going off all at once. The lick was the main riff throughout a song called The Ballad of Hollis Brown by Bob Dylan. I didn't know who Bob Dylan was. All I knew was that my dad liked him and that he had a funny voice, but I knew that his voice wasn't joking around, I knew an endless amount of experience were held in those notes, those were experiences that I was determined to have. He sorted it all out for me. Showed me just how chaotic and sad the world could be but he taught me that it was holy and beautiful too. AHC: Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote? Thankfully the first few hundred songs I wrote were all in a notebook that had been stolen along with one of my guitars a while ago. Those weren't worth remembering either. They looked like the palette of a beginner painter, nothing worth singing. AHC: Who are some of your musical inspirations? Which musicians have you learned the most from? I've been learning a lot from Neil Young. I love the fact that his shows are as energetic and special as ever. He's one of those guys that never repeats the same thing twice and he never fakes it. He's got enough dignity and self-respect to insist on doing it for real. Remember that song he wrote about how he doesn't sing his songs for Pepsi or Coke? What a beautiful song that is. Once in a while, I get a glimpse into how pathetic that major label world can sometimes be and let me tell you I wouldn't let most of those label reps come close to me with a three hundred foot pole. Keep those monsters away from the artists. It's pathetic and hilarious, creatures baying. AHC: What do you think makes for a good song, as you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak? Everyone arrives at their destination differently. In my small world, if a song comes out in less than a few minutes then it's usually a sign that it's a song worth singing. The song just tells me. If I feel compelled to sing it then it's a song I need to go out and play, but if I don't miss it when it's gone, if it doesn't live inside of me then I just forget about it and write a new one. I wouldn't know how to give that over. It's completely in my gut. I can feel when a song is right or when it's not but the fake ones don't really last too long. Sometimes a song is stillborn. If after fifteen minutes the song isn't complete then I probably won't ever look at again. AHC: How has your music evolved since you first began playing? When I started playing out I didn't really have a clue as to what I was doing. My songs weren't bad but my performances were and therefore the production wasn't great either. I had to play shows every night for a year straight, make a lot of mistakes, and simply learn from every single show I played. Again it's a gut thing. I knew I wasn't there yet but I wasn't patient enough either. Today I'm closer to where I want to be but of course I'll never quite be there because you keep setting your expectations higher as you move along and grow so although my voice is much better than it used to be, I'm still not satisfied with how I sound a lot of the time but I've had victories too. There are some recordings that I'm quite thoroughly proud of. AHC: Do you consider music to be a type of healing art, the perfect vehicle through which to translate a feeling, a state of rupture, hope lost and regained? Does the writing and creating of the song save you in the kinds of ways that it saves us, the listener? That's a truckload of a question. Absolutely music is a form of healing just as good as any other medicine, sometimes better. I heard the songwriter Julien Baker recently say that "music is an exorcism of pain" and I think she hit the nail on the head. Music makes everything float to the surface. There's no more denial in the world of song. A song will make you look straight in the mirror and tell it to yourself like it is. For a while, I was writing songs about a certain period in my life where I was close with someone and living in a certain city and then after a while, I started over-romanticizing the past until I started having memories of things that never actually existed. I only figured that out because of a song of mine called Polaroids. Polaroids is all about the inherent falsehood of a photograph, how you can take a picture of a moment that never actually existed. You can have a portrait of a smiling family and the second after the camera flashes, the entire family goes back to bickering and fighting like perhaps they always do. Every photograph is a lie in some way. A picture is worth a thousand words and a song is worth a thousand pictures so one can surely experience the same uncomfortable scenario when it comes to song. The past continues to change and evolve as you grow and therefore there's no such thing as a memory, there are only contemporary images that are cultivated by the current imagination. You wake up with a brand new pair of eyes every day. You can't see the same exact thing twice, therefore in order for a song to be healthy it needs to grow with you, the meaning needs to change, and that's the only way you should sing a song. Even if you think it takes you back to a certain time period, it doesn't actually do that. It makes you feel like you're escaping to the past but it's really taking you somewhere else in your mind that's heavily present and completely in the moment. If a song doesn't mean anything to you today then you shouldn't sing it today, maybe it should wait till tomorrow because things are always different tomorrow. AHC: What are your fondest musical memories? In your house? In your neighborhood or town? On-tour, on-the-road? I was on tour with my band upstate New York and we stopped between shows to take a dip in the Neversink River. It was a hot summer day and the cold water was the perfect answer to a common dilemma and I knew of this swimming hole that my friends and I would frequent back in the day. The sun was starting to think about going down and I have this vivid memory (there's no such thing as a memory) of my drummer bending over, butt naked, trying desperately to get his socks off. The view sort of slapped me in the face because he hadn't warned anyone of his specifically unique situation so that was that, I recovered quickly because he's a handsome fellow and there's nothing wrong with anyone's buttcrack, ever. After most of the band was in the water I started singing them a song. It was a song that I wrote on the spot for them called Waterfall and funnily enough that song has become a mainstay in the live show that we've been closing our sets with lately. It's a really fun tune that holds a lot of juice inside of it. Somehow I believe that the song was inspired by my drummer's butt crack. God bless him and his fine ass. AHC: What would be your dream gig, if you were asked to go on tour and open up for one of your musical heroes or heroines? Dreams are dangerous but I'd love to tour with the Arctic Monkeys. I'd try to teach them how to jam and maybe loosen up their live show a bit more and maybe they can teach me how to look so completely cool. Sadly enough I was trying to open for Leon Russell and it was looking good for me, I had a friend of a friend who was booking one of the clubs where he was slated to play but unfortunately he passed before we could ever shake hands. AHC: Do you have any new projects in the works you'd like to tell people about? Where can people go to support your music? People can come to our live show to support our music. If you can't make it out of your bedroom then you can listen to my new song on YouTube over here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLafJU-7B6s and you can connect through social media however you see fit but here's my facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShlomoFranklinSongs/ As for the future, I'm working on three albums now but the next release should be a song called Don't Love Anybody. It's a song that should've been written already but no one did it so I had to go and do it. You're welcome. For more visit www.shlomofranklin.com/ shlomofranklin.bandcamp.com/music
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