Photo by Marcus Maddox
Steve Forbert
While daylight savings time may be the practice of advancing clocks so darkness falls at a later time during the summer months, it also served as the title and inspiration for Steve Forbert’s newest studio album of the same name.
Passing his 70th birthday on December 13, 2024, mortality and aging served as a major inspiration for the veteran singer-songwriter as he was recording the 10 songs that make up Daylight Savings Time. Forbert will perform on October 23 at Shank Hall.
“These are songs I wrote over the last couple of years and that’s what I’m feeling,” Forbert said. “A lot of the record has to do with an appreciation of nature and the feeling of that oncoming autumn thing in this time of life. It’s not unlike appreciating daylight savings time as that time in the summer where you’re getting that theoretical extra hour of daylight.”
Fast and Loose
Fans can expect to hear these tunes and more when Forbert takes the stage. Given his deep canon, the Mississippi native plays it rather fast and loose with the songs he plays from night to night.
“No two shows are the same and I don’t really follow a set list,” Forbert explained. “I start off the same way. This season, the shows are starting off with a song I bring out for autumn pretty much every year called ‘Autumn This Year.’ Then of course, we always end with ‘Romeo’s Tune.’ That’s simple logic there. The in between is really down to the moment.
“The show sort of starts on its own flow and you want to vary the rhythms a lot and keep the keys shifting around just so it sounds interesting and doesn’t get samey. That’s the truth of the show,” he said. “Everything else is of the moment and like I say, I might get requests from the crowd and I’m free to respond to those. It’s not some big show following a set list. That would be very boring.”
Big City Cat
To know Forbert’s career path is to follow the trail of a music-loving kid born in Meridian, MS, who got his first musical experience being encouraged to sing Peggy Lee’s “Fever” when he was a toddler. And while he says the influence The Beatles had on him and his generation was considerable, it was The Byrds that really drove him to become a musician.
“When I heard ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was when I decided to pick up a real guitar,” Forbert said. “There was something embedded in that record by The Byrds. That sound, that feel and the fact that Bob Dylan wrote it meant that it was obviously very poetic and it had some folk undertones, roots and foundation.”
Forbert’s desire to pursue music brought him to New York City’s Manhattan in June 1976, where he quickly discovered the CBGB scene. For him, the timing offered endless possibilities, which he recounts in great detail throughout his 2018 memoir Big City Cat: My Life in Folk-Rock.
“At that time The Ramones and Patti Smith’s first records had come out and it wasn’t like I was trying to emulate those artists or going there as it were,” Forbert explained. “But it was clear that New York City was putting out some different new exciting stuff. There was so much variety between The Ramones and Patti Smith so I could see that there might be room for the kind of thing I wanted to do. I wanted to play and word was that in New York City you could sing in the streets if it came to that. And I wanted to play and it did come to that.”
Proving Himself
Forbert wasted no time diving into that nascent scene, particularly when it came to trying to prove himself at myriad open mic nights.
“I talk about the Hoot Night experience [at Folk City] and all of that in my book,” Forbert said. “It was exactly what I went up to New York City for. I thought it was great. It was all these young people my age—some were from as far away as Ohio. They came there for the same reason. They came to check out this so-called folk thing and they were singer-songwriters. You could learn about as much of what to do as much as what not to do from watching these Hoot Nights and I was there for everyone.”
Between busking on the street and playing at CBGB, Folk City and Kenny’s Castaway, it wasn’t long before Forbert was signed to Nemperor Records. By the time his 1979 sophomore bow “Jackrabbit Slim” dropped and its worldwide hit single “Romeo’s Tune” was turning heads, Forbert was the latest singer-songwriter to be hailed as the next Bob Dylan. Plowing through the hyperbole, Forbert instead clung to improving as an artist, a single-minded goal that’s rewarded him with a creatively rich career that now includes 20-plus studio albums.
“Regardless of the fact that you can make recordings in your basement with the greatest of ease, I always felt it best to get out in front of real people and play in what we’ll call real time,” he said. “You want to see what you’ve got to deliver and see how people respond to it.”
