David Greenberg has been marching to the beat of his own drum for nearly 40 years as a musician and even collaborated with his former Phoenix-based band on a CD before he moved to Kauai in 2008. But that recording
David Greenberg has been marching to the beat of his own drum for nearly 40 years as a musician and even collaborated with his former Phoenix-based band on a CD before he moved to Kauai in 2008.
But that recording experience using new digital techniques, he said, helped him develop an itch he needed to scratch.
“I’d say that right after I did that album about five or six years ago, I thought, ‘I think this would be a lot of fun,’ so I kind of got the bug to write my own music,” Greenberg said.
That process, he said, began about five or six years ago and picked up in 2011, when he compiled nine songs together for what would become Kawika and the Houselot Chilies, his first CD comprised entirely of his own songs.
“When you write music, you write a lot of it and most of it never makes it on a CD — you have to cherry pick which ones are the really good stuff that you think people are going to like,” Greenberg said.
But when it came down to recording the music, he circumvented the traditional route of forming a band, rehearsing the songs and spending time in a recording studio.
Instead, Greenberg said he reached out to the best studio musicians he could find on Kauai and in Los Angeles and Phoenix to provide some of the instrumentals for his CD, including local musicians Michael Ruff, Kirk Smart and David Braun.
For the next 18 months, he recorded and gathered all the tracks for his CD and even squeezed in some time in the studio while visiting his family in Phoenix, where his CD was produced.
“You have to realize that’s not working on it eight hours a day,” Greenberg said. “It’s recording when I can get musicians into a studio and get them to record their parts and their track and then a lot of pasting, cutting and editing stuff goes on when you do it that way.”
The finished product, however, was worth it, he said.
“There’s a couple of emotions, really,” Greenberg explained. “There’s relief because you’re done with the project and you worked really, really hard to get it done and it is what it is now, but then you also feel like, ‘Oh gosh, I wish I could do this a little bit more.’”
Each song tells a story. They’re based on funny experiences that came as an afterthought or even from several family members, whose opinions, he said, matter to him the most.
“There are a lot of songs on there that are about members of my family and about life experiences that I’ve had,” Greenberg said. “When they write back and say they had a good time with it, you can’t spend enough money on it to make that happen.”
And as for the genre of music on his CD? Well, it’s just as diverse and idiosyncratic as the subject of the songs — there’s county, blues, reggae and even one rock tune.
“It kind of goes all over the place,” Greenberg said with a laugh. “I suppose that if you were to take a cross between Don Tiki and The Tubes you would kind of have what we are. It’s a kind of rock out deal most of the time but there’s a lot of island influence and beat.”
But the main thing, Greenberg said, is for people to have fun with it.
“There’s some humor in it, so I hope they find it funny,” Greenberg said. “It’s out there for everybody just to have fun with. I’m the kind of guy who thinks music should be uplifting and not something that is a bad thing.”
A CD release party for Kawika and the Houselot Chilies, featuring OCDC, will be held tonight in the Luau Room at Tahiti Nui in Hanalei. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show starts at 7 p.m.
Proceeds from the $10 general admission tickets sold through Kauai Music and Sound in Kapaa will benefit the Kauai Music Festival.
Info: 823-8000
