Guitarist, Producer, writer, and owner of Sparkle Plenty Records, Michael Lockwood has been very busy the past few years on various music-related projects. Those have included remixing and rereleasing the Lions & Ghosts album Velvet Kiss, Lick of the Lime, launching new label Sparkle Plenty with John Brodeur’s album Lagoon, recording and releasing the new Lions & Ghosts song “Gurl I Luv You”, writing his first film soundtrack for As the Village Sleeps, and more.
Lions & Ghosts was a band that was active in the 80s and 90s before the members went their separate ways and Velvet Kiss, Lick of Lime was their first album, recorded in London’s Soho at Tony Visconti’s Good Earth Studios in 1987. Lockwood has had a continuous life in music, including working as a Producer with Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, and many more, so he put his skills to work on bringing this key Lions & Ghosts album back to active release. I spoke with Michael Lockwood about his varied career, the impact of the pandemic on his work, launching Sparkle Plenty Records with Jeff Keller, his experience handling his youthful work again, as well as writing a new Lions & Ghosts song and taking on his first film soundtrack.
Hannah Means-Shannon: You’ve been very busy. Would you characterize your activity level in the past few years as more busy than usual, or is this kind of par for the course for you?
Michael Lockwood: I think for all of us, things changed a lot when we went through the pandemic. For most people I talk to, that level decreased, but for others, it tripled. For me, it has been a steady climb of activity. It was okay before the pandemic, then it hit and changed things, but after many conversations with many friends and my now manager, I had to get really outside the box and figure out what to do. At some point, things got busier and continue to get busier every day, which I’m super-happy about.
HMS: I previously spoke with John Brodeur about Lagoon, from Sparkle Plenty Records, so I know a little bit about your work together. How did he come to be your first release with Sparkle Plenty?
ML: John and I got to work a lot together in person, too, which was great. I had met John not that long before the pandemic. I was friends with someone who Produced John’s previous album and when John needed to work with people on the West Coast, I played a show with him at Hotel Café right before the pandemic. I did another gig with him with the Echo in the Canyon guys. He called me and said, “I feel like our next step is that we should work together in the studio.” We started working on a song and instantly the pandemic hit. I was already doing a lot of work via the internet, so it wasn’t that different for me.
John explained that he had this whole body of work and a record that he had that was ¾ of the way finished. I called Aimee Mann and explained that he reminded me of her, and that various people she knew were working on the album. I asked if she could play bass on some music in her home studio. I did various phone and e-mail sessions with other musicians, putting a song together.
While that happened, I started working with my now-manager Jeff Keller via Zoom and Instagram. He presented me with the idea of having my own label and managing that. He asked what made sense to me to do, and I said, “I would love to help people. I have incredible distribution through my sister-label. Who can I help?” John Brodeur needed help. He had almost a completed album with all kinds of cool people on it. I told John what I had to offer, and it just came together, really seamlessly. We were able to finish everything.
HMS: How did the pandemic affect your Production work?
ML: There was a point in my life when I realized that I’d spent most of my life in the studio playing and working on music, and I was always the point-person, but I’d tell people something I wanted to happen and I’d have to rely on them to do it. Prior to the pandemic, I actually realized I had to stop being that person and take control of that aspect by getting more involved to get things done. During the pandemic, I educated myself a lot, and took courses. I really branched out into new areas, like I’d never really worked in Dance music, so I took a lot of courses in that.
HMS: I love the fact that you went into self-education during that time. You have come out of this with a new situation in terms of your knowledge. I don’t know how you found the time to do that, as well as making your first film soundtrack during that time.
ML: It was mostly because I wasn’t sleeping! [Laughs] During the pandemic, a friend reached out to me who’s been making independent, inexpensive films for the last six or seven years. He usually writes, directs, Produces, and scores the movie. He does everything. But this one was written and edited by someone else and he was working on multiple projects so he asked if I’d be interested in scoring the film. He sent me the movie and gave me no instruction, which was beautiful!
HMS: How do you even get started on something like that?
ML: I watched the movie three or four times with no music whatsoever. It was a blank canvas. I started spending some of those long nights working on soundscapes and creating themes for different characters or different situations. I didn’t know what I should do, so I made my own way through it, and I actually wrote the score chronologically. I evolved as the movie evolved and the score evolved right along with it. About half way through it, I wasn’t sure if it would be what he was hoping for, so I sent it to him. The movie is very organic and the score was anything but organic.
I have a love for scores and soundtracks, and I do have a soft spot in my heart for electronic scores of the late 70s and early 80s. All the stuff that was by John Carpenter or Tangerine Dream. The movie was organic, but isolated, so it made sense to me that the electronic music would be a little more cold and isolating. My friend wrote back and said “I love it!” He just asked me to remove the drums that I was using. I had some electronic drum bits here and there. When I released the soundtrack score right around Halloween, I actually restored the drums and remixed it. [Laughs]
HMS: That would be a great thing to release on vinyl. Soundtracks feel like they belong on vinyl.
ML: I’m a huge vinyl junkie and I hope to pass that onto my children. I’m so happy that vinyl has made such a huge resurgence over the last 10 years. I would like to put it out on vinyl but I don’t know if, financially, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe as a limited release for Record Store Day or something. I’m the kind of guy who would do a 7-inch box set of it and piss everybody off! [Laughs]
HMS: Did you handle and choose the files for the rerelease of Lions & Ghosts’ Velvet Kiss, Lick of the Lime?
ML: My manager and Deko got the original tapes and had them digitized. Then I did the remastering. But I also had tapes of the 12-inch remixes and B-sides. I had those digitized and remastered them in a way that they could all sit together nicely. I was really lucky on all that.
But I was also sitting on a mountain of unreleased stuff. I have all the early demos, the demos right before the records, the B-sides. I have the dance remixes from the 80s. In the end, I remastered the 80s dance remixes because they happened within the same time period, as well as a couple of B-sides from then. I thought it was nice because that material wasn’t too overwhelming and could be a little extra fun to go with the original record. That’s what we went with.
HMS: What was it like for you approaching all of that again? Did you hear those songs differently looking at them again after all these years?
ML: Oh yes, there was a flood of emotions. It’s hard to know what to even say. I made that record when I was 23 or 24 years old, a very young man. At that point in life, being in a band with other people, you have all these different dynamics and relationships. All of us were a little headstrong and inexperienced, which wasn’t a great combination, but we all had the same goals of writing the best songs we could, playing the best we could, and involving as many great people as we could to help us get that result. Looking back at it now, it’s really therapeutic on so many levels to think about the good times, the difficult times, and the journey.
Though I don’t have this anymore, that year I kept a diary of making that record. But writing it helped sort of instill the memories that I still carry. It was the first time I’d been out of the country. We flew to England. We stayed in Earl’s Court for a few months, then moved to Soho Square. My experience in England was so incredible because it felt like home, like I’d been there before. It was a life-changing experience for me to work with someone like Tony Visconti. It was quite a journey to revisit all of that through the remastering. The sidenote is that I’ve been back to the UK a lot, I’ve lived there for several years, and I really have a love affair with the UK.
HMS: How did the remastering relate to recording a new song for Lions & Ghosts?
ML: Concurrently with all that, I had rekindled my relationship with Rick Parker, the vocalist, and we wrote and recorded a new song. That’s a whole separate sidenote to all of this, but all of it together was overwhelming! It was a great time to put all these things together in perspective, during the pandemic.
HMS: I know that for Lions & Ghosts, you made another album, Wild Garden, and toured with that, but because that didn’t continue, the sound of the band didn’t continue to evolve in a natural way. When working with Rick on this new song, how did that work? Did you have to “match the wallpaper”, so to speak, and try to sound like your past selves, or did you move things forward?
ML: I like that analogy! The Cliff Notes version of everything is that I got an e-mail before the pandemic to do a session with a local musician playing guitar. They booked time at Rick Parker’s studio. I’d only seen Rick twice in twenty years, not for any good or bad reason. I walked in the door and it was like time had stood still. Rick looked almost identical, things were so laid back. We talked for about two-and-a-half hours even though we were supposed to be working. It was really good for us.
Later, I suggested we stay in touch by sharing Dropbox folders. We did that. He showed me what he was most interested in, which was wildly different than Lions & Ghosts, but I started working on some songs. Nothing much was happening, so I went over to the studio, and we sat down with two acoustic guitars and wrote the song “Gurl I Luv You”. That’s never the way that Lions & Ghosts had worked. I recorded acoustic guitars for it at his studio. I took it home to record some more things and have a friend play drums.
I sent him some tracks and it started sounding pretty Lions & Ghosts-ish. Not on purpose. We didn’t try to match the wallpaper, as you were saying. It was just the way that it was. There was another silence during the pandemic, but it turned out he hadn’t gotten my messages about it. I contacted him again the second time I had Covid, in a fever dream state saying that I couldn’t let go of the song, and he wrote back right away and said, “Let’s finish it!” We made a decision to get some real strings on the song, which had previously been mellotron tracks. It took two years to do that song, but at the end of it, I didn’t want to change a thing.
My 24-year-old self talking wouldn’t have said that. My 61-year-old self can see that it’s perfect the way that it is. It chronicles our journey and our literal therapy session, since that’s what it turned out to be. We got to go back and talk about all the things we went through together. We spent a good portion of our young years together and came away from it without figuring everything out. But we got together and made this song and it was also a really healthy to talk about that stuff. We have a few other songs that we’ve been working on, and as long as it continues to be a fun experience, we may continue to do it.
