By: Rick Landers
PART 2
Guitar International and the masterful singer-songwriter, producer, author and music historian-presenter, Rod MacDonald, continue our conversation about Rod’s music career, including challenges, lessons learned, and reinventing or re-strategizing his approach to changes in the music business and life.
If you missed the beginning of our conversation, please go to PART 1 HERE!
“Politics, passion, and a sense of humor” The Village Voice
“A poet with a lot on his mind who has never allowed himself to make points at the expense of making music.” Boston Globe
“MacDonald’s songs combine poetic vision and journalistic insight.” Dirty Linen
CHECK OUT ROD’S 2026 CALENDAR!
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Rod MacDonald: I’m the president of the Greenwich Village Folk Festival, LLC, but I think that the music that I actually compose and record is much more contemporary and diverse than folk music. As folk music is seen by most people, it’s a very finite kind of thing, even the folk music world. So within the folk music world, for example, I see the playlists of folk DJs. There’s a bulletin board where the folk DJs all publish what they play.
I look at it, I subscribe to it, I’m interested. Part of my job with booking the Greenwich Village Folk Festival is to pay attention to who’s getting hurt around the country. And it’s mostly limited to a very finite kind of sound. Sparse, acoustic rural in a way. And very little of what I actually do would fit that playlist. But because I’m not on a corporate record label, most of the other outlets aren’t available on a certain level.
Things like Spotify is actually a godsend to someone like me. Even if you’re not marketed or promoted by any big corporation, people can still stumble on your music and hear it. So I guess that I feel that a part of me is involved with folk music, but it certainly doesn’t describe all of what I do.
But, I do like folk music as a vehicle for song. And I think that some of the best songs that I hear come from people who are somewhat similar to myself, folk singers that love contemporary music as well.
Rick: I was reading about folk music and a term that I had not seen before for that genre is Folk Adjacent. Have you heard of that before?
Rod MacDonald: Folk adjacent?
Rick: Yeah.
Rod MacDonald: No, I haven’t, but it’s not a bad idea.
Starting in about April of 2020, I played every Sunday night for a year and a half. And after I’d been doing it for a little while, I started thinking, well, I really should play some new songs. So, I started trying to write a song each week. And some of them stuck. Some of ’em were pretty good, I thought timely, and that gave me a lot of new material for the cd. And then when we started working by May of 2022, when we started the actual recording process, I had, I don’t know, 10 or 15 songs to work from.
I teach a music history course in a big lifelong learning program here in Florida, for seniors. It’s the biggest lifelong learning program in the United States. It’s kind of the very first big one. And I’ve been the music Americana instructor since 2006, and I do lectures on famous musicians.
And it’s almost a given that almost every artist who’s been hugely successful runs into a situation where they want to expand their palette and the people that are their financial apparatus, the record labels, the managers, all tell them, “Oh, you can’t do it.” Even their audience, I mean, Dylan is a famous example of somebody who actually had to endure a couple of years of boos from his own audience to get where he wanted to go.
But, it’s not really unusual at all. Ray Charles started out doing R&B for Atlantic Records, and then they didn’t want him to do what he wanted to do, which was to do country music his way. He loved country music, but he wanted to play it his way. So, he changed record labels and had the biggest hits of his career. The music history is full of examples of artists who wanted to be more than they were pigeonholed as.
And I’m sure that’s true of many of the singer songwriters in folk music; that folk is kind of an umbrella term. And yet, Mark Moss, the editor of Sing Out magazine, who is a good friend of mine, once said that the one thing he wasn’t interested in for Sing Out was singer songwriters who couldn’t afford a band. He said, “Just because you’re playing solo doesn’t make it folk music. “And I think he was totally right, that that’s true.
But at the same time, it also means, “Where are you going? Where are you going to go if you’re going to play this music?” Because if you’re not on a commercial record label that’s going to support your musical aspirations, you’re going to have to figure it out yourself.
And then you have to find your audience. And so what you often have is people like myself who record with a full band, but when we go out on tour, we pretty much play solo. Or I go out a lot with Mark Dan playing bass, and we’re pretty good. We’re a pretty good act. But you don’t get to hear, we don’t present my albums’ (songs) the way they sound, when you play them.
Rick: And I don’t think people should expect you to sound like your albums when you’re out playing solo.
Rod MacDonald’s Newest Book, Election Night (2025)
Rod MacDonald: Well, it’s a good thing if they don’t, because for the most part, they’re not going to get it.
Rick: And you also have to split the pie with four or five other people, so you end up with hardly anything. So, how do you survive with the band? Pretty different type of thing.
Rod MacDonald: Yeah, and I played with a band in the late 1970s. I played regularly with a band from about 1976 to the late Eighties around New York City. I played with a band, and at one point we would go up and play weekends in Hartford in this big club for hundreds of people about once a month. And those are really fun times. But, as you get a little older traveling around in a van, everybody’s got their lives, people get married, have kids.
The idea of driving around the country, sleeping in the back of a van with the amps and speakers all around me, no, I’m not going to do that at this point in my life. So, I record the way I aspire to record the versions of the songs that I would really love to hear and then take them out and play them, what I jokingly refer to as the Lonesome Rod Show.
Sometimes, I just go out and sing the songs with my guitar. I think for the most part, the audiences that come to see me are okay with that. Every once in a while when I get to play with other musicians, people kind of go like, “Whoa, that’s a whole other side of you!” Sometimes they’ll say, “We didn’t even know that that existed.”
I’ll say, “Geeze, I’ve been playing and listening to rock and roll and band music all my life. It’s not really that big a stretch. You have to have a group of people that are willing to work to get the music together, to rehearse it, to learn it.
I do concerts here in South Florida for the Lifelong Learning Program a couple times a year, and we’ll take an artist’s entire catalog and boil it and teach it, learn it, learn it in three rehearsals, and then play it in front of hundreds of people a couple of times. We’ve done a huge array of music doing that. We’ve done The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Paul Simon, and Art Garfunkel. We did a concert of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Buffett and Van Morrison Tunes.
Last year, this past year. We did Gordon Lightfoot and Jimmy Buffett with a full band, five piece band, and it’s really fun. It’s kind of like… almost a fantasy. You’ve loved this music all your life. We’re going to pay you enough to learn it and play it a couple times. But, I wouldn’t want to go on the road and do it necessarily. even I got offered. We did a Leonard Cohen show and it was really wonderful. I love Leonard Cohen’s songs, and also a lot of the musical arrangements to his songs are really beautiful.
At this point in my life, it’s not what I want to do, but I enjoyed doing that concert
Rick: And you’ve got plenty of songs at this point to go on the road and play for two or three hours without a problem, I would think.
Rod MacDonald: Yeah, but the problem is, can’t you draw enough people to pay a band?
Rick: True. That’s true.
Rod MacDonald: I’m not a young guy hustling into the music business. I’m not signed to a label. I don’t have promotion people and the “Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”, follow me around and any of that kind of stuff anymore. I kind of gave that up years ago and have been on my own.
So, the idea that I’d go to Detroit and Chicago and Omaha and Seattle and draw a big enough crowd to be able to pay a band to do all that, it would take a real businessman to organize that and I’m not that guy.
Rick: And to get a label, from what I understand it, you’re a lawyer, so you’d probably be able to understand the lingo in the contracts. I think having a label, I’m not sure is such a great thing. I interviewed a guy who was picked up in a new RV and I knew he hadn’t had a great paying job and he ended up owing his label a ton of money.
Rod MacDonald: I’ve talked to some guys that have ended up in that position of owing their record company a lot of money. I never ended up in that position, fortunately, and I have done okay. I have a fairly modest career, but I think it’s okay.
Somebody asked me recently on a radio interview, how I feel about that and I said, “Well, I’ve never had to go to rehab. I’m not divorced. There’s some benefits to staying within yourself. On the other hand, you always dream of your music reaching more people than are available on a person to person basis. And hopefully some people who read this interview will say, “Hey, I’d like to check this guy out.” That’s a good thing.
Rick: Yeah. Well what about synching? Have you had any songs that have been in movies or commercials? There seems to be some bucks there.
Rod MacDonald: I suppose there are. The fact is that I don’t really spend a lot of time on the business end of this stuff. If there’s a fault in my career, that’s probably it, that I’m not a very aggressive business person. I don’t go out and look for those opportunities. I just don’t, don’t have time. I don’t want to spend my time doing that. So I guess either you can call it laziness or lack of engagement. I mean, I get emails every day, on how to navigate the new digital wilderness, “Sign up for this service and we’ll do this for you, sign up for that, blah, blah, blah.”
But basically, every once in a while I’ve tried one or two of those on a trial basis and they don’t really do any of those things. What they do is tell you a lot of things that you should do, which I just don’t have the time and ability to navigate my way through 550 Spotify playlists on an individual basis, trying to get my music heard.
If I could send it to 550 playlists in one blast, I would, or I have maybe, and that’s probably where I am getting air played, but I just don’t want to sit there and spend my day writing emails to 550 people or anything like that.
Rick: But what you do with your time has to be, since you’re a singer songwriter, you’ve written at least one book that I know of and you put on a presentations, workshops, whatever. So I would say you do have the discipline, but your discipline is really sort of vectored into actually having several revenue streams.
Rod MacDonald: My dad was an older dad and had started to decline health-wise and I wanted to help my mom take care of him. My dad did not want to leave home and go into a facility just because of his health.
Still very cognizant and he didn’t want to leave my mom, but she couldn’t take care of him physically. And I had been living with my wife, Nicole. We weren’t married yet, but we had been together for almost a year and we decided to move to Florida together and take care of my dad. But, then that meant getting off the road.
I’d been on the road for about 10 years by that time, driving around the country in a rental car, playing concerts. I had an agent. I was on Shaky records. I kind of gave all that up. I was on an upward trajectory probably career wise, but I gave all that up and I don’t regret it. I think it was a good thing to do. It’s given me a more normal life and probably less visibility as an artist, but it’s been a good thing to do.
And so I had to figure out how to make a living without being on the road, because you can only play your own songs in the town you live in so many times a year, you really can’t do that. So I learned. So I started doing a bunch of different things and at Lifelong Learning, being an instructor there came to me from playing this one club I was playing. I played with an Irish trio sometimes part-time here in South Florida.
I still do actually. I’ve been working with this same woman for 30 years and we were at that time playing like 40 weekends a year at this one Irish club, which was a pretty good gig and paid well. And they never objected if I sang one of my songs, any of my songs. So it was an okay situation. Then this woman came in and I didn’t even know there was a Lifelong Learning program. She said that there was, and she would like to introduce me to the director of it.
I went and met that person and then the next thing I knew they were asking me to teach a class. And that’s turned into very steady work and really interesting work, a lot of research and a lot of video editing. But I have learned a tremendous amount from it about artists that I’ve admired and music that I’ve always loved.
And one of the things that was really cool about it was the director of the program said, “We don’t want you just to teach what you already know. What we like our instructors to do is to take a general field that they’re well versed in. Then pick specific topics that they’d like, to know more about themselves.
Rick: Good idea.
Rod MacDonald: And go out and do the research and you’ll still be enthusiastic. So, you’ll bring that enthusiasm to your classes. Interesting. And so I do that and I’ve gone out and done lectures on probably a couple hundred different artists, including People that I always kind of loved but never really had the chance to learn that much about. And it’s really great.
And it’s also led to a lot of other situations where private communities will call me up and say, “Can you come do a lecture for us?” And I’ll say, “Okay, what do you want me to do a lecture about?” And they’ll look at the list of the lectures that I’ve already prepared and they’ll pick a couple topics and I’ll go talk to them and show ’em the videos that I’ve prepared. I’ll go talk to ’em for an hour and a half. And that’s led to another kind of income stream. So, I’ve been able to support my family by doing these diverse things. And then I still do, I don’t know, 50 nights a year of my own songs probably, which is fun too.
BONUS VIDEO “HEAL THE WORLD”
If you missed the beginning of our conversation, please go to PART 1 HERE!
