Not so long ago, her father was an unlikely candidate for parenthood. Justin Hopkins had a glint in his eye alright, but it usually meant trouble.
He was almost murdered in Sweden a few years back, for example, after he unwisely and quite drunkenly punched a bouncer in the throat after a gig. The bouncer’s brother, it turned out, was a neo-Nazi thug with a penchant for using bottles as weapons. He caught up with Hopkins a few months later – the singer was back in Sweden with a hit single climbing to #12 in the pop charts – and left him for dead, broken and bleeding, laid out in a park alone after midnight.
This was the stuff of Hopkins’ life, and his music. Like everything that happened to him – lots of broken hearts and boozy bad calls – he turned it into a song, called “Bad Decision.”
“Not to be crass, but in my early 20s, I think everybody, the music we make is chemically driven one way or another,” Hopkins said in an interview this week. “My personality is what it is, but it’s definitely a physical thing – whatever made me physically unable to sit down and look at a person and have a conversation with them for three hours unless nicotine and whisky was involved. And so, you know, a pattern can get established. Pretty soon, your music gets fueled by the fire.”
Now his music is fueled by home fires.
About two years ago, Hopkins was quite literally stopped in his tracks. He discovered that his girlfriend, Kristen Walker, was going to have a baby. Hopkins was still a hard-touring musician, but he understood immediately he had a choice – either to continue touring or be a father. He chose the latter. He found a little house on the Hermosa-Redondo border, married Kristen, and began thinking about a different way to live a life in music – one that didn’t involve self-destruction.
Nicolette was born last Oct. 13. She changed her daddy’s tune, and probably saved his life.
“That was a massive transition,” Hopkins said. “It went from making music for myself and from my experiences to music becoming necessary for survival and family. When that is the case, you have to stop being esoteric about what you are doing and start thinking pretty f**king universal. There is absolutely no room for self-worship….It’s humbling, and it’s made me approach the craft of songwriting with much more respect. Because I am not just in my own crazy universe, where really all I had to do is get water and some kind of carbohydrate into my body by noon to continue to survive and continue to do what I was doing.”
When he arrived in the South Bay from Portland, Oregon six years ago – led by his band, who had road-tripped a day ahead of their lead singer and abruptly stopped when they found the beach – Hopkins had the routine rock and roll dream. It involved fame and decadence, and he obtained a little bit of the former and a whole lot of the latter before he began to realize there was something deeper to be done.
It was a simpler dream: living for the sake of the song.
“I listened to producers,” he said. “Everybody is like, ‘We want hit songs.’ We are always trying to write that, but it is not why I do what I do. I write good songs, and at the end of the day, that is the most important thing – a nice, steady agreement with ourselves that you are not going to abandon what you are trying to do for the sake of bright lights and lots of money.”
His recalibration is now near total. Hopkins, along with his former band mate Scott Fisher, has formed a production team and has recently worked on projects by Jen Singer and Brett Young. He’s done a little work as a music supervisor for movies, and in general found a way to live inside music while still coming home each night to his family. His nightly jams are now with Nico.
“She is absolutely just a fountain of musical inspiration…I’ve given her piano lessons every day since she was six months old, and we have gone from some pretty heinous noise to the ability to play one note for five minutes straight,” he said. “We go in the house and she’ll tap in a rhythm like Morse code.”
This Tuesday, Hopkins is launching a “Songwriters in the Round” night at Saint Rocke (see story page 15). It features 10 songwriters, including some of the most up-and-coming young talents on the L.A. scene. Hopkins says this night is his statement of intent: he wants to help build on what is already an emerging, vibrant musical scene here in the South Bay.
“I went from trying to make my music into something I was trying to get to the world and try to share with everybody to really something I’m trying to use as a catalyst for more musical involvement,” he said. “I don’t have that same drive to go out and play across the world. I love to write song, and I love to perform for people that are listening. That really is my only goal, and it starts with building an environment, and a community.”
If he can’t go to the mountain, in other words, Hopkins has decided to bring the mountain here. He is working on several fronts. In the next year, he will release four EPs, but he is no longer seeking a record deal to make his music. The albums are being funded by his fans, and possibly by the internet start-up site Kickstart.org. There is much talk these days about the demise of the music industry, what with the dearth of big record deals and disappearance of label-funded artist development. But musicians like Hopkins have discovered that this can also represent a liberation day of sorts for the artists themselves.
“There is really no need for a record label ever again, unless you are already big,” Hopkins said. “If you can maintain 2,000 fans, you can make a living for the rest of your life, as long as you are only getting better. That is the main thing – continue making better music. The key is to maintain those that are close; there is such a thing as fans that go to your website every day, and it doesn’t take too many of those.”
Hopkins uses Facebook to keep in touch with his very own crowd. Last week, he asked for requests for cover songs that he’d record at home and post on the site.
“I’m thinking I’ll take a few requests, and all of sudden there is upwards of 100 people insistently and vehemently recommending their songs,” he said. “That is what I want to do – my albums are really a small part of the big picture of what I’m trying to do with music….The focus used to be about marketing myself and marketing my band. It’s not about that anymore. It’s about an outpouring of music, all the time.”
If this is the wave of the future, it’s something that comes from the past. It’s the ancient role of the songwriter, the troubadour who provides the songs for his or her community. It’s a tradition that is common in village life throughout the world and even has a parallel in the classical world and courts of medieval Europe. As another of the songwriters performing Tuesday night notes, Bach didn’t have a record deal.
“Classical music, and early Western European music, Beethoven, Bach – this is before they had recorded music, before radio or television,” said Keaton Simons, a songwriter who also has a degree in ethnomusicology. “These guys, the only way anybody could hear their music is either to hear them play or else if somebody else got a hold of their music and played it. Still, you mention Beethoven to anyone and they’ll know who you are talking about. People talk about how hard it is to get a hit. Well, yeah…but it’s all about music, all about songs. Just write that shit down and pass it around Vienna and you’ll be a legend.”
Hopkins is a prodigiously talented musician. He plays both piano and guitar with pure melodic verve and has a deep, soulful voice reminiscent of Michael McDonald with maybe a touch of Elton John’s supreme pop sensibility. If he continued to aspire towards it, he could likely find radio and record success. But he has very consciously chosen to make his stand, and it’s a determinedly local stand.
A famous pair of hazy philosophers named Jagger and Richards – from the Rolling Stone school of thought – once posited that you can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime, they argued, you just might find that you get what you need.
“You get what you need, man,” Hopkins said. “I don’t think there is a person that knows me in the entire world that would say this is not the best thing that could have happened. We have created a beautiful life. There was a decision to settle down, spurred by life…I was a 27-year-old kid. But the love of a good woman will fix your behavior pretty quick.”
Before taking a recent producing gig, Hopkins was asked if he took instruction from women well.
“Well, I’m married,” he replied. “That is all I do. If a man tells me what to do, I’d probably punch him in his teeth. Women are the only people I can listen to now. I live in the land of women. That is how it is.”
For tickets or more information on the Songwriter’s Round, see www.saintrocke.com (and see accompanying story). For more info on Justin Hopkins, see Facebook or www.myspace.com/justinhopkins. ER
