In Good Company

Singer-songwriter John Gorka makes sure to look back as he moves forward.

By: Matt Smith
   Lately, singer-songwriter John Gorka’s been thinking a lot about his days at Godfrey Daniels, the not-for-profit coffeehouse in the post-industrial steel town of Bethlehem, Pa., where he got his start.
   A philosophy and history student at Moravian College in Bethlehem in the late 1970s, the young John Gorka was drawn to the music of folk troubadours who played at Godfrey Daniels, particularly Stan Rogers, Tom Paxton and Eric Andersen. Mr. Gorka started emceeing, selling brownies, serving as soundman and eventually became the resident opening act. For a time, he even lived in the basement, affording him a unique perspective of the famed folk club.

"Singer-songwriter
Singer-songwriter John Gorka, who plays Hightstown Sept. 22, has a new album and a new perspective on the world around him.

   "Seeing the place day in and day out, and seeing it various parts of the day — coming in the morning or the afternoon and seeing it with all the chairs up on tables — it was not too far removed from what it had been, which was a doughnut shop," he says. "To see what it was like when all the tables and chairs and people were there and the lights were on and there were people on stage, and seeing what it was like before the show and what it was like afterward, a great performance would electrify the room and really put some magic in the air."
   Mr. Gorka, now 43 and living in Minneapolis, Minn., says watching those performers connect with the audience in a relatively austere setting, employing a minimum of lights and atmosphere, taught him he could play anywhere and make that magic.
   "It didn’t really matter where I played," he says. "I didn’t have to play a certain-sized place, I didn’t have to have a place that was prestigious at all. To me, I felt like other than the basic minimum of the technical requirements, the rest of the show was up to me."
   Mr. Gorka, a Woodbridge native who offered a melancholy, humor-tinged ode to the Garden State’s inferiority complex in his 1991 song, "I’m From New Jersey," has played rooms both large and small in the past two decades, building a devoted following for his sensitive-guy contemporary folk. He’ll return to his home state for a show at the Grace Norton Rogers School Theater in Hightstown Sept. 22.
   His eighth album, the company you keep (Red House), released in March, is classic Gorka: subtle social commentaries and bittersweet songs about love and its aftermath, delivered with self-deprecating humor and his trademark rich, soothing baritone.
   For the first time, Mr. Gorka decided not to use an established producer, opting instead to co-produce with his friend Andy Stochansky. Each of the 14 songs was recorded in four takes or less, he says, letting the songs remain fresh, and for the most part, spare. The arrangements are unobtrusive, freeing space for the harmony vocals of longtime compatriots Mary Chapin Carpenter and Lucy Kaplansky, and from Patty Larkin and "righteous babe" Ani DiFranco.
   He didn’t do much of the writing or recording at home because, after years as a single, hard-touring folkie, he’s now married with two small children. Being a family man means he only plays 75 shows per year — down from 150 — and goes out for three- or four-day mini-tours instead of traveling for weeks at a time. Mr. Gorka says most of his writing now occurs in hotel rooms or automobiles, as opposed to the days when he would write at home first thing in the "morning."

"Like
Like his 1998 album, After Yesterday, the rewards of family life are apparent on the company you keep, giving it a bit sunnier feel than some of his early work.

   "I’d wake up slowly and monitor the thoughts or images that were running through my head," he says. "It was kind of the musician’s lifestyle where I would sleep to 11 or 12, or sometimes even later. I would just work on things and if I got too many lines where I thought I’d forget them, I’d get up and write them down. Or if I started to hit a wall, then I’d go back to sleep.
   "That’s gone now, that morning time, with two little kids. They get up pretty early and there’s none of that half-dreaming time anymore."
   Like his 1998 album, After Yesterday, the rewards of family life are apparent on the company you keep, giving it a bit sunnier feel than some of his early work. A self-described shy person, Mr. Gorka says the album’s title reflects his increasing participation with the people and places around him.
   "The emphasis in that title is the keeping part, and that’s what family is. So there are definitely some changes in the point of view, like the second song, ‘A Saint’s Complaint,’ which I think of as a song about having a sense of place. I’ve had songs with a sense of place before, but now it’s different. With that song in particular, the sense of place is more as a participant, somebody who’s in the middle of things rather than as an observer, which I think there was definitely more of before."
   The song seems to reflect on his observer role in his Bethlehem days: I liked the towns, I liked the people/ But the brown bugs in my bed, I could have done without/ I liked the taconite, the slate roofs and steeples/ A few crucial details of my whereabouts.
   That song, like two others on the album, features the harmonies of Ms. Kaplansky. The pair have been blending their voices on each other’s albums since meeting in late 1984 at a taping for a Fast Folk Musical Magazine compilation at the Speak Easy club in Greenwich Village, the center of a singer-songwriter community that produced the likes of Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin.
   "Lucy walked in with Shawn that day and I asked them both, because I was a fan of both of them, if they would sing on my song," Mr. Gorka says. "They kinda gave me a look like, ‘Who the hell are you?,’ kind of a New York look. They said ‘Well, let’s hear the song.’ I played them the song down in the women’s room at the Speak Easy — they didn’t have any backstage area — and they agreed to sing on it."
   That song, "Down in the Milltown," made the compilation and appeared on his first album, I Know, released in 1987, on which Ms. Colvin and Ms. Kaplansky ended up serving as the primary back-up singers.
   Like a number of his singer-songwriter contemporaries in New York City in the early ’80s, Mr. Gorka was dubbed a folk singer. He doesn’t mind the label — he is, after all, a guy with a guitar who goes out and sings by himself — but he has developed a personal credo that challenges that moniker and keeps his ego in check.
   "I probably will always be an aspiring folk singer because I don’t know if what I do is folk music, if the songs I write are folk songs — that’s more the audience’s call. But the approach is to make music that matters to people, that gives them something that other kinds of music doesn’t give, and to make music that finds a place in people’s lives."
John Gorka plays the Grace Norton Rogers School Theater, 382 Stockton St.,
Hightstown, Sept. 22, 8 p.m. Alice Peacock opens. Tickets cost $17 in advance,
$20 at the door. For information, call (609) 259-1922. On the Web: www.outtasightsandsounds.com.
John Gorka on the Web: www.johngorka.com