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It’s onerous not to consider facial hair when you concentrate on John Oates. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer had one of the iconic mustaches of the Nineteen Eighties whereas reigning over the charts as a part of the duo, Hall and Oates. Yet, there was a time when he needed to shave it off – to save lots of himself. “It was kind of a confluence of events that happened all at the same time,” John tells HollywoodLife when discussing his new track, “Pushin’ A Rock,” and his partnership with Movember, the November-long initiative elevating consciousness about males’s psychological and bodily well being.”
“After Darryl and I were so popular, we were really kind of taking a hiatus. Our manager left for greener pastures. I was getting divorced. Things weren’t going that well for me, either professionally or personally,” Oates tells HL. “I was living in New York City, and I was on the hamster wheel of, you know, doing the same thing with the same people. And suddenly, I had a revelation that it wasn’t going anywhere, and I needed to make a wholesale change in my life. So, it caused me to basically kind of shed my skin, you know, metaphorically and for real.”
That second occurred in a spot that nobody anticipated: Japan. “One of the things that Darrell [Hall] and I did in the ’90s was, we went to Tokyo,” shares Oates. “Yoko Ono was having the tenth anniversary of John Lennon’s death, and she wanted to have a benefit concert. We were invited, and it was right after that show, back in the hotel room – it was the night before I was to get on the plane to come home. And I looked in the mirror, and I just shaved it off. It looked wrong. I shaved it off and showed up at the airport the next day, and everybody was just, ‘Woah, what happened to you?’ People had never seen me like that. And I didn’t have a mustache for quite some time.”
From there, John mentioned he bought every thing he owned, put New York City in his rearview, and relocated to Colorado to “start my life over again.” Oates tells HL that through the ’90s, he “really lived in the mountains and eventually got re-married, had a kid, built a house — did all the kinds of things that I never did when I was touring. I toured straight for 20 years without stopping. I was single-mindedly focused on my musical career, and nothing else mattered. And I realized there was more to life than that. So it was really kind of a wholesale life’s lifestyle change.”
That sentiment – of getting out of the rut, of creating that terrifying step to embrace that wholesale change, as John places it – is behind each the Movember motion and John’s single, “Pushin’ A Rock.” With Oates’ signature sound, one which seamlessly melds R&B with soul with pop rock, he delivers an anthem for anybody going via it in the meanwhile. “When the road gets rough, and you’ve had enough,” he sings, “When life hits you hard, but you keep standing tough / Lend a hand, try to help a brother… reach out / Reach out to each other.”
There couldn’t be a greater anthem for 2022’s Movember. While the rising of mustaches started as a strategy to increase funds for prostate most cancers, the motion additionally has since expanded to deal with the psychological well being points that males conflict with every single day. For John, his track is an opportunity to supply a lightweight within the darkness, making it the right match for this month’s marketing campaign.
Oddly sufficient, Taylor Swift had an surprising hand in creating “Pushin’ A Rock,” Oates explains. “The core of the song, the first version of that song, was written back in 2015,” he says. “I was doing an album called Good Road To Follow, and the theme of the album was that this musical journey that I’ve been on has taken me to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. And that’s where the idea came from. And it also had a lot to do with my collaboration with Nathan Paul Chapman, who was Taylor Swift’s original producer and a very good friend of mine here in Nashville.”
“And when Taylor moved on to work with different producers, I reached out to him just to see how he was,” continued Oates. “And, you know, it was a very traumatic thing to be this multiple Grammy-winning producer of one of the biggest artists in the world, and then all of a sudden not be so much involved.”
Oates and Chapman pooled their expertise to supply the primary tackle “Pushin’ A Rock,” however one thing didn’t budge for Oates. “It resonated for both of us back then, but the version we came up with, I was never that satisfied with it, to be honest, although I thought the lyrics were powerful. So, during COVID, when I was sitting around and had a lot more time on my hands, I went back and revisited a lot of older ideas. I realized how pertinent and timely the lyrics were – the original song was called ‘Pushin’ A Rock Uphill,’ and to differentiate it with the new version, I called it ‘Pushin’ a Rock.’”
This new model boasts a musical background that Oates thought was “more contemporary” than the unique and that doing so, the track scape “matched the quality of the lyrics a lot better.” With Chapman’s blessing (“he mentioned, ‘Have at it.’”), Oates put together a new version and played it for his friend. “His comment was, ‘this is the way it always should have sounded,’ which I believed was a excessive praise.”
While COVID afforded Oates an opportunity to return and provides “Pushin’ A Rock” the shine it deserved, he tells HL that he isn’t able to launch Abandoned Luncheonette (Oates’ Version). “I always have thought that recordings, they should be left alone because for better or for worse, they represent a moment in time. They are a snapshot of whatever was happening – your mental state, your skill. The people who recruited played on the record, the engineers, the technology involved, it’s really a snapshot of all that,” he says, including that one thing was compelling him to not less than push that rock up that hill.
It’s taken seven years for “Pushin’ A Rock” to see the sunshine of day. Similarly, John being the face of Movember has been a very long time coming. “The people who do licensing and branding for me, JC (Justin Coghlan, one of Movember’s co-founders) is their personal friend,” Oates tells HL. “They had a running joke. ‘It seems pretty obvious, but why haven’t you ever asked Oates?’ And it started that way.”
“I think it’s an important men’s health Initiative, I really do. And I’ve had things that I’ve dealt with in my life, health-wise — both mentally and physically. I just thought it was definitely worthwhile me being involved and also having some fun with it,” he says. Plus, those that resolve to embrace December with a clean-shaven face can expertise the “shedding of skin” that John skilled when he shaved his mustache off, all these years in the past.
“Traditionally, the hair-cutting or hair-growing has been a symbolic statement of sorts in all kinds of cultures across the world,” says Oates. In the years following his shaving, he mentioned he was having “a more fashionable version connected to a goatee. I haven’t had a full-blown stash since the late 80s.”
When requested the way it feels to have a mustache once more, John Oates says he’s “evolved” emotionally and bodily, that his facial hair is lower than his id and extra like what it’s: “It’s just hair. It doesn’t really matter that much anymore.” As for the ache and trauma that brought about him to shave it off within the first place? Growing again a mustache didn’t open any previous scars. “I think the scars healed,” he says with a smile.