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*When music fans got their first listen to Tony Rich, he was quite a piece of work, a project, as a matter of fact.
*When music fans got their first listen to Tony Rich, he was quite a piece of work, a project, as a matter of fact.
Under the moniker The Tony Rich Project, his debut album, called “Words,” offered up the 1995 hit single “Nobody Knows.”
“Nobody Knows” made Rich quite known and his disc won a Grammy. He rocketed to the top his first time out, with much commercial success and critical acclaim.
His sophomore disc, “Birdseye” and the subsequent two discs that followed, however, garnered the acclaim, but did not capture the commercial. Rich’s music career seemed to fade away. Seemed to.
What his career actually did was evolve. Rich released four albums since the mid-90s to now, as he drops his fifth project “Exist.” But this CD came from an organic process from frustration to fruition.
“I’ve been making records,” Rich replied when asked about his limelight sabbatical. “The question of where have I been has been a common question. I’ve always been a person where you never saw too much of me at once. Some artists go through that burnout period where people start to say, ‘I’m tired of seeing such-n-such.’ For me, it’s happened like that, but not necessarily by choice.”
Rich explained that he’s become sensitive to that fact that when an artist isn’t at the top of the charts fore a while, people tend to write them off.
“But sometimes they may just be dealing with some legal aspect or something that’s non-musical,” he suggested. “That will sometimes keep them away from the life where you see them. It’s funny how when people don’t see you, they think you’re not there. In the entertainment world, when you’re not in people’s faces, you don’t exist.”
Rich doesn’t mind the inquiry, though. He told EUR’s Lee Bailey that he welcomes the “Where have you been?” question because he has a story to tell. Even more, Rich said not having the question asked would be distressing.
The Grammy-winning artist was not distressed by the music business. He admitted that he was frustrated, though.
“Projects that ‘blow up’, or get a lot of attention, are ones where the money that was put behind the project was put in the right areas in the proper way,” Rich explained. “When you don’t have that thing going on, it becomes a great record that people don’t know about. It happens. It happened to me.”
“It was very frustrating,” he continued. “It was probably some of the darkest days I’ve ever experienced in my life. When you have been validated by your peers – I got four Grammy nominations, I won an award, I sold millions of records, I’ve been all over the world – and then the next album you put out, you know right at that moment, when you get to the second one ... that wasn’t the case. I remember after that, I wasn’t discouraged, I wasn’t depressed. I was frustrated because I knew it was a great record.”
This fall, Rich has another great record for R&B fans; the new disc, “Exist” on Hidden Beach Records. The singer/songwriter revealed that he found himself in a place where he had to explore other artistic outlets as a therapeutic way of handling his frustrations.
“It put me a position to where I really started to delve into all of my creative options,” he said. “I really started working on my oil paintings, doing my photography, and my poetry, which brought me to the point of creating ‘Exist.’ ‘Exist’ was the result of that and I have a book that parallels with the record that’s composed of all of my writings.”
New label, new disc, Rich said he’s going into the new project with “his third eye” open.
“When I finished this record, I had this feeling. I [thought] this would be a project that would be perfect for (Steve McKeever’s) Hidden Beach; Me understanding McKeever’s view on labels, artists and their relating to one another, and [how] the artists are being presented. Hidden Beach is an oasis for artists that want to be who they are.”
That attitude and mission complements Rich’s style and the new project. He explained that the title “Exist” has everything to do with how he is living, existing, passionately just by being himself.
“When you look up the word ‘exist’ in your basic dictionary, it’s going to say: to be present; to be present in the moment. Now, a glass of water can exist on a desk, but as people, what we have different from a glass of water is we have emotions. So in that, I believe in existing passionately from moment to moment. So existing, through everything that I went through with the frustration of my projects and even the beauty of seeing my things be successful – at the same time being misunderstood or being written off; even in my relationships in my life, family matters, everything that I went through, I learned to be OK, understanding that I could envision my new reality even in the midst of chaos. So I exist passionately, and the word ‘exist’ was so appropriate for this collection of songs because most people don’t exist passionately. When they go through something, that’s the last thing they’re thinking about. [But] through it all, I have to be me and I have to be ok with me.”
Check out The Tony Rich Project’s latest, “Exist”, the first single, “Part the Waves,” and find out why it’s OK to be Tony Rich at www.hiddenbeach.com or his MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/thetonyrichprojectofficial.
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