Quick Q&A: John Treacy Egan

I talked with John Treacy Egan about his just-released second CD “On Christmas Morning”, now available through iTunes and CDBaby.

What was it like to be recording Christmas songs in the middle of the Summer?

It’s kind of surreal to be throwing yourself into the Christmas mood in July and August. The crew and the musicians go home humming and singing the songs and you feel a little bad bringing Christmas to them so early. But if you want the CD out for Christmas you gotta sing it in the Summer.

What is the main thing it takes to put out a CD on your own?

The business takes forever: there’s so much paperwork that goes into procuring the rights and making sure everybody gets their royalties and their due. Before that, it takes choosing the material and a great Musical Director who can feel what you want to bring across and who has his own artistry. I had worked with David Shenton on some benefits for Broadway Cares and Cabaret Cares – I knew he was an amazing pianist with a gift for both classical and jazz. Not to mention he’s a great violinist, so that was something extra he could bring. I find him as a Musical Director to be very sympathetic to a singer – he has great musicality, and he breathes along with you.

When choosing material, what song was first on your wish list to record?

That would be “Grown Up Christmas List”. It’s a David Foster tune that’s been recorded by Vanessa Williams and Kelly Clarkson and lots of other people. Most of the material on the CD is from a Christmas show I did last year at Feinstein’s. That was the song that got the biggest response there. We do a modern carol on the album called “Mary Did You Know?” that we couldn’t do live at Feinstein’s since David plays both the piano and the violin on it.

Did any of the tracks go down in one take?

David did an arrangement of “Winter Wonderland” with “Let It Snow”. We had so many other tunes that I put it on the back burner and said we’d do it if we got to it. He got everyone together and we did it in one take, just adding a saxophone later. It was a last minute thing, we didn’t really even rehearse it, but it’s one of my favorite tracks and I’m really proud of it.

Will you be doing a show again this year like the one you did at Feinstein’s?

I had planned to just do a show of the CD, but then people started asking about Rudolph Unplugged which has become a little cult show. So I’m doing two totally different Christmas shows this year: one of this elegant, pretty Christmas music and the other a raucous foul-mouthed comedy Christmas show. Nothing in one show is in the other.

Any plans to record Rudolph Unplugged?

I don’t know how that works with parody, when you take someone else’s melodies and put your own parody lyrics over them.

Did you learn anything from making your first CD, “Count The Stars”, that you took into making this one?

I learned a lot. One of the toughest things with the first one is that we laid the musicians down first and then I had to fit in with them rather than us working together. That turned out to be a little tricky, because I hadn’t really plotted out the tempos or how long I wanted to hold notes. This time I wanted to make sure that we were playing with each other. Another challenge is recognizing the nuances in how things sound through earphones or the car stereo or the amazing speakers in the studio. It gets to be like Coke and Pepsi. There is a difference, but when you’re saturated it’s harder to tell what you’re drinking. Ideally you want to be able to listen to something and then put it away, listen again and then put it away.

What’s been your most fulfilling career high so far?

Getting to play Max Bialystock in The Producers and being in When Pigs Fly were amazing, but really the most fulfilling thing has been being a part of the community. It’s rewarding to have the chance to pay forward my experience – one dollar from each CD goes to Broadway Cares. Really it’s the people who make it all fulfilling. Broadway people are a lot of fun and it’s great to go to work and laugh every day. We laugh our asses off at Bye Bye Birdie: John Stamos is a great prankster. We’re always cutting up and getting reprimanded.

Didn’t I read about John Stamos playing a prank on you recently?

Yeah, but then someone uploaded a picture to Twitter and then one of the websites posted it. We had to ask to have it taken down.

What do you think of the fan culture that is part of Broadway now?

Twitter is a little crazy, but the Internet has made Broadway fan culture a hundred times bigger than it was 20 years ago. It used to be that if you didn’t live here you had only the cast albums and that was your whole experience of Broadway. Now a kid in the Midwest can go online and see so much of what’s going on. I think that’s huge and awesome.