Pop over to John Oates home in Colorado and you might be in for a surprise. There are a few native Aussies living on the property.
“We have nine Emus,” John tells Undercover News. “If they are Australian citizens at this point I am a little worried but I love them”.John can thank his wife for collecting the family zoo. “I married the quintessential Midwest farmer’s daughter,” he says. “She grew up on a farm in Illinois and always had lots of unusual animals growing up. When we moved out to Colorado she really wanted to have a little ranch. She is into rescuing exotic animals. We rescued all the Emus on the way to the slaughterhouse. We have llamas and peacocks and guineas and dogs and cats. You name it, we’ve got it!”
John also pronounced Emu right, the Australian way, as E Mew, not the usual American pronunciation E Moo. “We had an Australian girl came and corrected us,” he laughed.
It has been a big year for John. He and musical partner Daryl Hall this year received the BMI Icon Award. The music legends filmed an intimate concert from LA’s The Troubadour for an impending DVD release and John has just released his second solo album ‘1000 Miles of Life’.
“I’m very excited about it. I am very proud of it,” he says. “It was a labor of love. It is the kind of record that I think about this point in my life after 30 years in the music business I just deserve to do for myself. Obviously I am an independent recording artist now with my own label. I didn’t take into consideration anything except an uncompromised musical statement. I did it how I wanted to without anyone giving me any suggestions or criticisms. It was a pretty amazing project”.
John will launch the album as a guest of Daryl Hall on Daryl’s Internet TV show ‘Live From Daryl’s House’.
“Daryl has an internet broadcast show called Live From Daryl’s House,” he says. “He is invited me to be the guest next week. So I’m going to be the guest at Daryl’s house. This is going to be unique to me coming in as a guest artist. We are going to do some really cool old Philly songs. We’ll do some of my new stuff and probably go back into the vaults and pull out some obscure old Hall & Oates stuff”.
“We are going to do “Possession Obsession” which was a song that was out on the ‘Big Bam Boom’ album in the mid ‘80s. We are going to do ‘Back Stabbers’, the classic old O’Jays song. We are doing ‘Had I Known You Better’ that was a track on ‘Abandoned Luncheonette’ back in the ‘70s and we are going to do a whole bunch of stuff from my new album like ‘Ghost Town’, ‘1000 Miles of Life’, ‘Good Son’ and I think ‘Change of Season’ as well”.
John’s ‘1000 Miles of Life’ is available from johnoates.com
