FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved

Music by Aubrey McInnis A few years ago when Tal Bachman was in university, Randy Bachman, his infamous dad (The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive), ritually called him up once a month to ask him what he was doing, why he was still in school, to tell him he was wasting his time in university, and to ask him why he wasn’t in a rock band. Tal replied that he wanted to study philosophy. His father, humorously disgruntled, would hang up only to dial up the following month and give it another go. Finally, one month after studying Plato’s Republic, things clicked with Tal. He knew that he was not where he should be and he was in a state of confusion and denying his true calling. He finished the semester and began his new career as a musician. Before he got his big break in 1996 with Sony, he insists that he had no believers in what he was doing. You’d figure that with a famous father a record company could buy him a bright spotlight and blow all the necessary rock star smoke around him. Not so. Just when things were looking their bleakest, Tal got a phone call... this time from someone a little more famous than his dad who was encouraging him to stick with music and not throw in the towel just yet. "I was sitting in my dad’s demo studio, the phone rings, I pick it up, ‘Hello is Tal there?,’" Tal says feigning a high-pitched British accent. "I’m like, ‘Yeah, who’s this?’ ‘It’s Jeff Lynne.’ "I don’t usually get flustered, cause there was always famous people hanging around the house, but I was totally speechless," he says, wide-eyed in relaying how tongue-tied he felt. "I didn’t know what to say. I had to ask the engineer to leave the room because I couldn’t talk. What do I say? I was like, ‘I worship you.’ "So anyway, we went to Los Angeles shortly thereafter. I was playing drums for my dad at the House of Blues and he came. I thanked him in the liner notes because he was encouraging when everyone had sort of passed on me. That was the irony, my boyhood idol (was) my only fan." Understandably, the moment that he met Lynne made an indelible mark on his mind which encouraged him to carry on. That’s not the first time that Lynne inspired Tal. Obviously, Lynn’s music also made a remarkable imprint on Tal’s style, as illustrated by classically wistful ELO melodic notes which float throughout his strongly composed music. His self-titled debut, produced with Bob Rock (Metallica, Veruca Salt, Aerosmith) and with string arrangements by Paul Buckmaster, is an orchestral pop rock album with all the flavour of rock and roll. The first single, "She’s So High," is a powerful contribution to the love song genre that spills over with lyrics about wanting what you’ve dreamed up, with melodies that soar as freely as imagination in blue skies. "You know when you write a song, you have an initial spark whether somebody says something or there’s a facial expression, like that emotion of longing or something, or there’s like a melodic idea. What I wanted to do with the record and why I wanted to work with Bob Rock was because I wanted to make sure that whatever the original germ of the song was, that it would be carried to its full fruition. "I don’t like music that sounds defensive or sounds like somebody is afraid to let go because they don’t want to be considered uncool. The music that can move you is never like that. To my ears, (my songs) sound like fairly pronounced performances. I mean, they sound fairly muscular," he says before bashfully adding, "and there’s the love song. To tell you the truth, I hope that my songs are initially likable and superficially people like to listen to them, but really, they have ulterior motives."

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