Rebecca Pidgeon and Fernando Perdomo present Unillusion

Dynamic Duo Rebecca Pidgeon and Fernando Perdomo present Unillusion

The teaming of vocalist/actress Rebecca Pidgeon and multi-instrumentalist Fernando Perdomo has produced four very exciting albums, the latest being the vibrantly captivating Unillusion.  Featuring Rebecca’s cinematic vocals and Fernando’s brilliant auditory artistry, selections from the album such as Be My Butterfly and Alone set the imagination in flight.  The Unillusion record release party will be taking place at McCabes Guitar Shop in Santa Monica on August 31st and is not to be missed!  Highwire Daze recently interviewed this dynamic duo to discuss the making of Unillusion and other highlights from their respective music careers.  Read on…

We’re here with Rebecca Pidgeon and Fernando Perdomo. First of all, Rebecca, how did your collaboration with Fernando come about and how long have you been working with him?
We met through a mutual friend who’s a musician and a songwriter. I was writing songs with him, David Batteau. I think that’s how we met. David and Fernando had been working together. So David introduced us and said Fernando is such a talented multi-instrumentalist and producer. You guys should work together.

How many albums have you done with Fernando so far?
Rebecca: How many albums have we made together, Fern?

Fernando: Well, this is number four, correct? We have the double one Sudden Exposure to Light/Comfort. Then we have the green one. The green cover one.

Rebecca: Yeah. Parts of Speech Pieces of Sound And then we made Songs of LA.

Fernando: And now this one Unillusion.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this interview was when I heard the first song Be My Butterfly, I fell in love with that song, and I just wanted to find out what was the inspiration behind that track?
Rebecca: Well, that’s the one song that is a co-write with David Batteau on this record. It’s a song that we wrote years ago and we just made a little demo and we released that demo. We were writing about Hollywood and about Los Angeles, and the inspiration behind that song is a hotel that David stayed at where the wallpaper was women in fancy dress, and he thought they looked like butterflies. So we brought in a lot of a Noir feeling in that song of the Noir Hotel, what happens there, all the meetings that happen there, the love trist or the people running on the lamb or murders. God knows what is going on in these evocative places. We were watching a lot of movies at that time to get inspiration for these Hollywood songs that we were writing.

Let’s go to the last song on the album, Myself. What was the inspiration behind that one?
Rebecca: Well, that’s Fern’s favorite song…

Fernando: That’s my absolute favorite of anything that we’ve done.  Myself, is just glorious. There’s so much beautiful intimacy to Rebecca’s songs and that performance is just so cool. I also love the amount of space that we left on the recording this time around. It’s very intimate and it’s glorious. I could hear that song all day.

Rebecca: I brought it into Fern. It was the last song I brought in and I said, well, I’ve got this other song, I’m not really sure about it. I don’t know if it’s strong enough and he listened to it and he said, oh my God, I love that song. Then he put this fabulous beat to to it, this boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It’s got a gravitas that Fern really brought to it in terms of the sonic quality. Again, it was that the idea that my nature wants me to do certain things which I don’t want me to do. An Inner battle.

What are you looking forward to the most about your upcoming show and the McCabe’s and Fernando, will you be there as well?
Fernando: I will be there. It’s going to be an amazing show. We’re going to have the same drummer and bass player and string guy. They’re on the record and we’re also going to have a couple of other musicians. I wear a lot of hats and some guitar stuff, but her guitar playing is actually extremely underrated and under talked about. She’s a spectacular player and she’s also a fantastic producer on her own right.

Matt Tecu is performing with you both on this new album and at the show.  In addition, Fernando recently released a new album with Matt called Getting Warmer.  Tell me a little about that and the inspiration behind it.
Fernando: You know what it is? Matt and I, we speak the same language and through working with Rebecca, we’ve realized that we have a little bit of an extra bond. I had the idea of just like when we did the first record called Art, we decided to book two days at my studio with no songs prepared, and we ended up with 10 songs that were just absolutely mind blowing to me. We did the same thing with Getting Warmer. Now the thing with Getting Warmer is, we decided to push a little more in the sonic spectrum and also create stuff that was a little more variety. Art could be like a soundtrack to a film. Getting Warmer has obvious singles. It’s got some more rock elements. There’s the signature Quirk that the first record had. There’s some really bizarre stuff, but I don’t think it gets as weird as the first record did with Matt reciting the recipe to a cream pie over a very sexy rhythm. On this one, we did have a girl speaking in French. It’s like an exotica record. But it’s all instrumental and we’re trying to get these licensed for film, because I think these are the type of songs… it’s the type of album that Brian Eno used to put out where it’s like, okay, these songs could totally be heard in film, and a lot of them are.  It’s two guys that like to hang out and make music.

Rebecca, have you heard those albums?
Rebecca: Not yet, actually. I’ve got to sit down with my headphones and take a day off.

Fernando: They’re an experience. You’re going to like them, and we already have a plan for the next record that we want to ask you about because we actually want to do, for the next record, we want to call it plus one and have every song have one person extra.

Rebecca: I love that idea.  Can I be one of the plus ones?

Fernando: Absolutely. I’m going to go ahead and ask you on this podcast if you could be one of the plus ones.

Rebecca: Love it.

Fernando: Because we’ve been curating who we’d like to get, and it’s been great. People have been responding really nicely to it and it’s great.

Rebecca: You guys are such a great, great rhythm section. Fernando on the bass is just absolutely brilliant.

Fernando: Thank you. I really enjoy playing bass. It’s always to my mom’s detriment, because my mom was always like, don’t be the guy in the back of the stage that doesn’t get any attention.

Rebecca: He plays every instrument so superbly, but the bass is such a special instrument. One of my favorite instruments actually. Fernando is out of this world with it.

Fernando: I always tell people the better the music, the better I play. Rebecca always brings in the stuff that just makes everybody shine. Rhythmically complex, quarterly complex, lyrically extremely complex. But the best part about everything is that even though she gets a lot of comparisons to artists that broke through a lot like Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell and PJ Harvey and all that stuff. The thing that Rebecca definitely has that makes it different is that it’s always very catchy. These songs really stick with you. Every once in a while, I’ll have one of her songs just pop into my head and it’d be like earworms. They’re really great. She really has a great mastery of a good pop hook while still keeping it very classy. It’s very advanced, but it’s still very catchy. I feel like these songs, if they’re given the right chance, these songs could be played on all radio. It could be crossover into every radio station from NPR to pop radio because they sound so good and her voice is amazing. So, yeah. It’s very cool.

You mentioned Joni Mitchell. If you were offered to do one song on a Joni Mitchell tribute album, you could pick any song, what song would you do and why?
Rebecca: I would do The Boho Dance.

Fernando: Wow.

Ken: Wow. That’s obscure. Yeah. Okay.

Rebecca: It’s one of my favorite songs of hers. I love that song so much. It’s so wistful and literate and all.

Fernando: That’s amazing.

Rebecca: It’s complex jazzy. I love that album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

Fernando: The Hissing of Summer Lawns is definitely my favorite of the records because it’s got so much variety and it’s also the first record to really use sampling. It’s really interesting. It’s one of the first records to use sampling when she sampled the Burundi Drums. It’s really, really cool. It’s just a glorious record with the L.A. Express backing her up. That era is just so great for her. All her eras are great.

Rebecca: She’s really a jazz artist. She came up and everybody thought it was folk – and it was folk. But she moved very, very smoothly into jazz and her voice became such a great jazz voice.

Fernando: The record that blew me away was Mingus. That thing is nuts and I can’t imagine how amazing it would’ve been if Charles would’ve finally come in and done a proper collaboration with her. But that record is absolutely insane. The song that I would be involved in a cover with that absolutely blew my mind is The Wolf That Lives in Lindsay. That song is so cool. When she’s banging on the guitar with reckless abandon, that’s a trip. She’s literally banging on the guitar and you hear the strings and it’s just like, wow. The emotion of that song is just… it stopped me in my tracks. It was so cool.

Fernando, at the John McAndrew show, Davey Johnstone was playing from the Elton John Band, I was a little starstruck. How did you feel about playing with Davey Johnstone?
Fernando: It was a dream come true. Last time I had seen him was at Dodgers Stadium, and then we’re playing at Kula’s Woodshed, which is this tiny venue. But I was also excited about playing with Steve Porcaro. Toto is one of my favorite bands of all time. I’m honestly more of a Billy Joel guy than an Elton John guy. Actually, I’m really hot on Billy right now because of his amazing documentary on HBO. But it was a really cool experience. But I’ll tell you what, that’s my favorite way of meeting people, is to meet people on a bandstand as opposed to being starstruck and going, oh my God, I’m a big fan. Because it really makes me feel like I’ve done something to earn his company. It was a lot of fun. I feel the same way about working with Rebecca because it’s like, we’ve had some really, really cool experiences working, and we’ve had some great things. But you know what’s interesting about Rebecca is that she’s very loyal to these musicians that she works with and it’s for the quality of the music, not anything else. It’s been really a great experience, and we have a real great team going and I’d love to make four more.

Rebecca: Let’s do it.

Fernando: Absolutely.

The new album is amazing, and I love this professional partnership you guys have. It’s just so perfect. I have to go visit all these other albums you’ve done.
Fernando: They all have their amazing moments, and there’s a lot of variety in what Rebecca does. She’s definitely not a one trick pony. She has songs that are incredibly moving and then she has songs that are incredibly fun. Her lyrical style, it’s so cinematic. You could really close your eyes and imagine what she’s singing about. There’s also a lot of fantasy songs, which I love they’re really, really cool. I think you live out all your darkest fantasies on your songs, which I love.

Rebecca: I do. Yeah.

Fernando: It’s very, very cool.

Rebecca: My life is, thank God, quite boring…

(Interview by Ken Morton)

Rebecca Pidgeon on Instagram
Fernando Perdomo on Instagram