It starts with a simple fingerpicking pattern from Steve Rodgers, soon rendered atmospheric by a second guitar from his brother Jon Rodgers, a smoky fiddle from Ben Dean, a simple bass from Seth Adam. At the center of it is Steve Rodgers’s voice, plaintive yet steady. “Treat your body good / Mind the words from your mouth / Treat the earth like your garden / Be a light to another,” Rodgers sings. “Stay humble even when they kick you down / Love them all through the thick of it / Move forward to a better place / Full of love and joy and hope and grace.” Maybe they sound at first like commandments, but that’s not what Rodgers has in mind.
“Lessons that I learned / lessons that I learned,” he sings.
Those statements — from “Lessons That I Learned,” the first song released from Rodgers’s new album, Count It All Joy — are reminders to himself, something like a mantra, and the sign of a year that finds Rodgers in a very different place than he was when he closed the Space, Outer Space, and Ballroom at the Outer Space at the end of 2017 after running them for a decade and a half.
Those spaces reopened under new management. But for Rodgers, “there was a whole healing process where I actually had to be really quiet,” he said on a recent episode of WNHH’s “Northern Remedy.”
Part of the reason was medical. Earlier in 2017, Rodgers found nodules growing on his vocal cords. “It got to the point where I actually could barely speak, never mind sing,” he said. He didn’t know if he would be able to sing again. “Am I going to even want to play music again if I can’t sing again?” he recalled thinking to himself. “Am I going to want to play music after all the things I had to walk through during the last ending seasons of each of the Spaces?”
“There was a huge swirling of emotions,” Rodgers said of the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018. He lay low as he recovered from his health problems and figured out what to do next, filling notebooks with his thoughts. “I did go back and have a look through some of those very recently, just to track the journey I’ve been on since being a ringleader of a circus,” he said with a laugh. “What my life is now has just become a really peaceful place where I feel a lot of joy and a lot of comfort.”
He underwent throat surgery in January 2018 and had to stay completely silent for two weeks afterward, with a longer period where he couldn’t raise his voice above a whisper while he healed. “I really spent a couple of months being very quiet,” he said. He didn’t fully regain his voice until June. Rodgers has been a devoted builder of model train sets for years; while he couldn’t talk at all, he built an elaborate miniature city. “That was very therapeutic for me, because I couldn’t use my voice, so I used my fingers and hands,” he said.
He took a break from music “in a lot of ways,” he said — apart from keeping his job as music director at St. Paul’s in Westport, where he has worked for 17 years (“they moved me up from percussionist to drummer” to music director 15 years ago, he said) and through which he met his wife Jesse. He used to do that on top of running the Space complex, putting in 70-plus hours a week. Instead, he turned to home-schooling his kids. He learned to cook and had friends over for meals. “I learned how to garden with my wife, and I fell in love with my wife all over again,” he said. “We built a garden together and I built her a chicken coop out of a bunch of stuff I found by the side of the road in Hamden. Built her a chicken coop for 20 bucks.” He stayed off social media for a year and “it was such a beautiful cleanout,” he said. He quit smoking.
“We created a little backyard oasis,” he added.
And in the next few months, Rodgers began writing songs again. “I would hear melodies and lyrics in my head and I would write them down,” he said. “I couldn’t sing the melody, but sometimes I would play the melody on piano and capture it,” whether on paper or on his phone. In April, he started singing a couple songs as music director. He took a week-long trip to Honduras with his church, teaching guitar, helping finish building a pastor’s house, and distributing meals.
“We brought guitars and left a couple there and we’re going to bring a whole bunch more this year,” he said.
He set up a studio and recording space in his house. He also decided to learn how to fingerpick on the guitar — a skill he had left to his brother Jon since they were teenagers playing in Mighty Purple.
Thomas J. Nanos Photo
Rodgers had written a couple songs “in the last season of the Spaces,” he said, reflecting on what he was going through. He wrote the lyrics to “Lessons I Have Learned” during the summer, along with several other songs. He found that he had an album on his hands and turned to his friends and brother to record it.
“I just felt comfortable with them,” he said. And meanwhile, his ear had turned to roots music — bluegrass and the blues. While he was running the Spaces, “I would come home and be quiet and build my little miniature cities and listen to that music,” he said. “Folk music became part of my inner being.”
Rodgers and his fellow musicians recorded almost all the album live in a single room over the summer. Brother Jon, vocalist Rickie Harkey, and keyboardist Fred Dileone added vocal and organ parts. West Haven-based producer Vic Steffens, whom Rodgers had worked with since his days in Mighty Purple, produced the record.
“It didn’t take a whole lot of manipulation to make it be something that ended up being wonderful,” Rodgers said. “We probably spent more time hanging out and talking about the greater meaning of life than we did mixing the record,” he added with a laugh.
Rodgers is celebrating the release of Count It All Joy with a show at The State House on April 19 featuring the musicians on the album and a set from Cindertalk, Jon Rodgers’s own musical project. As Steve Rodgers prepares for it, he has had a chance to reflect on where he’s gone in the past year, and where he would like to go in the future.
“There were a lot of different seasons within my tenure at the Space, some of which were really amazing and some of which were really challenging times,” he said. “But I signed up to do it because I love music and this is my scene. I wear the New Haven pin proudly on my hat.” It’s a sign of his involvement in the city’s music since he was in his early teens. Now recovered and rested, he would like to keep that up.
“One of the things I love to do most is bring people together,” he said. To that end, “I’d like to curate a few very specific shows over the course of the next year or two” at a couple of New Haven’s venues. “I would love to be able to put together events that focus on bringing community together and bringing music that has real heart and compassion and a message to the world. And then also it’d be wonderful to have a pop-up food element, and maybe a daytime element where there’s family that can come and enjoy it too.”
But Rodgers is also interested in trying his hand at something new. “At this point in my life I want to learn things.” The Space “didn’t always allow my creative side to come out.” For 15 years he put “all of my passion, time and energy into it — and sometimes to a fault.”
He’s now setting up shows beyond the State House to support the record. But on the edge of releasing Count It All Joy, he already has enough material for another album. He’s as committed as ever.
“I have to put myself into all the music that I do or it’s not going to be real, it’s not going to be who I really am,” he said.
The release party for Count It All Joy happens on April 19 at the State House, 310 State St., New Haven. Click here for tickets and more information. To listen to the full interview with Steve Rodgers on “Northern Remedy,” click on the file below.