Out pop singer Derek Bishop is reaching back to the more experimental eras of pop music with his latest release, “Bicycling in Quicksand,” which draws inspiration from the funky and somewhat edgy heyday of disco, new wave and early synthpop.
Bishop sees his style of music as an antidote for the soulless by the number of pop songs that seem to be dominating the airwaves these days.
“It sounds in general like it’s been dumbed down a bit,” Bishop said of today’s pop sounds. “It’s the way a lot of things are. You just want something quick and easy that doesn’t really stretch your brain too much. I’m always drawn to artists that go about it in a little bit more of an avant-garde kind of way, whether they just have a weird song structure or they take bizarre left turns in the middle of a tune. It’s very exciting when I hear a song or an album that has elements like that. So I just want to write the same type of music like the stuff that inspires me or that I really enjoy. I’m writing it myself but I know there are other people out there that like those twists and turns. But I do feel like a lot of what you hear on the radio is pre-packaged-type things so I’m trying my hardest to not sound like something that is on the radio. I’m trying to write music that is intelligent and interesting.”
Up until recently, Bishop was balancing his musical pursuits with his other gigs, which included being an art director designing Broadway cast albums. One would think that the musical traditions of Broadway would have crept into his music, but Bishop insists that the theater has no bearing on his musical style.
“I just design the Broadway stuff,” he said. “I listen to it and I get a free ticket. I don’t think that it really influenced me. I’m influenced by music that is a bit more — and this is probably conflicting with what I just said — theatrical. But it’s not because I have a Broadway influence. I just grew up listening to a wider variety of songs than just pop music or whatever. I’m just trying to blend as many influences as possible. I really don’t think Broadway had much of an influence on this record.”
Bishop started his music career as an out musician and said the atmosphere is changing for openly LGBT artists in pop music.
“I don’t think growing up anyone that has heard someone like Elton John or Freddie Mercury back in the 1970s heard those songs and said, ‘I wonder if that is a gay dude singing,’” he said. “They heard the songs and thought, These are fantastic songs. So I would hope that that is still the case, that you judge based on what you hear versus what you know about the person doing it. But now, these days with social media and the nonstop amount of information you can find on someone, it’s more obvious and easy to stalk someone and find out about them. So I think you have to lay your cards on the table. If not, the gossip blogs are always trying to find out which member of this band is gay. Maybe that is good for your publicity but I would hope that newer generations are growing into music and culture so that it’s really not that important anymore. If fact, in some cases, it would seem like a fun twist to it because I have nieces and nephews and they think gay is cool. So sometimes that can help.”
In a genre of music where youth is king, Bishop, who is 43, said ageism is a more considerable hurdle than issues about sexuality.
“I feel that once you hit 30 or 40, they start to think that you’re old,” he said. “Having said that, there are tons and tons of artists that are in their 50s, 60s and even 70s, like The Rolling Stones, that are still selling out stadiums. Granted, most of their audience is close to their age. I hope and I pray that you’re not judged too much on your sexuality or your age, but just on the quality of the art that you make. If you are young and you’re pretty, you can definitely get attention faster. But to hold on to that attention: Your beauty is going to fade, so hopefully you can get a lot better songwriting-wise and all that stuff.”
With his focus fully on his music, Bishop is gearing up to take his show on the road at some point this summer.
“I had a tour set up for May and it sort of blew up and I had to scrap all that,” he said. “But yes, I’m going to go on the road in the summer because we had to reschedule everything. What I think I’m going to do to make it easier is just do little pocket tours. It’s not going to be one big three-month tour. It’s going to be little five-date tours once a month just to make it financially feasible. Driving around for all that time when it’s just you and a guitar player, you want to come back home and sleep in your own bed and recharge. So that’s the plan. I will definitely be hitting all my favorite places on the East Coast and I think I will also be going to California in September as well.”
Bishop added that one of the challenges of taking his music on the road is stripping down his layered pop songs into something he can execute live with only two or three musicians on stage.
“I had 10 musicians for the album-release party because I really wanted to simulate the sound on the album,” he said. “And that is not financially feasible to take 10 musicians on the road. I’ve got to figure out a way to shrink that sound while still making it big. That will be my challenge for the next month or so, so it doesn’t come across like me and a laptop. I don’t want it to be karaoke. I’m very open to exploring how I can interpret the songs on a more acoustic level or a more bizarre level. You have the option to take the song structure and peel away all the different layers and see what really makes the song hold up. Does the song hold up without all the percussion and all the extra guitars and keyboards? So that is going to be fun for me, how to figure out how to do that so that the audiences enjoy it.”
“Bicycling in Quicksand” is out now. For more information, visit www.derekbishop.net.