ALBUM| JOHN OATES
BIGGER THAN BOTH OF THEM
With his Hall & Oates days behind him, John Oates finds his solo career bursting in new directions… and genres.
BY GARYGRAFF
DAVID McCLISTER
JOHN OATES’ FAVORITE word when it comes to music these days is “untethered.” It speaks to how the 76year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist is feeling as he brings out a new solo album, Reunion, his first since a split with longtime musical partner Daryl Hall. The two have co-existed but not collaborated for many years, but legalities last fall, spurred by Oates’ sale of his share of their publishing, has led to an irreconcilable fracture. And Oates, for one, is not shedding tears over it.
“It feels like this is the beginning of a new era for me, yeah,” says the guitarist, a Pennsylvania transplant, by way of New York, who now divides his time between Nashville and Colorado. “Even though I’ve been working as a solo artist since the early 2000s and made, what, six or seven albums at this point, this is the first album that I haven’t had to try and squeeze in between Hall & Oates tours and projects and other commitments. So it’s great. It’s never too late to start over, y’know?”
It’s a substantial change, of course. Hall & Oates, which formed during the early ’70s in Philadelphia, released 21 albums and sold more than 80 million records worldwide, with 20 Top 40 hits, 10 of which reached number one. The duo was particularly ubiquitous during the early and mid ’80s, eventually inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 and the Hollywood Walk of Fame two years after that.