On the day before Thanksgiving, while most homebound families were prepping gi-hugic meals, Captain Kirk Douglas had other things on his mind. First, there’s that holiday float he was working all the last-minute bugs out of, that being the Tonight Show monstrosity where Douglas would appear with host Jimmy Fallon and the entirety of his comrades in the show’s house band The Roots for Manhattan’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “We’re crossing all the last minute T’s and dotting I’s on being in the parade—such is my life, my friend,” Douglas tells me, laughing.
Douglas was also thinking far beyond floats and turkeys, as his solo project Hundred Watt Heart just released the dreamy, full-blown album New Unknown, his second LP apart from The Roots. This is no turkey. “After years of performing with The Roots, the percentage of my input as a writer has been pretty minimal,” the guitarist shares, his stint in the band dating back to 2003. “And that’s totally fine. I’m super happy to be involved with them. But there’s not a place for my musical ideas. The Roots that you see on stage and on The Tonight Show, and The Roots that you hear on our recordings—they are different entities.”
Making note of the not-so-secret fact that The Roots haven’t released an album since 2014’s ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin, Kirk states that his personal writing and music-making goals have been met and surpassed. “It feels good to make my own music, as well as to share it,” Kirk says about becoming Hundred Watt Heart and dropping the raw, ruminative blues of his debut disc, Turbulent Times, as well as the more worldly and contemplative New Unknown. (It should be noted that Kirk and the rest of The Roots do write and play “spontaneous” interstitial music for in-between commercial break elements of The Tonight Show, a job “which keeps our creative juices flowing,” per Douglas.)
"I think of my melodies as an emotional crossword puzzle, making words fit into the holes of sound that convey what I'm feeling."
Borrowing Roots-mate Questlove’s quote about albums being museums of that which influence you, Kirk is a curious gallery curator who’s most attracted to what occurs when Spotify is off and the radio is turned down. “What happens in that silence…whenever I encounter that, melodies and grooves come to me,” says Kirk. “Inspirations such as those come from out of the ether, the result of having things go in one ear and out the other. It’s what remains in between that I capture, musically. Lyrically, it’s everything else.”
On New Unknown, the silence reveals long, soulful melodies, Hendrix-ian vibes, and ghostly, airy atmospheres. Lyrically, there’s simply “too much going on” in Kirk’s personal life—to say nothing of a pandemic break filled with social and political upheaval—to not affect his songwriting. “I think of my melodies as an emotional crossword puzzle, making words fit into the holes of sound that convey what I’m feeling.”
In becoming the nom de plume Hundred Watt Heart and recording his first solo joint, Kirk believed he was creating a “poetic way” in which to portray what was taking place inside of him—building out that emotional crossword, in his terms—with his longtime friend and drummer Rick Sheridan by his side. “It was music coming from my heart, but amplifying it in every way,” says Kirk of his first solo efforts. “If you’re listening to a 100-watt amplifier, you’re dealing with something fairly loud, a place where the guitar takes up a lot of real estate.” Turbulent Times was also inspired by The Roots’ recording stint in NYC’s Electric Lady Studios in 2016 on whatever album project of theirs is still in the pipeline. “The room thrilled me—they said they could have me, Rick, and Mark Kelly of The Roots record there, and we did eight songs in a few days.”
“It was music coming from my heart, but amplifying it in every way. If you’re listening to a 100-watt amplifier, you’re dealing with something fairly loud, a place where the guitar takes up a lot of real estate.”
New Unknown, on the other hand, was recorded with Sheridan during the pandemic in Kirk’s Long Island childhood home while in chill mode. “We went to my mom’s house, barbecued some food, went into the basement and had fun,” says Kirk. “I had to get familiar with home recording fast, because NBC’s studios were closed and The Roots had to send music and files in to the show remotely, so I—by necessity—figured out that new recording and engineering skill set.”
Building the bones of his new New Unknown songs through lengthy jams in Long Island since COVID’s start, by June of that year, his wife and his two children went to Denmark for school. Home alone without his family, the only thing Kirk could do was make music. “My only responsibility was to work and feed myself.”
“So much of this is about keeping sane.”
New Unknown benefits from seven months of unbridled freedom—“therapeutic” jams to be edited down that allowed Kirk to “not fret about the state of the planet, politically and pandemically.” To that end, Kirk organically processed and filtered those dreamy beliefs into songs such as the psychedelic likes of “Land of Look Beyond” and “Breathe In,” both dedicated to returning to the earth, loving Mother Nature, and dealing with the problems of the world. Other riff-rocking moments such as “We Can Be One” and “Over the Ocean” work introspectively toward curing that which ails the environment—his immediate environment and that of the greater good.
The balance of “polarizing viewpoints” and “loving your surroundings” and people “reacting to social justice issues on the back of George Floyd” are crucial to New Unknown. “So much of this is about keeping sane,” he says. At its simplest but most complex sentiment, Kirk’s new album is living out what he calls “my naive utopian dream, the wish for people to be treated equally and a world that allows that to happen. Sometimes, all you have to do is breathe in and breathe out—some of these challenges are temporary. These songs are often about me talking people off the ledge, so to speak.” FL
