Charlie and Jan are everlovin’ new partnership

Jewish Telegraph, November 2024

CHARLIE Midnight and Jan Fairchild both grew up in New York and became big names in the music industry — yet they didn’t meet each other until 2016.

But they’ve been busy since joining forces and earlier this year released blues album The Everlovin’ Travelin’ Show (Right Recordings) as The Skintight Revue.

And in a case of good timing, our interview came a week after Charlie received a Grammy nomination for co-writing Barbra Streisand’s Love Will Survive, for Sky series The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

“We grew up not far from each other,” Jan explained. “Charlie’s from Brooklyn. I’m from Staten Island. But a mutual friend thought we’d be great working together and she introduced us.”

Charlie — who grew up in the half-Jewish, half-Italian Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bensonhurst — added: “We had a connection right from the beginning. Writing together and producing together has come really easily, probably because we’re from similar areas, but also because I listen to Jan, who tells me what to do.”

Jan interjected: “One other thing is, we’re two Jewish kids from New York. So having that common denominator adds another dimension to it.”

Charlie took over: “First of all, there’s the humour and the Jewish mothers we grew up with.

“Our paths might have crossed at some point, but not to the extent where we’d be working together. That happened later on.”

It seems quite insulting to try to sum up their careers in a few paragraphs, but here goes.

Charlie was born Charles Kaufman to Louis and Bella Kaufman.

He co-wrote the classic Living in America for James Brown and has written and produced for countless stars, including Christina Aguilera, Big Time Rush, Cher, Joe Cocker, Hilary Duff . . . the list is endless.

And that’s before we get to his work with Streisand, which has included her Grammy nominated album Partners and her duet I Can Still See Your Face with Andrea Bocelli.

Jan is just as proficient; he is a producer, composer, musician. recording engineer and two-time Grammy winning mixing engineer who works in many genres including urban, blues, pop, jazz, world, gospel and country.

He has worked with artists including Justin Timberlake, NERD, Mos Def, Al Jarreau, Gwen Stefani and Stevie Wonder.

He has also been in bands with Michael Bolton, former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick and others.

Working together is a new chapter in their lives.

“We love it,” Charlie said. “Jan has a great little studio. I’m a singer, so we would go into his studio, write songs basically for ourselves.

“But then we were fortunate enough to get artists to work with and write songs for them and produce them.”

Jan continued: “It’s just one of those things where we didn’t have this grand game plan. The idea was, let’s get together, write some music and see where it goes.

“And then we found that we could actually use those songs for ourselves.”

Amazingly, they don’t have a band. Charlie says Jan does all the production and the recording.

“He’s a great great piano player,” he added. “The digital world allows us to hire people, and they’re in other places, and they play on it.

“And then, if we have to go into the studio with backing vocalists, we do that.”

Charlie added: “Jan didn’t hold back in the arrangements, and we just had such a good time creating this album.

“It was a complete joy because we weren’t looking to be a hit or to prove anything to anybody. We were just doing it for ourselves.

“Jan slogged it out in bands. I slogged it out in bands, and there was joy in doing that.

“Once you get into the idea that you want to have a big career or a hit, it just changes the way you have to approach everything.

“So we were going back to the beginning for ourselves of why we do this.”

They didn’t even know if they were going to release what they had, but then they came across John Kaufman, of Right Recordings.

Jan told me: “It was mainly done because we love the process. We love working on music, making music and it gave us an opportunity, like Charlie said, to do music that we wanted to do. We didn’t have to answer to anybody because we’ve been down that road too many times.”

Charlie credits Dan Hartman for putting him on the road to success.

The legendary Hartman, who died in 1994 at the age of 43, co-wrote many songs with Charlie, including Living in America.

His link up with Hartman came after “my own album bombed incredibly on Columbia, the least successful in the history of the label.

“Dan was very specific, and I would have to write and rewrite, and it really taught me to be able to go with the flow and not get stuck on just one idea.

“It’s not hard for me. If I’m writing for Hilary Duff, I’m not going to write what I write for James Brown.”

Jan, meanwhile, was working with a lot of rap artists.

He explained: “I’m a musician first, so the music speaks to me on that level. The genre is really not even part of the equation

“I’ve worked with Mos Def for a long time. We got nominated for some Grammys together and people would say to me ‘What’s it like working with that guy man? I mean, he’s like, really radical’.

“And I’m like, ‘You know, what? He’s really not radical. He’s a really smart guy and he’s very respectful’.

“We just clicked. He’s from Brooklyn, I’m from Staten Island, similar to me and Charlie. He’s a generation younger than me. But we clicked on a musical level, and then on a deeper level.

“And we ended up doing two records together.

“The funniest thing that happened was he’d have a lot of guys come check him out; see what he’s doing in the studio.

“And they would look at me and look at him. And I could feel them thinking ‘What’s this older white dude doing working with the icon?’

“One time he obviously knew what they were thinking. So he says to one of his friends, ‘Who would have thought I’ve been doing some of my best work with this older white dude’.

“That to me is one of the biggest compliments anybody could have given me.”

The Everlovin’ Travelin’ Show is described as soulful, bluesy, New Orleans-influenced.

Jan explained: “One of my idols growing up was Dr John. And I was a trombone major in school. So combining Dr John with horns, that’s such a New Orleans thing.

“I was listening to Muddy Waters when I was 10.”

Charlie added: “We love that genre. So we’re gonna stay in that area to a great degree. We are not concerned if we go off it a bit.”

Charlie’s parents were first generation Americans. Their parents had come from Austria and Poland.

He added that a section of his family were religious.

“Every once in a while I hear from them,” he said. “I am not observant, the high holy days, all of that stuff.

“The biggest part of my family is hyper-religious, one of my uncles was a rabbi.

“My mother kept kosher. Everything in the house was kosher. On Passover, we changed the plates. We did the Fast, as much as I could.

“When my grandmother passed, we weren’t as strict.”

Jan said: “Mine is similar to Charlie’s. My grandfather came from Kovno, Lithuania, and my grandmother came from Minsk.

“My grandfather came here in like 1910, when he was like 16 and they were fleeing the pogroms, and the same thing with my grandmother. She came a number of years later.

“Interestingly, I was just going through some papers. I found my grandparents’ original marriage certificate from 1922, and I found their naturalisation papers, too, when they became actual citizens.

“It was such a trip to see the real documents. That was my mother’s side.

“My father was adopted, so no one ever really knew what his background was.

“I grew up in a Jewish household. My grandparents kept kosher. The whole thing with the separate plates.

“I was friends with the rabbi’s son, and we used to walk to synagogue every Friday night. I was about 16 then.”

How did their families feel about them going into the music industry?

“My dad, Dave Mullaney, was a musician,” Jan explained. “So when I was about seven, he handed me an accordion and said ‘I’m going to teach you to play’, and my brother, too.

“But he was a jazz musician. He would not let us listen to pop music. He said, ‘That’s not real music’. So he played me Jimmy Smith, an amazing jazz organist, who influenced me a great deal.

“Then The Beatles came out and, all of a sudden, my dad was like, ‘Oh, this is actually good music’.

“So that was kind of the time when things changed for me. I started playing piano so my dad was always very supportive, obviously, because this is what he did.

“He took me in the studio when I was really young.

“He had a lot of success as an arranger/producer. There was a big song called Popcorn and he was a member of the group Hot Butter.”

Charlie told me that he grew up in poverty.

“When I went into music, they were just happy that I was doing something I loved.

“I was very fortunate. As far as being a doctor or a lawyer, they knew I had no interest in that.

“All I wanted to do was win the Nobel Prize for poetry. But rock ’n’ roll, there’s nothing like it.”

It would have been remiss of me if I didn’t ask Charlie about Streisand, whom he became involved with thanks to her executive producer Jay Landers.

“He relied on me to write lyrics for songs for Barbra,” he said, “and every time she does an album that has original songs, I get a call.”

He was asked to write Love Will Survive by Walter Afanasieff, who worked extensively with Mariah Carey.

“I always say yes to Walter,” Charlie laughed. “They didn’t really have anything except a clip from the show, which gave me no clue. Luckily there are still bookstores that exist.

“I bought the book, read it that night and wrote the lyric.”

He added: “Working with Barbra is a privilege, because she is a truly great artist.

“She is so much behind Israel and the Jewish situation, which is one reason why she got involved with the show.

“Barbra’s never sung in something that she isn’t in, and certainly not for a streaming series, but Claire Burns, who produced the series, had a vision of wanting Barbra to sing the song.

“Barbra loved not only the song, but she loved the purpose of the series.”