Lakeport >> Whether he likes it or not, Jack Wright shares the voice of a rather famous singer. “I sing at Christmas and people walk up to me and say, ‘You sound like Neil Diamond,’ and I say, ‘Well, I didn’t wanna sound like Neil Diamond,’” he laughed. But it’s pretty clear to see that Wright is enjoying the perks of this gift. He put together The Heartlight Show, a concert featuring 28 songs by the “Sweet Caroline” singer, which hits the stage at Soper Reese Theatre this Saturday.
“It’s a strange thing that I happen to have his voice,” Wright said. “There are artists out there who are impersonators and they memorize every nuance of his voice and they mimic him. I never tried. I just opened my mouth.”
Wright insists that he’s not a Neil Diamond impersonator. In fact, he made a very conscious decision to not sell himself as a tribute performer. “I researched the acts that do this. It’s fine. People go and it’s a big Neil Diamond show. The beaded shirts, the band. But they mimic him and it’s kind of eerie because when you take someone’s voice and you literally learn the vowel sounds and everything then you sound like kind of a cheap imitation of the real thing,” Wright explained. “I love to interpret his music, but I certainly do it kind of in my own natural way … If you think you’re going into a tribute band show, and there are going to be smoke and mirrors, you’re gonna get there and for a minute you’re gonna think, ‘Hmm, I’m not sure what this is.’ Once you get into the music, you’ll get it.”
For Wright, The Heartlight Show is largely concerned with forming a connection with the audience. “It’s about engagement. To go out and do his music is one thing. To go out and impersonate him his one thing. To go out and engage people the way that he does, to use the music to relate to people, that’s a big deal. If you can capture that, then you have the essence of Neil Diamond,” he said. “It’s not about me. I don’t need it to be about me. I need it to me about us. And that’s the way Neil Diamond talks. He said, ‘I didn’t come here to perform for you. I came for us to do something together.’ The goal is that.”
Wright is so serious about creating an authentic, emotional show that he’s spent years creating and recording his own backing tracks. “I play guitar, I play grand piano and I have spent literally thousand of hours orchestrating stuff,” he said. “So when you go there you have the real Neil Diamond arrangements.”
He could have purchased the music and saved himself a great deal of work, but he said these tracks are far from the real deal. “People will tell you that there is … karaoke music. Not the same thing,” he said. “When you listen to his arrangements, they’re amazing. The way that they build and add and so you can’t get that unless you do it literally yourself … Because of my work station keyboard, I have literally every instrument in an orchestra, every instrument in a band. I go line by line. So drums, bass, piano, violins, cellos, horns, over and over and over dubbing to where there are literally thousands and thousands of notes in any given song.”
Thankfully, Wright is a classically trained singer and musician, who was performing with college-level symphony orchestras at the age of 16. With his extensive musical background, he was able to create very genuine Neil Diamond arrangements. “I can give anybody a work station keyboard and they can put their fingers down and they’ll get a sound that is generated,” he said. “Because of all my years doing symphony orchestra work and classical stuff, I know how each of those instruments actually has to sound. So I can put vibrato and expression in there and make it sound like a flute, make it sound like a saxophone, because my ear will tell me how to do the expression. And that’s critical, otherwise it sounds like what it is: synthesized. So I went way out of my way to make it not synthesized.”
This training surprisingly did present some problems when it came to the technicalities of singing Neil Diamond’s music. “It’s been brutal for me because I had to forget everything that I’ve ever learned about singing. All my classical opera training, everything about it, all the mechanics about it have to go away. Because you can’t be in that very soft smooth place and be contrived,” said Wright. “To me it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done because you have to let go of your technique … I’m going up there into a higher range. Well I have a technique for getting up there but I just have to let it go.”
Wright has an extensive resume when it comes to creating music and performing. When he was a three-years-old in the Mormon church he performed in events called road shows and this is where everything began. “I was supposed to sing a duet with my sister ,,, and I just got cold feet and I was crying, clinging to my mommy and I looked out and my sister was out on the stage,” he recalled. “I ran out there and the spotlight hit me. That was it. It was all over. I guess I was just born to do it [perform] because I love it so much.”
From there he went on to explore musical theater, scoring the lead in “The Man of La Mancha.” After gaining exposure through that performance, he spent 13 years as a cover artist. He’s also worked scoring the background music for film and television for period of a time. Eventually his music led him to a charity event in Napa, where he performed Neil Diamond’s music exclusively. As a cover performer of a wide variety of artists, this was a new concept for him, but it worked.
All of this experience gives The Heartlight Show the richness it needs to be something special. “It was in my blood to do all of these things, including the classical stuff, and then go on to musical theater then go on to pop music … I think it’s an aggregate of all those different things that allow us to do this kind of show.” Wright said. “Neil Diamond’s not one dimensional. I’m not one dimensional. I don’t take credit for that. That’s just a whole series of gifts that were given to me to be able to do this.”
The Heartlight Show promises to take the audience on a musical journey of sorts. “The songs, they’re all story songs, they’re ideally suited for a show like this,” Wright said. “It’s almost like writing for musical theater, that you move from story to story through the night. And that’s way different than just going out there with a bunch of songs.”
The show isn’t arranged chronologically though, like a lot of performances. It instead follows the feel of the music, which ranges from soothing heartfelt ballads to Broadway showstoppers. “I go through it pretty much based on ups and downs and the themes of the stories. You do one that’s kind of really down, I’ll follow it up with something that’s literally like a marching band. He does that kind of thing,” Wright said.
Neil Diamond’s exceptionally wide variety of music is part of what makes Wright so enamored with him. “You go from early days and Sweet Caroline which everybody knows. And there are songs which are Broadway musical kind of things like ‘Stargazer’ … So all of a sudden you’re going from what used to be old rock, you’re going into kind of jazz. One of them is practically ragtime,” he said. “He’s a poet. He writes these amazing songs and the range of it is incredible because it’s not one kind of songs.”
But there is one unifying theme throughout all of this music. “They’re all love stories. Making up, breaking up, getting back together … All his life he’s been trying to understand and interpret the mysteries of love. How love works, how love doesn’t work, and not just on one level,” Wright explained. This is what hits home for him. “I really know what I’m doing with his music more than any other artist and I’ve done them all. But his music, I really understand it. It means a lot to me. I am feeling the poetry of it. The ups and downs. He writes songs about life. All phases of life. He even writes about death.”
Through The Heartlight Show, Wright hopes that he can help people come to a better understanding of Neil Diamond and his music. “‘Holly Holy’ I didn’t understand myself. It’s two words, Holly and holy. Well it’s a love song. Holly is the girl. Holy is his way of describing the relationship between a man and a woman,” he said. “I help people through the concert. Instead of just singing it to them I say, ‘Look, let’s think about this for a little bit.’ And then you hear the song in a new context.”
Wright is especially looking forward to the show at the Soper Reese. “It’s such an intimate house. There’s not a bad seat in there,” he said. He plans on getting people up and dancing, singing along, clapping and swaying to the music. “I want to give permission to people right off the bat to do that, and not just sit there looking at me perform.”
After all, The Heartlight Show is all about forging a connection through the music of Neil Diamond. “If I can go out there and have people understand the songs, have them feel the songs, have them smile, maybe even laugh a little bit, maybe even cry a little bit, and leave feeling like they just had a really wonderful kind of emotional experience, that’s what its all about,” Wright said.
The Heartlight Show is at the Soper Reese Theatre, Saturday Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 and $25 and can be purchased at www.SoperReeseTheatre.com, at the Soper Reese Theatre Box Office or The Travel Center in Lakeport.
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
