Larry & Alasdair’s Rockaway brings a lot of soft rock candy in new album Southern Border

When Larry Rifkin, 72, talks about the band Rockaway — his collaboration with Alasdair MacKenzie, 27 — and the album they just released, Southern Border, it almost sounds like he’s about to tell a joke that begins, “This old guy and a young kid walk into a studio and … .”

Except what comes after the “and” is not a punchline but 14 tracks plus a bonus song of great rock in such variety that it is impossible to pick one to tease the album.

No punchline, but Larry will joke.

“I think the 27-year-old and the 72-year-old getting together — if Alasdair were on this call, he’d say, ‘I love the music because it’s what my father used to listen to.’”

At another point, he gets to the heart of the collaboration.

“Here you’ve got a 72-year-old guy writing these songs, but he’s got this incredible producer and multi-instrumentalist who fronts a lot of the songs. He’s got a beautiful voice.”

One possible choice of a representative song was “Did I Make You Up,” a rocking little love song dedicated to his wife, Carmelita. Larry wrote what might be one of the sweetest love songs you ever heard and composed music in which the lyrics fly joyfully instead of drowning in syrup.

From the chorus:

Tell me this is not all a dream
Did I make you up
Did I make you up
Tell me this is really what it seems

Alasdair sings this one, as he does most of the songs. Larry has a good voice, but Alasdair has THE voice.

Larry is not just some old guy who, in retirement, decided to try songwriting and singing. He is, for instance, the man who got Barney to PBS and took a singing purple dinosaur viral before viral or the Internet were things. He did essentially the same for women’s basketball with his home state University of Connecticut team as the vehicle.

For most of his life, he has played in bands, and he still plays in one called BOOM, for Band Of Old Men.

Alasdair is a graduate of Harvard in politics, but music is in his blood. He is a member of a Boston band called Hush Club, “a brilliant” musical engineer and producer who works with a lot of writers, said Larry.

“We are both drummers as our primary instrument. I can play some keys, but he can play everything. I love working with this young man. He’s just amazing. That’s why the sound, I think, is so bright.”

They collaborate mainly by email.

“I send him demos, recorded at Ace Tone Studios in a nearby town, and he can tell what I’m looking for, particularly rhythmically, by the bass lines of my keyboard playing.” Larry sends the chords and lyrics and then the back and forth of the collaboration begins.

Larry has another album out, It’s Not My Circus, released in January 2024. It is still getting a lot of play on the college music circuit through Pirate, a radio marketing company in Boston.

Writing music was one item on the list of things he wanted to do in retirement. He had to learn a melodic instrument — something other than drums — in order to compose and chose keyboards. His father, who died young, wrote music but Larry never heard it because it was never recorded.

So, for his music, he found Matt Terribile at Ace Tone Studios and recorded some demos, in case the grandkids “ever wanted to know what was grandpa thinking.”

But “I can’t leave well enough alone. I kept doing that and posted some of the demos.”

His daughter, Leora, and her husband, Peter, aided and abetted by finding Alasdair, who produced one of the songs on the first album.

“He did a great job, and then he and I just started recording.”

Southern Border’s 15 songs are so diverse in content, subject matter and music that no one song can represent it, except in quality.

Even when the subject matter is the same, the treatment is different, as in “Suite for Carmelita.” Larry, to talk about “Did I Make You Up,” can only get to it by talking about the other two songs in the suite,” “Old Love” and “The One Promise.”

“Old Love” is about the magic of growing old together. “The One Promise” came out of a period of medical issues he endured early in 2024, and which he went through this year thanks to his wife's great care and support.

“And I said, ‘If I don’t get one good love song out of this, then what was it worth?’ So, the idea was, when you’re ill you make a lot of promises to yourself.”

Like, eating better, meditating, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.”

“That was the concept. Okay, you make all these bargains, then you break ’em all, except the one promise that I plan to keep is loving you.”

This song is acoustic, soft and slow but playful and upbeat.

And, for the record, he only got to that discussion after a detour through another sort of love song, “If I Say I Love You.”

“It’s a question about, what is love, right? I mean existentially. What does it mean to say ‘I love you,’ and does it have any consequence? I mean, people throw it around all the time, and two weeks later they don’t know each other. You know what I mean?”

The existential answer would seem to be “Suite for Carmelita.”

And then there’s “Four Cars,” a meditative piece about a four-car funeral procession he saw once, the only sad song on the album. It is so beautiful and thoughtful, it might make you cry.

Larry’s favorites are the political and social satire, like “What’s Wrong With Everyone,” “Over the Wall,” “Life of the Party,” and the title track, “Southern Border.”

Musically, lyrically, this album has a lot of delicious listening in a lot of different flavors.

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