Legacy – Ron Bohmer Website

THE NEW ALBUM

LEGACY

After a 19 year hiatus, Ron returns to songwriting with this 2019 collection of 9 new songs.

LEGACY examines themes of masculinity, vulnerability, sexual abuse, and prejudice. It explores questions of loss, what we inherit, and what we will leave behind. LEGACY is produced by The Brothers Koren. AVAILABLE NOW.

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THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS

WESTWOOD (Prologue)

WESTWOOD (PROLOGUE) was written in Grand Rapids, MI and in Southington CT, April-May 2019 (one of the last tunes written for the record). As the Brothers and I were working on the songs and themes of LEGACY, they began referring to the project as “like a Rock Opera”. I recognized the connection of the themes and certainly the role “Westwood” played throughout the songs. I started thinking, “what if it was a Rock Opera? We’d have to set the stage. It would need a kind of “. . . in fair Verona, where we lay our scene.” A couple days later, I was thinking about how to describe what, to me, growing up in “Westwood” felt like. Originally meant to be a short intro verse, it became a full-blown song and the basis for the sonic world of the album.

❂ My Father was my foundation.
My mother was my hero.

BORN TO LOSE

❂ BORN TO LOSE was written in September of 2018. I think the story is pretty clear here. How many of us have felt like we didn’t measure up in the eyes of a parent or to the legacy of a family? Do we keep trying to shove a round peg in a square hole? Or do we look for a bigger board?
Big props to Thorald and our brilliant engineer Kyle Mangels for their work on this track. I had a pretty complex soundscape in mind to tell this story; they never flinched.

FROZEN FLAME

My first car felt like it was awash with ghosts; you could feel them moving inside her when you sat down in her driver’s seat. I’ve always been intrigued by the mysterious history a used car must have. I ‘d never said the name “Frozen Flame” out loud until I started work on this song. It seems now that she’d been whispering it to me all along. FROZEN FLAME was written in December 2018 in Detroit, MI (appropriately) and in Lincoln, Nebraska (perhaps in tribute to Bruce Springsteen, he wrote a lot of songs about cars, sex, and getting out). Springsteen, Elvis, The Beach Boys, all those 50’s songs about car wrecks and tragic death, Jim Steinman, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, The Eagles . . . Seems like there would be no rock & roll without cars. Vehicles beget vehicles.
There’s a larger action in this song, though; It’s about being truly seen. When we are seen we can see ourselves, believe in ourselves. Then we can really burn.

CONFIDENCE MAN

One of the great gifts of working with The Brothers Koren is that from the start, they were invested in helping me go deeper as a songwriter. I credit Isaac for asking the hard questions that brought me to write Confidence Man. In my first draft of the song, Thorald suggested using the chords I’d written for that section to create a kind of 2nd chorus with just the lyric, “Confidence man.” It worked. The song is like a cautious visit to the attic or the basement to go through some long-hidden items from the past. In either of those places, we need a window to let in the light, the air. The “Confidence man” choruses gave the song some breathing room. This is difficult subject matter, for anyone. My hope is that putting it in the world makes it a little easier for anyone who has been there

I’M COMING IN

My Mother, Katherine Ann Bommer, “Katie”, died suddenly and tragically in 2000. She was my hero, my safe place, my courage. The gentlest soul one could ever imagine. She had a way of singing in this quiet, breathy kind of voice that was beautiful and tuneful but private and nearly inaudible. I still hear it sometimes, like a secret prayer, like a breeze that follows you that you think has died down and then suddenly it’s there again, always there.
Before my mother’s funeral, my father, my brother, and I had never spoken the words, “I love you” out loud to each other. It just wasn’t our way. It is now.

BRING ME ALIVE

BRING ME ALIVE is the only song on LEGACY that was not written between September 2018 and May 2019. I co-wrote a version of this song (formerly called I WANNA SHOUT IT) with friend and fellow Broadway performer, Ben Roseberry, back in 2004. We performed it at the Triad in NYC with a great band we put together. And that, I thought, was that.
In my early notes to myself on LEGACY, I wrote that I wanted some of the songs to have sing-along elements, and this tune kept rising back up in my mind like a phoenix.

STRIPPED BARE

I sometimes get song ideas in the moments right before I wake up. This was one of them. It came early in the process of LEGACY. It’s an attempt to capture the feeling of being awash in feminine wisdom, grace, artistry, power.

I can’t explain why, but the slightly techno-meets-acoustic groove of this song was in my head from the beginning. I heard these verses with a lot of space between the open F- sharp minor and C-sharp minor chords. We use more of an old-school pro-tools sound on the vocal here; it just felt like the right sound out of the chute. I did some early GarageBand demos of this tune while Book of Mormon was in Tulsa, OK and I added a techno drum loop. I became so obsessed with it that it remained part of the song, along with Syd’s real drums.

The spoken word idea was also there from the beginning. I heard this cacophony of my muses (my wife, Sandra, and my daughters, Cassidy and Austen) and the language they are using to reshape the world. Ultimately, this became a kind of anthem for me, not just about my personal connections, but about womankind. Hence, the male background vocals shift by the last chorus and become the glorious sound of powerful female voices (thanks to the rockstar women of The Book of Mormon).

THE KING IS DEAD

THE KING IS DEAD was the last song written for LEGACY. It is, almost word- for-word, an epic Shakespearean dream I had two weeks before we went into the studio to start recording. It felt like a huge gift, a full-circle piece of LEGACY that I didn’t know was missing. Its scale was of the Rock Opera feel The Brothers had noted and it was a clear metaphor for leaving behind what doesn’t serve us and becoming who we truly are.

“A hero is one who knows how to hang on for one minute longer.”

– Norwegian proverb

TRUE DAY

True Day was the song I resisted writing the most.

It nagged at me. Its melody hung in my head for weeks. I pushed it away. As the songs were coming together for this record, there was definitely a through-line and the vibe was edgier than I had expected. I was excited about that. I really didn’t want to write anything “woo-woo” for LEGACY. “Everything will be great if we just believe and hold the crystals” — that sort of thing. But as this melody kept nagging at me, I remembered something that led me to a different view of this type of song.

The first time I’d ever heard anyone sing and play the guitar live was in the backyard of the apartment complex I grew up in in the 60’s and 70’s. A guy named Chris moved in below us. Mid 20’s, he might have been a Vietnam vet. He wore jeans and army fatigues, his hair grown out somewhere between the length of the Beatles and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I was too young to understand the war and I was a product of my family and my town, where everything was flag-waving and apple pie. To my child-mind, that seemed right.

I was in awe of Chris. He was the closest thing to what I had seen on TV come to life, like a hippie Elvis or the Smothers Brothers with that guitar; I’d never seen one live. He was making music. Just him! No record player, nobody else helping, just him. Cool. There was something else. One summer evening, he sat on a picnic table near the brick barbecue grill (everything was brick, thank you Grandad) and the chain-link fence with me and some other kids gathering. The songs he was playing, Eve of Destruction, For what it’s worth (“Stop, children, what’s that sound”), Ohio, Abraham, Martin & John, One Tin Soldier . . . There was something in them my young mind was a stranger to . . . Protest. Resistance. Warning. Lyrics that said, “Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep, it starts when you’re always afraid, step out of line, the man come and take you away.”

So, wait. We can disagree? With the President? Holy Shit, this was huge. This was America. In rock-n-roll, I caught my first glimpse of what freedom of speech was all about.

As the notion of TRUE DAY kept pressing on me, I thought about Chris. I thought about racism, and the first time I knew it existed, when I was 7, and a man I admired told me he could work in my hometown, but he couldn’t live in my hometown. And I thought about our current times, my anger and helplessness about them. Suddenly, it seemed to me that a protest song, one that offered hope, was exactly the right way to leave LEGACY.