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About WEST COAST SOUL

Artwork by Santi Oviedo

The non-commercial music blog WEST COAST SOUL.de reflects my personal love story with a special genre mix that I didn’t even have on my list ten years ago: West Coast music.

Of course I loved songs like “What A Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers or “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac since my childhood. They belong to the unconscious listening experiences one had as a child in the back seat on car rides with parents in the late 70s and early 80s. But like many others, rock, heavy metal, jazz and especially soul and 70s R&B dominated my musical world from my youth on.

Before I discovered West Coast music as a genre, I was a soul fan for many years. Again, everyone starts with the classics. Even as a kid you love the Supremes or Stevie Wonder, without knowing what Motown is, you just like the beat. Later you discover Stax and can’t live without Otis, Goldwax follows and so on and so forth. Soul music is an important part of my musical DNA and of WEST COAST SOUL.de.

In the early 2000’s, it was the Channel 101 series “Yacht Rock” – written, directed and produced by JD Ryznar – that sparked my enthusiasm for this genre mix of soft rock, West Coast and AOR, which allowed me to dive deeper and deeper into this musical rabbit hole.

Starting with Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Eagles and Hall & Oates, I discovered artists like Pages, Bill House, Nielsen & Pearson, Ambrosia, Player and Ned Doheny, whose brilliant “Get It Up For Love” opened the first edition of Marcus Liesenfeld’s legendary “Too Slow To Disco” series and impressively demonstrated that this music can conquer new audiences.

The fact that WEST COAST SOUL exists can be indirectly traced back to a band that rekindled my enthusiasm for West Coast music in 2016: Young Gun Silver Fox. My first enthusiastic Facebook post about their debut “West End Coast” was the starting point that brought me into contact with many great artists, musicians, DJs and music lovers over the last four years, culminating in numerous interviews and articles that I wrote for various magazines and blogs. You can find all these interviews here. New ones will follow continuously.

I have always been interested in the stories behind the music, even as a young journalist who started out in radio and later wrote for newspapers and magazines. With WEST COAST SOUL.de I want to give these stories, this music and the artists a platform.

WEST COAST SOUL.de is not commercial. Artists and albums that I present here inspire me personally. Many of the articles you will find here are dedicated to West Coast and soul music of the 70s and 80s, but also to current music and genres.

This blog is not about highlighting genre boundaries, nor does it provide a classification by “West Coast” or “non-West Coast” criteria. It’s all about music – and as we all know, creativity has no boundaries.

Good music is timeless. It’s about talent, emotion and spirit, about an art form that speaks directly to our soul – simply the soul of West Coast.

Enjoy reading the articles and interviews!

Thomas Splett
(WEST COAST SOUL.de)