When a musician achieves success during a career is quite an accomplishment, and if twice with two different bands, then that’s a different story, and that story falls under the British multi-instrumentalist and producer Ian McDonald.
Ian McDonald who co-founded the progressive rock band King Crimson in 1969, he left the group after playing keyboards for their debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, then joined the group called Foreigner, and achieve tremendous commercial success with the three albums, Foreigner, Double Vision and Head Games.
After his tenure with the two iconic bands, he’s still on the road and remained active with his most recent group, Honey West alongside singer and songwriter Ted Zurkowski. The group released their album called Bad Old World, recorded with former Wings drummer Steve Holley and McDonald’s son Maxwell on bass.
“I’ve always tried to do some things a little bit different to keep things interesting,” he reflects on Honey West and Bad Old World. “This is not really a so-called progressive-rock type of situation. It’s more of a two guitars-bass-drums type thing, and my production additions and orchestrations.”
Bad Old World was recently reissued on 180-gram vinyl.
“I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to get stuck into something serious at that time,” McDonald recalls. “I felt like maybe I can help the band a little bit if they would allow me, and they could help me reestablish my production work. That led to writing songs [with Zurkowski ] and me actually joining Honey West. The group then went through a few personnel changes once I was in, and we ended up with quite a nice-sounding group.”
“There are a lot of different styles within the group format,” says McDonald, “I think production-wise, I’m making some of my best work. I really wanted to make sure that we had a good-sounding album with good arrangements, playing, mixing and mastering. I’m pleased at the way it turned out.”
In Kurkowski, he found himself with a perfect match for collaboration ideally. “Ted is a great writer of lyrics as well as a singer,” he explains. “I was very pleased to meet him because I’ve been hoping to meet a good lyric writer. That is the basis of the songwriting. And we applied that to your typical two guitars-bass-drums live format [in the studio]. It’s a lot of fun.”