By Brent Thompson

A scan of the satellite radio dial is all it takes to grasp Michael McDonald’s impact on Pop music. The vocalist/keyboardist/composer can be found on multiple Sirius XM channels including The Bridge, 70s, 80s, Classic Rewind, Yacht Rock Radio and Classic Vinyl. As a solo artist, frontman of The Doobie Brothers and session musician, McDonald has amassed numerous hits including “What A Fool Believes,” “Takin’ It To The Streets,” “Sweet Freedom,” “On My Own” (with Patti Labelle) and “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).” In 2017, McDonald released Wide Open, a 12-track collection and his first new album in nearly a decade. On Sunday, February 25, the five-time Grammy-winner will return to Birmingham to perform at the Alys Stephens Center. Recently, McDonald spoke to us by phone from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Birmingham Stages: Michael, thanks for your time. Where is your home base these days?

Michael McDonald: Nashville has been my home base, musically, for a few years now but I live in Santa Barbara these days. We kind of live a little bit of everywhere. My wife – I don’t know who’s more of a gypsy, her or me. We seem to be all over the map in the last 20 years. Right now we keep a home in Santa Barbara and I have my studio in Nashville, so I get down there quite a bit.

Birmingham Stages: We are looking forward to your return to Birmingham. The last time you played here you performed at Iron City and your son, Dylan, opened the show.

MM: That was a great venue. We are a fortunate generation in that there’s Classic Rock radio and more venues that cater to music than existed when we were younger. You were either in a nightclub with sawdust on the floors or old auditoriums.

Birmingham Stages: We are really enjoying Wide Open. If you will, talk about the creation of the album.

MM: It was a record born out of circumstance in the sense that a lot of [the songs] were demos that I had cut during the Motown records. I did these demos with the guy who wound up producing the record, Shannon Forrest, a drummer out of Nashville. He’s a world-class, A-list drummer but also a producer. He and I were co-oping on space in a building where I stored a lot of my old keyboards and my old gear. He had a vintage console, so we combined our stuff and put together a haphazard recording situation where we could make some decent analog records and we are both fans of old gear. So, he was working out of there pretty regularly and doing sessions and I would come back into town and – if I had a song idea I’d thrown down on my iPhone – I’d call him up and say, “Hey, if I buy you a pizza, will you make a demo with me?” So that’s what we would do after-hours a lot of times. He’d be done with his day and, rather that let the poor guy got home and see his family, I would ask him to stick around and play drums. It sounded pretty good so there were some fairly decent starts for tracks, even though they were just two-man demos.

He built another studio and, when he did finish it, he used those old files we’d recorded and replaced the drums he had done in my studio. When I came over to see his new studio, he told me he’d been using those files as a reference to record the drums to hear the sound here as opposed to over there. He said, “They sound pretty damn good – I think you have the start of a record here.” So he played them for me and we started pulling in musicians to help build the tracks around the original demo vocals that we’d done and those are still largely the vocals on the record  – the original demos we did at my place. We found that, to a great degree, we were well into this project before we even knew we’d started it. It was nice to have a jump-start.

Birmingham Stages: With a lengthy career so full of hits, how do you comprise your set lists these days?

MM: I try to look at it from the audience’s perspective because that’s what we’re there for. We’re getting up to play for them, so I try to keep that foremost in my head. It’s a lot of trial-and-error but I try to keep a good cross-section of older stuff that I think people will want to hear the most along with older stuff that I think the most ardent fans would appreciate us pulling back out. We compartmentalize the show to address all of those different things and then play as much of the new stuff as we can get away with.

Birmingham Stages: When you play fan favorites – so many including “What A Fool Believes” and “Sweet Freedom” immediately come to mind – how do the songs stay fresh and relevant to you after you’ve performed them hundreds of times or more?

MM: Along the way, when you play a song long enough, it morphs and certain things become part of the arrangement almost accidentally. We kind of fashion the songs as we go because there’s no better place than a live performance on stage to see what a song can do. But what keeps a song fresh to me more than anything else is the audience reaction. When you play a song you’ve played for years, it might be boring if there was nobody in the audience to listen. But when the audience recognizes it and they show the enthusiasm of being able to hear a song that’s familiar to them, it becomes that moment and experience unique to itself and it’s unlike any other time you’ve played the song.

Birmingham Stages: Is there any chance we will get to see The Dukes of September – your project with Donald Fagen and Boz Scaggs –  again?

MM: I would love to think we would. That’s Donald and [Fagen’s wife] Libby’s franchise that started as The Rock & Soul Revue that we just played around New York. We took it on the road and it became The Dukes Of September and it was great fun to play with that band – such a stellar group of musicians. It was great to be onstage with Donald again and being onstage with Boz, I always love touring with him. I hope it happens again. I don’t know that it will, but I’d certainly be up for it again. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that when I was in my twenties onstage with Steely Dan that I’d still be working with those guys all of these years later.

Michael McDonald will perform in the Jemison Concert Hall of the Alys Stephens Center on Sunday, February 25. Tickets to the 7 p.m. show are $59 – $85 (limited $10 student tickets are available) and can be purchased at www.alysstephens.org.