Happy birthday to the legendary Daryl Hall who turns 74 on Sunday (October 11th)!!! Hall, who has found a second career with the wildly successful AXS TV show, Live From Daryl's House, will forever be known for his decades of classics with partner John Oates in Hall & Oates.
Hall, who has been the primary vocalist of all Hall & Oates' classic hits, either wrote or co-wrote such pop/rock evergreens as “She's Gone,” “Sara Smile,” “Rich Girl,” “Kiss On My List,” “You Make My Dreams,” “Everytime You Go Away,” “Private Eyes,” “I Can't Go for That (No Can Do),” “Did It In A Minute,” “Maneater,” “One On One,” “Say It Isn't So,” “Out Of Touch,” and “Method Of Modern Love,” among many others. In 2014 — 17 years after first becoming eligible — Hall & Oates were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The pair is currently working on the duo's first original album in 17 years.
In 2015, Daryl Hall opened his Pawling, New York restaurant, part of the Daryl's House music venue in October 2015 and its now serves as the official setting of Live At Daryl's House. The original venue for the series, which debuted in 2007, was Hall's actual house in Millerton, New York.
Although Hall & Oates have been recording together since 1972, and scored several hits during the “me” decade, it was the release of 1980's Voices and their subsequent '80s albums that made them household names. We asked Daryl Hall about how he accounts for the pair's incredible popularity throughout the '80s, resulting in the pair being named the most successful duo in rock history: “What happened was, we had been making in-roads into radio all through the '70s. And then, I don't know what happened. I think the world, sort of their ears — whatever happened in 1980, y'know, to that decade. Somehow the masses became attuned to the kind of music that we were doing and made it easy for us to appeal to a lot of people. I think that MTV had a lot to do with it. We were on there all the time, we were basically, y'know, we were guest VJ's every other week, probably. It was just one of those things that you can never understand why music explodes in a certain way, but it worked for us.”
Daryl Hall says that he and John Oates take great pride in their stage act and feel as though it's constantly improving: “I think creatively, certainly, it's even if anything, it's even better than it was. I don't know. We're both sort of lifer musicians. We're in it for the long run, and I don't know. I don't feel any less fresh than I did when I first started out.”
With over 45 years on the road, we asked Daryl Hall how he and John Oates keep the shows fresh year after year: “You find different ways of doing it because within the song, there's so much — I mean most people's songs — but in our songs, there's so much room for improvisation. We just play around with songs and change them up all the time. Most of our band members have been with us for at least, I don't know, 15 years, 20 years, even longer. And so we have a telepathic relationship.”
Recently released is Hall & Oates' latest live double CD/DVD/Blu-ray release, Live In Dublin, which was taped on July 15th, 2014 at the city’s Olympia Theatre.
The tracklisting for Hall & Oates' Live In Dublin is: “Maneater,” “Out Of Touch,” “Say It Isn’t So,” “Family Man,” “It’s Uncanny,” “”Back Together Again,” “Las Vegas Turnaround,” “She’s Gone,” “Sara Smile,” “Do What You Want, Be What You Are,” “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do),” “Rich Girl,” “You Make My Dreams,” “Kiss On My List,” and “Private Eyes.”
