Ravinia 2022, Issue 1

GiveMe Neal Francis doesn’t hide from opportunities in plain sight By WeB Behrens “EVERYTHING LED TO EVERYTHING.” That’s how Chicagoan Neal Francis describes his childhood passion for music. One genre led him to another, unleashing a years-long, wide-ranging audio tour that covered everything from Georges Bizet to Allen Toussaint to Sly and the Family Stone. Give a listen to his two records—his 2019 debut, Changes , and the even more confident follow-up, In Plain Sight. Sooner or later, you’ll pick out some sonic building blocks of his artistic evolution, like Stevie Wonder’s funky R&B or Steve Winwood and Traffic’s psychedelic rock. The 1970s influences don’t stop at your ears, either. When you see the rocker during his June 15 appearance at Ravinia on tour with Amos Lee—his hand- some face framed by shaggy chestnut hair, rocking big-collared shirts with bold prints—you’ll easily imagine him jumping off the pages of a vintage issue of Rolling Stone . Or Creem , or Tiger Beat . “I gravitate most towards the production of the ’70s,” Francis admits. He’s chatting with Ravinia Magazine one day in early May, the day after he performed at New Orleans’s Jazz Fest with The Revivalists frontman David Shaw. [That band makes its own bow at Ravinia later this summer, on August 6.] “I’m not sure when I fell in love with that era, but it’s gotta be due to my exposure to it [as a kid]. Now I can identify that the things I like about that era, the coming together of musical influences: gospel, soul, jazz, rock and roll. And also, the technology used at the time to capture sound has such a distinct flavor to it.” Francis was born more than a decade after those albums were recorded, but thanks to his parents’ considerable record collection, they were a key part of the soundtrack of his youth. Now 33 and living in Pilsen, Neal Francis O’Hara grew up in Oak Park. (His high school “was really great for arts and music,” he notes.) Eventually he studied architecture at University of Illinois–Chicago and moved into the city proper, dropping the “O’Hara” to achieve a sleeker rock-star moniker. Music always flowed naturally in the O’Hara house. His mom plays piano, clarinet, and oboe; his dad loves to sing, a joy that led him to join the Bach Cantata Vespers choir at Grace Lutheran Church in neighboring River Forest. The pair nurtured little Neal in his love for music, with his mom teaching him a few things after he started plunking away on the keys. (Fun fact: The vid- eo for In Plain Sight ’s “Can’t Stop the Rain” features a solo Francis in a nearly empty wood-paneled room, jamming on the very piano he grew up with. Once his mom’s instrument, the old upright doesn’t survive the indoor deluge that erupts—nor the classic rock and roll climax of smashing instruments.) By the time he was 4, Neal’s parents got him into proper lessons, connecting him to the exact teachers he needed to further expand his keyboard horizon. At the start, “I had a great teacher, Martha Yelenosky, who facilitated what I want- ed to do,” Francis reminisces. “I kind of learned how to read [music], and then mostly used my ear to learn the pieces I was supposed to learn. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JUNE 15 – JULY 3, 2022 6