Teddy Thompson: Like father, like mother, like son, like self?

September 18, 11:47 AMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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Teddy Thompson: How far does the apple fall?

Teddy Thompson doesn't face the same problems as, say, Jakob Dylan or Julian Lennon, or Sean Ono Lennon or Frank Sinatra Jr., or Dweezil Zappa or Jason Bonham or Zak Starkey. OK, I'm getting carried away. 

But the point I'm trying to make is that being the son of Richard and Linda Thompson hasn't set Teddy up against the same sort of Olympian standards in the public eye that Dylan or Lennon offspring face when they forge ahead with musical careers.

Unless you're looking at it from my perspective, which happens to hold Richard Thompson peerless as a quadruple threat in terms of the total package of guitar playing, songwriting, singing, and wryly conversing with an audience.

But even from my perspective — which is shaped by having seen Fairport Convention play for free on the Janss Steps at UCLA in the late 1960s (yes, with Sandy Denny) and by attending an unconscionable number of Thompson concerts since the infamous Great American Music Hall Richard & Linda show in 1982 — Teddy Thompson needn't look over his shoulder to see if his lineage is about to crush him.

And I don't think he does. When I talked to him recently, as he was setting off on the tour that brings him to the Great American Music Hall on Friday, Sept. 19, in support of an absolutely wonderful fourth studio CD, A Piece of What You Need, he talked with equanimity about being propelled into the limelight as a member his dad's band in the late 1990s.

"I came from a folk-family background," he said. "Although we weren’t really the all-singing, all-dancing-around-the-piano folkies or anything like that, there is that idea of singing and playing with your parents and your family and your cousins. I’m not sure that it happens so much in the rock 'n' roll world, where people’s kids play in the band and all that. I think it’s more a folk tradition. So it didn’t seem that strange. I was glad to get my feet wet.

"But it can be tricky, because you can then be forever asked about that, and feel like that’s how you got your start — shouldn’t you have broken out on your own and done your own thing? But it’s not as if I ever really had a very different style of music. I’m more into American music and influenced by rock 'n' roll, but it’s not like I really wanted to be a thrash-metal headbanger and I was compromising by getting in my dad’s band. That was the kind of music I like anyway, so it was a pleasure."

Thompson might disagree, but I feel that, despite its super-slick (and aurally quite pleasing) production values, A Piece of What You Need fits perfectly with his dad's legacy, even as it asserts a clear, authoritative, and original voice. You can jump over to the Hear & Now at SF Gate.com to read much more of the interview by clicking here, but make sure you come back to watch Teddy Thompson sing Roger Miller's "King of the Road" with his good pal Rufus Wainwright — it's the song they recorded for the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack.

And if you do secure a copy of A Piece of What You Need, be sure to let it run to the "hidden" bonus track: It''s Teddy and his buddy Ed Harcourt covering an Everly Brothers tune.

Jazz is called "the sound of surprise," but I suspect Teddy Thompson, as a pop and/or folk musician, will fashion a career full of surprises.  

Teddy and Rufus sing "King of the Road":