RIDGEFIELD — When you work side by side with the same partner for over 40 years, taking a breather to spend a few weeks exploring new directions and opportunities with other collaborators provides a chance to refresh and reset. That is exactly what John Oates and Daryl Hall are doing these days.

While Hall hits the road with Todd Rundgren supporting the 30-track BeforeAfter album, Oates is also heading out with another close pal, the stellar Nashville-based guitarist Guthrie Trapp. Their brief and intimate regional tour will be heading to The Ridgefield Playhouse on Sunday, March 20.

In a call to The Newtown Bee ahead of his upcoming Ridgefield stop, Oates talked a little bit about how he got started as a musician and songwriter, along with his long-standing relationship with touring mate Trapp.

While it's hard to think of Oates with anything in his hand besides a guitar, his first exposure to a musical instrument was somewhat less conventional — and a whole lot clunkier.

"Technically, my first instrument was accordion," Oates recalled. "I sang as a very, very young child — almost as soon as I could talk. So realizing I had some musical talent, my parents went looking for music lessons and the only music teacher in this small Pennsylvania town I grew up in [North Wales] was an accordion teacher. So, if any of the kids from that town were taking music lessons, it was on accordion.

"But after a few lessons I hated it, never practiced, and left it in the closet. Eventually the teacher told my parents 'I don't think he wants to play accordion.' And I said no, I wanted to play the guitar like Elvis. So I pivoted immediately to guitar, started taking lessons, and I've been playing ever since — I was about seven or eight at the time."

It would be years before Oates took a stab at songwriting, but like the accordion teacher who drove Oates to take up guitar, it was another teacher who inspired him to create his first original song.

"Back in the day most artists who had hits on the radio did not write their own songs, that was a very rare. So it wasn't something I ever thought about until I got an English class assignment to write a poem," Oates said. "It was around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I wrote a poem inspired by the early folk movement with folks like Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton who were writing protest songs.

"I was a young guy playing folk guitar myself, and this poem I wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis got the attention of my teacher who knew I played guitar — and he not only gave me an A, but suggested I put it to music, which I never even considered."

Oates could not recall much about that first song, except for a few lines.

"...a pillow of death 90 miles from our shore, lurking in darkness awaiting the war... that was my big line," he said laughing. "Since then I have been very much influenced and affected by mentors and teachers in my life and career — and not just on the creative side."

Making A Record

As he developed his songwriting skills, Oates said he formed a band and eventually decided to make a record.

"It was right after I graduated high school — summer of '67. We pooled our money together, went down to Philly, found a recording studio we could afford, and made a record," Oates said. "We managed to get it placed on a local label, which got it out to the local radio stations. And Daryl Hall was dong the exact same thing at the exact same time with his group. So we were operating in parallel universes even before we met!"

Turning the conversation to focus on his current touring partner, Oates was quick to point out his relationship with Trapp was one borne from a coincidental meeting while both were participating in a huge regional Bluegrass festival.

“I met Guthrie long before I moved to Nashville,” Oates said. “Sam Bush and I had been friends for some time, and 15 or 16 years ago he asked me to come up to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and sit in with his band. That’s when I first met Guthrie, who was playing with the Jerry Douglas band. We ended up jamming a little bit and really hit it off, so I hired him to play on a few recording sessions and he became part of my band. And the more we played together, the more this synergy developed.”

Flashing forward to the tail end of a very COVID-challenged and ambitious 2021 Hall & Oates tour involving lots of staging, trucks, buses, and entourages, Oates said he was ready for a break, or at least a change of pace.

“When I came off that tour, I was just weary and I wanted to do something completely 180 degrees in the opposite direction,” he said. “So Guthrie and I got together and started playing in my living room. And we said, ‘Hey, this is fun.’ I think it was Guthrie who said, ‘Why don’t we just bring the living room out on a concert tour — do exactly what we’re doing, just the two of us.’ So I said, let’s do it, it’s a cool idea.

“After we tried it out on a couple of shows, people loved it,” Oates said. “We show up, we’ve got a couple of guitars, a couple microphones, a tour manager — no fuss, no muss, no amps, no trucks, no buses, no entourage. I mean, this is as real and organic as it gets.”

More About Guthrie

Fans of Hall & Oates — and anyone who likes cool, laid back, melody-driven tunes — should really enjoy this pairing, along with discovering the talents of Trapp, who crosses country, blues, Latin, reggae, jazz, rock and experimental genres with ease, taste and authenticity.

For several years, Trapp worked with country artist Patty Loveless, appearing on two studio albums with her including the Grammy-winning Mountain Soul 2. He has also supported a ton of other monster artists from Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, Travis Tritt and Dolly Parton to Tim O’Brien, Delbert McClinton, Randy Travis, George Jones, Alison Krauss, Sam Bush, Tony Rice, Earl Scruggs, Lyle Lovett, Rosanne Cash, “Cowboy” Jack Clement, and many others.

Talking about song selections for the Oates and Trapp Tour, Oates assured fans the duo will satisfy their H2O fix, get introduced to some of Oates’s solo work from his own seven albums, along with experiencing a range of tunes culled from the deep well of material from other influential artists familiar to Trapp and Oates.

“I make it a point not to try and replicate the Hall & Oates songs — you can’t, because Hall & Oates songs are so tied to their production and record-making process,” Oates said. “So rather than try to do that, I try to reinvent them. I take something like ‘Maneater’ back to when I originally wrote the chorus, which was in a reggae style. And with a song like ‘Out Of Touch,’ when you only have an acoustic guitar, you have to reimagine the song in a way that will work with that one instrument.

“So I don’t think about the original recording that much. I just play the song and sing the lyrics — other than that, it’s a free for all ... I just go for it,” he said. “When I play ‘She’s Gone,’ I really don’t deviate from the original chord progression or style of the song. It’s basically the guitar part stripping away all the drums, bass, and backing vocals. Other songs are completely reimagined.”

While a collaborative album of co-written Oates and Trapp material is something Oates said he hopes to do sooner than later, for now, “I just let him do his thing, and he follows me.

“What I love about playing with Guthrie in this setting, is that I have total creative freedom. Even if I come up with something in the middle of a show, say, like a new Doc Watson song, he’ll just do it — he’s really spontaneous, and I don’t have to stick to the script with him,” Oates said. “I can basically do whatever I want and he’s so good and so versatile, he’ll just watch me and anticipate what I’m going to do.”

Oates said the mini tour he’s bringing to the Playhouse is the opening segment of several smaller tours he’s hoping to do with Trapp over the course of 2022, but there’s also another band that will likely need his attention later this year, as well.

“Hall & Oates will definitely be playing some shows in 2022,” Oates promised. “We don’t know what they are and we haven’t booked anything yet. But my guess is it will be late summer and fall. There’s a lot of groups touring this year who had to take two years off, so there’s a little oversaturation in the marketplace for big tours.

“As far as this tour with Guthrie is concerned, we want to enjoy the process,” Oates said. “I don’t want to live in hotels any more than I have to, but we enjoy what we’re doing so we’ll take it as far as we can take it. As long as there are people who want to hear it and see it, we’ll do it.”

For more information or to purchase touchless print-at-home tickets ($70) go to ridgefieldplayhouse.org or visit or call the box office at 203-438-5795. The Ridgefield Playhouse is a nonprofit performing arts center located at 80 East Ridge Road, parallel to Main Street in Ridgefield.

Check out John Oates solo performing "Out of Touch" on Ditty TV:

John Oates nails "She's Gone" in this 2009 clip at the New York Songwriters Circle:

Editor John Voket can be reached at editor@thebee.com.