After nearly four years as an Internet sensation, Daryl Hall’s “Live From Daryl’s House” is coming to broadcast TV.
The award-winning music and conversation program, debuts in 95 markets on Sept. 24 with back-to-back half-hour episodes featuring Train and Fitz & the Tantrums. The syndication is being handled by Good Cop Bad Cop Productions in association with Scott Sternberg Productions and distributed by Trifecta Entertainment & Media. Hall, Sternberg and Hall’s manager Jonathan Wolfson are executive producers of the show.
“This is the logical extension of what we started with a flip cam,” Hall tells Billboard.com. “Television is still a big factor in getting to a lot of people, so I think that I’m going to get a slightly different audience showing it on television. I think that it will be perceived slightly differently, but the numbers are obviously going to get bigger and bigger just being on television.”
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Nevertheless, Hall promises that he’s “not changing anything; it’s an Internet show that is being shown on television, so I’m not adapting the show at all in any way to be a ‘TV’ show. In my first couple of shows it was real homemade, but after that I went, ‘No, eventually I would like to show this and sell DVDs’ and I had that future in my head, so we improved the production values as we went along.”
“Live From Daryl’s House” first aired on Nov. 15, 2007, from Hall’s home studio in Millerton, N.Y., about 100 miles north of New York City — where the show is still taped. His longtime musical partner John Oates was the show’s first guest for a holiday episode that year, and subsequent collaborators have included Smokey Robinson, Rob Thomas, Booker T. Jones (Watch Below), Grace Potter and the Goo Goo Dolls. “Live From Daryl’s House” has aired on broadcast TV just once to this point, this past New Year’s Eve on WGN America and WGN local in Chicago.
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“Daryl has always been an artist that has believed in integrations,” Wolfson says. “He proved it with (1985’s) ‘Live at the Apollo,’ when he brought (former Temptations) Eddie Kendrick and David Ruffin to MTV, and now he’s doing it again, merging his body of work with a younger generation via this show. When you take something from nothing and turn it into what it is now, it’s pretty amazing.”
The “Live From Daryl’s House” syndication covers 16 of the Top 20 television markets in the U.S., including WPIX in New York, KTLA in Los Angeles, WGN in Chicago, KYW in Hall’s native Philadelphia and KDAF in Dallas. More affiliates are expected to be added in the future. The broadcast roll-out also comes on the eve of “Laughing Down Crying,” which comes out Sept. 27 and Hall’s first new solo album in 14 years. He says “Live From Daryl’s House” had a significant impact on the way he approached the recording.
“I really wanted to get that immediacy and that spontaneity that ‘Daryl’s House’ conveys to the world,” Hall explains. “When I started the project I thought, I’m going to bring some of the guests in and all that kind of thing, just like the show. But then as I got into the (album) it became a very personal thing and I was really playing a lot of the instruments myself. But it’s still that real organic, thinking-on-your-feet feeling that the show has, and that really influenced my arrangement style for the album.”
Hall will perform on the outdoor stage of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Sept. 22, and he’s planning to hit the road after the first of the year for a tour that will combine standard concert performances with stage versions of “Live From Daryl’s House.”
“I’ve already done a couple and they worked out great,” Hall says. “It’s a real challenge to take that sort of feeling of the audience being a fly on the wall and breaking down that fourth wall and getting that casual, ‘Daryl’s House’ kind of feeling in a performance, but we pulled it off. I’ve talked to all the guests and pretty much everybody said they could do it, so I told the promoters to put together a laundry list of who they’d like to see me with, so we’ll see where it goes. I’m really lacking of time right now, but next year a lot is going to happen.”