ABOUT PATRICK
Growing up in France, and raised on the music of iconoclastic singers like Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg, it was only when a teenaged Patrick Thibiant moved to Los Angeles in 1970 that he would become completely swept up into the explosive music culture of the day.
He spent the next several years playing guitar in assorted bands. But life intervened, and he put his musical dreams on hold, instead ending up being owner/CEO of a major cosmetics manufacturing business that enjoyed tremendous success. He sold and retired from the business in 2017.
Now at the spry, exuberantly enthusiastic age of 67 he is planning to at last release his first original written and recorded music.
Destiny came in the form of a chance meeting with the venerable Chicago-born jazz/soul drummer Michael White, whose storied career includes session work with the likes of Lou Rawls and Curtis Mayfield. Patrick invited White to join him in the studio one day, and it all just clicked.
“Michael actually loved how I played, it went really, really well. He was very encouraging, he pushed me on – he was like a beacon.”
What is most immediately obvious is to what degree producer White allowed Patrick to just be himself – and the result is a collection of masterfully written, performed and recorded tracks which honors his long-standing love of classic, blues-driven guitar rock.
Indeed, “It’s My Time”, with its dramatic breaks and wistful solos, is a veritable new paradigm of the genre; while the pensive “Simply Michele” is possessed of a very Stonesy sort of swaggering melancholy (think: “Angie” or “Wild Horses”). But Patrick saves his greatest praise for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – especially guitarist Mike Campbell’s “simple accessible playing” – and his “Summer Nights”, with its gritty solos, emotional organ swells and impassioned sax blasts, captures the sonic complexity of the late musical legend so perfectly.
But if his story proves one thing, it’s that not only young people get to dream – and that realizing the dream is so much sweeter when you’ve had to wait a very long time for it.
“This process has absolutely helped me uncover something about myself,” he enthuses, “and the thrill is indescribable. I’m truly and genuinely inspired.”
