The Doobie Brothers On ‘Civic Duty,' ‘Limitations' in Today's Music & Writing Songs With Charlie Puth
Over two distinct sonic eras, The Doobie Brothers — led by singer-guitarist Tom Johnston and singer-pianist Michael McDonald — have sustained a genre-agnostic, commercially viable career since the early 1970s. That includes nine top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 and 10 top 20 entries on the Billboard Hot 100, as well as hits spanning the rock, adult contemporary, R&B and country charts.
But what truly defines the band is that 'it's a democracy,' according to Karim Karmi, its comanager of a decade alongside Irving Azoff.
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Now, 50 years in, the Doobies are proving just that with Walk This Road, their first album to feature significant contributions from all three principal songwriters (Johnston, McDonald and Pat Simmons). Produced by pop-rock stalwart John Shanks, the project is McDonald's first appearance on a Doobies album in 20 years and will arrive a week before he, Johnston and Simmons are inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (alongside George Clinton, Rodney 'Darkchild' Jerkins, Ashley Gorley, Mike Love and Tony Macaulay) on June 12. After which, McDonald teases, the Doobies 'might even do another' album.
How did working with John Shanks affect your songwriting process for ?
Michael McDonald: We found ourselves revisiting old ideas that might have never gotten recorded — in my case, songs that I might have demoed, gosh, 10 years ago, that I would every once in a while run across in my phone. And then some of the stuff was more immediate, where we just sat down with John and came up with a song in a moment.
Tom Johnston: John's a hell of a guitar player, and he has good ideas on sound. He's got a place up in the Hollywood Hills overlooking part of the San Fernando Valley and he's got a lot of toys, so you can try pretty much anything you want to try and that's liberating.
McDonald: It's every musician's fantasy man cave — literally every kind of keyboard, keyboards I never even knew existed.
A sense of social conscience is central to the band's music, especially on this album's title track with Mavis Staples. Do you feel a responsibility to address current times in your writing?
Johnston: The civic duty bit that you express when writing, that's something that you just feel — it's an organic thing.
McDonald: With 'Walk This Road,' I think John had the original idea for the title — of us getting back together, here we are still trudging the same road all these years later. But it immediately took on a bigger meaning, and I think bringing Mavis onto the track cemented that idea because she is an ambassador of the gospel of humanity. The sound of her voice and her intent made it clear what we might be talking about in the bigger sense, which is, we're all here together. As a band, we hope to appeal to the collective better nature of people.
You have a long track record on the charts. What does it take to write a hit?
Johnston: When you're writing a song, you're not thinking about that; you're just trying to put into it what you feel at that moment. The only time I ever even thought [about] that was on 'Listen to the Music.' You just want to do the best you can.
McDonald: We came up in the middle of the '60s and the '70s, when recording artists were starting to exercise a lot more latitude in terms of style and genre, and the Doobies were always a very eclectic band; we were free to do what we wanted or whatever we thought we could be sincere at portraying musically. I always felt fortunate that we came up in a time when there were a lot less limitations set on artists to stay in their lane.
HBO's highlights that aspect of you and your contemporaries — as well as your habit of turning up in unexpected places, Mike, both in the Doobies and as a solo artist. What's the most unexpected place or collaborator you've found yourself around recently?
McDonald: I wrote a couple songs recently with a kid named Charlie Puth, who's a really talented musician. And I find that I'm being taken more places than I would ever have gone on my own. I've been trying to co-write with people, which I always do with a little bit of mixed feelings. I never really know if what I'm writing is good or not. You start to compare yourself to everything else, and it gets a little scary sometimes. But I do like co-writing because it gets me out of the house and it makes me do something rather than watch another episode of HGTV. (Laughs.)
This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.
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