Daryl Hall – Favourite Things
Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.
Daryl Hall is an American rock, R&B and soul singer and musician, best known from the Philadelphia pop duo Hall & Oates. Hall & Oates have recently celebrated one billion worldwide streams on their 1980 hit You Make My Dreams. A long-lasting favourite, the song was also the UK’s most-streamed song from of all the records released in 1980, in 2018. You Make My Dreams has also appeared in Hollywood blockbusters such as 500 Days of Summer, The Wedding Singerand Dumb & Dumberer. Since 2007, Hall has hosted the web television series Live from Daryl’s House.
These are a few of his favourite things…
Travelling the world performing
Ever since I was a teenager, I have been travelling the world and it is my favourite thing to do. Being in this situation I have never been in before; sitting in one place looking out of the same window for almost a year, I am appreciating that more than ever. I know there is nothing unique about this and the situation is the same for everyone else, but I never realised how much I live for being out in the world. I feel very different when I’m on stage. It is sort of like a bird singing; I am sure a bird feels very good when it is singing full throat, it is the same for me on stage. It’s a transcendental, almost religious experience. And physically it feels so good. In that way, I guess you’d call it an obsession, or an addiction, or a combination of both.
Reconstructing old houses
I have always been interested in old architecture; I am a history person and I come from a part of America that is about as old as America gets (at least the European part of it). I come from a family of musicians but also craftspeople; they did everything from making chimneys to constructing houses, so I grew up immersed in architectural history, as well as music. I restore and sometimes construct old houses in the UK, America and the Caribbean. It is work, but it is a real pleasure to me. Putting a team together and finding the bones or an old house and restoring it, or in some cases moving houses to other locations and reconstructing them in authentic ways. It never gets old. It is a consistent, interesting thing to occupy yourself with.
I love doing interiors too, people say I don’t collect paintings, but I sort of live in one. I construct this reality and it is often based on location or the history of the building. I am living in my studio right now as I am working on my house in New York. It was originally built in 1787. That is pretty much the only thing I am doing at the moment. After I finish talking to you, I’ll get in the car and go and observe some construction.
Antique books
I have an amazing collection of antique architectural books that I use as reference for my earlier obsession. I have (to me at least) a very varied and interesting library. Two things you don’t get in old houses are built-in things and closets, so I use a lot of free-standing bookcases. And I mean a lot of them (and a ridiculously large storage unit). I have a series that I use all the time that was written around 1915 called The White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs. It is volume after volume of all the different regional and vernacular architecture in America, as seen in the eyes of someone in 1915 on what they considered to be old architecture. It is a really good series and so rare.
Guitar
I have a lot of guitars and have an affection for them all, but there is one that is my particular favourite. If you ever see me on my Live from Daryl’s House shows or on stage, it is the one I am pretty much always using. It is an F-Hole Telecaster from 1968; I got it in 1978 and have had it ever since. I lost it for two years after a show, it disappeared, and I was absolutely sure it had been stolen. Two years later, a roadie from another band found it in a locker in Nashville, Tennessee and returned it to me. It is such a good guitar, the fact that nobody stole it is beyond belief.
The suit The Temptations bought me
Mary Wilson from the Supremes just died, and it had me thinking about the old days. I completely forgot about it until today, but something I have from back then is a suit bought for me by one of The Temptations. It was the late 60s, I was eighteen, and Paul Williams and I were shopping in Philadelphia and he said he would buy me a suit – and I still have it! You wouldn’t believe what it’s like, a silken mohair sort of magenta-purple suit – a total stage suit.