Steve Rodgers on Pivoting, Passion, and Resurrecting Creativity

Connecticut musician Steve Rodgers is a man of many incarnations.

Dad. Grandad. Singer-songwriter. Church music director. Co-founder of the almost famous ’90s New Haven band Mighty Purple. Ex-nightclub owner.

And, since Covid Times, a sound engineer and producer.

Today, Steve spends most of his days tucked in his charming Hamden home-recording space, Tiny Bunker Studios, shaping soundscapes for some of the best artists in the Nutmeg state. He’s been at this since 2020, when health issues and the pandemic prompted him to pivot. Six years later, Steve could teach a masterclass on Pro Tools.

But when I suggest that Rodgers is a workaholic, he pushes back.

“I’m passionate,” Steve explains, although his flawlessly performed, sold-out hometown show at Lyric Hall in April suggests I’m not wrong.

Those who know Steve might agree with me. They will, in the very least, attest that he is a self-starter — an artist who fully embraces the DIY ethos. But channeling everything into his passions often comes at the expense of his health. More recently, he’s had to make a conscious effort to put boundaries around his time as a means of self-preservation.

Yet workaholism isn’t a bad thing when it’s directed in the right ways. On music.

Steve’s come a long way from his ego-centric teen years, which fueled some of the coolest indie-rock tunes I listened to in college (“When Kingdoms Fall” from Mighty Purple’s Bohica album is forever intertwined with my freshman-year memories).

His more recent solo singles – which he releases under his full name Stephen Peter Rodgers – are thoughtful, lyrically sagacious, bittersweet tunes that could only have come from a wizened Gen X singer-songwriter.

“The music that I have now I feel like is really cohesive, whereas the last record Speck on a Clover was more of an art piece,” he tells me.

One of my favorites of his new batch is “Stay You,” which offers hard-hitting universal truths over layered guitars and endearingly frayed vocals that expose his vulnerabilities. Another favorite, “Winter Is Coming,” is symbolically bittersweet. It kind of reminds me of late-career Johnny Cash.

In a recent conversation with Rockmommy, Steve reflected on his long, sometimes difficult, artistic journey, finding sobriety, and his forthcoming solo album with Bigger Beast Records.

[SEE RELATED: Steve Rodgers on the Art of Rebuilding a Music Scene]

Rockmommy: One of our first interviews together was in 2020. And here we are.

Steve Rodgers: Now that feels like such ancient history! But yeah, I feel like, you know, since we first talked about this way back in 2020, my whole life has changed and grown and it’s beautiful and all of that.

Rockmommy: I want to back up a little bit. When you and your brother Jonny Rodgers started the band Mighty Purple in the 1990s, you opened for Barenaked Ladies and Dave Matthews Band. When you think back to that time period, what do you miss the most?

Steve Rodgers: I miss making music with my brother the most, to be completely honest. If I had to pinpoint one thing, my brother and then my other two brothers, Adrian Van de Graaff and David Keith. [Jonny and I] are separated by 3,000 miles and tons of responsibility. He’s got small kids… I’ve got older kids.

Rockmommy: Was there a point when you were like, ‘we could be rock stars, this could be it!’

Steve Rodgers: You know, that was the trajectory. My whole life revolved around, ‘I want to go out and make music that’s going to spread a positive message.’ My whole life. There’s still definitely, even though it’s evolved and changed over the years, a thread that goes all the way back to that. And, you know, for a variety of reasons, Mighty Purple’s career sort of plateaued at a place and sort of hit a dead end, basically because of some bad management decisions, unfortunately, that really didn’t have to do with the band. 

We were sort of passed around amongst different scenes as well. Like, we didn’t really fit in the jam scene, but we got thrown there a lot of the time because we definitely didn’t fit with the hard rock scene or the metal scene or anything like that. We always just sounded very original, so it was hard for the record exec guys to put us into a category. We kind of forged our own mission and went out and built an underground following on our own. You know, living in an RV, 200 shows a year and barely, barely staying at home ever. 

Rockmommy: That is wild because when you look at the rest of your history, you got married at what seems like a very young age to your wife Jesse. 

Steve Rodgers: Yeah, I did. I threw myself full-fledged, you know, headfirst into my music career when I was 15 years old and literally spent the next 10 to 12 years before I got married, like either on the road or in pursuit of it when we weren’t on the road every single day. I had tunnel vision, and I’ve always been very, very motivated. But back then, I sort of threw all of myself into the one thing and didn’t allow for real relationships to bloom. 

So I spent my 20s as a bit of an emotional wreck, just trying to go and play every stage I possibly could. And then, you know, in my late 20s, I got married and then, all of a sudden, here I was opening music venues. By the time I was 28 years old, I opened The Space [nightclub].

Rockmommy: So you had your band, you had your solo career. And I know you opening music venues sort of aligns with you becoming a parent. 

Steve: It all happened right at the same time. So within a six-month period, I opened a music venue, made a full-length Mighty Purple album, had a baby, bought a house, and went on tour. 

Rockmommy: Can you talk about how and why you expanded your live-music footprint? 

Steve Rodgers:  When I was 17, I moved out of my mom’s house and ended up moving into what was affectionately called ‘The space’— which was a tiny little warehouse under the bridge on, you know, in Hamden [Connecticut] along the old railroad tracks and I lived sort of up in the corner closet of what was then a record label upstairs and downstairs was a rehearsal room where my band practiced and I sort of worked for the record label so I could have a free closet for rent or whatever. And I ended up living there for 10 years until I got married. 

Through Mighty Purple growth in the community, people just affectionately called the Mighty Purple Practice space ‘The Space.’ And I started putting on open mics there. And when some of the bands that I would meet out on tour would need a show in Connecticut, they were relatively unheard of, I’d put on house shows … in that space. 

And after years of doing that and open mic every week, it became apparent that this is getting to be bigger than what The Space can handle because it wasn’t very big. And eventually, about a year and a half after I got married, we got an eviction notice. And I remember I was really bummed out and… I didn’t have a cell phone at the time. It was 2002 or something. And I walked across the street to the nearest pay phone, believe it or not. And the nearest pay phone was in an almost abandoned industrial plaza on Treadwell Street in Hamden. And there was a building right there that said, ‘for rent.’ And literally within 72 hours, I had a lease signed on that building, which lasted for the next 15 years of my life. I was very impulsive. 

Rockmommy: That’s crazy. You’re like, ‘I’ll figure it out later.’

Steve Rodgers: I was like, ‘I need a practice space.’ I didn’t even think, ‘well, it’s gonna cost 10 times the amount.’ I didn’t think, ‘I might need to go get permits.’ I didn’t think about any of that stuff. Just, ‘we must have a space to practice so we can keep going on tour.’

So The Space [on Treadwell Street] opened in 2003 and, by 2004, there were lines out the door every weekend to come see bands. I was really only running shows on Friday, Saturday, maybe a Thursday here or there or Sunday afternoon matinee. We had Tuesday open mic nights, but the rest of the nights, it was it was closed and we’d use the various rooms and main room as band practice space.

And those are the nights when I would let the bands in and go work on my own visual art at home. In 2008, when the economy crashed, the lines out the door got smaller and smaller and smaller because parents didn’t have that $20 to give their kids to go to The Space for free high school babysitting, for lack of a better term. We were kind of in danger of going out of business right then and there in 2008, 2009, but I never gave up. 

I just got inventive and we started doing things in conjunction with the town, after-school programs where we do songwriting and recording workshops for kids … And we had several spaces that I turned into sub-lease spaces for, you know, like a photographer who focused a lot on music and fashion and then a recording studio space that we leased out. So with all the little parts put together, it was able to keep right afloat just above the water. And it rebuilt from there when things started rebuilding in the economy. But then, I had really identified that a lot of the kids that grew up hanging out at The Space and their bands had aged out of all-ages venues. And that’s when my wheels started turning about, you know, providing an over-21 space.

Rockmommy: You can’t just add a bar, like there’s legal elements, licenses, the whole thing, right?

Steve Rodgers: I got really good at the planning and zoning process and the fire permits and the building-permit process. I mean, I went through that whole process in my business four times. It was kind of like a joke. It would get to the point where I’d walk into the building official’s office and they’d be like, ‘man, here he comes again. What are you doing now, Steve?’ 

Rockmommy: Around 2017, 2018, a lot of things started happening at once that weren’t good. That kind of changed your trajectory a bit. Your health was a big motivator. Can we talk about that?

Steve Rodgers: Having tunnel vision for a project that you’re doing, you know, can become all-encompassing in life. And I sort of found myself coping with the self-inflicted stress of what I was doing with all my projects. I began, without realizing it, self-medicating with alcohol. 

I’d never really been a drinker in my early Mighty Purple days and through The Space days. It was an alcohol-free venue. And I was adamant about it. I’d go and bust kids in the parking lot. I’d bust parents in the parking lot for tailgating before their kids go on, because they couldn’t drink there. And so when I opened the other [21+] place, the whole craft beer culture was exploding at the time. 

I got really into the craft beer culture and without realizing it, I became dependent on alcohol. And that really sort of snuck into my life without knowing it. 

It became not only a crutch, but a real disability for me at a point. And I had a whole bunch of outside factors and things that were really difficult to deal with, with the business parts of The Space. It didn’t feel good anymore … I was like, ‘my gosh, this was my dream and here I am inside of it.’ And ‘I feel like I’ve lost complete control of it’ … there were just signs pointing to go towards the end of it all. It depressed me so much because I put 15 years of my whole soul into it. But now I look back at that and say … that was basically the crux and the start to the most beautiful parts of my life.

Rockmommy: You had to hit bottom to go to start going up. You didn’t go up immediately.

Steve Rodgers: Being in the bar music venue environment six or seven nights a week for years also took a huge toll on my voice. I ended up getting polyps on my vocal cords and having to go through a year and a half of therapy and then eventual surgery. I’d also completely lost time to focus on my own music. I wasn’t able to have any real relationships. I [couldn’t] talk to people for three or four minutes at The Space before somebody would come to me and be like, ‘hey Steve, we’re out of chicken in the kitchen.’

Rockmommy: Let’s talk about that. How did your relationship with your wife and children change after you left The Spaces? And how did you find your new career as a producer?

Steve Rodgers: It took me a couple years to figure out what the heck I was going to do. I was shell shocked, like, ‘oh my gosh, I just put 15 years into something that I have like zero to show for. And almost no music career as well.’ From basically early 2018 until mid 2019, I stayed home and I took on working at an apprenticeship rebuilding electric mechanical pianos with my good friend Fred DeLeon, restoring Fender Rhodes and Whirlitzers and learning all about that. And that was a nice, peaceful job because I could sort of like… scrape glue off of old piano keys all day and I wasn’t wielding 35 million phone calls. And I started playing guitar again. I took my guitars out from under my bed. 

I was at this point where I was like, ‘my goodness, I don’t even know if I can do this anymore?’ For that first year after the Spaces, I felt very like, ‘what am I going to do?’ I also couldn’t sing. There were a couple of months where I actually couldn’t even speak after surgery, where I didn’t even know if I was going to have a voice back. 

Rockmommy: You gotta feed your children.

Steve Rodgers: Exactly. So my wife, a wonderful and supportive woman, basically just gave me the grace to sort of create art. I still had a music director job at a church at the time. But I also still really struggled with alcohol in the couple of years after [leaving] The Spaces. It just became such a part of my life to have a few beers at the end of the night … It took me a couple more years to get away from that. 

Right before the pandemic, I’d had the opportunity to go to Honduras a couple of times as well, and faith was re-instilled there. I went to work at a place called Children’s Rescue Mission and it was through a church kind of thing … 

And then the pandemic hit, the guitars came out from under the bed and all I did was write and write …  and create and create and create. That’s when I also started building all my miniatures and really selling a lot of artwork. I did a giant installation for the Nationals’ ballpark in DC and then a smaller one for Beardsley Zoo in Connecticut around that time. I played more backyards during the pandemic than I have in my entire rest of my career. 

I got let go from a job that I’d been at for 20 years as a music director at a church [a second job while running The Spaces].  With the severance that I got from that job, I ended up basically being able to sit and record for the next year. So I gave myself that challenge to write and record a song a week for a year. I knew nothing. I had no recording gear except for an interface, laptop and a crappy microphone. And obviously I still have a dozen guitars that I’ve had since I was a young guy.

Rockmommy: I remember you releasing Speck on a Clover in 2022 or 2023?

Steve Rodgers: It ended up coming out in 2022, but those, you know, most of those songs I had written between the start of the pandemic and middle of 2021 … And then I sort of started to really hone my skills a bit more in the studio. 

Rockmommy: It’s a very well-produced record, by the way. 

Steve Rodgers: Yeah, had some help from the back end from my friend Sam Carlson. Sam basically helped me mix it and talked a lot along the way too. And he’s just a gem of a human being. He runs Sans Serif Studios in New Haven. He’s a great, great dude. I learned a lot from him. I brought Sam a mess and he cleaned it up a whole lot. And basically, that was the first time I’d ever recorded on my own. I’d been in studios my whole life and just never had actually hit the record button or knew much about the recording process at all. When I first started recording that album, I was like, ‘cool, I can put like a million instruments on this.’ I was just experimenting and trying everything. That record, I’m like, ‘man, Steve, you made some bad choices.’ 

Rockmommy: So Tiny Bunker Studios was born. I remember you put it out there casually on social media. And now you’re busy like 24 hours a day. You’re always in the session.

Steve Rodgers: Five to seven days a week for sure.

Rockmommy: It seems like a lot of your faith has carried you to this point. Can you tell us about how that sort of changed and evolved? 

Steve Rodgers: Yeah, I mean, going to church gives you as much faith as going into a garage makes you a car. You can go to church and never receive good things into your heart. You have to be open to it. I will say that I have been a bit more distant from the current American Christian culture because I don’t align with some of the political bent. I’ve been really blessed actually in the last year to have been able to serve at a couple of different very open-minded churches. 

Rockmommy: You have a new album coming out, hopefully later this year. Can you tell us about it? 

Steve Rodgers: It’s going to be rolling out over the course of this year. The album officially is going to come out a bit later this year through Bigger Beast Records, the music that I have now, I feel like is really cohesive, whereas the last record Speck on a Clover was more of an art piece. 

And now, you know, I’ve sort of like homed in on what my new voice sounds like. My voice changed a whole lot after having vocal cord surgery. And it was and I was still trying to sing in my old way. And my voice didn’t work like that anymore, like the way I used to sing in Mighty Purple. I can still get there sometimes. But, you know, where my voice sits comfortably and naturally is down an octave from those old days.