Neil Giraldo is a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and a five-time Grammy winner who has performed, written, and produced music that has sold more than 45 million records. Neil joins Adam to share his journey and his best lessons and advice. Neil and Adam discuss a wide range of topics: the road to greatness, leadership, creativity, ego, evolution, and much more.
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Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with Neil Giraldo.
Episode Summary
Neil Giraldo got his first guitar because a Catholic elementary school music director turned him away from the school band. His father bought him a guitar instead, hoping Neil could play duets with his own older sister, Priscilla, who played accordion, so the two of them could perform Italian songs for family after church on Sundays. Around the same age, Neil became fixated on Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” playing his parents’ copy over and over until, as he describes it, the idea of writing and producing music took hold in him alongside the idea of playing it. A few years later, his mother’s much younger brother, an uncle only a handful of years older than Neil himself, introduced him to the Kinks, the Yardbirds, and the British Invasion sound that pulled him away from the Italian songs and toward rock.
Neil nearly gave up on music entirely. He was playing cover gigs in Cleveland bar bands just to avoid a day job when someone recommended him for an open guitarist spot with Rick Derringer in New York. He learned everything in Derringer’s catalog before the audition, bought a one way ticket, and got the job. He calls that day the one that changed the direction of his entire life.
It was through that same period working with Derringer that an A&R contact introduced him to Pat Benatar. Neil describes an immediate, almost disorienting recognition the moment they met, and the two formed a band in 1979 and married in 1982, a musical partnership now in its 47th year. He credits part of that longevity to a strict separation of roles: in the studio, he is the demanding, assertive producer, and outside it, he deliberately avoids confrontation and lets Pat’s energy lead.
Neil’s approach to staying relevant across five decades has been to actively avoid repeating himself, mixing genres within the same record so that songs like “We Belong,” “Love Is a Battlefield,” and “Heartbreaker” don’t sound like each other, let alone like whatever else was on the radio that year. He applies a similar philosophy to Three Chord Bourbon, the spirits company he started nine years ago, structuring decisions around group consensus rather than his own preference, on the theory that ego is what kills creative partnerships fastest.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Neil says he can sense sadness or tragedy inside a house or hotel before knowing anything about its history, and how a realtor once tried to hire him to test empty houses.
- Neil credits studying the I Ching, a book a childhood friend brought back from California, with the calm preparation that helped him win an audition Rick Derringer said drew roughly 200 guitarists.
- Neil borrows a test from a line he attributes to Warren Buffett: if a song only makes him think “that’s really good” rather than “oh, hell yeah,” he knows it isn’t a hit.
- Why Neil compares his own songwriting process to a character in the novel Geek Love who could move objects only by “letting them move by themselves.”
- Why fans of the song “Hell Is for Children” still come backstage to tell Neil the song is the reason they finally escaped an abusive situation.
- Neil coaches people differently depending on the person, comparing one approach to a coach bluntly telling an athlete they simply are not putting in enough time to make the team.
About Neil Giraldo
Neil Giraldo is a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and five time Grammy winner who has performed, written, and produced music that has sold more than 45 million records. He grew up in Cleveland and began playing guitar at six, later joining Rick Derringer’s band in New York as a teenager before meeting his future wife and longtime creative partner, Pat Benatar, in 1979; the two married in 1982. Together they have written and recorded hits including “Love Is a Battlefield,” “We Belong,” and “Heartbreaker” across a 47-year musical partnership. Neil is also the founder of Three Chord Bourbon, a spirits company he has run for nine years.
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