Michael McDonald sounds both surprised and relieved to be back with the Doobie Brothers, this time not just as a nostalgia act but with Walk This Road, their first studio album together in over four decades. “It was just going to be a 50th anniversary tour and that would’ve been it,” he shrugs. “Here we are four or five years later still working. No one’s more surprised than us.”
The new album wasn’t part of some grand plan, which, according to McDonald, is how the Doobies operate best: “We just kind of throw stuff against the wall and it decides for us what’s going to fly.” Among the things thrown? An accordion. Yes, McDonald breaks out the squeezebox on Tom Johnston’s “New Orleans.” “That thrilled me to no end,” he beams. “Accordion and organ are two things I always thought, if you didn’t start playing when you were five, you had no business trying at 70.”
But try he did. And then some. Despite what he calls “a creeping senility,” McDonald is playing more instruments, writing more songs, and—by his own surprised admission—having more fun. “With my band, if I needed an organ player, I’d get someone who’s great at it. In the Doobies, I find myself playing things I never would’ve played live.”
Walk This Road marks McDonald’s first Doobies record since 1980’s One Step Closer, and the first with Tom Johnston since 1976’s Takin’ It to the Streets. For fans, it’s not just a reunion—it’s a rebalancing. “People credit or blame me with changing the band,” he says. “But they were always ready to change themselves. I was just another page in the book.”
That book includes a tracklist with soul legend Mavis Staples, whom McDonald calls “the first lady of American consciousness.” Her feature on the title track lifted the album from good to gospel. “The rest of us were just trying to keep up,” he laughs. “She killed it.” And while he insists the band didn’t set out to make a socially conscious record, the themes found them anyway. “If this album has a message, it was totally by accident—or subconscious,” he says. “We’ve never been married to the idea that an album needs a theme or moral.”
That said, McDonald doesn’t shy from waxing philosophical. He talks about unity, the illusion of disenfranchisement, and our collective failure to share the sandbox. “We’re not here to take anything away from each other. That’s a fallacy that pins us to the ground more than anything else.”
Still, don’t mistake him for a preacher. He’s perfectly comfortable slipping into tales of forgetting hearing aids on the bus or losing track of conversations mid-sentence. “What’s a crisis today? Trying to remember the name of that actor in that movie you forgot why you brought up in the first place.”
Yet once the Doobies hit the stage, the years vanish. “Something magical happens,” he says. “All the aches and pains, the forgetfulness, it all disappears. We all fall into the moment the same way we did when we were in our twenties.”
And while McDonald’s not a “super prolific” songwriter—his words, not ours—he’s quick to point out that deadlines are a powerful muse. “There are some songs I’ve been writing for five years,” he admits. “Only the next album will ever make me finish them.”
As for that HBO Yacht Rock documentary that unintentionally helped tee up the album rollout? “I did watch it. Some guys in the band aren’t thrilled with that moniker,” he says, grinning. “But I’ve always thought it was funny. And if Yacht Rock is Steely Dan, Toto, the Doobie Brothers, the Eagles? I’m all for it. It’s not like they’re throwing me in with the Archies.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
