Face-to-Face with Ari Gold: Pt. One...

As i mentioned a few days ago, had a nice breakfast interview this week with Ari Gold. No, not the agent on "Entourage" played by Jeremy Piven. This is Ari Gold, the talented and sexy singer-songwriter whose latest CD, "Transport Systems," will be released Oct.. 2. His music can best be described as "political pop" and Gold has never shied away from comes from the perspective of an openly gay man.
In this first part of our conversation, we talked about the new CD, his third, which includes a collaboration with Dave Koz ("Love Wasn't Built In A Day") as well as the song "Human" withy guest-rapper Mr. Man.
Explains Gold: "Transport Systems" is really all about we're everywhere now but how do we move forward" How do we move to a place where we're not just there to make straight people look better, that's not our only function. We're actually full-fledged, multi-faceted individuals with our own interior lives. How do we move forward in order to accept ourselves better? Most of us didn't grow up feeling it was OK to be gay so I think we internalize a lot of that. How do we learn to love ourselves better and treat each other better? That has to happen before we can expect the outside world to."

Gold was born and raised in a Jewish Orthodox household in the Bronx and became a child performer with credits that included the lead role on the CBS children's recording "Pot Belly Bear: Songs and Stories." As a child vocalist, he sung over 400 jingles and even sung with Diana Ross on her "Swept Away" album.
But once he began to come out of the closet as a teenager, his sexuality naturally impacted his work.
"I had my first demo when I was 12 and been writing songs since I was 14 and I always wrote about what was going on in my life, my personal experience," Gold says. "So as soon as i came out of the closet, I was very passionate about it. Once I came out to my family and in college, I was very proud and I wrote my parents and my brothers an 18-page coming out letter, sat them all down, handed them copies and read this out loud to them and basically held them accountable for their own homophobia but I did it in a nice way. They made me feel like it was not OK to be gay. But at the end of the letter, we all started to cry and my dad said, 'The only reason we're crying is because of all the pain we caused you. And after that, it was a journey. I knew they loved me. Unfortunately, not all parents are like my parents. I just wrote back a fan the other day telling them, 'You know, sometimes it just takes time.'"
It's been a challenge trying to gain a commercial foothold as a gay artist even when your music is embraced by the critics: "I hate to say it, but sometimes the gay papers and magazines, we put a lot of straight people on the cover. You don't see black culture magazines putting white people on their cover. It can start with us...With my last album, I was really trying to figure out,'Where do I fit in as a gay man in this world? As a gay artist? As an out artist? Where do we fit in because we were getting a lot of visibility and as a people we were no longer in the closet.""
Gold feels the time is right to be openly gay and to record and perform songs with gay themes. He's grateful to those artists who he feels helped pave the way: "All the artists like George Michael and Elton John and K.D. Lang and Melissa Etheridge, all those artists who came out of the closet mid-career or after they were already successful, all of those artists paved the way for someone like myself to be out at the beginning of my career. There's no reason today why people need to be coy or vague or closeted."
Ari, pictured here with me after breakfast at Kokomo at the LA Farmer's Market, also talked about using his sexuality to gain attention like posing for magazine covers without a shirt etc. So check back Friday for part 2 of our conversation.