Jon Foreman Interview: Switchfoot’s Buddy Guy Collaboration Delivers a ‘Full-Circle Moment’

The first time Jon Foreman attended a Buddy Guy concert, he was a teenager mostly interested in punk rock who only knew a handful of blues songs and artists. But watching the Chicago legend onstage—a show at which B.B. King also performed—changed something for Foreman, who went on to launch Switchfoot as the alternative rock group’s lead singer and guitarist.

“I felt like I was given a doorway to an entirely different universe of music, and I loved every moment,” Foreman said during a recent interview with Blues Rock Review. He was struck by the guitarists’ “eloquence,” and remembered how their music “breathed in a way that felt truly organic and refreshing and beautiful.”

“For the next few months, all I wanted to listen to and all I wanted to play was B.B. King and Buddy Guy,” he said.

Fast forward to February of this year, when the Grammy Award-winning band released “Last Man Standing,” a song on which Guy sang and played. Watching the pieces come together was a true “full-circle moment” for Foreman, who described Guy as “the blues legend that taught me how to play the guitar” in a press release before the song launched.

The idea for the collaboration emerged at one of Guy’s shows last year as the “Dare You to Move” singer was chatting with his friend—and Guy’s drummer—Tom Hambridge. When Hambridge suggested they write a song for the blues great, Foreman embraced the project immediately.

“That night, I remember I just picked up the guitar, and most of the song came out in probably less than five minutes, because I felt like I was just channeling what I had seen,” Foreman said while calling in from a tour stop in Atlanta on a recent Sunday afternoon. “It was almost like an electrical conduit. Buddy had given me so much inspiration—not just that night, but every time I’ve seen him.”

Foreman has a special fondness for songs “that don’t have my fingerprints on them, where they feel like they’re a gift from somewhere else,” he explained. “This song certainly felt like that.”

The title is a nod to Guy’s storied history within the genre. “I just kept thinking, ‘Here is this legend, this blues icon, who’s the last man standing. What would I want to hear him sing? What would that song sound like?’” Foreman recalled.

Switchfoot began recording the song the day after Foreman wrote it, and received “all positive” feedback from Guy and his team. Guy sent along his vocal and guitar contributions for the song, which Switchfoot and Hambridge produced, a few months later.

Looking back on the completed project, Foreman said the “biggest thing” for him was to create a song “that would be sufficient and feel worthy of what [Guy had] given me over the years.”

“It was such a gift to think that this man who’s given me so much inspiration over the years, that I was able to give him something that he felt like he wanted to sing,” he added.

Switchfoot has played the song while on the road a few times since its release on Feb. 21. Seeing audiences react to the band’s contribution to “an iconic American genre” has been “so fun,” Foreman said, adding that the song itself is “great” to perform live. The collaboration is also representative of the kind of music Foreman enjoys most.

“The thing that I appreciated about the way that Buddy makes music—and the way we try and make music, too—is, you put everybody in a room together, and the imperfections, the humanity, the things that are early, late, flat, sharp—those are the things that I have grown to love more than the perfected stuff,” he said. “That’s the takeaway that I’ll take from this, is just a reminder that what I love most about music is not its perfections, but its idiosyncratic humanity.”

While Guy was at “the very top of the list” of blues artists Foreman wanted to work with, he’s open to other collaborations like this in the future. For now, Guy has “reinvigorated” Foreman’s love for the electric guitar and influenced Switchfoot’s next album, which Foreman said might come out later this year.

Switchfoot’s forthcoming album “feels like it is an attempt to pay homage to the electric guitar,” Foreman said. “And hopefully it has gained some inspiration from Buddy Guy along the way.”