JJ: How has your own songwriting changed over the years? How was writing That Country Tune different from writing, say, The Faker?
RD: Actually, with That Country Tune, it’s very similar to the way I write songs now. One of the early songs that I still feel comfortable singing the song… I don’t feel too embarrassed about it. Some stuff, like Long Island Girls… it was a different time. I was just learning how to play at that point. I mean, I’m still learning. I wrote a lot of tunes like Long Island Girls and Dr. Graffenburg when I’d only been playing bass for, like, two years. I would first sit down and try to come up with a bassline that’s, now, some simple thing but, at that point, I had to figure out where my fingers went. And I had to practice singing… And you come up with some goofy lyrics and stuff. I still like them, because of what they are. My songwriting now, I really try to work on the metaphorical implications of the end of the phrase and the literal translation… I always try to think through everything. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s not. It’s just my style, I guess.
JJ: You guys are also notoriously picky about what songs you end up keeping in the rotation and what songs you end up ditching. What makes you kill a song and, sort of conversely, what makes you bring a song back?
RD: Different things make us kill a song. Sometimes, we realize a song just isn’t any good. Sometimes we just don’t… Like, we have a tune that Al wrote called So Long which we really like, but also doesn’t seem to be much of a crowd pleaser but we haven’t gotten a chance to really work on it, playing it live. It sort of has a middle eastern feel. It’s a long tune that’s slow. We enjoy playing it. It seems like it’s gone… but it’s not, because we keep working on trying to get the parts exactly the way we want. There are other tunes. Like, Canned Pastries, which we played and then… I don’t even remember the reason we stopped playing it. When we were like “hey, let’s bring some songs back” and we listened to a tape of old tunes, we’re like “man, that tune sucks… we’re not bringing that back”. We realized why it was dropped in the first place. It’s just stupid, you know? There’s not enough time to play everything… sometimes you write a song and it’s sort of whimsical and you don’t really think of the implications of it. You know that tune Magic Hat? Me and Al wrote that together one time in the back of the RV and it made us laugh. We tried playing it and realized the song was just “ehhh…”
JJ: What’s the editing process like? You played Waiting For The Punchline in its original form and it sort of went away for a while, and then you brought it back with a lot of revision…
RD: Al did that. I don’t know… I think that happened because sometimes when you go to record for an album and we play the tune and we listen to it really carefully, we discover that it doesn’t really translate to an album very well. And then [in this case], Al really wants to record it, so he goes back and takes out the part that just doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s not just him… it could be a comment that I make, like “why do we have to do that in the song” and then we argue about it. It works both ways. It’s just us being really picky about the parts that are in the song. Sometimes we write songs that have too many parts. Like “why do we need all that, it doesn’t really go anywhere…”
JJ: What’s a typical moe. rehearsal like?
RD: There’s not really a typical one. (Eddie Derhak begins to make noise in the background.) Hey, Eddie, what’re you sayin’? He’s making all these crazy noises.
JJ: He’s answering the question: A whole lotta cryin’.
RD: (laughs) Yeah. It’s sort of like a hurry-up-and-wait situation. You get there and you get all motivated to do something, and you start playing, and it’s like you haven’t seen each other for four weeks or five weeks. It takes a while… (Eddie gurgles again). It’s never typical. Sometimes you really connect and you get going. Like, these last rehearsals were all different because we had to go through every single tune. And the rehearsals before that were working on tunes. And everyone’s patience was pretty low, and tolerance was pretty low, so there was lots of arguing about stuff. But we actually got things done.
JJ: Here’s the big question of the month: what’s up with y’all and Sony?
RD: I mean, I don’t really care… Basically, we got dropped. We got dropped early, due to our request. We’re label-free. Pretty nice, actually. [Sony] gave us a lot of a money, that’s about it.
JJ: Did they effect what you were doing outside of the studio at all?
RD: You mean touring-wise?
JJ: Anything. Business-wise…
RD: I think they effected me artistically outside the studio. I wasn’t really able to… It’s hard to get motivated about what you’re doing when you have a sort of bodanker tying you down. And it’s kind of nice to be free. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t want to sign another record deal with somebody else. I would only do it if it was right. It was a good learning experience. We’d never been involved with anything like that before. Just to survive as a band, 99% of the time you need a major label to work… Ani DiFranco would tell you differently. It’s a lot easier to afford stuff when all you have is just you and your acoustic guitar…
JJ: What do you guys plan on doing now that you’re liberated?
RD: We’re recording. After the gig on Saturday [April 10] in Manhattan [at the Hammerstein Ballroom] we’re gonna go into the studio and we’re gonna lay down about four or five tunes. We’re gonna keep touring and go into the studio every couple months, turn out a few more tunes. If we don’t sign another deal we’ll have that for our own album and put that out next fall, or next spring.
JJ: Distributed through yourselves?
RD: We have our own record company with major distribution, Fatboy Records. That’s what “Headseed”‘s on now. If we don’t sign another deal, whatever tunes we feel comfortable with that we’ve recorded, we’ll put that together as an album and put that out probably.
JJ: What kind of stuff are you looking to record soon? New stuff, old stuff…?
RD: We’ve got about 15 tunes, 18 tunes so far. Something like that, that I wrote down, that we haven’t recorded yet. Some of them are old, like That Country Tune and Seat Of My Pants, which we’ve never recorded. We might get into that. But also have new stuff like Bring It Back Home, The Faker, Blue Eyed Son, Tambourine. We have those tunes. Plus, we’re thinking about doing a couple of covers this time.
JJ: Anything in mind?
RD: Just stuff that we play. We might come up with stuff that we don’t play, too. Maybe we’ll try to record Don’t Fear The Reaper. I don’t know what we’re gonna do, to be honest with you. Actually, we had an idea when we’re on Sony to put an EP of covers.
JJ: Sorta like Primus?
RD: (laughs) Yeah, exactly like that.
JJ: How do you choose a cover? Like, Cajun Moon seemed like a natural choice after I heard you guys play it, but when I first saw it on a setlist I was like “eh? what?”
RD: Basically, I’ve been begging the band for about two years to play it. That’s basically how anything gets done. One of us gets motivated enough to learn the song and we make the other guys learn it. I love J.J. Cale. I thought that would be a good tune to cover. I’m not happy with the way we play it yet. I kind of want to make it an original tune. Like I want it to sound moe… not just like a J.J. Cale cover.
JJ: And the final question for the morning: What’s up with the Electric Popsicle? [Rob’s side band with moe. drummer Vinnie Amico, moe. soundman Steve Young, and Scary Chicken guitarist Tim Bryant.]
RD: (laughs) Nothin’…
JJ: Absolutely nothing?
RD: I’m not saying that I’m not gonna do my own side project, but that was just a hastily thrown together… basically, Wetlands called and said “do you wanna open for Mike Watt?” and I said “what? are you kidding me? Of course!” I had to get some people together to play in the band. I had to make up something good to do. It was fun. I had a blast doing it. I had this guitarist Tim Bryant, a good friend of mine from Buffalo… it was just fun.
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Jesse Jarnow has been busy attempting to synthesize an organic substitute for Tang at his sometime home in Oberlin, Ohio.
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