JJ:: Do you put live drums behind this at any point?

SA:: There are no live drums…

JJ:: On this track or on the whole album?

SA:: Probably not on the whole album.

JJ:: Oh, wow. That’s a pretty different approach. How has that been changing your mindset towards playing?

SA:: I don’t know if I could ever play these beats. Dribble is about nine or ten minutes along at this point in the middle of the jam, where we are. I was just thinking if we’re gonna play this live, all the cool things that are in this jam that everybody could play. One of the things that Jon dreamed up when we first came up with Dribble… you know the part after the intro where it goes [sings some stuff] where it goes from four to three and then in?

JJ:: Yeah.

SA:: That was just a cop-out for me because the original plan was going to be one beat over four, then two beats over four, then three over four, then four over four, then five, then six, then seven, then eight over four. I couldn’t play that. You can’t really tap three over four let alone seven over eight… but, we could do that with the computer. I programmed it all out. It sounds ridiculous. We were just talking about whether or not I could actually play that. A lot of things are like that.

JJ:: So, if you can’t consciously or actively reproduce this stuff how do you see it as being connected to the stuff you do live?

SA:: Well, even if I can’t play it exactly, it’s certainly going to influence the way I play live. As far as just me sitting with the drums, when I sat down and was coming up drums for Dribble, these are things that I’d like to hear Dribble over – like a different style of Dribble – so I’ll be able to approximate some of the things. Like, I just won’t be able to play mad 32nd notes every other bar. I’ll get pretty close. (laughs)

It was that way after “Uncivilized Area”. The jams we did on “Uncivilized Area” we really liked. A lot of those things ended up in the songs [after that].

JJ:: What’s a typical Biscuits’ rehearsal like? How do you practice improvisation?

SA:: We’ve had exercises that we do, and still sorta do sometimes. One of the things we do – and I don’t know if people know – is that our setlists will be a song into the end of another song into the beginning of another song or a song backwards. Or we’ll go from one song into the end of another song into the beginning and then jam out the beginning and go into the beginning of another tune.

To get that freedom so that we feel comfortable going in and out of that, there are just simple things that we have to do: rhythmic shifts: the “all the 1s” jam where you shift rhythms. We’ll all get to the point, where we’re in four, and I’ll start hitting one. [Sings it.] And Jon will play triplets over those ones and then I’ll come around and the band will come around in order and then we’ll be in triplets. That sort of gets us in range. We sort of feel that. That’s one way we can go from one place in four to another place in three.

We have all these harmonic and melodic shifts, too, called “drop jams” and “majorizing” and “minorizing” jams — techniques to get us in and out of keys and in and out of harmonies and how to get to chord changes that build and how to get to chord changes that stick on something so that it gets really trancey. If we’re in a rock chord progression and we pick a chord to stick on, and everybody can then – after we’ve done that for a while – feel where we should stay on that and not be in changes anymore and it just starts revolving. That’s sort of like a “ball” jam where we get locked up in this rhythmic and harmonic ball and, out of the changes into other changes, and then we’re rotating like crazy around in that, and then we shoot out of that and into another set of changes, or into another song, or into another key.

We used to work on that in practice all that time. A lot of times in practice, we’ll learn. A fun thing to do in practice is to learn a new song. We’ll learn new songs. Sometimes, we’ll play a set — play song into song. We’ll do transitions in practice, but we try never to do the transitions that we’re going to do at a show in practice. We almost never say “wow, that transition was really cool in practice, let’s do that one tonight”.

JJ:: How often do you talk about the shows after they happen?

SA:: We used to talk about them pretty relentlessly. Like, in set break, we’d talk about them. We’d talk about the first set. If the first set wasn’t going well, we’d get back there and either happily or unhappily figure out why it wasn’t working. Then we just sort of realized that you have to give things some time before talking about them, in order to be calm about them — out of the moment before you really realize what was going on.

We pretty much talk about the shows when we’re on tour. We get the tapes pretty much right away and we listen to that night’s show in the RV or we listen to it the next night. We’re pretty much on top of what we’re doing. It’s pretty much the only way to know what’s going on with the shows.

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