JAMBANDS.COM: Speaking of the studio, how do you guys go about writing songs? I know that you recently asked Nick [Caudle] for some live recordings that he has. What’s your approach when you get into the studio?
WR: It varies completely. Sometimes we have stuff that we’ve been playing live, and over the course of several months, the fat gets cut off and what really seems to work, and how the audience respond, and what we keep and what we remember and what we keep coming back to — that ends up being a song. Sometimes we go into the studio with that and we know our parts and it’s like “boom!” Other times, we’ve got some ideas, we’ve got these colors we want to put together, we’ve all got parts, but it’s not worked out and we go, “If it sounds like that then this would be cool.” We definitely don’t have a formula and we’re always exploring new ways. Now we’ve got all these live tapes, and we’re seeing that there’s this whole year of live recordings, this whole treasure chest of melodies that you just completely forget. We listen to it and we’re like, “Wow, that could really be a song.” That might definitely be a new way for us to get material. It was improvised, but because the crowd was dancing or it was just the right mood, we go back to it.
MP: I think we really trust the stuff that we came up with spontaneously. There are also things that we construct completely in the studio, but we appreciate a lot of the stuff that just came out at that moment. Obviously we still have to work on it and make it into something, but the initial idea is kind of cool. It’s nice to go back and find some of those things that we had forgotten completely . . . but they happen for a reason.
JAMBANDS.COM: The three untitled tracks on the new album — I know y’all have played #2 and #5 since the album came out. Was that a situation where you went back and listened to the tapes and decided we like that, let’s work on it? Or was it something that just kind of got carried over from show to show?
MP: If we had decided to take those examples and put them on a record that we did in the studio, we would have refined them more, but since that already came out on the live album, we probably won’t mold those things into songs. They’re already on that album the way they are, so we just play them.
JAMBANDS.COM: . . . more of a theme than a song. . .
MP: Yeah. Considering they’re already on the album, I don’t think we wanna take those two ideas and make them into songs. We’d rather come up with different things. There are things that we play live that, when we go back in the studio and listen to them, we’ll put a couple ideas together and we’ll change it a lot more. But because [those two songs] are already on that album, we never spent time changing and refining those ideas.
JAMBANDS.COM: I posted a message on your message board asking people to submit questions. A couple of people were curious to know how you all felt about this new “movement,” these new jambands that are coming out — Sector 9, the Disco Biscuits, the New Deal, and you guys. People just want to know how you feel about that. Is it a movement? Do you guys feel a sense of community with the rest of the bands? How does this whole new group of bands fit together?
MP: Well, I definitely think we’re coming from different places, completely different places. I don’t know if it’s a fact, but I feel like it. From what I see and what I hear, we’re coming from completely different places.
JAMBANDS.COM: I think a lot of people see the connection in the electronic. Everyone seems to be bringing in this aspect of electronic music. You guys bring it in with your repetition.
MP: But we don’t really have any electronic [elements].
JAMBANDS.COM: Right. Some of the other bands bring in samplers or DJs. You guys have played with DJs, and I think that that’s probably where most people see the connection. Playing a festival like Camp Bisco, did you guys feel like there was a movement?
MP: I don’t personally feel part of a movement. You don’t see or hear anything like that or about that here in Baltimore. There’s no “jamband” scene around Baltimore. I don’t think we live our lives as that kind of band. But we also go into other situations, a rave or something and we feel like we’re visiting that. We certainly don’t feel like we’re part of a rave scene or anything like that, but we’re happy to be able to play to those people, knowing that they’re receptive. The same goes for the jam-band kind of thing: we’re happy to be received there and we like going and seeing those other bands and hanging out with them. But we always come back here and it’s something completely different. I don’t think we probably listen to a lot of the same kinds of music. We’ll go other places and it’ll be more of a kind of rock thing and we feel like we’re visiting. It’s not like we’re wanderers with no home, but I don’t think that we feel part of that scene all the time. When we go to those situations and events, it’s definitely nice to be a part of that and we feel that the people who like them like us. It’s a good feeling.
WR: I agree. I don’t think I’ve heard enough of any other bands that are considered in this movement to really comment on them. I’ve heard some of them live, but I haven’t listened to a lot of their recordings. We’re doing more electronic concept stuff: it’s more conceptual in its repetition. We also borrow from the minimalists — Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and all that kind of stuff. Our whole lives, growing up musically, we’ve been listening to classical. In the jazz [we listen to], there’s Coltrane doing his eastern stuff, more trancey, repetitive stuff. I think our avenue into that electronic-type sound is repetition, rather than we just added a synth or something like that. I guess it’s always been there, the hippie scene with the trance movement. But the audience has become more open to different timbres and sounds and colors. We’re a little harder-edged and not as flowy. Our shows don’t stay at a similar tempo the whole time. We change tempos drastically, up and down, from real slow trip-hop, to jungle and breakbeats. Obviously, with any band there’s gonna be lots of specific ways we’re different, but there is something going on. It’s notable or people wouldn’t be seeing the connection. I do think there’s a kind of movement. All the bands that are out there right now wouldn’t be able to do what they’re doing if certain bands hadn’t come before. For instance, Medeski, Martin and Wood opened a lot of doors, sonically, in terms of what we can do on stage. There were a lot of places where we’d start doing this sort of hard stuff and people would be just like, “Can you play ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’?” But certain bands have paved the way and people’s ears are getting more open to sounds; we’re just taking advantage of it. If people can hear this distorted scream and growling, as soon as they can deal with that, we’ll do something worse.
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