On your blog you indicated that you thought you would be working up some songs with Zach Gill, who’s opening your west coast dates.
Yup. Already happened, talking about rehearsing, that’s what we did yesterday. We worked on an arrangement of “A Day In The Life” and some other stuff. We did it for the first time last night and it went really well, so we’re going to keep adding songs as we go though the tour.
I’m definitely going to learn a lot on this tour just by watching Zach perform. I didn’t know that he such a good entertainer. I’ve seen him perform with ALO but when he’s out by himself, he started out with piano and then he did an MGMT song on accordion and then he came out with my band for three or four songs. He’s really natural and he can talk to the audience without sounding cliché. Whenever I talk to the audience I’m all nervous and I don’t know what to say (laughs).
Your new disc Then There’s Now offers a variety of flavors. Was this a conscious decision to cover a broad palette and did you think about at all about reining things in?
Well you’re talking to a guy from String Cheese… [laughs] For better or for worse we’re not afraid of jumping between styles, and I kind of just let it speak for itself. I didn’t really try to rein in anything. I did have an overall vibe of “Okay, it’s going to have some funk, some G Love, Beckish sort of stuff going on here…” That’s probably the stuff that drove me to start this disc. Then in the studio we were inventing things like “All I Need” and certain little snippets came out. So I knew I wanted to have a well-rounded record as far as keeping the interest of the listener’s ear.
How does the music on this disc relate to some of your other projects? Did some of these songs emerge from your collaboration with Speech and DJ Logic?
There’s a big relationship. These songs were all written in the past two years for the most part. In those two years I’ve been influenced by what’s happening musically in all the different projects I’ve been going out with like soleside [which also featured Speech and Logic] and Fiery Furnaces. I was attracted to what Speech was doing in Arrested Development and what Logic has been doing. Some of the more hip hop driven stuff like “All Inside” is from that era with soleside.
In terms of the Fiery Furnaces, how did that gig come about?
I went to my manager and said, “I want to step outside the jam scene in this next two years or three years or whatever String Cheese decides to take off.” So I went to him and he knew Fiery Furnaces which is an indie rock band out of New York. Their music, I wouldn’t say is 180 degrees from mine but maybe it’s 165 degrees. It was only 10 days with them but it was a great experience to learn all their music. It’s still in my brain.
Let’s talk a bit more about some of the material on Then There’s Now. “Way That It Goes” is a collaboration your wife.
I had written the music and I wasn’t sure what the chorus would be. I wanted to talk about the experience of a bystander walking through a freaky city. My wife spent a lot of time in Seattle and I spent the last 15 years in Boulder ,so we made a list of the freakiest thing things we’ve seen. Then I finally figured out that the chorus was going to be, “Oh that’s the way it goes…” That’s how our life is right here.
“Too Young” offers a catchy groove and may be the closest to what String Cheese fans might have expected from you on the recording.
It’s funny, that song almost didn’t make it on the CD, although that’s one I’d imagine we’ll play with String Cheese. It’s also a song that I’ll play over the next few weeks because it’s very much in the singer-songwriter mode where you have your verses and your chorus and it comes back out. But when I was trying to figure out what made sense for the whole CD, I wasn’t sure whether to put it on but I’m very glad I did. I think that’s what people would expect of me as an artist, and it’s become a lot of fun to play.
“I’m too young to be getting old,” that’s just one of those songs where you look in the mirror, you’ve been on tour for 15 years and just feeling that experience of going through life. I’m a new dad now which is an incredible experience and now I’m forty one. Forty one…[Laughs]
Since you mentioned becoming a dad and there are images of your daughter in the liner notes, I’d be interested to hear what extent you feel that experience is reflected in Then There’s Now.
I think a lot of this stuff came out of her birth, her joining my life and my family. “Don’t Wake Me,” the song with Dar Williams was written between the hours of 2 AM and 6:30 AM when I was holding my child and giving her a bottle. I’m kind of awake but I’m also kind of in a fog and it’s a beautiful moment. Don’t wake me because it’s a great moment.
There are also a lot of tunes that didn’t make the disc because they could be an entire children’s album alone.
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