Summer Camp 2008, Photo by Luke McCann
How do you feel the three albums function as a set? Do they feel like a stylistic package or three unique statements?
They are different, but at the end of the day it is like a sunset. Every night is different but it’s still a sunset. It’s still us, it’s still our music, it’s still our experience, it is still our way, so there’s no real concept holding it together except writing music to create a nice night of music. All of our songs are structured to have a great deal of openness to allow for improvisation in some way or another. That’s really it, all this music, all these different ways we can do that.
At certain gigs—especially festivals—you deviated from the Radiolarians concept and threw in some classic MMW songs. What was it like revisiting these tunes after a break?
It’s always good for us. Anything any of us does outside of the group, the bottom line is trying to create a certain vibration or energy. There’s so many different ways to do it and so many things that can feed that. For us working on new material, and not going back and playing songs we’ve been playing for fifteen years, that does breathe new life into it. We play them and they feel fresh because they’re surrounded by all this new stuff, so the energy is new. So when you throw something old into the mix, it feels good for us, if not the listener. And it’s been fun because we have actually occasionally thrown in some oldies, and it’s been really fun to play them.
To be honest, we’ve called some old tunes on stage and just trying to remember them was a trip, and kind of fun because it makes us treat them differently. It was great, because a lot of times in general when we start them, there’s a lot of openness and the more you do it over the years certain things becomes habit. With a lot of bands it starts off that way, but for us, we are very conscious of trying to not do that, but it’s inevitable, you landed certain things that work, and you end up doing them again. So by having all this new life around the creative energy of the group, it’s excited everything, including how we interact socially with each other. It’s never been bad, but we’re like family, sometimes you take your family for granted, and it’s really been great that way for us.
From a listener’s perspective it seems that way, and you guys have always been good about interspersing solo projects or different collaborations among the three of you in your normal tours.
Doing all those different projects has kept the fire going. It’s really a necessary thing for us at this point. I mean all along there were so many times we could have done the obvious commercial thing to do. I mean when we made The Dropper it was a turning point for us because we could have gone the obvious route and really catered to the jamband thing and maybe been more successful in a way. But we knew we couldn’t do that. We really had to be honest and ask ourselves what were feeling musically. We decided that we didn’t want to fit the obvious role for MMW.
That being said, now that you have completed The Radiolarians series, moving forward how do you envision your next album?
We are always talking about who we could collaborate with, and the thing is we each have our own ideas about who we’d like to work with. You know, we are a democracy—we got to throw it on the table. We’ve been talking about the next project being some kind of CD/DVD. I don’t know, that’s been the plan for a while. We started working on it, but we got all swept away with this Radiolarians stuff so we need to get back to it, but that’s sort of the next idea. We’d love to do a DVD where you can break down how we make music—almost educational in a way. It would be musical but you can break it down and see how we use rhythm, the way we turn rhythmic patterns that we sort of counterpoint into music.
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