Last spring you guys recorded a session in a New York studio. Is that the material for the upcoming album you speak of being produced in Nashville?
RM: Yea, it’s an album that we’ve been working on since last year. We started in December [of 2008], and we’ve just hit a couple bumps. Then we were touring and such. I guess we got a little lost in this one, and we’re finally finding our way out of it. So next week is the official gathering. We got our shit together.
How are the collaborative efforts in Guster when creating an album? Is everything group consensus lyrically, musically, etc?
AG: Definitely lyrically it’s mostly on Ryan. Brian will do some lyrical stuff, as will Joe occasionally. I try to stay the hell away from it…lyrics wise [laughs]. Musically we all come together on stuff, and it all goes through this really laborious process involving all of us. Basically it’s a consensus process. Sometimes a song can literally come out of thin air where someone starts a bass line or a drum groove and it turns into a song. Or someone brings in a melody idea. Some stuff is more flushed out by one of us. Other things just get completely thrown out to everybody right there on the spot. But all the songs, no matter how they originate, go through this consensus process. It’s a difficult thing to do, but at the end of the day we end up with music that we are proud of and feel ownership of.
And now that you’ve revisited Lost and Gone Forever, have there been any thoughts of going over any of your previous albums and reworking them?
AG: I don’t know. We’ll have to see. You know the concept of doing an anniversary album tour happened when Parachute turned ten. And we decided that we didn’t like that record enough to do it [haha]. That would be painful for us. So we didn’t, but we liked the concept. And then when it came to Lost and Gone Forever we felt that this made sense, this seems to be where a lot of our fans meet in the middle; some of the old schooler’s that have been here since the beginning and people that are newer to the party can all agree on that record. Every record we do we try to make pretty different and there’s definitely been a progression. This record seems like one that the old school and the new school can agree on.
RM: Yeah, I don’t know if we’d ever revisit another record. Like Adam said, this record was special in the sense that it was our first record that we really felt like we could get behind. Our first record was just sort of us not knowing what we were doing. It doesn’t really hold up as well. And our second record really, it’s not great in our opinion. Lost and Gone Forever for a lot of people is when they discovered the band. And I feel before that we were sort of known as a live band, ‘you know they don’t make great records but they’re a great live band.’ And so from that point on I felt like alright we make cool records and put on a good show. It’s funny. Our fan base is not unilateral, and it’s not like with some bands that everyone loves this one record and the rest are whatever. They’re definitely a lot of people who didn’t really get into our band until our last record or until Keep It Together. I feel after Lost and Gone Forever there’s a real distinct change in the direction in the band…
Like what per se?
RM: In terms of Brian’s stuff on percussion and that we all learned how to play bass. We almost completely hanged the way we approach music. So, I don’t know, I mean I don’t know that there would be the same enthusiasm to do another record live like this. Not so much that it was our best record, but it was a seminal record. It was really a breakthrough. So, I’m interested because I felt like this album on this tour has held up pretty well for the most part. We can play these 11 songs and be like, it feels like it’s a set, and I was really worried that after the novelty wore off that we were going to hit these lows. If it’s a shitty song and you have to play it every night in slot 7, it’s gonna hurt. But really it’s held up pretty well, which I’m excited about. Every night I wonder if we played Keep It Together where the lows would be and where the highs would be. But we’ve been playing a lot of these songs, with the exception of 2-3 songs on Lost and Gone Forever, all of them are on rotation of the songs we play so there’s nothing crazy radical about what we’re doing.
And doing an album front-to-back live is incredible in my opinion. I mean, when I saw Bruce in Jersey, he used the same approach and it blew my mind. I’m not sure if all fans are like that though.
RM: As a fan I had heard about bands doing this, starting with Van Morrison doing Astral Weeks a year and a half ago. And that’s my favorite record of all time. When he came to New York I was the first one in-line. It was both the best and totally disappointingly awesome [laughs] because it’s a 40 year old album. The whole concept of this to do an album, it’s a total bandwagon thing and everyone’s doing it. We certainly aren’t innovators on this front. but it’s a cool thing for fans indeed.
Well the idea of going completely through an album live is particularly amazing because it seems in this day and age people are also forgetting about the concept of an album.
RM: Well, the music business is changing, and how they monetize music as well. I can get behind it; I can pretty much even get behind giving away our music for free. I steal music and I get all that and I understand the trend, but the one thing that sort of bums me out is what you said, that the album is being lost in this. The fact that there’s a whole generation of people growing up that have never bought an album doesn’t depress me as much as the fact that there’s a whole generation that can’t get the concept of an album anymore. It’s like playlist, and this song, and this song. And I think celebrating an album format is something really special. It is a complete thought in the way you sequence an album. It’s the only time in the whole sort of move forward I feel like a grandpa. I get vinyl and all that but I don’t fetishize all that stuff, but I still fetish albums. Not all the time, I listen to my iTunes on shuffle every day, but it’s cool; the album as a unit to come out and be like ‘this is an album, this is a snapshot of where we were in a point of time, this is what we’ve crafted.’ I think that it’s really a cool document and something that’s worth fighting for. So the fact that we’re sort of in this day and age and still have people listening to the album of our band is amazing. I hope people still make records and not just singles.
It got depressing in the early part of this decade, but I am seeing a sort of revival in a positive direction. I mean, I’d like to believe this…
RM: Yeah, I don’t think it’s as bad as I’m making it out to be. Now just due to the pure ambiguity of music and how music is disseminated for now, our tastemakers like Pitchfork and our top ten lists every year are still talking about albums. So really the guiding hands are still consuming music in this way. Promotional cycles are built around album releases and things like that. So it’s not completely gone, but then people will cherry pick a few songs and forget about the album, of course. You know, whatever… it’s sort of what we’ve been doing forever. I mean Steve Miller Band? I don’t know that dudes albums but I know his greatest hits really well [haha].
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