The band is going on almost 20 years. Where do you feel Guster would be today if the band had formed in the modern indie rock era?
AG: If we were just starting recently?
Yeah, like ten years ago when the indie scene began to take full charge.
AG: There’s so much more now. I mean it’s amazing when I think about what we had to deal with. I remember us sitting around, there was no email really, I mean there was but not in the real way. It was for communicating with your friends who went abroad. That was kind of it. So the whole reaching people and fans online that didn’t happen. So we would sit there and write out postcards and pay for postage. We would have label sticking parties where we would all sit around when we all lived together. We would bring all our friends over, buy pizza and beer and stick some labels on all these postcards we had to send out to our fans. It was expensive, it was time consuming. Now it’s like send out an email, blast a tweet from your phone and you’re done.
Since you guys have been together for 20 years, is there any desire to go solo and participate in other projects? I know Adam does the Reverb thing…
RM: I mean Joe’s made a solo record, and I think he’s kinda working on another one. As we get older with the kids thing we can see changes. Adam’s Reverb thing alone is an 80 hour week job whether he’s on the road or not which is amazing and crazy. Not only that, he can quit Guster tomorrow and still work harder than he’s ever worked in his life, so he’s all set up. And Joe built up a studio in his house in Nashville so he’s producing bands, writing with other people, making his own records. I wrote a movie and scored it last year with my buddy, and I’m really sort of interested in doing more stuff like that. Even now as we’re writing this record, I’m really interested in doing a lot of stuff and finding a lot of ways of doing it. As much as there’s bullshit, Guster’s still our best chance for achieving all the things we want. I could shit in the woods and no one would know, it doesn’t mean anything. Ryan Miller isn’t going to sell thousands of albums. So I would much rather have my creative energy go towards the band at this point. It’s definitely a situation where the sum is greater than its parts. There wouldn’t be four dudes having the impact that we have now. I think it’s a real easy situation and years of hard work giving us the breathing room to take time to make albums. We know that there are going to be people that will always be interested in our music.
What about you Adam? Besides the Reverb gig do you have any solo plans?
AG: You know I had an opportunity to do something sorta solo. It was just this fun idea that I did a couple years ago with Dave Shneider from the Zambonis. They were opening up for Guster. and we were talking about being Jewish. It was actually spring time; I have no idea why we were talking about holiday music and Hanukkah. We thought, “man, there’s all these great Christmas songs but why aren’t there any great Hanukkah songs?” So he and I wrote the album, Hanukkah Rocks and the bands called The LeeVees. It’s one of those things; it’s not something that we took seriously at all. It was more like, “Let’s have fun with this.” So we wrote the songs in a week when we were on tour together. We started crunching numbers and saw that, shit if we just sold 2,000 of these that’d be fine. But then Warner picked it up. It didn’t sell crazy amounts but it’s a nice thing that happens every year. That Fox show, Cleveland just licensed a song from us. There’s this other gig, this isn’t really a solo project either, but it’s fun to play with another band sometimes. There’s this ski band that I’m in [laughs]. It was based around this Warren Miller movie. So it’s me, Stefan from Dave Matthews, Ed from Barenaked Ladies, Dee Snider from Twisted Sister, Eric the drummer from N.E.R.D. and then Jason Biggs on cowbell.
Wow, what a collaboration.
AG: [laughs] It’s just this random assortment of dudes. It’s a cover band, a bunch of us fucking around. The most fun ski cover band you’ve ever seen! Every year we do that, we’ll get together and ski for a week someplace and play a gig. Yukon Kornelius is the name of that band.
I know during a lot of your live performances there is frequent crowd participation. How did that come about? Was it promoted by the group or did the fans truck their way into doing it?
RM: It’s very organic. I don’t know that it happens all the time. There hasn’t been a ritual like that that’s come up in the last couple albums. I don’t know it can happen at any time. It speaks to the dialogue of what goes on with our fans. We are very much plugged into how people are receiving stuff, and we sort of feed off of that and go back and forth. There’s something in that continuum that’s sort of powerful and interesting.
I see that the band has toured internationally. I know, from my own experience, that I grew up with Guster and grew to love them as they matured musically with me. How are you accepted in Europe being that you are one of those bands whose fans grew with you as you’ve progressed through the years?
AG: We don’t go there that much, actually. To be honest we’ve been there rarely. It’s expensive. We’ve gotten used to a certain set up here. So it’s hard for us to go to Europe because a) it’s expensive and b) there hasn’t been a lot of support from the label. We had these amazing opportunities a few years ago to play Australia with Ben Folds and John Mayer… Maroon 5 was an offer but we didn’t have the tour support as the time. So we did some shows in England which went great, but you have to keep the momentum going and we just haven’t done that. So we have a lot going on in the states. We’ll go up to Canada here and there where it makes sense like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, but that’s it. We’re not going to Saskatoon or anything.
What else besides the upcoming record do you guys plan on doing in the near future? Will the habitual touring continue?
AG: As long as people still give a shit about us and want to see us play music and hear our stuff I really don’t see any end to it. Like you said, it’s almost been 20 years now so I think we’re all really happy to be making music still and feel that our best ideas are ahead of us. We still have a lot more to create together. We’ll finish this record, we’ll put it out, we’ll tour on it and make another record put it out and tour on it. I don’t really see it ending. It’s funny, when we first started I’d be like well, you know, let’s give it two years and see how it goes. And I would say it almost every two years, oh two more years, you know I’m happy but you never know. At this point I just don’t see this really ending, but maybe that’s when it will finally stop…
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