It is definitely a big part of any band’s growth—figuring out how to morph and change, while still keeping your roots intact.
The last year-and-a half or two years have been the best two years of being in the band ever because I am so oblivious. I’m the fucking most ignorant bastard you have ever met. I just write shit for myself, and if I like it I go forward with it, and that’s all I care about. I trust myself.
“Caves of the East” is a perfect example. When we started out with “Caves,” I was playing it on a regular bass, Magner was playing the guitar line and, little by little, we shifted it around. I started playing it on a keyboard the way I did in the studio and that changed the whole vibe of the song. [Drummer Allen Aucoin] started using a click and syncing-up with Aron’s computer. Barber took the main melody line, which freed Allen up to do all the little things to make “Caves” sound like Caves and then Magner—because he was on a click— started to get a little bit funky with it and started dropping all these samples. We were in LA and he played Snoop, we were in Atlanta and he played Ludacris, we were in New York and he played Beastie Boys. It’s fun—on Halloween he just made scary shit happen.
This was over an eighteen month period, though. When we first started playing it in Europe it was really terrible—not what I wanted it to sound like, but as we worked on it we figured out the instrumentation. Sometimes that’s a process when you write shit the way I write shit on a computer…you have to figure out how to play it later and interpret all these sounds. “Rockafella” is another example…it goes from really raw and loose and not really that driving to being a song that people are like requesting, and looking forward to.
I’ve definitely felt that this new batch of songs represents a new era for the band, rooted more in true electronica than the earlier “trance fusion” sound the band was known for.
That process to me is what being in the Disco Biscuits is all about. We are maturing to the level to where we can write a song a day like Frank Zappa did—everyday he’d write a new song, and pick the best one, and start warping those ideas into real pieces of music to present to fans. You never stop working on them—it’s just like a piece of clay, and the sculpture is never quite perfect. But you are just always making a little bit better, and you have to be open to making it the best it could be. “Caves,” for me, is a quintessential example of why being in the Disco Biscuits is so much fun. It goes back to the improvisational spirit of the band where it can change all the time— whether it’s in the studio making it unique and doing remixes and different collaborations. It’s a pretty cool time.
It is a cool time and there’s so much shit that’s about to come out that I can’t even perceive how it’s going to play out. We have committed ourselves to just like putting out more content all the time—writing music all the time, and just continually evolving and continually pushing the envelope with what it means to be in a band. That’s our job. It’s fucking great.
It goes back to the beginning of the decade when you were writing operas and writing music all the time. I remember at one point in the early ‘00s Barber told Jambands.com that the Disco Biscuits had six or seven albums of material ready to record…it sounds like the band has gotten back to that point.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that all year why ‘99 and ‘09 mirror each other so much— the cycle of time and how you reach the end of a decade and there’s a sense of urgency. All I can think is that maybe it just pushes you creatively. You can’t help but get pushed creatively. It’s not just us, there’s so many other bands pushing the envelope creatively right now—putting out new material and new records. I think it’s just a creative push to the end of a calendar cycle.
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