I’m sure you long imagined what life would be like as a full-time touring musician? What has most suprised you now that you’ve achieved that goal?
I think what may be most surprising is the fact that you don’t have to be on the road all the time. I think when we first imagined it, we thought we had to get an RV and a van, throw our stuff in storage and be on the road all the time. In reality that’s a hard lifestyle to sustain. Eventually you’ll have a girlfriend, you might have a wife or a kid and you’re going to need a place to call home just to stay sane. But it’s different for everybody. Some people can just live on the road and do it and be very bohemian about it and we did do that for a while and that’s what I thought the lifestyle would be. But in hindsight you do all that legwork to get your name out there a little bit and then you can scale it back and tailor it a little bit. You can figure out where are the places that really love ALO make sure you go back there once or twice a year. Then you realize people need new music from ALO so let’s go spend time recording and then promoting the album. There’s so many ways to do it and I think every band finds out what works for them but I think what was the biggest surprise to me was that to be a professional musician you don’t have to be on the road 365 days a year.
How would you describe Man of The World in comparison to your last release, Roses and Clover?
It may be obvious to say but it’s an evolutionary step in taking things from that record and every other record we made. I think that one of the things we took from Roses and Clover, part of the process of that record was we had some songs we’d worked out before we went into the studio but we also discovered a few new things in the process of recording and those ended up being the most exciting things for us. “Lady Loop,” “Shine” and even “Roses and Clover” were all new discoveries we wrote because we were jamming and the jam was really cool and somebody had some lyric ideas. So seeing how much we loved that, we really wanted to focus on that approach as much as we could for the next record.
It took a couple of years for us to get into the studio to even try that idea out but leading up to it we said, “Let’s leave things open-ended and leave room for jamming in the studio and the process of discovery.”
I think we did a pretty good job of it. There were a few songs on the new record that were pre-thought but a lot of the songs developed where we were free-playing without any sort of agenda. “Suspended,” the first song on the record, is definitely like that. We came up with that intuitively and in the moment. It’s also the longest song on the record and we decided to open with it. I remember when that decision was on the table, I wondered, “Is that a good idea?” But we all really liked the song, we liked how it turned it out, it was natural-sounding. So we decided to put it up front so people could hear it. “The Champ” was kind of a jam. “I Love Music” was a jam that we pulled out from our archives. It was this random show at the Mystic Hot Springs in Utah and we had this crazy free jam and we listened back and said, “Whoah, that’s really cool.” We never played it except for that time so we took that and developed it a little bit. We definitely got into the crafting element on this record but the source of it is that free play, free jam space.
Was that part of the process, going back and listening to earlier shows for ideas? Was it happenstance?
I feel like I might be the one who does that the most out of the four of us. I’m big into archiving, so in the past I was always the one to bring the tape deck to the show and record it. Then at the end of the night I’d go home and transfer it to a CD and have it on my hard drive. So I feel like I’ve been the one to do the archiving and listening back to live shows. The other guys will do a little bit but they’ll do it more if I point something out. There have been a few songs where I’ve found some cool jams from the archive, presented them to the band and we’ve worked with them a bit.
To that end, do any particular shows jump out at you as the band’s archivist that you’d recommend folks check out?
I would say any of the shows from Mystic Hot Springs in Monroe, Utah. I think they’re all up on archive.org and there’s even some cool video on YouTube.
It’s south of Salt Lake City, south of Provo even. It’s in this kind of conservative little town called Monroe and they have this amazing little hot springs resort. It’s very bohemian and very hippie and the guy who runs it, whose name is Mystic Mike, was part of touring Dead scene back in the day. And the story goes that on Grateful Dead tour they passed through Monroe on the bus, saw this spot and this dilapidated hot springs resort and settled there. And he built it up, built this killer stage and even built a video production studio. So he gets bands that are touring between Salt Lake City, Vegas and L.A. and he always cooks them an incredible meal and you get to soak in his hot springs and then you play a concert. So it’s a really all-inclusive experience for the band. A lot of times you’re just playing for him and few of his friends and maybe some people who’ve decided to experience the hot springs. It’s always really conversational and there’s lots of free jamming. I’d say any of the Mystic Hot Springs shows are really worth checking out and probably for any band because there’s something special that happens there.
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