When did you guys start working on Lady Walton?

It took forever! A couple of the pieces we toured, actually. We played “To Hugo,” and I used to do two of them that we could play live, and we really worked those out together. Others, like “Adages,” which is a big kind of modernist one, is a really hard piece of music, so it took awhile to get it right and learn it. I think the composition of it probably started in 2005 even before Lantern was released.

You mentioned that Clogs is rooted in classical composition and freeform improvisation, phrases that don’t normally go hand-in-hand. How would you say you balance those approaches?

It’s funny. Though history would make it seem differently, we’ve always been on that bench, part of our interest in renaissance music is that renaissance musicians are like the greatest improvisers. Only half the notes are actually written and most of what they actually play is ornamentation. So that kind of process of classical musicians being great improvisers was kind of lost. Many Bach fugues, he would actually improvise those, when he wrote those down they were just one version. Or Mozart … there’s a long tradition of that that’s kind of been lost, and in our own naïve way I guess I would like to think that somehow we’re tapping into that, even…hardly as our music isn’t a Bach fugue.

Do you feel the material on The Creatures In The Garden of Lady Walton works in a live setting?

We’re not doing that many shows because this new album has a lot of collaborators on it— my brother [Aaron] plays on it, Matt Berninger from The National sings on a track and Shara Warden, who is like a fifth member of Clogs, plays on it. So to get everybody together is not easy, but we’re doing a show in New York where we’ll present the whole album. And then we’re planning a few more over the year in between National tours and some other shows. We just did two shows in Minneapolis: one night we did old Clogs stuff, and then the second night we did all new stuff. It is nice to mix in a few of our older pieces or whatever, but the new stuff is different. It has its own special sonic thing about it. At the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville we’re also gonna be presenting all the music. It is this festival I am co-curating with Ashley Capps later this month. He is a really amazing guy and lived in downtown New York in the ‘70s, so he has a wide understanding of all sorts of music.

You have always balanced careers in rock and classical music. Which form did you study first?

I’ve been playing in rock bands with my brother since we were little and around the same time I started playing classical guitar. My initial interest in classical was that I became more and more interested in the guitar as an instrument and how to play these different techniques, though I was still playing rock music. That led to at a certain point where I got really interested in classical music and specifically Baroque music or Renaissance music. I still play a lot of contemporary music—people like Steve Rice and other contemporary composers. So it kind of started through the guitar and then it became something more about loving playing that instrument, and I ended up doing a master’s degree in classical guitar.

What was your main entry into the world of improvisation?

I originally got in to classical guitar because I love guitarists like John Fahey, and as kids my brother and I were definitely into the Grateful Dead. I’ve never been into jazz improvisation, really—I mean most of the jazz I like is more modal or drone based. There’s a great guitarist named Ralph Towner, but he pretty much plays a couple chords. I tend not to like jazz guitar and a lot of changes. I just find it kind of meandering. So I would say we’re more influenced by the economy of rock music more than jazz.

Do you find that your early love of the Grateful Dead still comes through in your guitar style?

On some level I’d say it does. It’s funny…you’d be surprised at how many bands are influenced by the Grateful Dead. We were joking with our friends in Grizzly Bear about starting a Dead cover band with them because they’re kind of obsessed with that music. I mean certainly some of the longer form improvisational stuff we’ve done over the years is influenced by the Grateful Dead, though I am a lightweight compared to many Dead fans. The full-on Deadhead in my community is National drummer Bryan Devendorf. The Dead and New Order are the two things that are essential for him.

I would say that everybody in Clogs is similar in that we all have more than one thing going on, and everyone has varied musical backgrounds. Padma Newsome was an amazing classical violist and played in great orchestras, and quartets and stuff, but then he got interested in Indian music and then he’s really a highly trained composer and writes for opera and large orchestras. And Rachael Elliott is the most classical by nature of her instrument, bassoon, but she also played jazz saxophone, as a kid. Thomas Kozumplik is similar—I think he played a fair amount of jazz and in rock bands and stuff. I would say I’m the most rock-oriented of the bunch—obviously I’m playing mostly in a rock band now. But I think that’s typical of musicians nowadays. Very few musicians just do one thing. For the last century or so it just seems like in popular music it seems the divisions of those things have disintegrated that it’s just hard to even classify. The other thing is that being a guitar player, the guitar is kind of the musical ambassador to every kind of music in the world. So you have to be very narrow minded not to be exposed to these different sounds these days.

How would you say your classically training his influenced your approach to rock music?

You don’t suddenly come to rock music and then learn how to turn an amplifier up loud—that’s something that the people who have been doing it well have been doing it for a long time, and it’s intuitive in some ways. I don’t play really loud or whatever like the way I did in The National, but I’m glad that I’ve had those experiences for a long time. I’ve experienced a lot of pressure to be one thing, even now, you get certain narrow minded people whether it be critics or presenters or whatever, saying you’re not allowed to do that or do that, but to me they’ve always co-existed and I need different sides of music in a way to really keep interested, and I think it’s really rewarding to have different experiences.

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