RR: So the new studio dictated the songwriting process, or did you get together at the beginning, and decide to try any idea, but do it in a collaborative way?

AM: It really wasn’t any sort of regimented process of how we were writing these songs. It was an open door process. On previous albums, we would write the song—one person would write it, bring it to the band, and say, “O.K.—I’ve got this song, but I don’t know what the other parts are, so let’s collectively make the song as a band.” Or, the opposite—“O.K.—here, I’ve got a song. This is the guitar part, this is the bass part, drums, and I’m looking for this type of beat.” This was more like “O.K.—we’ve got a computer screen that’s open. Let’s fuss around and come up with a cool groove that we could work on.”

Or, in the case of “Rain Song,” for instance, that was something that I did three years ago. I recorded the piano intro and outro on my grand piano that sits in my house here. I took a really nice mic from the studio, hooked it up to my laptop, and just started playing and I came up with that riff—the very beginning of “Rain Song” where it sounds like a cabin in the woods with rain falling down on it. I brought that into the studio, and I had the other main riff of the song, if you will, as well. I said, “O.K., guys, I’ve got what’s only an idea, but the vibe is there, the feeling is there, and it almost feels cinematic to me. Let’s do something with it.” We listened to it, and Allen [Aucoin, drums] started putting a beat over it, and then we got a little bit further, and Dirty Harry [track producer] and Jon [Gutwillig] said, “Here’s a cool lyric. Let me just go into the vocal booth, and just sing this lyric.”

So piecemeal, all of these different thoughts from different musicians started to come together, and then Marc said, “Dude—I’ve got a killer idea for a bridge.” It was a very interesting and collective process. We’ve gotten mature enough where we’ve learned to trust each other a lot: “O.K.—go for it. You have carte blanche. I have idea somewhere in the back of my head where I want this song to go, but if you’re feeling it right now, get in there, and you’re in the driver’s seat. Get behind the computer, and see what you’ve got.”
I already know what idea I want to put in, but I’ll put that one later, and see which one works.” It was a very trusting process, which I think comes with age and maturity (laughter) that we were able to allow ourselves to do it.

Plus, it was just really fun to have that open door policy with different musicians coming in. We never really set out to say “O.K.—we want Tom Hamilton to produce this track.” Tom’s a good friend of ours, and was in the studio a lot with us. He was just always in and around the studio, and it happened very organically with Tom getting involved to the point where he contributed so much that we said, “Tom, you’re going to produce this track. You earned it, buddy. You helped us work on it; now, you’re producing it. This track is now your baby, as well.”

RR: Speaking of your work on “Rain Song,” you also had a sweet piano interlude in “Fish Out of Water.”

AM: (laughs) Yeah. It’s funny—the derivation of that. “Fish [Out of Water]” was written before I put that little piano break in. The similarities are definitely there. There’s no hiding it. Obviously, everybody loves the Beatles, and Tom and I have an acoustic show that we try to do every December, and one of the songs that we do is “In My Life.” Learning the piano solo to “In My Life”—I was in that mode: “What can I do with a two-handed piano solo?” The chord progression is descending as it is, and very arpeggio-friendly, but still very organic in the instrumentation of it. I didn’t want a synth to be arpeggio, or anything like that. I still wanted it to sound somewhat classical. The chord progression is descending, which is a very typical Beatles progression as is. I spent a couple of hours, and I wrote the right-hand line. I thought, “There needs to be a contrapuntal line. There needs to be some sort of harmonic structure in it with the left hand that’s not just calling out where the chord changes are, but complementing it contrapuntally. I then came up with the left hand, and put the two of them together, and came up with a piano solo bridge, I guess, that I’m really proud of. I love that little break.

RR: Once the songs were all nailed down, and you had this exciting collection, how difficult was it to sequence the album so it would flow from song to song?

AM: It was difficult. What everybody did was that we came up with our own album order. Interestingly enough, everybody’s was fairly similar. Everybody had the same thought. We wanted “On Time” to be in the number two position. We wanted “Loose Change” to be up there. We wanted the [Simon] Posford tracks to be somewhat together because they have a similar vibe and a similar feel, and were also recorded at a similar time, so the sound is kind of similar so we wanted to put those tracks together.

Everybody came up with their own album order, and we discussed it, and everybody had different playlists. We were putting it in our iTunes: “O.K., this is Jon’s playlist, this is Marc’s playlist, this is my playlist, and Allen’s playlist,” and, then, everybody would listen to the whole fuckin’ album (laughter) again and again in different orders to check out the flow. What we found was there were a lot of different things that worked. It became obvious which ones didn’t work, so that was pretty easy, but a lot of the different transitions did work, and we just—very unanimously, actually—agreed on one. In the end, most of our playlists could have worked. You could have picked any one—they weren’t that different from each other—and they could have worked. We all agreed pretty quickly that the one we came up with was perfect.

RR: How did you get Simon Posford’s involvement?

AM: We started befriending Posford years ago when we brought him out to Camp Bisco in ’05, and then brought him back the next year, and in ’07, we brought him in for our New Year’s thing. We’ve been trying to get Posford to work with us for a while, even before 2005, contacting his camp, and it always felt like [affects a British accent]: “Who are these American blokes that keep on faxing me, and they’ve got shows, and they want me to play?” Posford would only play about a dozen shows per year in the most remote locations in the world. He’s on a full two-month long Shpongle tour right now, and it’s his second one in the last twelve months, as well, of the States, nonetheless. I feel that we helped open up those doors, helped expose our crowd to Posford’s music.

That’s kind of what Camp Bisco is about, in general. We’re very hands on with a lot of these artists, and a lot of these DJs, and part of the M.O. is to expose music that we feel is really good and genuine and has soul to it—still, obviously, somewhat in the electronic world—and we want to expose that to our fans, whether they’re huge in Europe already, or whether they’re up and coming, and our fans haven’t necessarily heard of them yet, but put them in front of our fans because it’s music that we believe in. That is part of the ethos of Camp Bisco to begin with.

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