How do you approach original songs in the live setting?

Take no prisoners! Show no mercy! We pretty much just play original music in a live setting. We are too into writing and have written so many songs it seems a shame to do all the work it takes to get in front of people and not play your own music.

What about covers, can you talk about what songs you toss in from time to time? Who selects them?

We throw in some covers in here and there. It is always good to give the audience something they know from time to time, but it has to be a cover that still gives the band its own identity. You can’t play “All Along the Watchtower” for the gazillionth time, for example, it has simply been done to death. We all have equal say in what songs we cover, but picking them democratically can take some time because there is always a reason not to do one. However, I generally like the covers we do partly because the screening process is so thorough. We also have a tendency to get excited about particular situations and pick one-off covers. For example on one of our boat cruises we covered “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation and we threw in Neil Young’s “Vampire Blues” last Halloween. I think it was New Years this year that Ryan sang a falsetto version of “I Like the Nightlife” by Alicia Bridges.

In terms of cover tunes can you talk about any spectacular successes and failures?

We have been doing “Power of Soul” by Jimi Hendrix and Band of Gypsies for a while now. It is a fun one for me as an electric guitar player, but it is also interesting because it was incomplete at the time of Jimi’s death. There is the Band of Gypsies version from the live album and there is a studio demo from South Saturn Delta, and they are drastically different. We sort of combined the two versions and made our own, so I think that no one else has done it quite the way we do it. We also do “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock and that is just a tune that’s hard not to dance to.

Failures, hmmm, all I can say is that we wish we could play a lot more Zeppelin and Radiohead but those songs are written for very idiosyncratic singers. Robert Plant has another octave and a half above what anyone in this band can sing.

How often do you rehearse? What do you focus on when you get together for rehearsal?

We rehearse as often as possible, depending on how many shows we have or where we are. Right now we are rehearsing two or three times a week and playing about 3-4 shows a week for the next month or so I believe. We record pretty much everything we play and usually start the rehearsal process by listening back to the most recent show.

That is a hard thing to do because you have to be critical of yourself while still enjoying what you do, but it is definitely the best way to get you focused on what needs the most attention. There are so many songs, old and new, and so many approaches to improvisation, not to mention harmony singing, that are available you really have to stay organized as far as what you need to work on. It could be the song catalog or arrangements, or the never ending threat of staleness that can creep up in improvisations unless you are vigilant enough to study and employ new methods to make it more interesting and better.

We also have a studio album we are going to make later this year that requires a whole different kind of preparation, actually deconstructing the live versions of songs into their simplest most essential form for posterity’s sake.

Can you talk about some of your performance highlights thus far. Is there a gig (or gigs) that stand out? Why?

I would say look no farther than the last New York show. You can check out the Mercury show here. Over the course of the whole 2 hour plus show you can hear the band doing many of the things we love to do, taking the roll of psycadelic rock group, or a dance band, or a freely improvising group, singing an original country song like “Desert Rose,” or a newer original like “Big Sur” or “The War of 9161,” or experimenting with sound. No better example the than the most recent.

Of course there are last year’s sets at Bonnaroo, which are hard not to mention. You can find a youtube video of “Eddy the Sea” here. Bonnaroo really is head and shoulders above other gigs, there were so many artists to see that we absolutely adored! And the crowd and energy were truly awesome. New Years at 320 South in Breckenridge for 2008 was memorable for the fact that it was the debut of Ryan playing the harmonica with an inflatable device. Soon it caught on that he was doing that and people now bring various inflatable things to shows for him to play, such as a shark or an alien. Our policy is ‘if you bring it, he’ll play it.’

Another recent show that comes to mind was the Fox Theatre in Boulder Colorado earlier this year. It is just such an amazing venue and has so much history, I thought the band played a pretty inspired set. The front of house guy there, Dave, who is awesome, is still working on the recording I believe.

You recently released a live disc, what approach did you take in selecting the material? Can you talk about the balance between new/old compositions, concise/open-ended songs?

The live disc selections were from the summer 2009 tour and the tour was multi-tracked by our sound engineer, Joe Mango. However, we couldn’t truly multi-track every show and there were limited tracks to pick from logistically, so we kind of worked with what we had. Justin mixed it, it was his first effort doing so, and I think he did a great job.

A lot of the songs we actually play differently now, some are more developed, but the album is a good snapshot of what was happening at the time. We wanted to simply pick a few unreleased ones and a few Turbine classics from each of our previous two albums. As far as long ones and short ones, that is a never ending battle when you improvise. Again, we were pretty straight forward about it, like “lets put a few short ones and a few long ones.”

You’ve released two studio discs. Can you talk about the experience and also the challenges of bringing your live energy into the studio?

Yes, two studio albums and we’re gearing up for a third. It is always a challenge bringing the live energy into the studio but I guess I feel that today with archive.org and the fact that we can put out a live album, the studio is really a place to feature the songs and create a mood. As I mentioned earlier, it is about distilling the songs to their essence for the record and you have to think differently than if you were performing a show. You can sort of leave chops and big jams for the live setting, the record is a place for the song to be the feature. Also something that we have just touched upon in previous records I’d really like to get into on the next one, is setting a mood for an extended period of time. Due to budgetary constraints we’ve put out a mix of songs on both records, some ballads, some rockers, sea chanties, etc, that make up a whole. This time we have the support of our new label, Mason Jar Records started by Ryan Dembinsky. They put out our live album that we just released that you can get off our website or on itunes. So now we have Mason Jar and a large amount of unrecorded material and we find ourselves thinking big for the next one. Not to get too crazy but if you take a large work like the White Album or Exile on Main Street, you have a large amount of varied songs with two totally different approaches. With the White Album you have a hodge podge of songs, all mixed together. With Exile, you have more of little suites of songs, the first 5 are blues based rockers, the next 5 are acoustic, etc. I would love to do something more along those lines because it allows you to keep a certain mood going for a while. Another example is Bright Eyes putting out I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn simultaneously, where one record is dark and computerized and the other is acoustic and bright. I’m not sure how we’re gonna do it yet but we have enough material to make a statement with that kind of depth, and there’s no time like the present. Of course it is a monster of a project we are talking about, we will have to keep you posted as it takes shape this year. It is in the wonderful stage of being discussed in broad strokes right now.

Any final thoughts to folks across the country who may be hearing about you for the first time from this piece?

Are you crazy? Where the fuck have you been??! Check this shit out!!

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