BF: Let’s talk about the new album and tour. Completely is the first album billed as the Jamie McLean Band (JMB), and the band looks a little different now.

JM: We finished up American Heartache and started touring behind that in the fall of ’08. Pretty much on that tour was when a lot of the music for this album started to be written. On the road and off, we had a two-month spell when we were in a rehearsal studio. A lot of those tunes were written as a group during that time period, around the American Heartache tour.

[As for releasing the record as the JMB] there was a lot of thought put into that idea. The first record I wrote all the music, and the second record I wrote all the music except two songs. So it was basically me bringing in finished songs to the band, we’d play them, and everything was sort of on my shoulders in that department. For Completely, there was a lot more collaboration. Songs were written as a group and individually by the guys in the band, so it became much more of a group effort, rather than me presenting everything. And so it just made sense to kind of make the change. If it was me continuing to write all the music, maybe keep it the same way, but it’s developed into a thing where it’s a cohesive group and everyone’s contributing, everyone’s singing, so it’s a band.

Pretty soon after that tour ended, we decided we wanted to go into the studio and record it. Our keyboard player was going to be on the road with another band [Ed. Note: keyboardist Jon Solo now plays with Brett Dennen], so we decided that was a good time to get in there. The songs were all kinda fresh, a little road tested, but they weren’t getting stale. So we went in and recorded with that band, with Brian on drums. The keyboard player went on tour, and the bass player [Derek Layes] sort of hung up his touring shoes, and that’s when we first met Ben. So we recorded the record, got a new lineup going as a power trio, and now we’re touring behind the record as a trio.

BF: How did you meet Ben? I take it was in NYC?

JM: Yeah. I asked my brother [Carter McLean], who was the drummer on the first two records, if he had any recommendations, and he gave me Ben’s number, and then we just hit the road (laughs)…

BM: Jamie called me, and I was on the phone with my now-wife at like 3:30 in the morning. I get a phone call from a number I don’t recognize, and checked the voicemail, and it was like “Hey, this is Jamie McLean, got your number, wanna know if want to do some gigs. Give me a call.” I showed up, we did two or three rehearsals- actually a year ago today was the first day I left on tour with these guys.

BF: Brian, how did you and Jamie hook up?

BG: Through some other musicians in New York. We had known of each other for a little while.

JM: I got his name through Joe Russo, as in Further.

BF: Let’s talk about the trio versus quartet. To the average fan, what’s the difference?

JM: When our keyboard player initially split, we tried a couple different options. We looked at adding another guitar player, we were thinking about another keyboard player, and everything was cool, but nothing really seemed to gel as it was with the four piece originally.

So, sort of by default, things fell into a trio, and pretty quickly it felt like it was just a lot tighter, but it was a lot more open. I had way more freedom on guitar, not being held down by the chords on the keyboards. I had to handle more, but it was really great for me to able to do that. It really changed my playing. I feel like the unit has really gelled as a trio, and the music has been tight like that.

BF: Brian and Ben, does being a trio affect how you approach the material? Do you find yourself filling more space, or playing differently?

BG: I started playing with Jamie three years ago right around now, like almost three years to the day. And I feel like Jamie and I got into this thing of playing wider and bigger. I was playing bigger and bigger drums and trying to play less and less notes, and then suddenly he started playing two amps and it became this thing where it was sorta convenient that our keyboard player had another gig, ‘cause it was four people trying to play ‘big’ all time, [yet] everyone’s always dialing it back.

BM: I guess for me, it was a trio when I joined the band. I [was] coming from a real strict jazz background, just relearning to play [this style of music]. And Brian was always busting my balls- I came in and I was always playing a lot of notes, and wasn’t filling in the right places. I think the biggest thing for me was having Jamie and Brian to kind of groom me to fit into what they were doing; learning how to play around the two of them. Now, I’m starting to learn where Brian’s going to fill, and where Jamie’s going to fill, and where I fit into that, and where I don’t fit into that, you know? That’s been the biggest thing for me as far as playing in the band.

BG: I just kind of like going to hear someone, either on a recording or live, where you can hear whatever the part is, but you also just hear some ‘air’ around it, right? Like I play a kick drum and a snare drum and maybe some other stuff occasionally, and then Jamie sings and plays guitar, but any listener can sort of latch onto just a couple key ingredients. Once you start adding a bunch of extra guitars and keyboards, suddenly the air that surrounds each of those ingredients gets all sucked up, and you can’t distinguish as much what’s happening.

BF: Going into the recording process, did you just let the songs have their own life?

JM: Yeah, [that] was definitely the mindset. It was kind of documenting what we had written in the last six months. We used the same producer on Completely as American Heartache [Stewart Lerman], so we didn’t tweak too much. We sort of went in with the same recipe, but “Completely” was recorded over the course of three days, so it was pretty damn quick.

BF: Was that on purpose? Did you want to capture that immediacy?

JM: Yeah, we had time constraints, financial restraints, [but] we were so tight from playing these songs on the road, that we didn’t necessarily need a ton of time. It would be a luxury if we could just tweak and put psychedelic Wilco keyboards on there, but we didn’t. We did seventeen songs in three days, and it was a stretch, but not that much of a stretch, ‘cause the songs were already tight, written, and we knew the parts.

And that’s been the case for a lot of them. Like “Don’t Do Me That Way” on the last record, we did that in one take. That was the only time we tried to record it, and that’s my favorite “sounding” song on that record. So I don’t think time was really the issue, it’s just the time that we had put in prior to that on the road and in the rehearsal space really kind of solidified the songs.

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