At this point do you feel the Disco Biscuits as an entity is bigger than any one or two musicians?
Yeah, it’s like being a TV channel in a way, which is why reality TV is so interesting. Basically people turning to you to be entertained and, essentially, that’s what being an entertainer is all about. I’m a guitar player and, though we’re attempting to be groundbreaking and take our music to a new levels, at the end of the day I am an entertainer. So while it is psychologically and mentally to our internal dispositions and our egos and other pointless things to make great music, at the end of the day you’re just another model on the catwalk. I’m not a model on the catwalk, but really I am, but I’m trying to, we’re trying to instill as much pride and other things into it to make it what it is. People get what they’re going to get with the Biscuits. The album is shaking them up a little bit and we want to shake them up. We want to give them something a little different.
But, at the same time, the reality story of the Biscuits is sort of awesome at this point because we’ve had so many years of people trying to kill each other—people dying and all sorts of different stuff.
How have you felt the fan reception has been to Planet Anthem?
There is a small group of people who might say Planet Anthem, “Isn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for something a little different.” And honestly, I think those people are sometimes more vocal but are definitely more of a minority. People seem to like change, but there are some people who just want to hear us do what we traditionally do really well. In January and February, there was like five or six Biscuits concerts and they were some of the best concerts we ever played so people still like the music we are making. It is fun to be a fan of the Biscuits. It’s fun to be entertained by the band. I feel like we have a good relationship with our fans right now because they get a really weird interesting album from left field and yet the live stuff is what they except. As far as Biscuit style music goes, which is pure improv, I feel like we’re playing the best we’ve ever played. To some degree we’ve filed it down, shaped up and turned it into something that’s as good as it can possibly be.
I agree. The Disco Biscuits has always expanded its palette, from classical and jamband sounds early on through electronica and now hip hop.
We’ve always been doing that. As weird as that is to sort of think, we’ve always been consistent on that, since the days of Tim Walther [who produces All Good and produced some early Camp Bisco festivals]
The Disco Biscuits are currently working on a few projects with Damon Dash. What has that experience been like for you?
It’s interesting because the process of creating the music is the thing we have in common with the Damon Dash crew I would say. They make a totally different kind of music than us. As much as the Biscuits are influenced by hip hop, we are not making hip hop music. It’s still electronic, it’s still at the right pace, but it’s still a big world of difference from hip hop. But those guys have a similar vibe to us and a similar collaborative process, so we can work together easily. And that’s why Planet Anthem is so diverse because we had so many musicians coming in and out of our studio and the process was to include them and the vibe was to just make everything work and everything great and those guys work on the same process. It’s very interesting to meet people who work the same way, so when I go into the studio and those guys are working in the studio, it’s like working with them it’s like we’ve been working together for years.
They’re taking the Black Keys, which is sort of a bluesy rock band, and mixing what they do with hip hop. Now they are taking what we do, which is an electronic thing, and mixing us with hip hop too to see what it comes with. Hip hop is almost more of production approach so it can go wherever you want. People got caught up in hip hop sounding like what hip hop sounded like in the late ‘90s again and again and again, but there’s been some new sounds and I think there are some cool things going on in hip hop. And I think the reason that it keeps reinventing itself is because, at the end of the day, hip hop is really just guys rapping instead of singing and you can rap over anything. Damon Dash is an old pro at how to make good hip hop. He’s made some of the best hip hop of all time and, besides Jay-Z, he was the most important person in those rooms probably and those are some great albums. So the guy is obviously hip to this. I’m just realizing it right now, but he’s obviously been doing it for a while
That’s an interesting point. Rapping in today’s music is like the saxophone in the classic rock-era.
Yeah, they had a period in the 70’s where they put the saxophone over everything—the Rolling Stones had their saxophone thing, Pink Floyd had their saxophone bit, and everybody had sax going on in the studio. And if we all spoke with the saxophone, then we would be able to do 20 years on that, but since only a couple of us play saxophone, it’s only going to last in our society for a certain period of time. Many more people can rap.
I mean, music goes with technology. There’s things about technology that are re-doing—like the car is just a better horse and carriage, you know, but the technological advancement of it. And music is the same way, to some degree there’s a lot of throwbacks in music, you know, there’s a lot of things plugged from earlier generations. But the sound is always evolving and always getting more advanced.
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