Was there a defining moment in this regard?

I started thinking about it on this Bad Livers record called Blood and Mood. When I made that record I began to realize what I need to be doing is making ideas and making things happen and making new contexts and stuff. And that record’s all based on samples and loops and stuff like that. I wrote out some of the drum parts and had my friend play but then I’d chop them up in the computer. Back then it was pretty primitive, we didn’t have Abelton or any of these contemporary programs that we have now. It was a little rougher I guess. But that was part of the cool part, that it was a little bit unsteady.

When I started working on that record and going back a couple of records, on this record called Hogs on the Highway that I did, there was a track on there called “Falling Down the Stairs (With a Pistol in my Hand)” that I just put on there, just sort of at the end of this track, but it was like my first experimental kind of thing where I was really beginning to use the studio as an instrument and beginning to paint pictures with sound as opposed to trying to get a performance. And that just kind of put a little bug in my head. It didn’t come to fruition until many years later but those two events just really got me thinking about ‘Wow, I have a totally different tool palette.’ Typically in the acoustic world or the banjo world, when you have bands that have mandolin, banjo, bass, whatever that instrumentation is, they’re not thinking like that. They don’t look at music architecturally that way. I have more in common with DJ’s and techno guys or say hip hop musicians or metal musicians, the way they sort of start with the beat and work from there and sort of build something off of a groove. I’m certainly not trying to be derogatory towards any genre or anything, I’m just trying to explain it the best I can.

How does _Pizza Box relate to your folktronics approach?

Well Pizza Box is just about songs. I just wanted to make a record where when you came away from that you just thought about the songs. That’s what I really wanted to do. There’s looping on there but there but there’s not a lot of effects on there. It’s really a song-based record. What I wanted to do with that record was make the songs big.

So are you moving away from folktronics?

Well I just make ideas, you know, all of the above, forward in all directions. For instance, I’ve been doing a lot of my performances behind this record with folktronics. A lot of my promotion for this record has been playing these songs chopped up on the computer and improvising with a highly processed banjo. It’s like I’m just realizing my trip is to move forward and make ideas. Before I would think in a linear way, like ‘Because I did this, I’ll need to do this and I’ll have to do it in this way,’ and what I’m realizing is what I need to do is just keep making ideas and keep moving forward. I’m using a computer approach, like I’m using this banjo and laptop thing, really to play a lot of that material.

I have a band that I play with that has a really good friend of mine, Jeff Pinkus from Butthole Surfers and when it makes sense for me to have a band, we do a sort of metal rock version. But a lot of this stuff that I’m doing is promo stuff and opening dates and kind of small format. I’ve been doing a lot of shows this year since that CD came out just by myself and what I’m doing is using the computer. So I take the banjo and I chop it all up and I play the material off that record but I take the folktronics approach which is like a highly processed banjo sound with a lot of loops and atmospheric samples flying around.

That’s what I call my folktronics thing when I’m using like the loops and the banjo in a lot of different ways. When I started doing that, I used pedals. I had a tabletop full of pedals and I kind of got that idea from my friend John Paul Jones and from Bill Frisell, you know guys that sort of work in that way. They kind of got me interested in that idea about how to do that and I was using pedals for a while. But about six or eight months ago I got hit with this program called Abelton Live and I use it just with a laptop. It has all of the effects built into the software and what Abelton allows you to do which is really far out. It allows you to take a nonlinear view of your set. So say when you have a band playing the set, you’re going verse, chorus, solo, but you don’t have access to what you just did. But with Abelton I have all my stuff up, I have my whole set available at once. So if I’m playing, I can grab anything I’m doing and I can use it again later in the gig and I can also melt the songs together and I can take the drum part from this song and then build this other song around that and then drop that drum out and bring the new one in, all while just manipulating this little grid thing. And that’s pretty far out and it’s really creative because you can do all of this stuff without having to rehearse a band or anything. If I think it, I can just do it and that’s just amazing. I’ve been really freaking out with this program.

You mentioned that Dave Matthews put you in touch with John Alagia. How did he become involved in the development of Pizza Box?

I guess when we really started talking was when I was in New Orleans working on his record down there. I played banjo on some of that record and one of the things that you do with writer guys is when you sit around, you just play what you’re working on. He was still writing a little bit and I had all these songs and we just passed the guitar around. A lot of my friends when we sit around, we just do that, play new music that we’re working on and just check it out. I realized I was getting pretty close on this batch and he said ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ So we did and then he told me, ‘We want to help you make this record. We believe in what you’re doing and we have some resources and we want to help. What can we do?’ And so at that point we kind of started talking about how we could move ahead and that’s when I realized I felt like I had something pretty good.

You’re obviously quite contemplative. To what extent do you find that this is at odds with going out and making music live?

I think that when we practice and we’re developing and we’re in the lab, that’s when it’s the right time to be contemplative but when it’s time to actually play, I use what one of my teachers taught me which is called ‘calm unfocussed attitude.’ When you go to play I think that’s the time to just let it happen and not get too worked up about it in terms of trying to choke the energy with your head, getting too far ahead of yourself in terms of thinking about things.

I think that the best place for heads-down work is in the lab, which is what I call when you’re practicing or working or writing or developing or editing or whatever. But in terms of performance, I think what we have to do is just breathe and make something happen. It’s a little bit elusive, but man, I tell you I’ve been at it a long time and I get where I feel pretty good that I can make something happen.

I really feel that’s kind of helped me, looking at it like an external work, like a statue out in the yard and going, ‘Wow that turned out pretty good, that feels pretty good.’ And there’s a lot of different little levels, like if the punctuation is in a different place, the meaning changes, like there’s a lot of little things going on and layers of stuff. For an example there’s the song “Road” where the meaning kind of changes depending on where the punctuation is, and the record is just chock full of those ideas where the sentence has a little bit of a different meaning if you read it all at once or if there’s commas, which is pretty cool because then these people get like all these different reads on it which is pretty fun.

What I try to do is leave some stuff open because when I was a little kid I used to listen to Radio Mystery Theater by E.G. Marshall on the radio. These little mysteries would come on for an hour and it was in between reading and watching a movie in that you could still participate in the interpretation, you could paint a little picture in your head. And so I’ve learned that to me if a song is like super nailed down, it’s kind of boring. If a person says, ‘Well I went down the street and I met this person and he said this and we went over here and this happened.’ That to me is not so interesting. But say ‘Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry,” [William Blake “Songs of Experience], now that has something. We can hear that in so many different ways. Those are the kind of things I try to do. I like to leave the door open a little bit for people to kind of mess with it in their own way. It just seems like it’s a richer experience as a music fan myself.

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