Photo by James Martin
RR: Let’s talk about that payoff. How do you keep your perspective while out there on the road, presumably to play festivals and some other select gigs, as well? How do you keep it at a level where it reflects why you got into music in the first place?
BK: I think the first thing is that every five years you have to fire everyone involved in your organization. (laughter)
JA: Clean house. It’s terrible. It’s an awful date.
BK: You kind of get the fresh blood in there, and five years later, you need your quickening so you get rid of the old blood. Have you ever seen Twilight ?
RR: Yes.
BK: It’s kind of like that with the vampires and the werewolves and such.
JA: Myself? I would say for myself over the last year, late last year, keeping it fresh for me has involved dropping some ridiculous habits and picking up some really good ones. I started running, working out, and sleeping better. I always tend to eat well on the road, so that has never really been a problem. To be completely blunt and honest, it was cleaning house and getting rid of stupid shit and bringing in some good shit. It’s made me feel revived and rejuvenated and focused and re-focused and all that good stuff. On a personal standpoint, that’s what it has been for me since late last year—a whole new day. I got home from this last tour, and at the end of the last trip, Ben and Adam had gotten this wicked cold/sinus/bronchial kind of thing. On the last week of the trip, off course, you know, that’s when it’ll hit you, and luckily I didn’t get it until the exact day after tour ended. I woke up and was sick as a dog and spent a week in bed, (laughs) and tried to recover. But, I’ve tried to be healthier on the road and pace myself.
RR: Does the band have discussions about how to push things forward, around, or move things in a different direction, or do you try not to have those conversations?
JA: As far as musically, we’re not like a “let’s rehearse the improv sections” type of band. If we’ve got a tricky little transition, it’s not anything where we’ll sit down and go “All right, we’re going to do this and that,” and really plan it out. We let it be open, or we might have a small little thing where we’ll say, “O.K.—we’re going to go from this into that, and maybe we’ll just slow it down and it’ll just happen.” I like the fact that we don’t rehearse the stuff that much, then it’s true improvisation. We’ve been together for 13 years. We were almost in high school. It’s kind of a new day for the group and all of us and where we’re at, so the ability to speak more openly to each other has increased greatly since the year began, and just the understanding of what’s being said. It’s pretty sweet. It’s nice to have it operating that way.
RR: What about current discussions about repertoire and setlists?
BK: Well, we just got a steady and ongoing new injection of material, so I think one of the possibilities is—and something I’ve been thinking about for a while—that I have a couple of tunes that I feel like I want to put away for a while from the show, and I think we’ve got new stuff to replace them. That could happen; therefore, a song gets a little bit of different life, or a new life, when they come back. You know, playing some of the same stuff for thirteen years is an interesting thing.
JA: I would agree. It’s nice to be able to have this great injection of new material and, like I said, we’re getting together next week to do some recording, and we’ve got some stuff, collectively, a few ideas that are just sitting there idling and waiting to be finished up—words being put to and arrangements and stuff like that. When you’re able to bring new material—and we’re always trying to bring new material to the table; we just happen to be in a time right now where it’s very fluid. There is a lot of new stuff coming out right now, and it really does—like Ben said—gives certain songs a rest and it allows new songs to really grow and develop. So it’s not like the new song we’re only playing once or twice. It’s like “hey, let’s play this every week; let’s see where it goes.” Until you let something breathe live, you never know what it is going to be. You never know. Until you let a song really get its legs underneath it, you never really know where it’s going to end up. We may have a song that sounds like it is four or five minutes long with a little bit of a stretched-out section. That’s fine. We may play it one night, and all of a sudden, we hit an improv spot and “Go. Take it. Let’s see where it goes.” I think there are a lot of songs of ours which are vehicles, I guess you would call them, that started out like that, but now have stretch out potential and a lot of room for other songs to weave in and out in the same area.
RR: Would you bring new material to the stage where arrangements are not worked out yet like ‘let’s bat it around on stage and see where it comes out’?
JA: No, not really. I don’t know if we’d go that far. There might be stuff where it’s like…we’ve discussed…“O.K., this song has an open section here; let’s just take it on stage and see what happens.” But, no, we don’t go that blind. We definitely discuss things like that. It’s always nice to have the road map in the car, but you don’t necessarily need to read it. It’s always nice to have it there. And, also, we are four men; we’re not particularly good at reading maps. I know I am terrible at reading maps. I was banned from being the group navigator many, many years ago.
BK: I have this female English voice that tells me where to turn. (laughter) I don’t know if anybody else can hear it.
JA: (in an English accent) “500 yards, turn right to C chord.”
RR: Perfect autobiography title— Can You Hear the British Girl in My Head ? Festivals…Yonder are obviously veterans on the festival circuit, but any places that you’ve been in the past that look promising in 2011?
JA: We haven’t been to Grey Fox in a while and it’ll be interesting. (laughs) I’ll just say that. We’ll see how our grand return to the Grey Fox works out. It should be fun. I think it’s the year where, shit, now we’re deep into it. What is this—our 11th, 12th Telluride? It’s our 10th year at [Northwest] String Summit. We’re going back to All Good. We’re going back to the Grand Targhee Festival. High Sierra, we did for years and years and years, and now, every couple of years we’ll end up there.
BK: We also have this new festival Harvest Fest.
JA: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
RR: Right. It’s Yonder Mountain’s festival in October in Ozark, Arkansas.
BK: It’s at the same place that they do Wakarusa—really wicked cool property. It’s the totally acoustic opposite of Wakarusa. That one I’m pretty excited about.
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