Photo by James Martin

RR: Do you ever have that feeling that ‘you know, if I just stayed up here on stage, everything would be all right’?

JA: Yeah. (laughs) I had that this last tour. Go home now? But, it’s so safe up here.

BK: Eventually, you’d piss yourself on stage. That would be uncomfortable and awkward, but at the end of the day, it could be liberating. (laughter) I’ve always said that one of the great things that happened to me is that I made a lyrical and/or musical gaffe/mistake in front of an audience of, I don’t know, 50,000 people, and I’m sure nobody really noticed, but I sure as shit noticed. I felt like “Wow, I just embarrassed myself in front of all these people.” Getting over that was super liberating. Now, I’m not really bothered by that kind of stuff. That was kind of cool.

RR: So…Yonder’s plans—tour through the summer, put out a studio record in the fall, and what’s up from there? Can you see a year out from now?

JA: Yeah. I can. One of the other exciting things that we’re doing is that we play Red Rocks on August 20. The way that tickets are tracking—we’ve been very lucky at Red Rocks; we’ve had a few sellouts; we’ve always sold over 9,000 tickets; it’s always been really really great, but this year we put together a great package with the [Infamous] Stringdusters and the Railroad Earth guys and it’s a really cool thing. But, we’re going to be filming Red Rocks this year. Not just filming filming, but bringing in executive producers, producers, directors, huge crews, cranes, booms, and whatever the hell we’re going to have. The reason we’re doing that is because we four for almost ten years now have had a desire to really investigate what’s happening overseas. What are the possibilities for this music outside of the boundaries of the U.S.? We took one trip to Europe years and years ago that just went over really well. We had some of the most amazing experiences from a 115 in a pub in Galway, Ireland to 10,000 people on the side of a hill in France. We’ve always wanted to go back and just between this and that and this and that and the economy it’s just never worked out.

What we’re doing is that we’re filming [Red Rocks] for a lot of reasons. One, for a
beautiful sense of posterity—what a great thing of who we are and to be able to show this to family and friends forever—but, also, we’re going to use it as a tool to expand our horizons outside of the U.S. to Japan, to England, to Europe, in general, to Australia, and to New Zealand. We’ve got this amazing manager behind us and this amazing management team and everything is coming to this beautiful meeting place where everybody is at the same table and everybody’s got the same voice. I’m really excited about filming that because it’s going to be really, really fun, and more details, that we can’t talk about now, will come out soon.

So…a year from now? Oh, yeah, shit, a year from now—I expect momentum to be at an all-time high. I’m a lurker online, and I love reading that “this band peaked in ’06,” “this band peaked in ’05,” “this band peaked in ’07,” and, well, I don’t know if you were at the sold-out nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco with freaks bouncing off every wall, and higher ticket sales then we’ve ever had at Red Rocks at this point, or amazing slots that we’re very, very lucky and very appreciative to have at these festivals, but I think the day that we’ve peaked is the day that we end, the day that we wrap it up.

I’m a fan of Phish. Saw my first show in ’91. I saw shows last year that made me go, “Holy crap, this band is on a roll.” I don’t like the peaks and the valleys and the this and the that; yeah, bands will have their ups and downs, but that’s the beauty of creating live music. It is always changing, always evolving, always breathing. Sure, if I went into every single concert that I see and said, “Oh, man, this band sucks. They peaked forever ago,” yeah, you’re probably going to have a terrible time. You probably just need to have a glass of ginger ale, take a deep breath, and lighten up. For me, seeing this band a year from now, I expect nothing but more camaraderie, tighter everything, approach-mentality, physical strength and physical well-being, material, this Red Rocks movie that we’re shooting, a new record—the possibilities are endless, and that’s the way that we’re looking at it. It’s really rejuvenating and very, very fulfilling. Sure, anybody who has had a job for 13 years has ups and downs, but when you find somebody who inspires you like our new manager and our new management team and, in turn, it inspires all of us to inspire each other, it’s this circular thing that we’ve always been into. It’s going around and coming around, and every time it comes back around, it’s “ooh, let’s see what it looks like now.” For me, seeing a year out is pretty bright and I’m pretty excited.

BK: Definitely want to reiterate it for the travel overseas for a lot of reasons for me. I’m really excited about that. Looking a year out…to me, this seems like a year where a lot of new opportunities and new things are going to be happening. I guess there are so many variables that we’re going to have along the way, and everything in one direction or another, that I think this year is almost going to be too interesting to predict where I’m going to be in a year. I know where I want to be in a year, but that’s a different story—on a rocket ship, cruising through space, exploring where no man has ever explored, [Austin hums the Star Trek theme music at this point] and peeing myself on stage again.

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