Papadosio is a rising quintet now based in Asheville, NC. The group made the festival rounds this summer from Camp Bisco through The Big Up and its own Rootwire. While the band originally performed as a four piece with Mike Healy (drums), Rob McConnell (bass, vocal), Anthony Thogmartin (guitar, vocals. keyboards) Billy Brouse (keyboards), Papadosio has since expanded with the addition of Billy’s brother Sam on keys. Another recent change has been the relocation to Asheville after emerging in Athens, OH. The group’s stated goal is “To combine eclectic musical traditions with modern Electronica to stir the heart and fuel the mind.” In this Conversation, which took place at The Big Up, the band members share some thoughts on how to achieve that intent.
Joe: Each of your albums has a specific vibe that makes it feel as if the songs were written in unison. What is your writing process and is it different for each album? Where does the inspiration for your lyrics come from? What about the album you are working on now?*
Anthony: It’s cool that you say that because we were just talking about how we feel that we write albums that are sometimes scattered when it comes to how the music goes. There’ll be a jammier track or poppier stuff. I guess Observations was in kind of a crazy time because we were experiencing a crazy updraft, much like what we’re experiencing right now. When we started touring on it, it was pretty steady, but while we were writing it, all kinds of stuff was going on. We were really busy, so we were like, “Try to record this and get it down.” It was more representative of where we were at the time than even our first album. It was like we did it, we hit it and quit it and that was the music we had.
Billy: The first one took a year and a half.
A: Yeah, the first one took a year and a half and that one took eight months to put together.
J: A lot of your new material has been tested live this summer, how are the songs going to change in studio?
Mike: Well sometimes there will be a song that we have that’s written for the album. We’ll play right through it and don’t jam out super hard on some parts, but live we’ll take a section and be like, “All right this section we’re just gonna go crazy, do whatever, improv it out,” and then we have some fun signals to get each other ready for the next part. I feel like some songs on the album, we’ll jam out on them, but sometimes we don’t do that, we’ll just do that live.
Rob: I think with making an album, after it’s done, it always goes into making the live show more concise and completes the song a little bit after going into the studio and hearing it.
A: Yeah, we record songs and after we’ve recorded them we listen to them, just our base tracks and we’re like, “What were we thinking?” We don’t feel like the song is done until we’ve laid it down in some way and been able to step outside and listen to it, or at least a live show.
M: We’ve laid stuff where we’ve listened to it later and have had to go back and do the drum take completely differently, change the part up because we need a different feel. That’s really fun too, because we do it ourselves in our own studio so we have the ability to really nitpick and go in there and do what we want and not have the constraints of having to pay by the hour at any other studio. We do it all ourselves.
J: So, did you just build this studio?
M: Yeah, we’ve kind of done that over the years, tried to throw our money back into recording and gear for ourselves. Over the years, we’ve gotten better and better stuff and learned a whole lot more about the process. This year we moved to Asheville, we rehearse outside of Asheville, and we have a cabin that we turned into a nice little studio room, control room, and a jam room, where we can talk back and forth.
How’s the new pad?
A: It’s radical! We’ve always lived with our gear though. If you wake up you might stumble over a guitar cable or a microphone, that’s just how it is.
M: There’s just cables everywhere!
J: You said there are sections where you may not know where the jam is going to go and then you come back into the song. Is there a cue or a riff or something that sends you back into it?
M: It’s different for different songs. Recently we’ve come up with a couple different gestures that we all know what mean different parts. I guess it really depends. Sometimes there is a riff that you just know how many times that riff goes through until you have to slam into the next part. Sometimes you just feel it out and just take it wherever it goes.
B: There have been some really funny signals over the years, though.
M: Yeah, there have been.
A: We tried to do hand signals, but that doesn’t really work.
B: If we’re in an improv, Sam will throw up a one or maybe fifth just to go just to chord changes.
Sam: That has proved to be really hard to do.
M: You can’t see each other in the fog.
S: Well, Rob and I will do it because it’s really important when the piano and the bass change at the same time and then these guys can play around on top of it.
R: It can get stagnant too because it’s hard to almost throw out changes, sometimes you wanna half-up the changes.
A: I think we’ll figure it out this week. Don’t you think? I feel I’m on “The Gestures of This Week.” This week’s gestures are…(makes a surprised face, all laugh)…You throw the eyebrows up and drop your jaw like you’re surprised. That means that everyone’s gonna stop what they’re doing, but not change key, we’re just gonna do something different real quick. That’s in an improv and if we’re gonna go to the next part, we’ll just do that again. So you’ll see us do that tonight for sure. But to answer your question, in the song format we try to have songs still because we watch bands sometimes and they don’t really have songs. You don’t walk away from it remembering anything. We try to do songs that have a verse and a chorus and then there’s usually a break point somewhere, maybe even after the first verse there’s a jam, but you always come back to something written because I feel like people like to relate to the music just as much as they like to have something new happen. So we’re trying to take on both and try to find a balance.
S: Especially with the new songs we’re writing in the studio, the newest new ones that we haven’t even played live yet, we’re finding it kind of challenging to find the mix because right now they’re just songs we haven’t even played them live. We’re trying to find the mix between a super concise indie rock song and a jam. It’s really confusing right now, but it’ll work out eventually.
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