It’s not like the stuff on Cabaret or Mountains Beaches Cities isn’t jam music, because you open those songs up live. But in the studio, artistically, you appeal to a much broader audience who is more indie and unfamiliar with the jamband scene, so I would imagine some people could see you live and get confused.
Trevor: I think that confusion is a good thing. It sort of makes us happy because we don’t fall into a certain categorization. Categories tend to divide people and we want to unite them.
Tommy: Our fan base is really diverse, if you go downstairs there’s all sorts of different people. We really like that.
Is Nashville still home?
Trevor Yes it is.
How would you say Nashville has helped shape your sound?
Spencer: I think the thing that’s helped us most about Nashville is that since there are so many people there for music, you’re always surrounded by people involved in music. Whether it’s your genre or not, all the people working in the industry are working at a high standard and a professional level. Being surrounded by that, you find that what you expect of yourself has to be the same. You can’t be an amateur, you have to be a professional.
Tell us about your new EP Acoustic on West 56th
Spencer: The EP comes out on December 17th and it was something we recorded the week our record came out. We went up to New York City to do some promo stuff and the night before the record came out we played a really small show at our label’s office, in this really cool building with an awesome view of the city.
Trevor: Yeah it was something like the 57th floor or something; it was high up there
Spencer: We recorded it just because they had the set-up there and it could be recorded. We didn’t necessarily have any ambition for it. But it sounded cool. They had an awesome grand piano and it’s just a different sound of the songs on Mountains Beaches Cities. It just kind of shows them at their core and the songs are kind of exposed, which is something that’s really cool and I think the fans are really going to enjoy hearing it because the records we put out are sort of layered and intense but this is a real raw presentation of these songs.
Trevor: It sort of goes along with that we enjoy doing acoustic videos. We did one with “River Water” with the backup singers that were on the record. Even from Cabaret we went into this botanical garden and recorded “Gunflower” in this weird dome. We like to play these songs that are very layered, very complex studio songs, but we like to completely simplify them, bring them down. Maybe add a banjo to it and keep it real simple. We just really wanted to challenge ourselves a little bit after putting out such a dense studio version of these songs, so it’s a cool challenge for us. We think that people are really going to like hearing that presentation.
We’re about to wrap up 2013, what are the rest of your plans for the year?
Tommy: We have a Christmas show in Birmingham on the 20th and our New Year’s Eve show in Nashville, we’re really excited because we have some big plans for that.
No Comments comments associated with this post