Particle keyboardist Steve Molitz surprised fans last December when he announced that founding members Eric Gould and Darren Pujalet would be leaving the band to spend more time with their families. However many of those fans were soon excited to learn that the band would soon be hitting the road much harder than they had in some time, with longtime Brothers Past bassist Clay Parnell and Quixotic drummer Brandon Draper replacing the newly departed musicians. A few weeks later, Particle were back onstage with an album in the works and a renewed sense of purpose. We spoke with Molitz about the band’s new lineup, their forthcoming album, some of his other projects (including a video game with the one-and-only Shaq) and more.
So, the thing that everybody really wants to know about right now is the lineup change. What was behind the reshuffling of the Particle lineup?
It was a solution to the question of how could Particle get out on the road to really tour again. For the past few years, I’ve been talking to our founding rhythm section, Eric (Gould) and Darren (Pujalet), about recording new albums and really touring again but they were in very different places in their lives than I was and the timing just wasn’t right for us to go out and do big tours like we used to. They were starting families and involved in projects, work related projects outside of the music business that they needed to stay local for and really couldn’t get out on the road.
So, by necessity, over the last 5 or 6 years I was doing a combination of things. I was still playing about 20 Particle shows a year. That was the amount of time that those guys felt comfortable giving. We had a blast the last 6 or 7 years playing together even though it was on a smaller scale. I did a variety of different things on my own: touring with Rich Robinson for a couple years, playing with Headtronics and scoring a bunch of video games. I worked on one game for most of 2012. I was playing with a bunch of bands but still keeping busy with Particle along the way. Somewhere in the process of doing all of these different things, there were some years where I was playing with 20 different bands and I always loved playing with different people. I always learn something from the musicians I’m playing with.
Playing different styles and interacting with different types of fans is always a great experience but somewhere along the line I just found myself missing the Particle scene. I missed playing those songs on a more consistent basis, interacting with the fans and just kind of throwing the circus tent up from town to town, night to night and seeing how the experience unfolded. Particle has always been a band that liked to try new things, enjoys improvisation within the show and liked to incorporate new thematic elements. Over the years we would do themed tours or themed events, whether it was a Studio 54 party or a Calilicious Tour. I just missed all of that creative energy and of course writing and playing new songs.
Basically, I reached out to Eric and Darren and asked if they would be interested in revitalizing the band and really getting in the studio and getting back out on the road. They shared that they were really at a different point in their lives and they gave me their blessing to carry the Particle torch with a new rhythm section because they have a lot of love for Particle and want to see it thrive and continue even if they can’t be the ones to continue it. They sort of respected the fact that I really wanted to get back out there and play this music again, and they didn’t want to hold the band back even though they couldn’t tour anymore. So once they gave me the green light to move forward with a revitalized lineup, it was a really easy choice to turn to Brandon Draper on drums and Clay Parnell on bass. They were the first people I called. I’m very thankful that they were available and that it worked out.
Brandon is somebody who had been subbing for Darren whenever he couldn’t make shows over the last several years, so he’s played a handful of shows with Particle, and he’s just an amazing drummer who’s totally risen to the occasion. He really blew my mind with his playing on the recent winter tour we just had. He was really just a perfect fit in terms of his style and also his creativity. He’s a great multi-instrumentalist, so he’s been writing songs and singing as well. He’s a really diverse player. He comes from a jazz and world music background, but definitely has a lot of flair and originality within the more electronic dance music style — breakbeat, drum and bass. So he’s a real thrill to play with because he’s always trying new things and within his own playing trying to set the bar higher for himself every night and really takes risks, and that’s something that I just love and admire. It was a blast playing with him on this last tour.
And then Clay Parnell is someone that I’ve known through the scene. After years of touring, Particle and Brothers Past had crossed paths many times. Recently, I kept bumping into Clay at all these different situations, it’s like the universe was sending me a message as I was looking for a new bass player. I think the first time we hooked up was on a recording session with Jon Gutwillig for a mockumentary called Bad Foot that’s getting made. It’s basically a film being made about this band, three girls, called_ Bad Foot_, and Barber brought a handful of guys in to write the music. So Clay was brought in on bass and I was brought in on keys, so we found ourselves at this recording session, had a blast and really connected. And then we played together a handful of times. We also did a show together in Chicago with this group called Skydeck Allstars. And then we were on Everyone Orchestra together with Matt Butler. Kind of like every step of the way as I was sitting there scratching my head like, “Oh, if only I could find an amazing bass player,” Clay was just kind of there. So I was recording with Ben Combe, our guitarist, and Brandon Draper, our new drummer, the three of us were recording up in Woodstock, NY, at a studio just writing some new songs. And Ben was playing bass on most of the tracks, and then one of the days I said, “I bumped into my old friend Clay Parnell, and he lives in Philly, it’s not that far away. Maybe I’ll call him and see if he wants to come by and play.” So sure enough he was in town and had the time off and generously drove up. And we just recorded and jammed together for a couple days, and there was an instant chemistry. And he ended up just on the spot playing on probably three or four songs without ever having heard the songs before. And the parts he played were so good, they’re all keeper parts that are going to make the final cut of the album.
When it came time to tour, it was just a really obvious choice that Clay was who I wanted to reach out to. And I have to say the same thing about him that I said about Brandon—that he just totally stepped up and was just such a pleasure to play with on this past tour. We’re really just having so much fun out there. And we just finished up this tour with 16 shows, and on the last night of the tour we were all just having such a good time. We didn’t want the tour to end because it was different arrangements of the tunes, and trying new material, and practicing as long as we could every day at soundcheck. We were having so much fun playing together. We wanted to play together every chance we got. It feels great to be playing with these amazing guys, to be surrounded by such talented people and also people who are just so passionate about what we’re all doing. We’re really all out there with a common goal, just having a blast and really enjoying playing together.
It’s a fun thing when you start developing these friendships on the road, but also developing new relationships with the material. For me to play some of these songs that I’ve been playing in Particle for 13 years now, and just hear how different musicians use the rhythms and the melodies. They put their own personal stamp on the sound. So it’s been really fun for me to listen to the material kind of being reinvented by Clay and Brandon. Ben and I have opened our minds to some new arrangements. But they’re really fun. Even the old material that those guys have been learning, it all feels new to me. It feels like a new song. But obviously the melodies and the song structures are all there, but it’s kind of been revamped to fit this new format. And then on top of that, we’ve written probably 15 or 20 new songs together, and I just can’t wait to keep debuting those. We’re definitely going to be playing a bunch of those on our upcoming spring tour, and that’s 24 shows.
The fact that those guys are so diverse and can go wherever the music takes them—it’s such a cool thing. And by the end of this most recent tour we did, we were really opening our minds to going wherever the music took us. My favorite show of the tour, if I had to choose one, would be Austin, which was the second to last night. So it just felt great. It felt like the tour had this really beautiful arc to it, like this exponential build where every night we were learning more about ourselves and figuring out new and interesting ways we could do things, you know really progressing from night to night, which is such a good feeling and it’s really why I wanted to play with Particle again.
To get back to what I was saying a moment ago, I just really missed that feeling in my soul of being out there on the road, totally creatively immersed in the Particle music and with the Particle fans. So it was a great tour, and I’m really looking forward to the next one as well. It just feels great to be really digging in and playing these songs again, and also writing new songs We’re heading out to our guitarist Ben Combe’s place in Connecticut, and the two of us are going to lay down some guitar and some keyboard parts over some of the rhythm section parts that Brandon and Clay took down in Woodstock. So, slowly but surely the new studio album is shaping up, and I’m really excited to keep cracking these new songs and ultimately playing them on our next tour.
Now that Clay and Brandon are in the band, are there going to be any major stylistic changes on the new album or is it going to maintain the Particle vibe that we’ve become familiar with?
I think the Particle vibe is definitely there, and will always be there. It really is the core of who and what we are. I would say the foundation is still there, that classic Particle sound is definitely still there. But I think there’s also an evolution that’s happened, which is really exciting and refreshing because these musicians have a slightly different set of colors on their palette. They’re able to color the songs with different feelings and nuances than you might have heard from Particle in years past. So it’s sort of an expanded, evolved sound, but definitely building on the same foundation.
When people ask what kind of music we play, I still say it’s high energy dance music mixed with funk and rock and electronic dance music. So the foundations are definitely there, but the songwriting has expanded and evolved. I think maybe about half the songs we’ve written have lyrics, so that’s a new and exciting thing for us. I feel like the structure of the instrumental songs has kind of opened up and they are able to breathe a little bit more than some of our earlier material. When we were younger, our songwriting was really turbo-charged and relentless, and we still absolutely have songs that are like that, these kind of upper-cut songs that are just a total blast of energy from top to bottom. While we definitely still have those songs, we’ve all also matured as players. For every couple songs we write like that, we want to write two or three where it’s maybe a more laid-back tempo or patient song structure, or maybe shorter melodies and shorter solos and more focus on the group dynamic than individual soloing. So it’s been really fun just to write together and let the sound of this new lineup come together organically and naturally. It’s been really cool to get into the studio, hit record, jam on some different melodies and chord structures, and sort of let the songs shape themselves rather than trying to force something to be what you think it should be.
It really feels authentic and inspiring. The way I like to think of it is it’s like we’re digging for buried treasure together. That goes for the studio and the live setting, but especially the live setting. When you’re taking risks, as so many jambands do, and you’re out there without a net, and you’re sort of deep into uncharted territory, where you’re allowing 5 or 10 minutes for an instrumental section to blossom—the musicians are being really patient, the fans are being really patient, and everybody’s just allowing this process to take place and it’s really a beautiful thing. In those moments I always feel like we’re kind of digging for buried treasure. Some nights you strike gold, and some nights you don’t. But when you do, it just makes the digging so worth it. That feeling, metaphorically speaking, when the shovel hits the treasure chest. It’s seven minutes into some jam and you guys are all just looking at each other like, “Wow, we’ve never been here before, this is pretty cool,” and then everything comes together, and everyone’s in that moment. The band can experience it in real time, and you can just see the expressions on the musicians’ faces that they’re experiencing this thing for the first time, and it’s exciting to them. That’s kind of the zone we strive for every night, to be in the moment and try to get to new places every night within the same song structure and within that classic Particle sound you were talking about a minute ago. It’s been really fun to kind of hop out on tour with these guys and kind of dig for treasure. Some nights you find it, and some nights you don’t, but as long as you keep searching, I think that’s what it’s all about.
You mentioned that some of the songs on the new album are going to have more singing. What made you guys decide to go with that?
We’ve written songs over the years that have had vocals. We started writing songs with lyrics in about 2005, just in different songs. It’s probably been maybe 5 or 10 songs that we’ve written that have had lyrics since 2005. So it’s not necessarily that it’s a totally new thing for us, it’s just that within a normal Particle set you might get 80 percent of the songs are instrumental, and 20 percent have vocals. Now, as we’re pursuing more vocal-driven songs, that ratio may change to be a little more balanced between instrumental and vocal-driven songs. Granted, a lot of the songs with vocals will still have open-ended improvisational sections. It wasn’t really something we set out to do. It wasn’t a contrived decision, it was really just trying to serve the song.
It’s been the kind of thing where we’ve just approached each song as its own entity and sometimes the song steers you in a certain direction and you just get a sense of what it needs. So there were some songs that we wrote where once the grooves and the melodies were all in place and the chord changes and the song structure, we’d listen back to it and said “Wow, that feels done to us. Let’s just leave that one instrumental, it seems like it’s great the way it is.” And then there were others where we would listen back and think, “Wow, this section right here would be great if it had a verse,” and someone would improvise some words or hum a melody. And everybody kind of had the same feeling about it. “Yeah, that’s what I was hearing, that’s what I was thinking, too, let’s put something like that down.” So we didn’t really have any rules as to whether or not we were trying to write an all instrumental album or all songs with vocals, it really was a song-by-song thing where we just tried to stay open-minded and serve the song, and sort of let the music inform whether or not it needed lyrics or not.
It’s been a great process in that way, and ultimately we kind of love it all. We all love playing songs that are these 15 minute, high-energy dance epics that go through all these peaks and valleys and have tons of improvisation and kind of driving rhythms and big soaring melodies and that we can kind of ride these big waves of dynamic changes. We love that, but we all are just as interested in kind of playing rock songs that follow more standard arrangements. I mean, when I look back at some of the songs we were covering on this tour, we were covering the Beck song “E-Pro,” Radiohead’s “National Anthem,” Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar.” Those are all songs that are vocally driven, but then we would open them up to have these big improvisational sections, so a song like “Have a Cigar” might be 15 minutes on a given night, whereas on the album it’s probably 5 minutes. So even on the material where we are incorporating lyrics, sometimes the songs end up being a 4-minute tight rock song, and other times there are lyrics but it ends up opening up into a sort of epic narrative saga where the lyrics are just one part of the story that’s being told, but the music and the melodies are also adding to the story. We’re really not trying to impose too many rules on ourselves.
We recently posted an interesting story about you teaming up with Shaquille O’Neal to score a video game. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
I contributed on a number of different levels to video games over the years. The first thing I did was I wrote a couple songs for a game called Scarface: The World is Yours that Universal put out. It must have been in 2005 or 2006. And one of the songs, “American Dream,” was recorded by Particle and featured in the game. And then there was another song I did where I took Giorgio Moroder’s score from Scarface and kind of remixed it, and did a mashup with Blondie’s song “Rush Rush.” So I kind of did my own thing, and Particle also did some songs for Scarface. And since then I’ve worked on a handful of other games.
I spent a lot of 2012 working on an original game that was being created by the film director Gore Verbinski, who did Pirates of the Caribbean and Rango and most recently The Lone Ranger. So I worked with Gore and an amazing development team out in LA for most of 2012 as the lead composer for that project and probably wrote two hours of music, so it was a really in-depth project.
Last year I scored a game called R.I.P.D., it was later made into a movie that came out last year. And the company that put out R.I.P.D. is teaming up with Shaq to put out this game Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn. So when it came time for them to make the game, they gave me a call and just basically said, “Hey, we’d like to put you in a room with Shaq and see what happens.” “Oh, alright.” So we got together, and we really just had a great time and hit it off creatively right away. We both grew up listening to a lot of the same hip-hop and rap, so there’s a lot of common ground there. He’s really an incredibly creative and talented guy. He’s just an endless source of inspiration and ideas. So he’s constantly brainstorming and throwing out a bunch of great ideas and we were able to connect creatively pretty quickly.
I also did some music for a trailer that this incredible game company put together. The company’s called Big Deez Productions. They’re out of New Jersey, and they’ve worked on all kinds of different games, Halo games, and Street Fighter, all kinds of different projects. Shaq and the game developer are putting up a bunch of their own money, but they’re also running an Indiegogo campaign for the game to sort of get fans involved and to open the thing up to people. There are all kinds of creative things you can do with the rewards where you can be the voice of one of the characters in the game, or you can help design kung fu moves or something. Honestly it’s really, it’s a lot of fun and it’s not the kind of thing that’s meant to be too heavy-handed. Shaq’s a really fun guy and has a great sense of humor. I think the game is going to be a lot of fun, and I think the creative process will be a lot of fun as well. So definitely keep your eye out for that as it shapes up or check out the Indiegogo page and you can kind of get a better sense of it. We’ll have to see how it all shapes up, but I think I’ll probably be writing some beats for Shaq, and maybe he’ll be laughing or we’ll get some other special guests in there. We’ll have to see how it all shapes up, but it’ll be fun and exciting. If you want to hear what happens when you put the Particle keyboard player with Shaquille O’Neal…(Laughs)....I guess you’ve got to visit the Indiegogo page.
What’s in store for you and for Particle in the future? When can we expect that new album?
We’re working on it every day whenever we’re not on the road. We’ve got this great 24-city tour coming up that spans over a month. It starts in Lake Tahoe and ends at Jazz Fest with a Late Night in New Orleans. So really whenever we’re off the road we’re just working on finishing it up. We may put the album out all at once, or we may put it out in two parts just to try to get the music out there as quickly as possible. As the first five or six songs are ready, we may just release those and then release the next five or six later. We’ll have to see, but the new music will definitely be out as soon as possible.
What’s next for us is really just trying to be in the moment and take each show and each day as it comes. We’re trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves. But we’ve discovered that we’re just having such a great time at these shows, so there’s a real passion and motivation to keep playing together and to keep pushing forward. You can definitely expect to see Particle touring and putting out the new albums. We definitely have a lot of exciting stuff to announce in the coming weeks. So you can check out particlepeople.com or Facebook and Twitter for the latest info. There’s some really cool stuff we have in the works right now. It really just feels great to be back on tour with Particle, connecting with this music, and with this amazing band and with the fans, most importantly. We’re looking forward to a great year.
I guess the only other thing I would say is that we’re traveling with a lighting designer. He’s from Minneapolis so he’s teamed up with Atmosphere and PROF and that whole thing out in the Twin Cities. So we’re really happy to have him on the road, and he is taking a custom light package out on the whole tour. That will only continue to build and expand as the tours go by. We’ve always loved incorporating multimedia into our live show. Back in the day we used to travel with a projectionist, and then that became lights, and now it’s these lights. I could see it evolving to some other ideas that we’ve been throwing around for the future as well—incorporating more stage design and interactive multimedia. That’s something else that fans can look forward to.
We’re also really excited to be capturing multitrack recordings of all the shows on our upcoming spring tour. If you check out our website in the coming weeks, there’ll be announcements about how those shows are going to be released. We’re really excited to be getting multitracks of all the shows that we play. Aside from that, we’re just really looking forward to playing a bunch of new material. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve really wanted to write new songs and really forge new ground in Particle for a long time now. Now the stars have finally aligned, and that time has finally come. I’m really just very excited for this new phase in the band’s evolution and we’re just having a blast and looking forward to it.
