“Educated Guess” is a complex tune. How much practice went into that one specifically?

Any time we’ve had backstage rehearsal gear for the past month since we’ve been on tour, we’ve been running it probably three times a day. We start out on practice gear so you can kind of work on and really hear what everyone’s doing. Get your parts down and get the vocal and the playing thing down together, and then try to move out to the real gear and play from there. So sometimes for me it’s real useful—I’m playing different keyboards in the middle of the songs—it’s really useful to be able to play on the real stuff. That’s the other challenging thing is that we’re trying to learn the music, and during festival season, we don’t really have sound checks, so we’re just working on our small practice gear and keeping it kind of intimate like that. There’s some more vocals that I’d actually like to add, but the trick is that the rhythmic part that I’m playing on the keyboard doesn’t line up with the vocals, so you have to almost get the muscle memory—automatically do one thing so that you can do the other, and it’s pretty hard, so I’m not singing a third harmony that might be there eventually, so we’ll see.

The decision to debut the song at Red Rocks was interesting. How much discussion went into putting that in the setlist and playing it?

We made a plan probably about two weeks before the album came out about which songs we wanted to start on first. We just kind of spread ‘em out over the past month, so that we had a little time. Actually, I still don’t think we’ve played “No Diablo” with the new chorus yet; we’ve still been working on that one. Oh yeah, and “Hindsight,” too. I don’t think we’ve played “Hindsight.” We’ve practiced both of those, but obviously, like I was saying, we spread them out, so we really wanted to get “Educated Guess” out there for Red Rocks. And it’s one of those things where even the week before, I don’t know if we were all 100% confident that we would do it, but we worked it a ton in the last three days coming up to Red Rocks too. Like anything, the more you do it, the more you’re trying to get to that point where you don’t have to think about where your hands are moving and what you’re playing, and to go back to that previous question, I think that’s also the moment when you say ‘okay, it’s working now because I don’t have to think about it anymore.’

With fall tour fast approaching, you said the band will hit several new venues—a trend over the last few years for you guys. Is that a product of the entire body of work or the last 2-3 years?

I think it’s a little bit of both, honestly. I really feel like Mantis was when we put it into overdrive. And honestly Kevin Browning making the move off of the road and into the office and becoming part of our management team has been so crucial because one of the things that is going to keep fans energized and interested is simply producing content, and that’s really one of his central areas of focus. And that was incredibly hard to do when you’re out on the road working 15 hours a day, running front-of-house sound for that band. It’s been a great transition for him. I feel like we’ve come up with a lot of really cool unique things that now we have somebody that can focus on that aspect of it. And he knows the music so well, so he’s in a very special position that really nobody else could do, because of his familiarity with the music. He knows the sort of thing that fans might like or be interested in. So there’s this really authentic connection, I think, that has even grown between the band and the fans, and Kevin has been a big catalyst for making that happen using technology and social media, and all these things to connect with people on a human level. It’s an amazing experience for me looking out in the crowd and recognizing thirty faces in the first five rows where I could tell you at least what their first name is.

I think you have that and I think the quality of our albums has gotten better and better. Manny Sanchez produced this one for the first time since Kevin has kind of stepped into more of the management role. He’s kind of gone more into the business or executive producer sort of vibe and Manny just absolutely knocks this one out of the park with the production. This album that we just put out here, Similar Skin, we’ve got the songs and the performances and the production all coming together in the most solid package that we’ve ever put out. There’s definitely a lot of excitement within the band. We’re really thrilled to have new songs to play, and we’ve gotten some great critical response as well as the fans being into it. It’s very difficult to get those two things to line up as well to where you pretty much have a lot of people saying, “This is some good shit. People should pay attention.”

I was asked recently if Umphrey’s was going to play Madison Square Garden sometime soon. That seemed crazy. Is it possible?

I think it’s great that that’s something that’s being brought up now. Obviously having a sold out show at Red Rocks is something that kind of legitimizes that argument. It’s one of these things where it’s like, if we can do it here, why can’t we do it in these other places? But every market is kind of its own different thing. There are definitely a few places where we’re considering an event in like a smaller arena where it’s like a 5 or 6 thousand person place, and we think that it could definitely work in a few places, and obviously with the production that we have now, we’re really confident going in that we’re gonna put on a big badass show.

Like I said, every market is kind of its own thing, and we’re definitely in the really good position of having growth pretty much across the board everywhere. Every show we try to do, we’re booking it at a place we think we at least have a chance of selling it out, with maybe like 5 or 6 exceptions a year. That’s really how you build a scene as far as touring as well, because you’ve got to teach people to buy tickets in advance. Gradually that sort of thing is happening, but the good part about it is, because our tickets are still pretty affordable, we’re still getting tons of walk-ups on days of shows when it’s not sold out yet. Those people are the ones that are like, “Okay, maybe I’ll go, maybe I won’t.” The fact that we’re getting those people through the door too is a good thing.

Overall, I think our playing in 2014 has been pretty consistently good and adventurous and interesting. The thing that we talk about is “raising the bar of the bad.” We know that we can get up to a certain point and really nail some stuff and be good, but how do you make it so the low point of a show is the high point of most other shows. That’s kind of our focus, is to keep improving that and keep improving the whole energy of the show, start to finish, and at the same time, keep it completely anything can happen. Definitely needs to be loose out there. We play our best, I feel like, when we have those sort of arrangements.

You mentioned earlier that the music can be hard to dance to if you’re not familiar with it. How much mainstream appeal does Umphrey’s have in your mind? How accessible can it be without completely selling your soul?

That’s the whole thing. We’ve had discussions about stuff like this before when we’re trying out different ideas for a song or talking about background things we could add. We’re just like, “That just doesn’t feel like something that is authentic, coming from us.” And so I think we have a vague idea of what the voice of Umphrey’s McGee is at this point, and what is it that is us at heart.

I think it would be very hard for us to make something that’s good with the top-40 requirements. We don’t really fit into those lines very well. That being said, there are always songs that are anomalies that become hits that you’re like ‘wow, the instrumentation of this is completely bizarre.’ Things like Gotye’s song [“Somebody That I Used to Know”] from a couple years ago or the Lorde song [“Royals”] from this year. There are oddball, off the wall hits that happen that way too. We’re not trying to write music that’s so obtuse and angular that there’s no melody, or no hook to it. The first couple tracks on Similar Skin are certainly kind of closer to that idea of writing a more conventional rock song. There definitely is that variation on Similar Skin, where the back half of the album is certainly more progressive and adventurous as far as the compositional side of it, and the front half is kind of more focused, aggressive but melodic rock songs.

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