How hard was it to get everybody on the same page for something like that? To make the album in a rock sense, like “Okay look, we’re going to write ‘Cut the Cable’ and it’s going to be 3:54.” Was that difficult for anybody to get onboard with?

I feel like we all kind of felt ourselves wanting to go in this direction. Honestly there wasn’t really too much pushback, as far as “How are we gonna get here and do this?” Once we get into the studio and start working on the arrangements and stuff, Manny’s always good at pointing us in the right direction, or making sure that Kris does something like hit the crash on the downbeat. It’s so funny because Kris is such a master of doing multiple things at once that sometimes it’s the simplest things like that that will elude him. There’s a lot of discussion as the songs are being put together about how many times something should happen, or how do we get back—I think that’s one of the things that we probably work on most, is , you have an A and a B section, or an A, B, and C section and what do you use, how do you connect these pieces and make it something that’s logical but also interesting and not completely already done.

So a lot of times we’ll try a few different things in the studio while we’re working on the pre-production of these songs, and try to see what it is that’s gonna be most effective with that. So one of the really funny ones on this is “Educated Guess” actually came from two different songs. I don’t know if they’re both up yet but they will be eventually. But those two different songs are in I think the bonus material package. So we had a couple different sections of it. One of ‘em, the part actually started out in F, and the rest of the song was in F-Sharp and so we tried it a couple times in the original key and it was just too strange with this like half-step thing. So then we did it in F-Sharp but somehow—I don’t know why we didn’t do this—but we didn’t record a version of us playing in F-Sharp, even though that’s what we agreed that we were going to do. I think we might’ve recorded the other section down a half step, but we didn’t record this one up a half step. We thought, “Oh, maybe we’ll move this down.” So anyway, we actually did that in post-production where we moved everything up a half step, so we’re playing everything in F and it’s tuned up a half step. That’s only in certain sections of the song, though, the first part.

That was one thing that made it much more interesting when we were trying to re-learn it as a band, is we’d been used to playing it a half step lower, so it really was like learning how to play it from scratch again.

You guys are throwing the annual Mashup Halloween party in Boston this year. How are the mashups coming along so far?

[Laughs] I will be completely honest with you, we usually don’t start working on this—we’ll probably get a list going before summer tour’s over here, and we have a few things that are left over from last year. We always have a running list. You just never know—things can look great on paper, and you’ll be like, “Oh my god this is gonna be so cool!” and then sometimes you’ll try it live and be like, “Well that wasn’t as cool as I was thinking…”

Have those become increasingly difficult to come up with as the years go on?

Maybe. I don’t know. They’re probably getting hard in the sense that we’ve chosen a lot of the obvious songs that people would know and like, but they’re getting easier in the sense that we are getting better at figuring out how to make them successful. In the beginning we made them way too hard for ourselves. I get people all the time that are like “Dude, you gotta play the ‘Land of Wappy’ mashup again!”

That’s a heavy one.

Well it’s seventeen minutes long. So think about, you’re like “Oh let’s run through it twice.” Well there’s your whole soundcheck. So that was not the smartest arrangement. But we were learning how to do it, so we’ve definitely gotten a little better at it, as far as that goes. But I definitely feel like the last two years that we’ve done here have been…We’ve got the “Life During Exodus” mashup that we still play sometimes, and I really like the “Thunderkiss 65,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood one [“Frankie Zombie”]. That one always cracks me up.

I like the Blurred Lines/Marvin Gaye mashup too [“Papa Can Change a Blurred Stone”]. I feel like you guys could be material witnesses in that lawsuit that’s going on between those two.

Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve looked into this, and there’s a very blurred line between what is original and what is copied, and the fact that we’re combining different parts of things at the same time. It’s one of those things that we can kind of scrape by on right now. But yeah, we thought that one was pretty fun, and it’s pretty rare that you actually get four songs that work together like that, so that was really exciting to me to have all those different parts. The LCD tune [“I Can Change”], and “Papa was a Rolling Stone.” So yeah, that one, I feel like we can only play it once, because “Blurred Lines” was happening back then and not now, but that mashup was pretty hilarious.

And you’re going back to Atlanta for New Years for, quite literally, a week of shows. What happened there?

This was a really interesting year with how everything played out because it really had to do with the days of the week. We looked at this, and doing the 28-31 this year is awful. It’s like Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We looked at that and just weren’t loving it. And I’d honestly forgotten but someone told me after the fact that Phish did this one year, back in the early 2000’s or something, where I think they played on the first. Maybe they did a show on the 31st and the 1st…

2002, yeah, it was when they came back from that hiatus. The first show was New Years.

Okay, got it. So I thought I was coming up with this really unique original idea and that it had never been done before. But nonetheless, it still had a great application for us. This way people hopefully only have to take off a day or two of work and they can see five shows. And that just never happens.

At first we talked about doing four, starting on the 31 and going through the 3rd, and the more we thought about it, we were gonna have to take a production day anyway on the 30th, and you just never wanna have the 31st as your first show, at least I don’t think. Get the kinks out, make sure everything is working technically, and then for the crew guys as well, it’s just such a long day, us playing three sets. It really just made logistical sense saying, “Alright, well let’s try to throw in the 30th too,” and voilà, we have our first ever five-night stand.

And Atlanta’s kind of become a little hub for you guys, especially in the South. The locals have really taken to Umphrey’s.

There’s a really special energy for us floating around Atlanta the past few years. It’s interesting because it’s kind of gone out from there in probably a 300-mile radius. I don’t know, the South seems to be really digging Umphrey’s right now. We had some great shows this year in Nashville, Birmingham, Chattanooga and Knoxville. It’s been kind of a good little hub of our fanbase there, so it’ll be real interesting to see what we can do after doing five nights at the Tabernacle. I’m hoping we’ll be able to come back and play Atlanta in the summer next year.

When are we going to have you guys back in the city? When’s the Garden run?

[Laughs] The Garden run. Is 2017 open? I mean that’s reasonable, right? A couple more years. Yeah, we are definitely coming back to New York in January, and if things go as planned, we’ll have a pretty cool little surprise with those shows, and see what happens.

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