Earlier this year you guys released your first album in quite some time. How has the response been?

It’s been great. We’re enjoying kind of a resurgence of another level of success that we hadn’t reached before and it’s just very rewarding. Not only that people are listening to the record, but it’s also just bringing us a ton or new live music fans. So, it’s been great. We’ve been traveling much more than we have in the past bunch of years. We have new management, a new booking agent, things are just really on the up and up for The Motet.

It seemed, for a long time, like you guys were almost the house band of Colorado. Then in the last couple years or so, you have been around on a more national level. What do you think has been behind that wider exposure?

Jans—Well there was a lot that happened. I mean from personnel changes to also a life change. Some of us had kids. We decided to hang back a bit and just do the stuff that we knew would be great for business and that people would show up. We’re a party and our Colorado scene is just so supportive, so it was kind of easy to just stay home and have all these great gigs. Either in the mountains or at festivals in Colorado or these big Halloween and New Years shows. So we made a commitment that we were going to put out original music that we collaboratively wrote, and we were going to get back to the rest of the country and that we were going to do really this thing. So that’s what it was. It was the commitment. It was that the band was ready to give it a real shot and get our music out there.

You mentioned it not really being that hard to get gigs in Colorado all the time, what is it about Colorado that you think makes it such a musical state. For a little while now, its been such a center of the live music scene.

Well there’s a lot of reasons. For one, it’s absolutely gorgeous so people like to come there. There’s a kind of tourism. Kids like to come there. There are great schools, and now weed is legal. It’s a great place to come and do shows. I mean Phish does three shows a year there. There’s Red Rocks and other venues. The music business is also really set up there. There are really great and large management companies, booking companies. If you’re a band it’s one of the premiere spots in the country to start out and have business infrastructure. I mean think String Cheese Incident, Big Gigantic—they’re all running their thing out of little Boulder, Colorado. There’s pretty amazing stuff.

This upcoming New Years show will be in Portland, OR. Is this the first time you guys have left Colorado for a New Years show?

It is our first in a long, long time. We made this a point that we wanted to bring some of these special shows that we’ve been treating Colorado with to other places. So we’re going to start to expand and we want to bring some of our special shows with special guests and special music to New York to Atlanta to Chicago. To these places that have shown us a lot of love in this last year and a half that we’ve been getting out there.

I know a lot of members of the band recently joined Big Gigantic on stage at Rowdy Town over at Red Rocks. Since Dominic [Lalli] used to be a member of The Motet, was that kind of a full circle thing for you guys?

Absolutely. We’ve always been really involved with them. We still do shows with them in Colorado once a year. There’s this Herbie Hancock Tribute we do with them. He’s still our bro and we see him all the time. He comes to support and we have him sit in. We’re just so happy for his successes, and he really brought it around to us and said, ‘Hey I want you guys to do something so that I have a live sound up there and also get the kids to know that The Motet is where it came from.’ So it was a very cool thing. You can’t complain about two sold out nights at Red Rocks.

So what else is in store for you guys? I imagine you plan to keep the national push going.

Yep. More than ever. This next year, like I said, we just got a new booking agent and he’s really going to make sure our festival scene is on point and that we show up at all four corners of the United States—and the middle—to represent. We’ve also got shows coming up in the East Coast next month. We’ll be playing the Brooklyn Bowl. We’re just excited to finally create more great original music that hopefully can last the test of time.

On that note, do you guys have another album of original material in the works?

We are in the writing process for it right now, and we are very excited to get it out to the world.

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