Electron

Do you ever foresee a time again where the band might be playing 40 or 50 shows a year?

I could definitely see that. I don’t see a time where we’ll be playing 100 shows a year, but 40 or 50? That’s only 15 more than we’re doing right now. I can see that! Fifteen is easy! You can do that in two weeks. I can see a time where we say “Hey, let’s go out and do two weeks and really do it.” Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and do it two weeks in a row. Bang ten shows out. I see String Cheese does that from time to time and it’s a big difference from what they were doing, which is what we’re doing right now. Twnety-five shows, but then that extra three weeks where you’re doing five shows a week. It’s not that many shows, but it’s a different impression. I could see us doing that, but I don’t necessarily say “I wanna do that” or “I don’t wanna do that.”

There was a time where all I wanted to do was get back out on tour, but over the last couple of years, I’ve started to grow really accustomed to the balance that I have in my life right now. It’s really good. My kids are getting older. My four-year-old son had to fill this thing out at school for Father’s Day. It said, “What is my dad’s job?” And he wrote “Going to meetings.” And I was like, “Going to meetings!? That’s not my job!” And he was like, “Well, I know you go to shows, too, but you haven’t really been going to shows recently. More these days I feel like you go to meetings.” I thought that was pretty astute. Man, even my four-year-old is picking up on the fact that I’m at home a lot more. Because last year we were on tour with Conspirator, we were on full time tour. This year is the first time in his life that he’s had me around and he’s acknowledging it and appreciating it. So I could see another three weeks though. I think you picked a good number, 40-50. I’m going to make some calls.

What about new music? Are you or anyone else in the band actively writing new music for the Disco Biscuits?

I know Barber wrote a lot of songs over the last few years. But where it all end up. I don’t know what’s going to happen. When I got home from Jam Cruise this year, I thought to myself: “I wanna take some time off.” We had Dominican Holidaze, then New Year’s run, then Jam Cruise with a sort of Phish New Year’s run in between. Then we came out to Colorado and did Electron at the Gothic. I came home and Mike Greenfield had given me this book called The War of Art. It’s about writer’s block, but it could be applied to anything. It’s meant to have widespread applications, but it’s about how to get over writer’s block or, maybe, if you want to run or work out every day but you find yourself procrastinating and skipping. It’s a self-help book.

I sat down and I read a couple of chapters in the book—I had already started working on a new batch of songs—and it started speaking to me a lot, and I banged out like five or six new songs. So we’ve been playing one of them the last few weeks called “Miracles,” and this other one that was a little older, that we brought to the set called, “This is Your Time.” Electron has introduced them in the last couple weeks. So there’s new music on the way. There’s like three or four new songs that these guys are starting to hear and know, but we haven’t learned as a band yet. I’m hoping that I can take them and put them together with songs like “The Bridge” and “Last Days of Everything,” and couple of other Biscuits songs that didn’t quite make it into full rotation, and make an album. Whether for the Biscuits, or probably for Electron, make an album where we take all these songs and get them down definitively. Just as an exercise and for the fans. People don’t listen to studio music that much anymore. I know, I could go and make a whole album of these songs and people are just going to go and tell me that the version of “Miracles” from Disc Jam is awesome and it’s 18 minutes long and they don’t need to listen to a five minute version that I made in the studio. So it’s more for me, because I see people don’t buy it. People barely even download new, free studio music. They want the live shows.

So I’m thinking about it. I’m writing, notwithstanding what the final product is. What’s the product? I don’t know, but I know I need to write. I haven’t written songs in five years, so it’s a whole new batch. I think people are really responding to this song “Miracles.” I’ve been shamelessly self-promoting the song because I think it’s exciting for me after years of being—I don’t want to say jaded—about the whole process, but I was over it. I got to the point where I didn’t feel like creating anymore. I didn’t feel like writing songs and lyrics and verses and choruses. We were playing with Conspirator, and I didn’t really have a band that was touring or learning new music so I gave up on that process. Then I realized one day: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if anybody hears the song. That’s not what I write music for. I’m writing for myself, and so I did. I wrote a bunch of songs. I wrote this one song called “Without You” and I know, for sure, there’s no way people are going to like it. There’s no way. It might be the best song I ever wrote. It’s probably the best song I ever wrote. I have a friend at home who is an adult in the music industry who has heard it. I played it on acoustic guitar for him. This is like three months ago now and he got in touch with me two days ago and he told me, “Man, I’m up in New York right now and I’m just in the elevator, and I’m singing something and I’m like what am I singing right now? Oh my God, I’m singing this dude’s song.” So he reached out to me and was like “I’m singing your song right now and I want you to know something: Three months after you played it for me on an acoustic guitar in my studio, I just started singing it again.” This is good, but I know it’s so far from what anybody in my fan base wants to hear from me. I think I know what people want. But the older I get, I realize that I don’t know what anybody wants. So maybe the best thing is to write from the heart and put it out there without regard for that. It’s all for the heart and from the heart. It’s just meant to put out positivity in the world.

Pages:« Previous Page