Photo by Keith Griner

That’s impressive to hear someone who’s been around for so long saying they’re still nervous about this week. I think that’s a good sign.

Yeah. Really nervous. It’s crazy. Spinning the Wheel—there’s a reason we’ve only done it twice. It’s crazy. But it’s so fun. When the wheel is spinning, there’s an excitement that is unlike anything that happens during our shows. Obviously there’s all different kinds of excitement during the course of a concert, but this is completely different. There’s a wheel spinning, everybody in the place is fixated on it, including us, and then it lands and it’s either the big cheer or the big sigh that everybody gets. And then you have to shift and settle in to “What now?” How are we going to do this as a group? And that’s the groupthink that we share with the fans. That’s the best way to describe it. There’s a thought process that we go through every night, ten times a night, of “Okay, we’re in this song and key, we need to get to that song and that key, that rhythm.” And we’re doing that throughout the course of the jams. And the fans are trying to figure out our thought process and where we’re going with it, as opposed to this, where they’re going to have a sort of open view to what that process is like, you know? It’s an excitement that we share together. But yeah, it’s a little nerve-wracking.

So today is the anniversary of Allen’s first Biscuits show. How do you think the band has changed since he’s been involved?

Well, Sammy is uniquely Sammy. He’s not trained like Allen. Allen is a classically jazz-trained drummer. He spent all those years at Berklee studying music with all the music geeks and the people who really know music better than anyone. Sammy was just a reckless beast on the drums. As with every instrument, he just figured out how to play it and played it great. He was a genius at playing music. And he was great at writing music. But Allen, people talk about how he’s a robot. He brought a sort of sense of technology to the band. Sammy was really good with technology, too, but Allen set up a whole system with Aron [Magner] where they have computers onstage and their computers are slaved together so when Allen turns on the click track and locks us in to the tempo, Aron’s whole arsenal of computer sounds is linked up at the right tempo, which opens the world up to us in terms of being able to pull off things that are more authentically electronic. That was the big shift. With Sammy, we were sort of mimicking electronic music, whereas with Allen, we’re actually playing electronic music.

People say the music was jazzier in the early days. We were more heavily influenced, I think, by Phish and the Grateful Dead back then. Eventually, as with every business, there’s competition. Your investors are gonna want to know what’s different about your business. There needs to be something about your business that differentiates it from the rest of the businesses, otherwise nobody’s gonna invest in your business, nobody’s gonna buy the product. So if you look at that from the perspective of a band, you can’t just copy what other bands are doing. So, little by little, we got less jazzy and a little bit more trance-fusion-y. That was our differentiating factor. Like it or not, there needed to be something that was unique about our band. And I think Allen takes that a little bit further.

That’s, for me, what makes this whole thing special, that we have an identifiable sound that’s all our own. And I think, ten years into playing with Allen, it’s even more of a factor. This is what The Disco Biscuits sound like. And Allen, he’s a workhorse. He’s a really, really hard worker. He’s brought so much to the band. I think about how in 2007 we turned the corner—to think about it from that perspective, where it really only took two years. In a twenty-year career, there was a two-year bump in the road where we were adjusting ourselves, and there’s just been no looking back since then.

What is it like writing for the Biscuits as opposed to writing for one of your other projects?

It’s funny you say that, because I had like a moment of clarity on stage the other night. We were playing these two Electron songs—one is called “Miracles” and one is called “This is Your Time”—and I had this moment where I was like, “You know, maybe these are just Electron songs.” I don’t think about that when I write them—and these are songs that have been written for over a year now and we’ve played for almost a year. Only a year into playing them did the thought even really cross my mind. These days, [Electron is] where I debut a lot of music. I use Electron as a vehicle to try out new songs and develop them and then eventually bring them over to the Biscuits. All of the Chemical Warfare Brigade songs started with Electron, the Maui Project songs—most of my songs started over at Electron.

Trey [Anastasio] sort of does that, with Trey Band. It’s different songs than what Phish plays. There’s a couple that started as Trey Band songs and then ended up in Phish. He still plays those, like “Sand” and “Jiboo,” at his Trey shows, but primarily there’s all these other songs. I think with him, he writes all of these songs and brings them to Phish and the ones Phish likes Phish takes, and the rest of them end up as Trey songs. I don’t know if that is how I would run it, but I feel like I had an “Aha!” moment on stage the other night where I was like, “Wow, these songs are good.” “This is Your Time” is a good song, and “Miracles” is a good song. Of the ten most recent songs that I’ve written, those are my two favorites. I would definitely play these with the Biscuits, without question. If we took a deep breath for a second and stopped taking on so much stuff that takes preparation for these Biscuit runs and we all sit down in a room and say, “Oh, by the way, I have this song ‘Miracles,’ it’s a great song, let’s all play it.” I think the Biscuits would destroy it.

When you’re an artist, you try to balance—I think every artist struggles with it. After twenty years, you say, “Should I change? Should I try to keep up with what’s happening?” Even looking at the Grateful Dead in the late ‘70s—things started to look very disco-y all of a sudden. Then in the ‘80s it started to get really ‘80s-sounding at times. When you look at some of the greatest bands of all time, like Pink Floyd or the Beatles, you look at how they sounded when they started versus how they sounded when they ended, and it was completely different. But those bands were also rising with the changes in pop music. They were the driving force behind what was popular at the time. There’s the struggle of trying to stay on the forefront and stay influential.

The Grateful Dead—obviously they changed the way they sounded over time, but essentially they stayed the same. Phish has changed how they sound a lot of times over the years, but essentially they stayed the same. At the core of who they are, they get on stage and they play—they’re Phish, and Phish jams come out. The Dead, still, to this day, they get on stage and play and Dead tunes come out. I think that that’s the key for bands in this genre, that as you grow and as you change, you also sort of have to stay the same. It’s a fine line between adjusting who you are and how you sound but at the core being true to what we are—which is essentially a psychedelic, improvisational rock band. If we hold true to that one element, then how it sounds doesn’t really matter. The element is the exploration. That’s the thing that connects the Grateful Dead and Phish and bands like the Biscuits all together despite not really sounding anything alike—we share so many fans with those other bands and that’s because we share that one core element of psychedelic exploration.

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