How much improvising do you get to do within your recording as well as live performances?
I like the balance of improvising in playing a song, because within that, there’s always room to improvise a song even though you’re not improvising, per say. In the last couple of years, I’ve really been getting into the freedom of improvising with a new language. I’ve been listening to these 20th century string quartets, like Bartok, and Schoenberg, and Berg, and Shostakovich, and the language of that is blowing my mind because when I first hear it, I don’t understand it; I don’t know the form.
Over a couple of years, I’ve been listening to it a lot, and it’s really opening up what’s possible with improvising, with the band. But then, I love playing solo guitar. It just opens up what you can do with space, starting by making space. It’s really just a whole different world. I’m really loving improvising.
But I also like playing tunes because I love tunes too. If I went to go see Peter Gabriel, I wouldn’t want him to start jamming! And then when I saw him and Sting—Sting is cool because he plays a song, but he’s also a little bit rock and roll where he has guitar solos, and that’s cool too. I like the balance. But I’m really into improvising now, a lot.
When I practice, I’m going for a full day. I’ll play a record that I like that lasts at least an hour, and just play to it—just go ape shit. That’s so much fun. That opens you up to have a vocabulary when you’re playing live. You have to practice improvising, so you can push through your habits, and go, “Okay, I just did that. I always do that. Fuck that, wait, do something else man!”
You’re not improvising sometimes, because you have to think to do something that’s not what you always do. But then you push through that. Usually for me, it’s just waiting. “Okay, don’t play that thing you’re going to play. Start with something else, and then build,” and then in a couple seconds you have a different phrase that you didn’t think you were going to do.
I’m trying to keep it fresh. And that’s, for me, in the last couple of years, been an informative exercise. When I listen to string quartet and then listen to Miles Davis, the next thing I go to is ‘60s Miles Davis where the certain band he had–it wasn’t his commercially successful band, but it was his really good E.S.P. record, Nefertiti, and Sorcerer. A lot of the improvising he does, they lay it out there: the piano, the chord progressions, the piano changes, and then when it comes back in, it’s like “Woah!”
It’s interesting for me, learning lessons that I still need through this strange exotic music of the string quartets. Then I put on Miles, which I’m familiar with, but then hear it like it’s simpler. Like, “Oh wow, I can hear that! Whoa!” Then, when the chords come in, at least subjectively, it’s expanding my listening strength, and it comes back out in improvising.
I’m just really enjoying trying to make time to give myself music lessons. With string quartets, and then listening to Miles and listening to jazz, which I grew up playing and then got out of it. It was kind of formulaic to play it in its standard form, but then, growing away from it, I really appreciate it now a whole lot more, especially with the idea of space. Instead of trying to play 64th note bebop runs forever, which is awesome I also like the idea of when you start new from space. You can make these poly-rhythmical statements that float over. They groove, and they create a phrase that takes sixteen bars to complete because it’s got so much space in it.
And where does rock and roll fit into that for you?
For me, it’s like every cell of my body is rock and roll. It comes out and mixes with that immediately. One night I was walking and I start singing this lick. To me, rock and roll is wide open; there’s Peter Gabriel and there’s ZZ Top, and they’re both rock and roll. They’re just different. So yeah, I think it all just goes back to rock music, because I can’t help doing that. I listen to rock music every day like I’m a ‘70s classic rock addict. I can’t stop listening to that. That’s the shit.
This will be your longest run of shows just with Dave probably since the ‘90s. How do you approach these longer runs with him and what do you want to accomplish as a duo?
We’ve already been playing all of the songs, pretty much, with DMB, so we just kind of have to figure out how many we can play that are well-represented in that format. It’s pretty much most of them. There’s a few that might be drum-heavy, and sometimes we’ll try to think of a way to compensate for that.
I’m really excited because I’ve been practicing improvising a lot, and I’m really excited to be able to do that a lot. In that format, that’s like the most improvising I do in any format, even my own. Because my solo thing is mostly the tunes and a little improvising, and TR3 is mostly tunes. We definitely improvise, but we don’t just jam.
In Dave’s tunes, since there’s a lot of space and a lot of tunes for that, as we keep learning and we keep playing it over the years, I don’t always have to rely on the original guitar part. Sometimes we’ll go back to it if we jam it a couple times not doing that, but you know the freedom of fucking shit up a little bit, in a good way. And you don’t know how that’s going happen until you start doing it.
That’s the thing about playing live for me–and whatever it is, solo, TR3, DMB–the freshness of each place you go to, the new day that that brings to the music, you never know what’s going to happen. You just throw it out there, playing the song, but then stuff happens, and that’s the best part; you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have a plan, but there’s an interface between your plan and reality, and that’s the cool part.
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