Do you think the Extended Family has had an impact on your writing style or process?

It’s a very integral part of my writing process, I think as it’s developed, to work with these people and work with new musicians all the time because I get a charge out of that and I just love creating those moments and those relationships. The records, for me as someone who records with all these different people, are very different, because when I listen to the tracks, I see the recording sessions. I see the 40, 50 people that I recorded, and I spend all this time editing everyone, so when I’m hearing it, it’s almost like seeing 50 people that you really admire and love in your head at one time. You just kind of get an overwhelming thrust of emotion.

I’ve always associated music with memory. Whenever I hear a song, I’m transported to somewhere else. So to have that condensed…

It’s crazy, too, because when we were editing this last record specifically, it was a much larger task than I anticipated because, the first record, Beneath the Brine. You know, with each record and with time my composition grows. My skill grows. And on Brine, it was almost like a smaller orchestral quartet-ish group. And the parts were written in a way that my bass player was able to understand what I was doing with the orchestration, so he was able to help with the editing process, and making sure things were lining up.

But with this record, the compositions were so much more advanced than they were for Brine, so we realized very quickly that all of the editing I was going to have to do, because I’m the only person who knows where things are supposed to go and what downbeats they’re supposed to hit on and so forth. So it went from me spending a month in the editing room to I think nine months straight of 12 to 14 hour days, and when you spend that much time doing something that repetitive, and then you get to the ending. I mean one song I could have spent a week on, literally listening to each individual part and then like putting it down and making it sure that the take that I’m using best showcases that person, and that it’s going to make them proud. So you spend a lot of time and put a lot of love into each individual track, and you’re almost fortifying those memories as you’re doing that because you’re living in that track for such a long period of time. And then, at the end of it all, when you press play, suddenly you just have like 50 memories just thrust upon you, and it’s very emotional. It’s really intense, it is. But it’s something that I would absolutely not trade for anything because it’s just so amazing.

I also read that you guys recorded on a self-made, mobile recording rig. How did you guys build that and come up with that idea?

When we started, again, we were a recording project, and there were only two of us. So, at the beginning, it was for budget reasons. We realized if we were going to be recording even ten musicians, and we’re essentially constructing and building the record versus coming in with a well-rehearsed band, because again, we weren’t a band. It’s just a different way of thinking, you’re going to want the space and time to spend on the actual songs. And for me at least, when I’m in a studio, some artists love being in studios, and feel there is a level of professionalism there and they like the fact that there’s a pressure there—they’re under a sort of ticking clock and that works for them.

But for me it feels really sterile, and I feel like any mistake I make I am just wasting money and wasting time, and that’s not something conducive for a good performance. And so, my thought was, “Alright, we’re gonna build this rig so that we can record people anywhere, and we’re just going to learn how to record these instruments as best as we can.” We did some research on what kind of gear we should get, and we did most of the recording on our first album in living rooms and this old, old church from my hometown that was really great acoustics. And then, there was a slow realization that we were getting really great performances out of people when they didn’t feel the same way, when they didn’t feel there was a ticking clock and they didn’t feel like they were going to screw up and therefore ruin the record and they were messing up a take. The last thing you want to do with a musician is put them in a place where they’re recording and already vulnerable and then they feel stressed out and they feel like you’re disappointed.

How do you think that impacted the sound of your music and your recordings?

It became this kind of psychology as well for recording—“Instead of trying to get like four songs done with a quartet, let’s aim to get two and have a good time with that,” because in the end of the day we’re creating relationships with these people. We don’t want them to come in and feel like they’re being pummeled by all this music. So it kind of worked out in a way psychologically that we decided to continue to do it even though we theoretically could record in a studio, because there’s that element of, the DIY-nature that I think just enables people to be a little more free and a little less constricted. So we do 90 percent of our recording on the orchestral instruments and stuff ourselves, and then we always do drums and bass in the studio, just because it’s a really specific art form to record, specifically drums. You really have to know the recording and mic techniques and outboard gear, all sorts of different things, and we have an eighth member of the band we call him, Jay Pellicci, a mixing engineer and producer out of Oakland. He owns a studio, New, Improved Recordings, and he’s just a complete genius. So we trust him with drums and bass. We did vocals in the studio this time, which was new for me, and some piano and stuff. In the studio, if we’re mixing stuff and have extra time to finish up some extra things we’ll do stuff in the studio, but most of it is done on our own time. It’s a lot of work but it’s a lot of fun.

You guys have been promoting The War: Act I for a bit. What’s your favorite memory from the road?

It’s funny you bring that up because I think in March maybe we started a podcast called “Band, Together,” and the whole point of it is to kind of shed a little bit of light into the industry from the point of view of somebody in it, because I think we’re seeing a lot of music sales dropping specifically since people aren’t buying CD’s anymore and all these things. A large part of our philosophy is, in music, there’s this way of thinking people try to make it look like there’s no work involved, like there’s nothing behind the scenes, that you just show up and it’s awesome.

But that’s not the case, and our industry is suffering, and there is a lot of work that goes into it so the point of our project, is not trying to bitch to the world that it’s hard, we don’t really talk about that, but we just want to be honest about how things work and how much time we put into things. So in that podcast we’ve actually been going through our favorite stories on the road and things like that.

Since you’re in New York, let me think of a good New York story…Ok. I think, for me personally, New York has always been the city where we have some of the best fans. They’re a really dedicated and loud city when it comes to singing in the audience and stuff like that. I remember the first few times we would play New York people would tell us, “Oh, it’s a really hard city, the people in the audience don’t really sing, they just stand there,” but the first time we played, people were really energetic. So our fans in New York, we’re really lucky to have them. But I think my favorite show that we’ve played out there and one of my favorite memories was playing at the Bowery. We opened for Jukebox the Ghost, and it’s a great venue. But the crowd was just really invested, and at an electric show it was one of the largest Extended Family lineups that we’ve ever had. Usually, we have one or two on stage with us, but that one we had an amazing sax player from New York, Chris Ward, who’s just brilliant. Right now I think he’s playing with Fischerspooner and I think he did something with Lord Huron. And another guy, Avi, on guitar. I think we had a trombonist at that show, or two. I think we had a choir. It was, I think we had between thirteen and fifteen people on stage at one time. It was a lot of fun to be able to bring that kind of energy and that many people to an audience in New York.

Pages:« Previous Page