When you linked up with Trey, you focused on material from the album you did together, Bar 17, as well as some fun covers, a few originals and songs from his catalog. But when you were touring as a trio, you played these largely instrumental reworkings of songs from The Duo and Phish catalogs, as well some of other choice selections. What was the process of choosing those tunes like?

MG: They had their staple songs that their fans knew pretty well, so there was already this incredible energy. They were just super nice to welcome me into that. And then—and I am still doing this today—I tend to bring in these kitschy, old covers from my childhood that I wanna sing. So it ends up being a real smattering—it’s pretty eclectic.

MB: I remember liking a lot of those instrumental jams that you threw on the table, like [Betty Wright’s] “Clean Up Woman.” Maybe we should do that at the festival?

MG: We also played “Roundabout?” And also I know that you had one…

MB: I feel like we did like, [Rush’s] “Xanadu” or something.

MG: “Xanadu,” right, and we had Joe singing. [Laughs.] In fact, we opened for Phil Lesh right when that tour with Trey started. This was the three of us, before Trey came on board. And we were late to our own show, so we had to do our set after Phil, instead of before. And there we are, at that arena in Asheville, N.C., with Russo doing his best Geddy Lee after Phil played.

Speaking of Phil, in 2006, you both played the Bonnaroo SuperJam with Trey and Joe. Phil was the set’s special guest that year. They didn’t announce the SuperJam’s lineup before the show and I remember everyone being incredibly surprised that it was actually the debut of the G.R.A.B. project.

MB: Trey had a gig with his band somewhere else earlier in the day [in St. Louis, opening for Tom Petty] and had played with Oysterhead earlier in the festival, so it was unheard of that he could make it back to Bonnaroo to do the SuperJam.

That was a huge one for me. I was 24 or something and Trey called me and left me this message that I saved. He was like, “I got an idea.” He was just laughing the whole message—he wanted to put on superhero capes and masks because it’s the SuperJam. The message ends with him just cracking up. And I was like, “Woah! OK, Trey’s ready for the gig. Yeah!” I remember playing “Casey Jones” with Phil and that was the first time I played that. And I remember Trey really wanting to learn some Duo songs and I thought that was really cool. He wanted to make sure that we got a chance to play our own original music, which was like, “Yes! Awesome! Thank you!” Nobody knew who we were at the time and we played two Duo songs in front of thousands and thousands of people. The fact that Trey, the almost leader of the group, was like, “Let’s play some of your tunes” was really inspiring.

We played Bonnaroo this year with [Joe Russo’s Almost Dead], and had Bonny Light Horseman come out with us for “Row Jimmy.” As Joe joked, we were fulfilling their “band with instruments” quota at the festival now, but it was still awesome.

Since your initial run together, you have both not only started families but also sang with your daughters in professional settings. What has the experience been like watching your children come to love music and then playing that music in public with them? 

MB: Has Tessa come up and played with your band, Mike?

MG: Yeah, actually she did. We’ve done a lot of sit ins—some of them big, like with Old Crow Medicine Show, which was 3,000 people and she got up there and belted. And then we’ll do little things. We’ll play in a park and people will give us $5. And last year, when my band played at [New York’s] Webster Hall, she came up for the encore. We had done a lot of country songs together already—old honky-tonk things—but we were adding some funkier stuff, and so we actually brought up a horn section for the encore and Tessa sang a couple of songs. It was an indescribably beautiful experience. We’ve been singing together publicly since she was 9—usually in little bits here or there or at a benefit show once or twice a year.  

But when we’re at home, we try to sing together every night. There’s something about the chemistry of family members collaborating and the sound of it. Her voice is so beautiful and her heart is so pure. We’ve gone into the studio over the years, but I like to make a little cell-phone recording when we first learn a song and capture the spark of, “Oh, that sounds great!” So I have six years of cell phone recordings on my phone now. What we do is we try to learn a new song at night—and she’s been writing too—but we’ll usually do covers and then, the next day, I will be sitting in a coffee shop with my earbuds on, and I’ll just start crying—“Oh my god, how did this person come into my life that’s willing to sing with me and who is teaching me more than I’m teaching her.”

When someone is young and has a pure heart, it comes out in their singing in a way that’s just undeniable. As singers, and when we’re older, jaded adults, the biggest thing is to try to get back to that childlike wonder that’s gonna come out in the voice as this pure thing—as opposed  to when we are adults, with all the second-guessing that ends up coming out into the voice. I don’t know what your experience is, Marco, but to take inspiration from that, for me, has been amazing.

MB: My experience has been, honestly, the overwhelming feeling of, “How the hell did you just become a singer? I didn’t even know that you could do this.” I’ll go the concerts at the school that my daughters go to up here in Woodstock, and my older daughter Ruby sang a Radiohead song and killed it. And I was like, “I can’t even sing like you! Where did you get that from?” She’ll do these vocal inflections, like almost like gospel-esque, and I’m like, “I don’t sing naturally like that!” We were listening to a song recently and she was like, “Oh, no that’s C! That’s the note C,” and I’m like, “What do you mean?” And she was like, “That’s C.” And I was singing the note C.

MG: She’s got perfect pitch.

MB: Well, that’s the thing. And I went to the piano and I played it, and I’m like, “You can sing a C. Tomorrow, when you wake up, come down for coffee and just sing the note C when I see you in the morning.” I thought maybe it was a relative pitch thing. So, the next day, she came down the stairs and I was like, “OK sing the note C” and she sang it and it was the note C! She was 16 then, 17 now, and it took me almost that long to realize that she has some sort of perfect relative pitch.

MG: We should pull families together. The Double Family Band.

MB: Exactly! Her pitch is like, dead on—laser beam connected to somewhere in there. Music filters through her and my younger daughter Illa. And it’s just the beginning of it all too, so we’ll see what happens from here. On a whim, Illa sang with JRAD at Red Rocks. She sang a Beatles song that just happened to be a cover we were doing and also, coincidentally, was a song she had to sing at the school concert a week before that. She knew all the words and everything and Joe was just like, “Well, do you wanna come sing it with us?” And she was like, “OK.” And then she came over to me at the piano and was like, “I don’t have to stand up there, right? I can just sing into your mic, right?’ And I’m like, “Yes, just come sit right here by me.”

MG: Aww, that’s so sweet.

MB: And, without hesitation, she was like, “Sure, I’ll sing in front of 10,000 people.” It’s amazing to see their confidence but how oblivious they are of how good they can sing. There are things that are in their blood, that have just been growing in their brain through listening to music with such a musical family. It’s mind blowing but at the same time you also don’t wanna push it! And I hope that maybe they find another job. [Laughs.]

MG: Yeah, you also want them to find their own passions. If it doesn’t come from them, then it’s worthless.

Marco, you have also been performing with the Benevento Family Band at Follow The Arrow. How did that project come together?

MB: The Benevento Family Band stems from the fact that, every year, all of us—cousins, aunts, and uncles, who all miraculously still get along—all get together for a week down the shore in New Jersey. It’s 24 of us in a house, and we’ll wind up playing guitar with uncle Frank or Mikey or Eddie or the cousins. My dad comes over and starts singing covers he knows.

So, when the festival was coming together, Drew Frankel, the promoter, was like, “Don’t you have a Benevento Family Band?” And I was like, “Yeah! I’ve got my cousins. We could just sing songs that we do, like “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” and just play. And he was like, “Let’s just do that.” So the announcement was made, and my cousins called me up and they were like, “What is this Benevento Family Band?” And I’m like, “We’ll just get up there and wing it.” And they were like, “No, we gotta get together. We have a gig! We gotta really dial this in.” And I was like, “I just thought we’d keep it loose, like what we do down the shore.” And now all my cousins are stepping up to the plate, being like, “We’re gonna come to your house and we’re gonna rehearse. This is the song that I wanna do, or I wanna play drums.” And then Ruby’s like, “I wanna do this song,” and I’m like, “Wow! Like, this is impressive.”

Everyone’s now taking it a little bit more seriously, which is great. Everybody’s name is Mike because my grandfather’s name was Mike and, in the Italian tradition, the first-born kid was always named after him. Everyone had nicknames, so Big Guy all of a sudden now plays bass. He owns a bass and bass amp, and now Mikey has guitars and Eddie plays a really cool electric guitar. It’s covers, though maybe we will have one original song in there. And everybody sings a different song. My dad comes up and sings an Italian song. It’s hours and weeks of practice for a 45-minute set. But it’s really great. [Laughs.]

When you think back on your collaborative history, is there a particular concert, session or hang that comes to mind?

MG: Actually, I have a little memory, which isn’t any of the above. It’s not a concert or a session or even a hang. It was a dream that I told Marco about. And, in the dream, I’m coming into this town on a 100-year-old yellow carriage—I don’t know if it’s a pedicab or a horse-pulled—and Marco’s there too and he jumps in. We are sitting in this bucket seats in this old-fashioned, highlighter-yellow, old-fashioned carriage, and we’re coming right down to the middle of the town. And there are these gigs going on both sides of the street.

It was almost a premonition of the whole festival, but he was gonna play on one side of the street in a club, and I’m coincidentally playing on the other side of the street in this restaurant. And we just decide we’re gonna hang and we’re gonna cruise the strip again—except, this time, instead of having Joe in the convertible, we have this little yellow carriage and we come right into the town and people are yelling different things. Some people are jumping in with us and then jumping back out. And that’s my memory, even though it’s out of dreamland.

MB: That’s a beautiful memory—I’d love to see a comic strip of that or see it as a drawing. I’ve got nothing after that, honestly. Although, one time when, I first moved to Woodstock, N.Y., Mike called me and said, “Are you home?” I was like, “Yeah.” He was like, “Well, Phish tour is over and we are heading home and the amount of hours our bus driver can drive before he has to stop is basically right around where you live. You said, “Can I just come over? The driver will sleep and he’ll just pick me up later. And I was like, “Yeah, sure.”

MG: We brought the whole tour bus over.

MB: I just bought this house in Woodstock and this tour bus rolls up. Ruby was little, and I think on the old Blackberry microchip-card I probably have a video of her jumping on the bus and hanging out with Tessa.

MG: That was great. I remember you had a peacock named George walking around.

MB: I just remember walking around being like, “I’m so happy I moved up here and have all this space, and Mike’s stopping by—with his tour bus. And, coincidentally, Mike recorded the song “Escape Horse,”which is out there on that record I have called Tigerface, while he was here. And then we had dinner, you got on the bus and went back to Vermont.

MG: You also reminded me of the time that, before Robert was in the band, we came and we had a jam session with you and some of my band members in your barn.  It was really vibey, there were a lot of drum machines and things we were playing and a lot of acoustic instruments just all blended in. And we made what was gonna be an album, or we conceived of the idea of an album, which was gonna be called,      N is for Pillow. It was super fun. [Laughs.]

MB: I remember that jam being really fun, and I think you even used some parts of it.

MG: I did. The first song on my most recent album, Flying Games—I’m still kind of touring and playing that material—is “Tilting,” and that was a jam straight out of that barn. There were some grooves that just came together, as they sometimes will—some really fiery grooves. And that was one of them. When I was working on the song, I just kept that original recording from our multitrack right next to it, so I could make sure that it was kind of honoring that jam—a moment happens and the moment is gone. It is what it was. So it’s always gonna sound different, but that jam was was a big inspiration. 

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