RANA have been a band for over 25 years, though recently, their live shows have been few and far between.
“I just made a post on Instagram about how RANA’s been around for 25 years,” bassist and band co-founder Andrew Southern says. “It’s crazy to think about how fast time goes by. You’re in the same flow for so long and then one day you realize, ‘We’ve been a band for over 25 years.’”
Southern drummer Ryan Thornton and keyboardist/singer Matt Durant formed RANA in the late ‘90s while attending high school in Princeton, N.J. Soon after, they were introduced to fellow New Jersey musician Scott Metzger, who eventually became their lead guitarist, completing their classic lineup. While still in college, Metzger and Southern also pulled double duty in Phish songwriter Tom Marshall’s group Amfibian—Metzger tells a fun story about meeting Marshall and Trey Anastasio at the local New Jersey spot Small World Coffee, where the Phish guitarist encouraged Marshall to hire Metzger for his nascent project after discussing their mutual love of Marc Ribot—and then started touring nationally with RANA.
Along the way, RANA grew into the Wetlands’ final house band, emerged as one of the first modern jam-rooted acts to weave in indie and alternative music elements, and even played the inaugural Bonnaroo in 2002. RANA stopped touring around 2006, though Metzger went on to play with acts like Particle, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, LaMP and Wolf!, and Thornton continued to perform with one-time RANA tour manager Noah Chernin in the indie act Sam Champion for a while. RANA has regrouped on occasion over the years as well and will return to the stage for shows at Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Sultan Room on August 8 and 9. The shows are being presented by drummer Joe Russo, a longtime friend and fan of the group who will open both evenings as part of Durant’s Matt Trowbridge Band.
In the following conversation, Southern discusses the group’s decision to reform for the first time in eight years, RANA’s origins and how they ended up sharing the stage with Lynyrd Skynyrd.
It’s been a number of years since RANA last regrouped. You were supposed to do a few shows at The Sultan Room in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2020 around Ryan’s 40th birthday, but due to the pandemic, that didn’t happen. When did you start tossing around the idea for this August’s shows?
We have our RANA group chat, and we talk all the time, especially about Scott [Metzger] and the stuff that he’s doing. So we keep in touch, and every once in a while, it’ll come up. Somebody will be like, “Hey, let’s get together and play.” And then rarely, we’ll all have the time, and it will be like, “Hey, actually, let’s do a concert.” And that happened after a good long while prior to the pandemic. We were so excited—we booked two shows at The Sultan Room, and one of those shows sold out right away.
And then, when the pandemic hit, of course, we couldn’t do the shows anymore, which I was upset about. It’s silly when you think about it in the grand scheme of things, but we were all just really looking forward to getting together for those shows. We kind of dropped that idea for a while, but more recently, I went to the group again and was like, “We should revisit this and make it happen.” And everyone started chiming in like, “Yep, I’ve got time—let’s do it mid-August,” and it just came together.
Joe has been one of our greatest champions, and he helped us secure the dates and promote the show, frankly. Matt’s gonna do the opening set both nights. It’s the Matt Trowbridge Band featuring Joe Russo, Jon Shaw and Dan Iead. They are all part of the larger community of musicians Joe plays with.
Matt, Ryan, and Scott recently got together for some rehearsals. After such a long period of time, did it feel natural to start playing this music together in advance of a pair of shows?
It sounds sort of cliché to say it, but it’s like riding a bicycle. We were touring the country in circles for years, so we are still very much attuned to the way each other plays. We got together for two days in New Jersey this summer to start the rehearsals—we started with a mid-tempo tune just to kinda like ease into it but were very quickly getting into the more elaborate stuff. Everyone was surprised by their own fingers and hands. It’s just like what you remember, especially when you’re in. Things are just kind of coming back to you from the moments when you were onstage in Alabama, or moments when you were onstage in Mill Valley, Calif. Those songs were all there, just waiting for us.
In terms of the stuff that’s more elaborate, there were a few times when we said, “OK, let’s stop that and just run it one more time,” because somebody needed to work on a part here or there. It felt great, and it’s so fun to play with those guys—they are my brothers. So, to be able to communicate, musically, again after all this time is really great.
Scott has obviously been incredibly active over the years, between his work with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, LaMP, Wolf! and his solo material. Matt is opening these shows with his band, featuring Joe, and they play around the Tri-State area from time to time. Have you been staying active musically over the years?
[In the years since RANA was active,] I moved away to the Caribbean with my wife and my two children and lived there for years, though we recently moved to Savannah, Ga. So without having RANA to play with, I essentially made my wife and children become my band. [Laughs.] Since they were little kids—they’re teenagers now—we’ve had this traveling family band, which really just exists in our own home and on Instagram. So that’s mostly what I’ve been doing, and it’s been great because, in RANA, we found a fantastic way of communicating and working out issues—all kinds of things—in the context of a band. And I’ve just applied some of those lessons to my family, using music as the platform to be able to communicate better.
As you get everybody together in one room, you’re trying to figure out different ways to interact with each other. I learned this with RANA, but you could come in with something completely unrelated to music—maybe you’re playing really frustrated on your instrument—and inevitably you stop the rehearsal and say, “Hey, what’s that all about?” and work it out while you’re trying to figure out a song. And so, I’ve been doing that with my family.
It’s a really cool project and it’s so much fun because the kids have had an opportunity to play with Joe, Scott, Matt and Ryan. And they can play—they can play chords and they can play songs, and they take it seriously, which is cool.It’s almost all covers that I love. We’ll play some Fleetwood Mac, Talking Heads, stuff like that. It’s really age-dependent because every year we would go away on a trip with our instruments, and we would do these little sessions. And you can see in the progression through these little videos that we’ve made as the kids got more advanced on the instruments. So I try and pick songs that are a little bit more advanced for someone to play as they’re getting older. We call it Jamborghini, like Lamborghini.
Separately, Ryan has been doing this really cool project, Cold Soil Drifters, with a bunch of musicians in the central Jersey area. He’s got a record out, Shanks Pony and they play around New Jersey.
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