Yonder Mountain String Band heads into the summer with yet another spirited romp through numerous festivals and select smaller venues leading up to a much-anticipated Red Rocks stand in August and their own festival in Ozark, Arkansas in October. The Boulder, Colorado-based band, in its fourteenth year of existence, appears to have gone through a rather inspired period where the well not only has not run dry, but seems to be overflowing with vitality, creativity, and, most importantly, new material.
Indeed, as Jambands.com sits down with YMSB’s Jeff Austin and Ben Kaufmann—nearly a year to the day after we spoke with Austin about his side project band, 30db, co-fronted with Umphrey’s McGee’s Brendan Bayliss—one gets the sense that all of the outside and internal activity from all directions has impacted the four members of the seminal bluegrass jamband in a very positive way. Our conversation finds the two band members in both a humorous and serious mood. They are very aware that the coming year brings great promise with a strong tour card, a new studio album, and a film on the horizon. What is also quite apparent is how much passion both members bring to their music, but in quite varying ways, for audiences who are often critical of just about anything when, in fact, the band may be playing its best music in quite some time.
RR: I was revisiting your last studio album, The Show and was struck, again, by the instrumental, “In the Seam.” A musician is used to the phrase “in the pocket,” but I was wondering what you felt about that particular turn of the phrase—in the seam.
BK: It’s definitely a fishing term. That’s Adam [Aijala, YMSB guitarist]. Adam fishes all the time. He’s kind of a dick about fishing. (Austin laughs) I golf with him. I swear—I’m in a golf cart, and Adam is walking and he’s a half a mile ahead of me.
RR: How is the new studio record going? You are shooting for a fall release?
JA: Well, that’s the hopes and the dreams. We all have our hopes and dreams. We did some demo stuff last year for it that just didn’t have the feel that we were looking for, and we’ve spent this year trying to seek out exactly what the attitude of the record I think is going to be, and exactly the best way to go about capturing who we are best. We’ve been experimenting with a couple of different recording techniques and recording ideas and stuff like that. What we’re actually going to do is that we’re going to start fresh next week because we have this big back log of stuff and guerrilla record everything that we have so we can lay it out on a table and see. “Well, these couple songs go great together; that would be a cool little sequence of music.” And then another song, maybe we record it, but it doesn’t end up on the record, or maybe, it does. It’s always nice to see what you’ve got and what you need when you’re working on a record. “We’ve got this, we’ve got this, we’ve got this. We need maybe something mid-tempo in a different kind of key, like an E flat, or an F, or C,” or something like that. That’s what I’m envisioning is what is going to end up happening when we get together—just a standard recording of what
we’ve got and what do we need.
RR: Are you going to self-produce, or work with Tom Rothrock again?
JA: We don’t know. We’re kicking around the idea of a couple of different people, but as of right now, we’re taking everything that we’ve learned from every producer that we’ve worked with, and seeing what we can do with each other, and sharing ideas.
RR: On the last album, you had Pete Thomas on drums for almost half the album. Are you going to have some different collaborations on this new studio album?
BK: We’re not looking, but I think, basically, right now, we have a decision to make coming up soon, and that is whether we want to do a self-produced thing, or whether we want to make a self-produced demo of all the stuff we have and find a real cool producer and take our time with it. One fork in the path is to quickly produce something. It’ll still be good, but a self-produced vibe. The other [path] would be a little more producer-intensive. We’re not sure yet.
RR: Jeff, you, obviously, had some high profile collaborations last year, and Ben, you’ve had your share over the years, too. What do those types of collaborations bring to the table when Yonder goes into the studio and you write new songs? Is it constantly a growth and development process, or is everyone in the room bringing their own depth to the scene?
JA: For me, yeah, what I try to do is if I am writing with somebody else who is not in Yonder like Todd Snider or [Brendan] Bayliss, or any of these people who I write with, it all comes full circle back into what happens with Yonder Mountain. It’s always my intention that whatever I’m doing outside of the group is going to just reinforce ideas and thoughts involved with Yonder Mountain. Out on the road collaborating with those guys in 30db brings me back to “oh, hey—there’s this tune that I was playing with that group; I think that would work really really good playing with Yonder. Let’s play it,” and all of a sudden, it hits, and it works. I’m sure Ben can say the same thing—not every song that I write is something that has the original intention of having it be from the minute you sit down and write it to the minute it’s 100% finished for Yonder. I think if you lock yourself into that mind frame, you can potentially shut yourself off from some really cool ideas. So, when I sit down to write music, I write it just to write the song, and when I listen to it, I go, “Oh, this would be a really cool Yonder tune; this would be really great with some harmonies and Dave [Johnston, YMSB banjo player] taking it off,” or I write a song and say, “Oh, this would be really cool to play with Brendan,” or show it to Todd Snider or Ronnie McCoury or anybody. For me, it all comes back to the song. Also, too, it’s really a lot of fuel. It’s nice to step away and get some different inspiration and a different way to look at a song, a melody, or a hook. I think that stuff is really important to stay healthy as a songwriter, to keep your mind moving.
RR: You have different ways of approaching your studio recordings, which we just discussed. Does the band have conversations about what will happen with these songs once you put them out since the dynamics of the music industry have changed so drastically over the last several years? Perhaps, the thought that you are not sure what will happen once the songs take off?
BK: I guess you never know what’s going to happen. Obviously, you just sort of go in and you want to make the best record that you can. You may go in with the idea of what you want the overall thing to sound, or you might not—you might discover it along the way. Although, I would love that, I think, for a song to become popular, like huge popular. I’m not sure I’d like it. Maybe, I would. There is nothing you can do to control that in a band like ours. We can’t grease the wheels like all that Disney money can. I think we just make the record, and the rest of it is out of your hands. It doesn’t really pay to get all obsessed about it.
JA: Yeah, I would agree. You just have to go in and make the record, and not concern yourself with what kind of life it will have afterwards. It’s not like we’re sitting here and we’re the next band that Sony is going to push: “I’ll be damned if this sucker’s going to be on the radio.” For us, the beauty of it is is that we get to go make music, and that’s all that we can do. As long as we make the truest music that we can, hopefully, that will reflect in the listening audience and the payoff will come.
Photo by James Martin
RR: Let’s talk about that payoff. How do you keep your perspective while out there on the road, presumably to play festivals and some other select gigs, as well? How do you keep it at a level where it reflects why you got into music in the first place?
BK: I think the first thing is that every five years you have to fire everyone involved in your organization. (laughter)
JA: Clean house. It’s terrible. It’s an awful date.
BK: You kind of get the fresh blood in there, and five years later, you need your quickening so you get rid of the old blood. Have you ever seen Twilight ?
RR: Yes.
BK: It’s kind of like that with the vampires and the werewolves and such.
JA: Myself? I would say for myself over the last year, late last year, keeping it fresh for me has involved dropping some ridiculous habits and picking up some really good ones. I started running, working out, and sleeping better. I always tend to eat well on the road, so that has never really been a problem. To be completely blunt and honest, it was cleaning house and getting rid of stupid shit and bringing in some good shit. It’s made me feel revived and rejuvenated and focused and re-focused and all that good stuff. On a personal standpoint, that’s what it has been for me since late last year—a whole new day. I got home from this last tour, and at the end of the last trip, Ben and Adam had gotten this wicked cold/sinus/bronchial kind of thing. On the last week of the trip, off course, you know, that’s when it’ll hit you, and luckily I didn’t get it until the exact day after tour ended. I woke up and was sick as a dog and spent a week in bed, (laughs) and tried to recover. But, I’ve tried to be healthier on the road and pace myself.
RR: Does the band have discussions about how to push things forward, around, or move things in a different direction, or do you try not to have those conversations?
JA: As far as musically, we’re not like a “let’s rehearse the improv sections” type of band. If we’ve got a tricky little transition, it’s not anything where we’ll sit down and go “All right, we’re going to do this and that,” and really plan it out. We let it be open, or we might have a small little thing where we’ll say, “O.K.—we’re going to go from this into that, and maybe we’ll just slow it down and it’ll just happen.” I like the fact that we don’t rehearse the stuff that much, then it’s true improvisation. We’ve been together for 13 years. We were almost in high school. It’s kind of a new day for the group and all of us and where we’re at, so the ability to speak more openly to each other has increased greatly since the year began, and just the understanding of what’s being said. It’s pretty sweet. It’s nice to have it operating that way.
RR: What about current discussions about repertoire and setlists?
BK: Well, we just got a steady and ongoing new injection of material, so I think one of the possibilities is—and something I’ve been thinking about for a while—that I have a couple of tunes that I feel like I want to put away for a while from the show, and I think we’ve got new stuff to replace them. That could happen; therefore, a song gets a little bit of different life, or a new life, when they come back. You know, playing some of the same stuff for thirteen years is an interesting thing.
JA: I would agree. It’s nice to be able to have this great injection of new material and, like I said, we’re getting together next week to do some recording, and we’ve got some stuff, collectively, a few ideas that are just sitting there idling and waiting to be finished up—words being put to and arrangements and stuff like that. When you’re able to bring new material—and we’re always trying to bring new material to the table; we just happen to be in a time right now where it’s very fluid. There is a lot of new stuff coming out right now, and it really does—like Ben said—gives certain songs a rest and it allows new songs to really grow and develop. So it’s not like the new song we’re only playing once or twice. It’s like “hey, let’s play this every week; let’s see where it goes.” Until you let something breathe live, you never know what it is going to be. You never know. Until you let a song really get its legs underneath it, you never really know where it’s going to end up. We may have a song that sounds like it is four or five minutes long with a little bit of a stretched-out section. That’s fine. We may play it one night, and all of a sudden, we hit an improv spot and “Go. Take it. Let’s see where it goes.” I think there are a lot of songs of ours which are vehicles, I guess you would call them, that started out like that, but now have stretch out potential and a lot of room for other songs to weave in and out in the same area.
RR: Would you bring new material to the stage where arrangements are not worked out yet like ‘let’s bat it around on stage and see where it comes out’?
JA: No, not really. I don’t know if we’d go that far. There might be stuff where it’s like…we’ve discussed…“O.K., this song has an open section here; let’s just take it on stage and see what happens.” But, no, we don’t go that blind. We definitely discuss things like that. It’s always nice to have the road map in the car, but you don’t necessarily need to read it. It’s always nice to have it there. And, also, we are four men; we’re not particularly good at reading maps. I know I am terrible at reading maps. I was banned from being the group navigator many, many years ago.
BK: I have this female English voice that tells me where to turn. (laughter) I don’t know if anybody else can hear it.
JA: (in an English accent) “500 yards, turn right to C chord.”
RR: Perfect autobiography title— Can You Hear the British Girl in My Head ? Festivals…Yonder are obviously veterans on the festival circuit, but any places that you’ve been in the past that look promising in 2011?
JA: We haven’t been to Grey Fox in a while and it’ll be interesting. (laughs) I’ll just say that. We’ll see how our grand return to the Grey Fox works out. It should be fun. I think it’s the year where, shit, now we’re deep into it. What is this—our 11th, 12th Telluride? It’s our 10th year at [Northwest] String Summit. We’re going back to All Good. We’re going back to the Grand Targhee Festival. High Sierra, we did for years and years and years, and now, every couple of years we’ll end up there.
BK: We also have this new festival Harvest Fest.
JA: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
RR: Right. It’s Yonder Mountain’s festival in October in Ozark, Arkansas.
BK: It’s at the same place that they do Wakarusa—really wicked cool property. It’s the totally acoustic opposite of Wakarusa. That one I’m pretty excited about.
RR: How much preparation goes into putting on your own festival?
BK: We have input. We give suggestions about artists that we’d like, or different pairings of artists and getting people playing together when they haven’t before. We have input, but leave it to the people who have been in the festival business for a long time to help with making sure that it’s really, really good.
RR: Speaking of ambience in a setting, Yonder Mountain played at the Fillmore in San Francisco a few weeks back. How did that go down for the band?
JA: I had a great time. It was the last two days of a month-long trip for us. It was nice to get all the ya yas out. I thought it went great. It was full, people were rocking, and having fun. San Francisco—the place is pretty close to our heart. There are a lot of memories from there, not just from the city, but from the actual Fillmore itself. I had a blast. I don’t think I ever really have a crappy time at the Fillmore. If you’re having a crappy time at the Fillmore, you need to get some more rest. (laughs) I don’t know. I don’t know, man. Go for a walk. Go down to the Wharf. Get some killer Ramen noodles. Whatever it takes.
RR: I would assume that the band never really has an issue with energy level?
JA: I’ll say this. I didn’t grow up playing music on stage. I grew up in theatre. I grew up doing show choir and 16th century magical singing and stuff like that, but especially the theatre background. I don’t care how tired I am. I don’t care how sick I am. I don’t care—and this is years ago—if I am hungover or been up late or all that stuff, it doesn’t matter. There are people that have paid to come in, and my biggest pet peeve of any artist is when they walk out on stage and say, “Folks, I gotta be honest with you, I’m feelin’ a little sick, but I’m going to do the best I can.” I paid for the ticket. I don’t give a fuck if you’re sick or not. I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know. I bought a ticket and walked into a venue. Therefore, I am expecting a state of illusion. It’s a show. There’s a stage, there’s lights, there’s an audience—that means there’s some sort of illusion that is going to be going on. You go to see a musical on Broadway, and the guy goes flying over the audience. He’s not really flying. It’s an illusion.
For me, I really don’t care how sick or tired or whatever I am. I’ve got to buck up. I’ve got to get it up. I’ve got to get it up. It doesn’t matter to me. The whole band does a really good job of that—sick as freakin’ dogs and we still go out there and cut heads and play our hearts out. I grew up with that mind frame of “oh, you’re sick; you’ve got this, you’ve got that, you’re tired, you’re depressed, well…_tough_ .” (laughs) We, as a band, do a really good job of that, of saying, “Oh, my God, it’s week three, I’m absolutely exhausted. I’ve had all these depressing, terrible things happen to me over the last few weeks, but, you know what? I’ve got to put on and pull up the big boy pants, and get rolling, and get out there and give it my best.” Like I said, at the end of the last tour, Adam and Ben were so ill and it never showed. I had people coming up to me saying, “Adam didn’t sing a song last night; that was weird.” I said, “Yeah, because he couldn’t speak.” They’d say, “What? He was sick?” I said, “Yeah.” They said, “We never knew.” And I said, “Well, good! Then, we did our jobs. Then the service fee was worth it.” (laughter)
The moments when I’m least pleased with myself on stage is when I catch myself letting that stuff effect me, when all of a sudden I’m sitting there and I’m moping or I’m projecting, maybe, an energy that is unnecessary to me, to the band, or to the audience, especially. It’s just the development of a performer. I try to catch myself pretty quick, and I say, “O.K.—buck up, Dude. Pull up the pants. Let’s go.” That’s one of the things that I’m proud of ourselves as us as a band—fly from Alaska, go through Dallas, land in Louisville, play a show two hours later on about 45 minutes sleep on a bunch of airplanes, and play our hearts out. I think if we didn’t do that, (laughs) it would have ended a long time ago. You can’t exist in an environment where people are half-assin’ it. I don’t feel the band has ever taken the stage and half-assed it, regardless of the situation. It makes me really proud to be able to say that. It really does.
BK: I think somewhere along the line I just convinced myself, or internalized it, the music that Yonder makes has to be played with energy. That’s just the nature of that particular music. Obviously, everything has energy. Anything being performed is being performed with energy; hopefully, you know what I mean. There is that sort of high energy thing that you have to do, that you have to have, in order to play the music of Yonder Mountain.
JA: You know, that’s a brilliant way of putting it. That’s a great way of putting it. That’s so true. It would be a strange exercise to try one time, to say, “All right, hey, let’s go out and we’ll soundcheck two songs that are in the show…” That’s the other thing that we do—we soundcheck and try to play as if it is the show. First of all, it doesn’t help our Front of House engineer to have us go out and be laying back a little bit during soundcheck because then the levels are going to be weird once we take the stage. But that’ll be a strange exercise to do one time—to get up there and play two songs full bore, and then, really put the brakes on it, and play a fast song and see if we can pull it off, see what it sounds like, actually, like physically how the effect is different out front. Being at it this long with this attitude, I don’t know if we can do it. (laughs) But, yeah, it’s one of the things as far as us as a band and us as people that makes me the most proud.
Different situations, and you know…hell, man, this is one of the most screwed-up things you could do for a living. Is it amazing? Absolutely. Holy cow, I have five to six months off every year—they’re not really off because we’re always working—and what an incredible job we get to do, but to know that you go to work every day with people and everybody’s going to be busting their ass and if somebody’s having a down day, they’ll be somebody there to pick them up. That’s important.
BK: Not Dave and Adam. I like to isolate them and make them feel uncomfortable. (laughter)
JA: Dave, mostly, and our lighting engineer, our lighting designer, (laughter) I like to really isolate him. Lots of frowns. Lots of head shakes.
BK: That vacant wide-eyed stare that Vanessa Redgrave had.
JA: Disconcerting sighs.
Photo by James Martin
RR: Do you ever have that feeling that ‘you know, if I just stayed up here on stage, everything would be all right’?
JA: Yeah. (laughs) I had that this last tour. Go home now? But, it’s so safe up here.
BK: Eventually, you’d piss yourself on stage. That would be uncomfortable and awkward, but at the end of the day, it could be liberating. (laughter) I’ve always said that one of the great things that happened to me is that I made a lyrical and/or musical gaffe/mistake in front of an audience of, I don’t know, 50,000 people, and I’m sure nobody really noticed, but I sure as shit noticed. I felt like “Wow, I just embarrassed myself in front of all these people.” Getting over that was super liberating. Now, I’m not really bothered by that kind of stuff. That was kind of cool.
RR: So…Yonder’s plans—tour through the summer, put out a studio record in the fall, and what’s up from there? Can you see a year out from now?
JA: Yeah. I can. One of the other exciting things that we’re doing is that we play Red Rocks on August 20. The way that tickets are tracking—we’ve been very lucky at Red Rocks; we’ve had a few sellouts; we’ve always sold over 9,000 tickets; it’s always been really really great, but this year we put together a great package with the [Infamous] Stringdusters and the Railroad Earth guys and it’s a really cool thing. But, we’re going to be filming Red Rocks this year. Not just filming filming, but bringing in executive producers, producers, directors, huge crews, cranes, booms, and whatever the hell we’re going to have. The reason we’re doing that is because we four for almost ten years now have had a desire to really investigate what’s happening overseas. What are the possibilities for this music outside of the boundaries of the U.S.? We took one trip to Europe years and years ago that just went over really well. We had some of the most amazing experiences from a 115 in a pub in Galway, Ireland to 10,000 people on the side of a hill in France. We’ve always wanted to go back and just between this and that and this and that and the economy it’s just never worked out.
What we’re doing is that we’re filming [Red Rocks] for a lot of reasons. One, for a
beautiful sense of posterity—what a great thing of who we are and to be able to show this to family and friends forever—but, also, we’re going to use it as a tool to expand our horizons outside of the U.S. to Japan, to England, to Europe, in general, to Australia, and to New Zealand. We’ve got this amazing manager behind us and this amazing management team and everything is coming to this beautiful meeting place where everybody is at the same table and everybody’s got the same voice. I’m really excited about filming that because it’s going to be really, really fun, and more details, that we can’t talk about now, will come out soon.
So…a year from now? Oh, yeah, shit, a year from now—I expect momentum to be at an all-time high. I’m a lurker online, and I love reading that “this band peaked in ’06,” “this band peaked in ’05,” “this band peaked in ’07,” and, well, I don’t know if you were at the sold-out nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco with freaks bouncing off every wall, and higher ticket sales then we’ve ever had at Red Rocks at this point, or amazing slots that we’re very, very lucky and very appreciative to have at these festivals, but I think the day that we’ve peaked is the day that we end, the day that we wrap it up.
I’m a fan of Phish. Saw my first show in ’91. I saw shows last year that made me go, “Holy crap, this band is on a roll.” I don’t like the peaks and the valleys and the this and the that; yeah, bands will have their ups and downs, but that’s the beauty of creating live music. It is always changing, always evolving, always breathing. Sure, if I went into every single concert that I see and said, “Oh, man, this band sucks. They peaked forever ago,” yeah, you’re probably going to have a terrible time. You probably just need to have a glass of ginger ale, take a deep breath, and lighten up. For me, seeing this band a year from now, I expect nothing but more camaraderie, tighter everything, approach-mentality, physical strength and physical well-being, material, this Red Rocks movie that we’re shooting, a new record—the possibilities are endless, and that’s the way that we’re looking at it. It’s really rejuvenating and very, very fulfilling. Sure, anybody who has had a job for 13 years has ups and downs, but when you find somebody who inspires you like our new manager and our new management team and, in turn, it inspires all of us to inspire each other, it’s this circular thing that we’ve always been into. It’s going around and coming around, and every time it comes back around, it’s “ooh, let’s see what it looks like now.” For me, seeing a year out is pretty bright and I’m pretty excited.
BK: Definitely want to reiterate it for the travel overseas for a lot of reasons for me. I’m really excited about that. Looking a year out…to me, this seems like a year where a lot of new opportunities and new things are going to be happening. I guess there are so many variables that we’re going to have along the way, and everything in one direction or another, that I think this year is almost going to be too interesting to predict where I’m going to be in a year. I know where I want to be in a year, but that’s a different story—on a rocket ship, cruising through space, exploring where no man has ever explored, [Austin hums the Star Trek theme music at this point] and peeing myself on stage again.
