The last time we spoke with Marco Benevento, the Woodstock, NY-based keyboardist and songwriter was on the verge of releasing his latest solo album, The Story of Fred Short, and embarking on a long year of touring with his trio, which was about to go through some changes, as regular bassist Dave Dreiwitz was being temporarily (at the time) replaced with Karina Rykman while Dreiwitz toured with newly reunited Ween.
Now, Benevento, who supplements his solo work by playing with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead—among other collaborations—is readying for another solo tour, this time in support of his first official live record, has formed a strong musical bond with his new bandmate and has a new PledgeMusic campaign where he’s asking fans to help out his tour and join him along the way. Phoning in from his Woodstock home studio after a Colorado trip with Almost Dead, Benevento outlines his tour and PledgeMusic plans, looks forward to a new year filled with shows (including the long-awaited official reunion of the Benevento/Russo Duo) and a new studio album and recalls his top highlights of 2016.
How was the trip out in Colorado?
It was really fun. We played Denver and Boulder and Aspen, and then we played—our good friend just started a new weed company, and they make really good chocolates with like—they know somebody in Nicaragua that has a cacao farm and they’re doing all ethically grown cacao and making sure the locals are cool with what they’re doing. They’re super legit. The company’s called Binske, and they’re super cool, super high-end.
Can you tell me a bit about the new live album? Had you done one of those before?
No, we haven’t done an official live album. We’ve put out live shows that have been multi-tracked and that sound good, but this one we did at this incredible studio here in Woodstock [Applehead Studios]. I’ve actually mixed my record TigerFace there, and I also mixed our record Story of Fred Short there. It’s a big place, so they’ve been putting on concerts in the studio and recording them and releasing them. It’s part of a whole thing called The Woodstock Sessions —Medeski Martin & Wood and Nels Cline did one there, Bad Brains, Rich Robinson, Vieux Farka Touré. He’s from Mali in Africa. It’s cool—it’s on a farm, they served dinner outside, there’s goats running around, there’s this huge pig, they have a llama and horses. It’s this beautiful piece of land with an enormous studio that holds about 100 people. They put a live audience in the studio, and you’re there all day soundchecking, and there’s people in the control room if you want to hang out. So it’s basically like a record, but we did it in front of a live audience. One of the things I wanted to do was play “The Story of Fred Short” in its entirety—meaning the whole side B of our new record, which is seven songs that kind of morph into each other. So that was a fun experience, and yeah, it is our first official live record. It was cool to play the songs live and know that the stuff was going to be captured professionally and sound really good. And we’re playing a bunch of shows in the winter and spring to promote it. And of course, right now I’m working on another studio record.
Was that something you sought out?
No, they’ve actually been trying to get our band to do it for the last two years, but we’ve just been on the road so much that it’s been hard to. Actually, the guy told me that I was the reason that he started in the first place—he was hoping to have me be the first person, but it took me two years to finally get there.
Can you talk about your new PledgeMusic campaign?
The campaign is a way for us to try to connect with fans a little bit more and have people maybe write a setlist or come backstage and spin some records with us. When we go on the road, we actually travel with our own record player and a case filled with vinyl and we like to just hang out and spin records before the gig and after. We’re just trying to connect with folks and see if they’re down to help our tour. Because we have so many dates, and it’s just really expensive. There’s not many tours where bands like us, playing relatively smaller rooms—like we’re playing in front of 500-700 people in those major markets, and, realistically, hotel rooms and expenses don’t get covered and someone winds up losing money, which is basically me. So we’re trying to get people involved.
I have a studio here in Woodstock, and one of the [perks] is if you pledge, I think, $1000, you can come here for a day and record with me. If we do get money, we’re hoping to maybe expand the stage setup and get some different lights. Another good thing about PledgeMusic is it gets you sort of saturating the social media market a bit, so people are like, “Oh, what’s he doing.” Which is good publicity all around. I think people like knowing they can help a band, even if it’s only like 10 or 20 bucks. They like knowing they can help musicians out.
The last time we talked, you were just about to have your first rehearsal with Karina. How has that musical relationship been going so far?
Well, Dave Dreiwitz found the perfect sub. Ween is back together again, so Dave’s very busy playing with them and realized that it’s too much for him to do, and he met Karina a while ago and knew that she was a cool chick, a cool hang. She actually plays heavy-metal guitar. When he knew that he was kind of on his way out, he actually called up Karina, and they got together and he taught her all the songs. He went to her house and played her the songs and showed her how he was playing them. He got her to sub for this three-day tour or something, and she just absolutely killed it. She’s super chill and fun, and she’s young and she’s got a lot of energy. She really embraces the fuzz bass moments of the songs, even though they’re short moments—she puts her leg up on the monitor and whips her hair around and kills it. I think it helps, visually, for people to see somebody so into it. And she’s a cute lady—I’m seeing all these young, 18-, 21-year-old boys in the front row standing by Karina just checking her out. I’m like, “Hey, look at those little geeks.” [Laughs]
Going forward, are there plans for Dave to come back or is Karina the one now?
Karina’s the one now. I mean, if she couldn’t do a tour, obviously I’m sure Dave would do it. It’s up to Dave. I’ll take Dave back onstage with us at any time. I love both of them equally. They’re just amazing bass players, and luckily there’s no rift or anything. It was all a very natural sort of evolution. But Dave’s busy, and if it does happen it’ll be super fun.
How far are you into your new studio album?
I have about 12 songs that are kind of demoed out, and now I’m changing them over a little bit, realizing that some songs need to be played a little slower or some songs need to be played a little faster. I’m basically in the demo stage—messing around with lyric ideas—and I actually had a little session over here with Simon Felice from the Felice Brothers. He lives nearby and actually he bought a little piano for me to put in his studio, and then I was like, “I should play you what I’m working on, ‘cause I could use some help with this one tune.” And he came over and helped me, which was really nice. I also sent a tune to Leon Michels, the keyboard guitar player in The Arcs. He’s also the horn player—he’s just an overall bad ass. He just produced this band called The Shacks. They’re pretty cool. I subbed for Leon with The Arcs—I did three shows with Dan Auerbach and them in May. It was awesome, a great hang. And we did our previous record with Richard Swift [also an Arcs member]. And I’ve always liked Leon’s stuff. I sent him a tune, and I was like, “I think I could use your help on this one.” And he dug it and he’ll be around next month maybe to help me out. So I would say I’m halfway there, maybe even more. I have this little studio right next to my house, so even if I just come here and work from 10 at night to midnight or something, I can get some stuff done. And I’m always working—I love being out here in this lair sort of figuring out stuff about engineering and producing, as well as just songwriting. Just a wide variety of musical aspect I cover out here.
Do you think Simon and Leon would maybe be on the record?
Good question—I don’t know. Probably just mainly the engineering and producing part, and then maybe a bit of the songwriting part. Then, of course, if the playing wound up being on it, that would be cool, too. But no ideas of that so far.
Last time we talked you mentioned that you were coming into your own with the production side of things. How has that been coming along?
It’s going really, really good. It’s grown a lot more—I feel like I’m really dialed in here. Things happen even faster than they did, which was pretty fast to begin with. Just getting things rolling right away. My drumming has gotten a little bit better, same as my bass playing, and same as my lyric writing as well. So it’s like, if I do whip something together really quick, it doesn’t sound as janky as it did maybe two years ago. [Laughs] I mean, it still sounds demo-y and stuff. Then going into the engineering side of things, after making The Story of Fred Short here, our friend Kenny Siegal from Old Soul [Studios], after having a sort of pow wow with him, knowing how to use the new pieces of gear I got, I definitely feel more on it. It’s great. I can make really good demos in here, and I can even make a record like I did my last one. And I’m planning on doing it again here, but we’ll see how it goes with the collaboration between Leon and Simon and what might be the finished outcome. I’d be okay with doing it somewhere else, but I do like doing stuff here.
At least with Side B of the last album, you said it came out of a long improv session that you then split into distinct songs. Is there any of that this time around?
So far, it’s more song-by-song. Just kind of worked out like that. Although, one improvisation I did I split up into three songs, actually now that I think about it. But they’re not necessarily going to go into each other, they just wound up being three separate song ideas in one session. But there’s no stringing of songs together to tell a story about one guy. So far I don’t have any of that.
Is that how you write your songs a lot?
That’s one way—I’ll set up a drum machine and a couple synths and just hit record and improvise, and a chord progression will come out, then maybe a melody. And I’ll have a vocal mic set up and I’ll improvise the vocal melody, or even just get a quick lyric idea I like to start the song. And sometimes I also just sit down at the piano and bang it out acoustically. It comes all sorts of ways. But I would say, over the last two or three years, it’s primarily been getting “ear candy,” as I like to call it—coming out with these fun synthesizers that I like to have. Because I do like incorporating that sound into our music.
You and Joe Russo are reuniting the Duo at Jam Cruise in January. How much time have you guys had to actually work on that with all the other stuff you’ve had going on?
We got together and had a practice—I was in Brooklyn from like noon to eight at night, about a month ago, and it was really great to hang out and play those tunes again with Joe. It really brought me back to those days—which were some crazy days, for sure. We’re just sort of relearning our songs again. I mean, we only put out two studio records.
And that’s how you guys came to bring out some of that material with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead recently?
Oh, totally, of course. Because we just had that practice and then did some JRAD shows. We were like, “This kind of reminds me of ‘My Pet Goat’” or something. Yeah, we were laughing about that.
It’s the end of 2016, which has been a rollercoaster of a year, so I wanted to get a bit of a recap. Do you have any standout moment or shows from the year?
Man, let me think. What the hell have I been doing? Our friends The Barr Brothers played at Levon’s Barn, and I opened up for them and played with them. I’ve been good friends with them for a while. That was a nice moment here, in my backyard basically. And I also got a chance to play with Ronnie Spector at Levon’s Barn. That was fun. We did some songs from that Phil Spector Christmas record [1963’s A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector ]. I’ve been making a bunch of mixes and putting them online. On Soundcloud, I go as “Mr D,” and then “I’m A DJ Too” is what comes after that. [This Saturday, Jan. 7 he will DJ at Woodstock’s Catskill Mountain Pizza Company]. I’ve been making mixes from vinyl that I’ve been collecting over the years. I made about, I don’t know, 10 or so mixes that are like an hour, hour and a half long. I’ve been getting into that, getting into vinyl—old and new. It was cool to play with Bob Weir at the Fox Theatre in Oakland. That was a nice part of our night there. We sounded really good. That’s all I can think of right now.
Any long-term plans for 2017?
We have two big tours with my own band. Those are some big projects, I gotta say. We’re hitting the whole West Coast, Colorado, basically the whole Northeast. We’re logging in some miles, promoting the new live record, probably testing out some new songs. Those are the two big ones. One big gig that stands out to me is the one we’re [Almost Dead] doing with Medeski Martin & Wood at Red Rocks. You know, I’m staying busy, writing my own tunes. Always searching, over here. Trying to write a hit, you know? One song.
