Following February’s Tour d’Amour, ALO are back on the road this month. The California-based group is crossing the continent for a series of dates with the Ryan Montbleau Band (and a few solo gigs as well). In the following conversation, ALO guitarist Dan Lebowitz look back on the group’s 2012 studio album Sounds Like This, projects into the a future a bit and shares insight into the Northern California music scene.
Let’s start out with your last album Sounds Like This, which came out last year. It really appeals to my aesthetic and it I continue to play it quite a bit but it was something of a departure from your previous Brushfire releases, which presented much more concise versions of your songs. Looking back on it now, can you talk about the decisions that went into making it.
We’re kind of chameleons in our interests. We love crafting short songs and getting into that world. But we also just love to play music too. Both those interests for us have been happening in parallel. I think part of the thing about putting out albums, at least for us, is the art side where you want to have something new that you’re going for. I don’t ever want to feel static. I think with each album there’s been some theme in part, and with this album the theme was that while the songs weren’t any different, the approach to the way we record them and the way we arrange them for the recording was different. We thought, “Let’s just let them open up.”
I imagine that most of your fans appreciated that. I wonder if there were some folks out there who know you only through your albums and may not have ever seen ALO perform live who might have been thrown off a bit. Was that any consideration?
It’s funny to talk about that because I haven’t even thought about it much. For us, we have our fans that know us as a band, and know our live show and know our records, and dig deep, and they know the whole gamut. Then we have the fans that see us at festivals and come out to a show now and again, and they pretty much get it too. Then there’s this other group of fans that know us for the song, “Girl I Wanna Lay You Down,” that heard the song through Jack Johnson and came to like the band through that, and I can imagine that this would be surprising for some of those people. But I feel like we try not to think about those people too much when we’re making art, because they’re sort of casual and those people are probably going to come and go anyhow. If they’ve got a song or two they like by us, well that’s cool, they have that already. But for us—I guess it’s kind of like with any band—you’re serving yourself first. When we think about our audience we’re more concerned with the people that get that exploratory side of us.
You mention Jack Johnson. Some of his initial success came through radio play. To my mind ALO is a band that writes songs with the potential for radio exposure. In making Sounds Like This was there any discussion about the fact that longer songs could hurt you there?
In the past I felt like when we were making these records we were definitely spending time getting the songs ready and thinking on those terms—let’s trim every bit of fat that we can. Not make it too banal but let’s get it down to its essence and then live we’ll explore it. With this one, what we realized is that you can just do radio edits anyhow, so the song “Speed of Dreams,” which was the first single for the record, we just made a radio edit where we cut the whole bridge out and it just cuts to the end and that’s what they ended up playing. We started realizing that when we trimmed them down to what we thought was the essence, they were still doing radio edits for those anyhow. At a certain point we were like, “Let’s do whatever we want and not devise the album for the radio.” It’s so easy to do radio edits these days, just throw the track up on Pro Tools and cut out what you need to.
What sort of relationship does the band have with radio these days? To what extent do you feel the medium has helped ALO?
For us the formats have been Triple A and college radio. It’s always been good. We’ve never had big radio hits or anything but we’ve gotten played on radio, which is pretty cool, because especially with the scene we’re in, people avoid the radio sometimes. I think it’s been super helpful for us when we roll into towns where we haven’t played a lot if the radio is on board with it. It takes the place of having been to a town ten or twenty times already. There’s already a little bit of a crowd already. So we’re definitely interested in keeping those relationships.
At the end of the day we’re into having hooks in our tunes, we enjoy it. We’re going to have that and explore it, like we did on the last album, and still have radio edits. For me it feels like the best of both worlds. We can kind of have our cake and eat it too. I feel like with some of the arrangements we did on those earlier albums, just as a band listening back later, we would just miss the openness of some of the tunes.
As a musician or even just a as a listener, do you view radio in the same way that you did a decade ago?
I think it’s way different, because ten years ago, whatever town you were in there were like two radio stations. Now it’s so broad. I feel like now what’s so cool is the power has been handed to the people. Word of mouth counts for so much. For me, the main way I check out music now is just friends, people tell me about something and that’s how I end up checking them out. In the past it was like, “Okay, there are a couple radio stations and between those you’re going to hear what they give you.” Now there’s a million bands and everyday something’s coming out. I also subscribe to Mog and I’ve really been enjoying the new release Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I just listen to the new stuff coming out, and I’ve found some music I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
I’m on the east coast and you’re in the Bay Area. I’m always interested in learning about bands that are emerging in other local regions that I haven’t discovered yet. For instance I hadn’t heard of the California Honeydrops before they opened that run of shows for you earlier this year.
They’re a great band out of the Bay Area, relatively new and they’ve definitely have this New Orleans influence, even though they’re very much a Bay Area band. There’s definitely a New Orleans thing going on but they have a Bay Area aesthetic with their thing. As someone who grew up in the Bay Area, I feel like as a band it’s a part of who we are as musicians. But I also sort of feel like it used to be more regionally specific, especially when radio wasn’t all corporatized and each region had its sound. Now there’s so many people with access to so much music that there can be a New York band that sounds more Bay Area or a Bay area band that sounds more New York because of all this crazy cross pollination.
I still think there are regional pockets, though. In terms of that all that available music, sometimes I think that there’s so much of it that it almost becomes white noise. In certain respects I feel that as we become as we become more global we’ve also become more regional in a lot of regards.
I feel like the word of mouth from a friend or someone I respect is the main thing that will get me to dig into a band. With the Bay Area bands I do feel like there is a Bay Area aesthetic. I’m not sure I can put it into words but it sort of evolves out of the 60s psychedelic Grateful Dead scene. There’s a certain approach to music from all the bands that I interact with in the Bay Area, a certain kind of openness to the options. The aesthetic I find with bands out here with bands that are more focused on dance music and more people that are into folk music is just trying it out and letting it flow, and trying not to force it.
Sometimes it just comes out of relationships, like it did with the Wetlands scene in New York after that club opened.
For a little while there was this recording studio called Mission Bells, that was owned by Jackie Greene and Tim Bluhm, and that was sort of a neat fit. The studio is no longer there, but I found that was a great meeting place for the scene. A lot of the Bay Area bands were recording in that studio, our last album was recorded there, Sounds Like This. What’s neat with a studio is that everybody is working on stuff all the time and just dropping by. So a lot of cross pollination happened through that studio and the scene that evolved out of that.
I used to live a block from Bo Carper from New Monsoon, and we both like country blues, Mississippi John Hurt type stuff and last night we went out to The Independent and played with Elephant Revival. We were in town and so we went and did a quick set of country blues music. In that way there’s a total regional thing going on where we’re sitting in with each other and having guests. Stuff like that is appreciated by all of us. It’s cool that have that community, it feels like something.
What’s so cool about it is that it’s people that you respect but they’re your friends too. You want to do a good job because you respect those people and you want to impress them and I think they all feel the same way. That’s how that band, Brokedown in Bakersfield came about. That’s with me and Steve and Dave from ALO, and Tim and Nicki [Bluhm] and Scott Law. That’s a great one too because that’s a scene of music where we all know each other and sit in with each other’s bands, but then after hours we all enjoy picking on Merle Haggard tunes and Buck Owens tunes and talking about how we like Bakersfield country. I don’t know how much you’ve dug into that but it was much less glossy. So suddenly we have a little band where we do that. It started as a one off but now it’s a project we enjoy a couple times a year.
Lebo closing out Tour d’Amour 2013 with ALO at the Fillmore- photo by Brian Spady
What are the dynamics of getting you all together to play, given your various other commitments?
One side of that is the Bay Area way, which is sort of “just let it happen,” but it doesn’t always work. With that one it’s interesting, because for about two years I started playing a little pedal steel guitar and I always loved that music and have some friends who loved it—who eventually ended up being in that band—but for about two years we would always talk about doing a set where we all learn this music and throw some originals in there and make it that vibe. We literally talked about it for two years, but it wasn’t until High Sierra when they do those playshops which are like workshops and our bands all happened to all be there and I was like, “Oh, this is going to be the time to do it.” So I talked to Dave Margulies, who does all the High Sierra stuff, and basically pitched him the idea. And Scott Law was going to be there too, and he didn’t even know Tim or Nicki or any of them, and I thought he’d be great for it. So I sort of pitched it and then was like, “Cool, let’s find a way to make it happen because we’re all going to be in one place.”
So we have fun doing it, and when we’re all in the same place and the timing works out right, we do it, but it doesn’t get to happen nearly enough as we’d all like it to because everyone’s so busy with their main projects.
I’ve also seen listings for when you perform as Lebo, but fewer of those as of late. Is that still a band?
Yes but over this past year ALO has been busier than it’s been in the last five or six years. So this last year has been really focused on that. Beyond that I do gigs with my own band. It’s sort of revolving cast members but I’m always writing tunes. With ALO we’re more album-based and as we tour, we have so many tunes from over the years mixed with whatever our album is.
For all of us, we’re all writing all the time, and for me the Lebo band is a chance to mess with all of those. We’ll do some of the tunes I’ve brought into ALO but a lot of them conform to stuff I’ve been working on. The band isn’t a consistent band. A lot of times it’s whatever music I’m working on at that moment that I’m not playing out, so I think who’d be good for that and I grab them. I do stuff with Reed Mathis, sometimes I use Steve on bass, sometimes Dave Brogan on drums. A good friend Ezra Lipp who lives a couple blocks from me, he’s a great drummer, so I just started doing some playing with him. This great Bay Area singer named Lesley Grant, we’ve been working on some stuff together too, which is a lot of fun.
Here’s a great example of our Bay Area scene: Tea Leaf Green just put out a video with Lesley Grant and that’s me playing the steel guitar on there. That’s a great example of Bay Area, “Okay, just head down to the studio, bring a pedal steel…Lesley come sing on this track.”
Their studio is a really cool scene in the Bay Area. It’s called Coyote Hearing and it’s owned by Cochrane and Jeremy Black. You know Cochrane is in Tea Leaf Green and Jeremy Black is east coast, but now he’s living out here full time. They’ve got a great thing going on with their studio now where a lot of people are recording there and there’s multiple projects there. So lots of people are passing through, popping in for a couple hours and suddenly they’re on a track. New little projects are developing.
Speaking of which, do you have plans in motion for the next ALO studio album?
We’ve actually been talking about it because next month it’ll be a year since this album came out. So we’re about eleven months into it, and at sound checks we’ve been starting to mess with some new tunes as a band. We’ll probably go into the studio some time in six months or so. We’re still supporting this album and having new tunes coming together. We’re not rushing to the studio right away, but I would say we’d head to the studio in about six months and an album would come out six months after that.
Beyond that, for me, there’s the Lebo band stuff and I’ve been doing stuff with Mark Karan, you probably know him from RatDog. We’ve got a little band we do called the Rock Collection. That’s pretty fun, but again it’s another band where we don’t get to do it that often because everyone has their schedules. I guess for me, when ALO has breaks there are a handful of projects to fill things in with. It’s been fun working with Mark and that’s led to some cool things, playing with Bob Weir for a couple of shows, and then I recently was out in Hawaii with Reed Mathis. We did a festival with Bill Kreutzmann out in Kauai and that was kind of neat, because Reed’s a Bay Area guy now too so it was kind of like a generations thing: me and Reed and Bill and Steve Kimock did that show too, so it was a lot of fun.
You mention that Reed is Bay Area based these days. When he first made the transition from Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey to Tea Leaf Green, some people were surprised by his decision but it seems as though he has fit in quite well.
Yeah, and he’s brought his fingerprint to that band. It’s not like he just went in to play the parts that Ben [Chambers] played. He’s come in there and put his own stamp on everything. I’m really stoked that he moved out to the Bay Area. He’s been a great guy to play with and he’s such a creative and enthusiastic guy. He fits in great around here.
In terms of musicians performing in new contexts, on New Year’s Eve, your longtime friend and bandmate Steve Adams didn’t play with you [instead he performed with Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers].
Yes, that’s a new thing, because we haven’t done gigs without him before.
He’s been ramping things up with The Gramblers. Do you know if there will be more situations like that this coming year?
Yeah, we do actually have some gigs coming up that he won’t be on. It’s interesting, we all talked about it—the thing is, within ALO we all do a lot of other projects but in the past with the other projects, there’s been time to do it all. With Nicki, she started to get really busy probably about six months ago so for a while they were using different bass players here and there, but like any band, you don’t want to be having it in flux all the time.
So for him with them getting busier, it’s a good opportunity for work—he’s got a good, busy year with her—and for ALO, we’re doing a bunch of shows this year but we probably won’t be on the same schedule as we were last year when we were out the whole time. So for him I think jumping on that has been a lot of fun, it’s all friends, so he’s doing that gig and with ALO [on New Year’s] it was more of a one-off so we called on Ron Johnson, who’s an old friend—I’ve been playing music with him for seven, eight years on and off during ALO breaks, doing different things with him here and there. He was the first guy we thought to call and he jumped right in and did such a great job, so we actually have a few more shows this summer that he’s going to be on.
Steve will be on a bunch but there’s a handful he won’t be at. He’s on all the stuff for April, all the east coast stuff, but some of the festivals are kind of one-offs and Ron’s going to be jumping on for those. Ron fits in right at home and he and Steve have a similar approach to bass. It’s fun too, each person sort of adds their own flavor to it, which is really cool, so you get to hear something a little different in the music.
The neat thing with ALO is that with Zach, Steve and I have been playing together since we were in seventh grade. The history is long and deep, and Dave even, he’s the new guy and he’s been in the band for twelve years now. I think with this, it’s just a scheduling thing. Ron can jump in and pick up where Steve left and even adds his own flavor to it, which is really fun.
You mentioned Mark Karan earlier. How did you connect with him?
With Mark it was a good Bay Area moment actually, with SEVA, Wavy Gravy’s foundation. It was an event they were doing a few years ago at the Great American [Music Hall]. It was a bunch of musicians and Mark was on it there. Those things are kind of fun when you’ve got so many musicians hanging out throughout the day, between sound check and different people coming on and off stage and hanging out back stage and stuff, and we just realized that we had a lot of similar interests in music and had a fun time playing together.
So from that, we didn’t see each other a lot because we were just all so busy, but then Greg Anton, the drummer from Zero, got offered to put a band together for the Oregon Country Fair. This was two years ago. So he called Mark who he’s friends with and I knew Greg too a little bit, and they gave me a call and said, “Do you want to come up to Oregon and do this crazy gig in the forest up there?” It sounded fun. So we got together, rehearsed, sort of put a set together and that’s where that band Rock Collection was born out of. And again, everyone’s schedules are busy but we’ve been logging in some gigs. This year we’re probably get in six or eight gigs or so.
We all love it, so if there’s a way to do more we’d be into it for sure. Mark’s a blast to play with. He’s fun and we have a nice zone we can get into. A lot of the jam session things can be like, “You take solo, now you take solo, now you take solo,” and I think Mark and I have a good time interweaving the whole thing where it ends up being really organic. We have a lot of different experiences but we have a lot of common experiences too. The common experiences in terms of influences, those are what make it work because that’s the common dialogue, but our differences are what make it interesting.
What was the music you listened to growing up? The formative stuff?
When I was first becoming aware of music—young junior high, late grade school—I really liked all the British stuff. Like the Who was my favorite for sure, but the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all that stuff was right up my alley. But the Who definitely, when I first got my first guitar, all I listened to was the Who.
Where I kind of grew up, which is in South Bay, closer to Santa Cruz, there was just a lot of classic rock people that were listening to. Some time around eighth grade somebody played the first Van Halen album and that kind of blew my mind. So I spent a few years being into that kind of stuff. But then I sort of came back around to the other stuff and went deeper, and I got really into a lot of blues and jazz for a long time after that and all through college that was pretty much what I was interested in. If you get into jazz you kind of have to go deep into it. The typical path, I’ve talked to a lot of friends, is where you kind of stop listening to anything else. Going really into that and I definitely enjoyed it for a long time.
When I moved back up the Bay Area I started just really appreciating songs, anywhere from Neil Young to Bill Withers. But there was also a jam aesthetic: take the song for a little walk and explore it for a little while. That’s the jazz influence on it, which is why I feel really at home in the scene which is really supportive of that. People love to listen to the lyrics but they also love to let their minds unwind and see where the music takes them. It all comes around eventually.
In terms of your improvisational ethos, would you say it’s grounded in jazz?
Yeah, for a long time. That and the modern form of the blues where jazz really opens it up more. That for me was the first improvisational stuff I got really into. Ironically, my dad took me to a couple of Grateful Dead shows when I was in junior high. He actually took Zach and me to our first one, so that was kind of a wild experience too. But at the time, as a seventh grader just getting into music, I was more sort of grabbed by the crazy scene at the time then even the music. “Wow, what is this crazy carnival.” So I don’t remember that much music from my first Grateful Dead show. That would have been around 1989 at Shoreline. Brent was definitely playing in the band but that first show was the only time I saw him there. I was so enamored by the scene, I spent my time just wandering around the lawn, starring at the twirling people, smelling all these new smells.
When you’re seeing something in a new way, with child’s eyes, it’s such a powerful thing and I feel like that shapes so much of the way we see everything. I’m always trying to remind myself of that, to keep my child’s eyes on, because it’s so easy to—I feel like we want to organize everything in our minds but then as we get all these experiences down it’s so easy to put them into categories of experience. I like the idea of trying to keep it open but it’s a battle to do that a lot of the time. Even with bands it’s like that sounds like that, or a mixture of this, whereas my child ears or eyes, my ears will just hear this music as just music. And I love that sense. And that’s why for me I try to listen to a bunch of new stuff.
When I first moved back to the Bay Area, when I was listening mostly to jazz, I was listening to a lot of old stuff, kind of stopping in the late 70s. For a number of years I kind of went that way and occasionally would listen to something new, but as I started opening my mind to the new music that was happening it was such a revelation. Especially for someone that was trying to create music, I just find it really inspiring now to listen to as much new music as I can, just to be open and checking out new bands, because there’s so much cool stuff happening. It’s crazy where with Spotify, you could literally stop at 1975 and have more music than you could ever need. I can see why people say, “Who needs the new stuff?” But there’s so much cool new stuff happening, new combinations, it’s great, you know?
I always like to hear musicians who know their jazz make recommendations for our readers who haven’t listened to very much but might want to start dipping in their toes. What would you recommend?
I feel like Bird, Charlie Parker, is such a complete experience. Especially for someone who’s not sure about jazz, I feel like he’s so great because he’s got such character in his playing. It’s so heavy and so light at the same time, whereas Coltrane you have to be more into the commitment of what you’re going to get with his brooding thing. But I feel for someone who’s just checking it out, Charlie Parker is a great place to go, because the depth of what’s going on is so deep but there’s a certain lightness and a certain sing-ability to it that just keeps it floating along. And there are so many good albums. With him it was a short life but just a constant state of recording throughout his whole short life. I feel like he’s a great artist to go to.
I always liked and still do like checking out horn players over just guitar players. I think with anyone it’s important to look just beyond your instrument for inspiration. At least for me it’s important, because on your instrument you start to do idioms and it’s so cool to take influences from another instrument because it takes you out of the idioms and more into the feel. And maybe you get some idioms off of that instrument that actually translate to your own and suddenly, you can’t do it the same way, so it becomes a new idiom or your own interpretation of it.
For me though, I started more with the guitar players, like Wes Montgomery, those things sort of sucked me in initially. Charlie Christian was one who I used to listen to a lot. With Wes there was this album that was the go to for me for many, many years and what I really liked about it—and this is one of the things with jazz albums that’s so cool, is the band is so important, because there’s so much jazz expression going on. So with Wes there’s a live album he did at the Half Note in New York [ Smokin’ at the Half Note with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb] and it’s just perfect, everything that they do. If someone likes guitar and jazz, I would say that one would be the one. It’s just great.
That’s a favorite of mine and one that appears on our forthcoming “Relix 40” list of top improv-fueled live albums. Jumping back to ALO, can you talk a little bit about your Hot Tub Club ?
For us, being a band for so long, we have a ton of material in the vault. Whenever we go into the studio, whenever we work on an album, there’s always a bunch of other tracks. We tend to start our recording process by laying lots of stuff down and there are also times when we have some time off of the road and just pop into the studio for a day. So we end up with all this stuff and we would play it for friends and people seemed to really like it and it resonated with some people more than the albums at times in the sense of what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation.
So we have all this stuff, and basically our connection with people is to tour and through our albums which at this point come out every two years. So we thought it’d be nice to have an additional way to connect beyond just going to the live music archive and stuff like that. So we got the idea that we should start a fan club type thing where we can get this material out to the people that would really appreciate it, because it’s not for everyone. It’s not the kind of stuff we want to bring to Brushfire Records and put out. It’s for the people who already like our stuff, it’s a way for them to go deeper. It’s been fun and the way we’ve been doing it, people subscribe and they get a package right away, a poster and some specific stuff, but every quarter a different band member curates. So I just curated this last one that came out and it’s fun because it’s an opportunity for each band member to say, “This is what I want to put out there from the vault.”
One of the things I went for with this quarter—I feel like ALO has this quirky side that comes out live not even all the time, but it’s a side of the band that I really like. So I grabbed a few tunes that we’ve never released. Some are tunes we’ve done live, but these are studio versions that haven’t been released of songs that I thought displayed that more quirky side of things. It’s really fun to put these tunes out there. We’ll also release a show that has some sort of meaning to us, and in this case I had a show we did in Chattanooga earlier this year- one of those shows where the setlist was real off the cuff, with funny banter, just the scene that fit with the quirky side of the band.
How often will you work from a setlist?
I’d say most often we make a different setlist each night, it’s part of our centering process. Someone will just take a crack at it and get it going and then we’ll all just hash out the fine points of it. But, we’re also very open, and we made this decision many years ago when the band was starting, not to be married to the setlist. If something starts emerging in the tune we’ll go for it. If someone has an idea in the middle, we’re all very open to that. We know it’s nothing in stone, but it’s a nice guide to have.
I especially find at festival type sets and stuff where you’ve got one sixty or seventy-five minute set, you need to have a road map, but even with those we veer off the set list. We’re happy to do so and it’s usually a good time when that’s happening, it means that we’re in the moment. But we have the full range. We used to never make setlists when the band was first starting and we first moved back to San Francisco: no set lists and a lot of our songs didn’t even have endings. We would just start playing and they would blend into each other. Then we had this thing where we’d just go around in a circle and take turns calling tunes. That was fun for a while, whatever you were feeling in that moment. When that is on it’s killer but when it’s not and you’re saying “Uhhhh…I don’t know,” forget it. So now we’ve got our setlist but we don’t stick to it. But this night, that I put on in Chattanooga was cool, because it was a Sunday or Monday night, a last minute added show and we’d been going strong many nights in a row already, so it was one of those nights where we just set up and were like, “Let’s go play some music, we’ll start with this…” and it all flowed out so nicely.
Last question. You’re touring with Ryan Montbleau this month. How familiar are you with him and what can people expect?
We’re stoked, stoked to play with him. We’ve known him for a few years now. I think I first met him at High Sierra and we crossed paths at a lot of festivals and just hung out, but we’ve never played any shows together. We’ve been talking about it for a long time, for a year, a year and a half probably, just batting it around. We were at Gathering of the Vibes this year; we were both at that festival and we hung out for a while backstage, and we were just like, “We have to find a way to make this happen, we’ve been talking about this for way too long.” So then these dates sort of emerged and our managers got to talking together and they worked the whole thing out.
I love doing stuff like this, where we get to tour with a band. In general, with ALO, it’s going to be fun because it’s a co-bill tour, but even with headlining tours, I really like it when we have a certain band that’s touring with us. We really like to bring openers with us, or in this case a co-bill. When it’s just a different opener each night, that’s fine but you miss out on something. You don’t get to build the camaraderie with a band, and for us, when you get to do a string of dates you create something that’s there forever. This tour we just did with the California Honeydrops, it was about five weeks with some nights off and we ended up with a lot of tunes together. By the end we were sitting in with them, they were sitting in with us and you never know where that’s going to pop out. I love building those kinds of relationships and a lot of times that’s what leads to interesting side projects and new things.
What’s cool with Ryan is people have always been saying you should do shows together and now we have an opportunity to do it, so it’ll be cool to see what comes from it. You never know, it could be a lifelong hang and collaboration.
