Photo by Chad Anderson
For the better part of a decade I’ve watched Joel Cummins work his magic as one part of the glorious machine that is Umphrey’s McGee. As a longtime fan of the band, I was a bit surprised to find myself in Cummins’ cabin on Jam Cruise 12, getting a sneak peak at one of the never-before-played tracks from UM’s forthcoming studio album. The song—I wasn’t clued in on its name—starts off with some of the hard rock edge that we’ve come to expect from Umphrey’s McGee before shifting gears with a pleasantly unexpected, ethereal string arrangement. It’s not really like anything the band has done before, and I look forward to giving it a proper listen once the album is out. Better yet, I look forward to seeing it jammed out in all its live splendor.
And that’s the beauty of Jam Cruise. One minute you’re lounging by a pool deck with a craft beer in one hand and a soft-serve ice cream cone in the other while Steve Kimock, George Porter Jr. and company put their spin on the Grateful Dead, and the next minute the keyboardist from one of your favorite bands is asking you to describe an unreleased song from his forthcoming album. Polar vortexes be damned, this is what humans should be doing in January.
It was on the aforementioned pool deck that I ran into Mr. Cummins, who graciously agreed to an interview. Over the course of an hour or so, we discussed a range of topics, including Umphrey’s McGee’s upcoming studio album, Jam Cruise, underground (literally) nightclubs, Mellotrons, New Year’s Eve in Colorado and much more.
So here we are on Jam Cruise. How cool is this?
This is your first Jam Cruise and you’ve come in on it now on year eleven, Jam Cruise 12, and Umphrey’s McGee did the first five years of Jam Cruises and then I’ve been on as a solo performer with a few different side projects, OHMphrey, Yacht Rock and I think maybe that’s it. And then just doing piano sets and sitting in with people. But it is insane to see how far it’s come from year one. Year one we came here, it was an 800 person ship—it was this big, ugly, grey, metal thing that I was somewhat frightened to get on—I thought there was at least like a ten percent possibility it would sink, you know? We would be testing the ship more than any other cruise group ever. So year one went great despite the fact that it was a somewhat scaled down production. When you do an event the first time you’ve got to make sure it succeeds and not try to do something too big from the get-go.
So here we are 12 years later in a 3,500-person ship that just set sail in 2012. This ship is insanely nice—we’ve got crystal staircases—but it’s not just that the ship has improved. Whenever I’m hanging out with Umphreys’ fans they tell me this, that there’s this Jam Cruise family element that has developed and all these people have come here—I would venture to guess at least 50 percent if not 75 percent have been on more than one Jam Cruise—and it’s one of these things where once you come once, you don’t ever want to miss it. You make friends from all over the country in such a cool, special way and then you get to come back next year or a couple years later and reunite with them. And there’s just an amazing vibe here that is hard to describe because you have all these people. It feels like an enlightened group of fans, who get that life can be great with just music and friends. What else do you need? Here we are on the open seas traveling for five days and you know you’ve got all these musicians pouring their hearts out and it’s so easy to do when you have an audience that is immediately open to having a great time. There are really no hazards on the ship. You don’t have to worry about walking into a bad neighborhood.
So really the only thing is just that you have to make sure that you make it back to the ship before port call on the land days. We got a little close yesterday. The cool thing for me is that, as an artist, there are a few unique things. I get to be a fan, I get to watch way more music than I do at any other festival because I go back to my room, chill for a few minutes, and there’s always something going on and having that option to go back and take a breather is really nice, especially when you can open your door and the ocean is going by. But you have that and being able to hang out and just casually mix with the fans is also a lot of fun. I feel like I’ve met so many cool people from all over the country. A lot of them don’t even know who I am; I am just hanging out with people having a good time. So to be able to just strip it down and just feel like we’re amongst friends, we’re amongst people who get it.
How’d you end up spending your time in Jamaica yesterday?
We did a little trip to this tunnel cave. It was insane. We went to this place that used to be a night club that was an underground cave but then they eventually decided it was unsafe because they’re like, “Oh yeah, maybe the base isn’t going to be so good for the support, it could cave in.” But one of our friends had a portable speaker with her so we were able to turn up the club one more time and have a little dance party in there. Then we got to go on an hour-and-a-half tube ride down this river after doing a little hiking up some rocks, too. I mean it was a pretty mind-blowing experience to be able to be that deep in nature just an hour away from where this was happening.
There’s also another thing about these. You can venture a little bit off the beaten path and discover some really cool unique things about whatever country it is you’re visiting. So there is a little bit of culture happening, too. Last year I did the Positive Legacy event. The Moog Foundation got off at a school in Turks and Caicos and I went with them. It was unbelievably inspiring for me, getting do a little moog clinic with Bernie Worrell and Rich Vogel from Galactic. Just getting to spend a little time with those guys, working with kids. We were demonstrating what the moog was, and these kids, their eyes were just lighting up. They’re like, “Oh my god!” And some of the kids who knew how to play keyboard stepped up and we showed them how to play with it a little bit.
At one point we were like, “Bernie come over here, you’ve got to play them some songs.” He’s says, “Okay, okay. So this is a little tune that I wrote called ‘Flashlight’.” So he plays it and a couple of the kids are like, “What’s this dude doing?” And then he says, “Yeah, we’ve got another one.” All the kids start singing “We want the funk,” and we tell them, “this is Bernie’s tune, too” and the kids are like, “Oh my god!” So it was this really, really cool inspiring moment. We also left the school with a Theremin there so they had something new there that they could play with for their music program. So it’s little things like that where you can go to a community and you know it doesn’t matter who we are to them. It was this awesome thing for them, that somebody from the United States was coming and bringing these instruments and spending the day with them. It’s cool. I’ve taught a lot of piano lessons over the years to people from the ages of seven to thirty, so to be able to reconnect with that teaching was a really special thing.
Well, moving on from Jam Cruise, Umphrey’s just wrapped up your New Year’s out in Colorado? There were some new covers, some new tunes too. How was that?
The run was amazing. Colorado is an incredibly special place to play music, it’s a lot like Jam Cruise where you just feel like the audience immediately gets it. Everybody is just completely getting down. It was our first time doing New Year’s there so I think there was a little special energy for that as well. Of course, Red Rocks is my favorite venue. I feel that with the Red Rocks shows we’ve been able to do in the past couple years we’ve gradually just built the fan base and stoked the fan base to the point where we felt like we were finally ready to do a New Year’s thing there. So, yeah, it was amazing. We got to play a new original tune called “Bad Friday” that we’ve been working on for a long time. We had Mad Dog make a horn arrangement for it to. That was something that we hadn’t done before; play a new tune for the first time live with horns. It was definitely a little bit of a risk, but it’s kind of like the Talking Heads, just the groove keeps going. It’s kind of almost an anti-Umphrey’s song in the sense that we’re so known for these jagged changes and all these different parts. For this one we were like, “Let’s just make something that just keeps going, that can be a successful four-minute song.” But I think it can probably be a successful ten or fifteen minute song down the road. It’s got something that’s super catchy and danceable and fun, yet at the same time not predictable or lifted from something else. I feel like it still falls into that very original, unique Umphrey’s McGee. It’s one of those things where these six unique voices are creating the music and that’s still going to be heard no matter what song it is. So that was really fun.
Then the covers. We did “Rock the Casbah,” which has a pretty sweet little piano part so that was fun for me. We had Josh Redman the second night and Josh is just the best person to have play with your band. The first time that he played with us in 2004, we were talking to him before the run and tried to figure out what it is he wants us to do. Does he want us to play his tunes? Does he want to play covers? Does he want to play our tunes? And he’s like, “No, no, no. Dude, I’m really into what you guys are doing compositionally, originally. I want to play your music but I don’t want to solo over the top of it. I want to find a part and create a part and be within the textures of everything that is happening. I want to know what it is and I want to be inside of that.”
So we gave him a bunch of tunes and he picked up a few of them. One was “DBK,” and the first time he showed up for rehearsal he was like, “Well we should probably start with more of the complex stuff, so let’s start with that one. I made a few notes so it’s not going to be perfect but I definitely got through it and got notes on all the parts, so if we need to stop we’ll just make sure it’s tight.” So we played through the whole thing. I swear he did not make a mistake and that song took us three months as a band to get tight back in 1998, and that was not easy. We just all looked at each other and we’re like, “This is going to be cool and fuck you.” Yeah, he’s such a jerk for being so good. So we did, I think, five original tunes. We had “Redtape” prepared, too, and we didn’t get to it. And he was really pumped about that one. He was like, “I really wanted to play ‘Redtape,’ man.”
We also did a Weather Report cover for the first time called “River People” that Ryan has been wanting to do for a while. We did this obscure late 70s fusion-jazz tune written by Jaco Pastorius with Wayne Shorter on sax, Joe Zawinul on keys, and Peter Erskine as the drummer. We’ve never covered Weather Report before, so this was kind of a really fun thing for us to do. We’ve been wanting to give them a nod for a while so it was nice to make it happen, and having Josh on it was so killer.
The thirtieth we played Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me.” It was a really fun, funny song. I listened back to it a couple days ago and I was like, “Okay, it turned out alright.” Ryan wanted to do this super funky 70s tune by a band called Pleasure that I’ve never heard of before. Apparently they have this song called “Glide” that had some pretty sweet keys in it, too. So we got to do that one, and New Year’s I think we did four other new ones. We did maybe five. We did “Twilight Zone” by Golden Earring—which I think is maybe my favorite cover from that—and he killed it on the vocals and it just has this great driving groove that we kind of turned into a house jam. That’s another one that I feel like is going to have huge potential for improvisation for us to come back and revisit it and play it more this year. We did “Hit It and Quit It” by Funkadelic, which was cool. We did “Sussudio” by Phil Collins. I heard that one on the radio one day probably three or four weeks ago. I wrote everybody and I was like, “You guys, we’ve got to do this.” We were kind of waffling on a couple other ones that we weren’t sure were gonna be the right calls and I was like, “’Sussudio,’ everybody knows ‘Sussudio,’ it will be badass with horns and everything.” It was really funny because the horn guys were like, “There isn’t a real horn section that can play this; there’s no place where they stop to breathe.” So they did it like half and split it up, but they were telling us this was in the heyday of MIDI. I think I can hear MIDI horns where they had it recorded. But yeah, that was a fun one.
What else did we do? Howard Jones’ “Things Can Only Get Better,” another classic 80s tune that I always loved as a kid so that was pretty fun to be able to play with horns of course, too. Cool and The Gang’s “Funky Stuff.” I think this was the first time we’ve played that one, too, but I think that was the last song of the night just to go out with a fun party vibe with the encore. We had a great time with all of the covers this year. I think we ended up having a really nice variety of stuff from the 70s and 80s; some more rock, some more funky shit, some fusion jazz stuff.
“Bad Friday” is a new song. I heard you guys have a new album in the works? Is that song going to be a part of it? What can we expect from that?
Not allowed to share that at this time, unfortunately. It’s a great question, but I can only tell you a few things about the new album. We’re still not quite sure when it’s going to be out. I’m going to say sometime in the first half of the year, and we’re done with the recording at this point. We started with I think sixteen tunes, six of which are new, ten of which we’ve played live at some point before and we’ve narrowed it down to thirteen now. My guess is probably ten will make the cut I would say. Ten seems like a good number, right? A few bonus tracks then. But yeah man, it’s turned out really great. I’ve actually been spending a lot of time listening to the tracks. We’re kind of in the mixing critique stage at this point. So, one thing I could do—I can’t give it to you—but I could let you listen to one of the new songs and you could describe it without saying its name. You can’t tell people what it is. How about that?
Sure. Are any there any other details you can share?
I’ll tell you a couple things about it. We did most of the tracking. Some of the songs are older songs. I think probably the oldest song is from 2003 or 2004, so we definitely went back and picked a couple that we haven’t put down on an album before because we felt like it mixed well with this group of songs. Just in general some of the new stuff, and also the newer things that we’ve been playing live that we wanted to put on the album. I think the only song we’ve really completely confirmed, that we’ve talked about with somebody, is “Puppet String.” That is definitely going to be one of featured tracks on the album. It’s on the record. It’s on the vinyl and the digital release.
But it’s been really cool. We started back in October 2012. We took a day up at Jake’s place and we kind of worked on some arrangements for some of the newer stuff that we hadn’t played live. We kind of let that sink in for a little bit and made a few changes. Then in May and June of last year, we went into IV Lab for two and a half weeks and just spent the days tracking and putting stuff down and it was so fun. Our method to get the drum tracks down first, so it’s about getting the arrangement right and then letting Kris figure out his parts and everyone playing live with Kris so that it really is a live band take. There’s something about the energy, about everyone playing in the room that brings out better performances than just saying, “Okay, here how it goes, you just play along.” W all do it together. It’s got to be like that, and then we will sometimes keep parts from that if they were good enough. Sometimes the bass will end up being used from that. Sometimes the keys will end up being used from that, but for the most part we’ll come back in and re-track stuff after we’ve kind of had some time to listen to it and get acquainted with it. So Manny will send us edits then.
For this particular one I went back into the studio with Manny Sanchez, our producer and engineer who has since moved to Culver City. I live in Venice so he lives five minutes away from me, so we got together. He also works with Patrick Stump—Fall Out Boy’s singer, songwriter, and guitar player—and we went up to Patrick’s one day and did some tracking and then we decided to have a huge keyboard day so we had the fun job of looking around Los Angeles and trying to find the right studio that had all the keyboards we wanted to use. Manny found this placed called Fonogenic and called them up and told them what we were trying to do. The guy answered the phone like, “Oh cool, you want to rent this studio?” So Manny’s like, “Yeah. Well Thursday or Friday will work I think. I think Thursday is gonna be better because Friday we have a gig that we’re playing, but what are you guys doing tonight?” He says, “Well we’re having this rehearsal and little jam session down here so if you guys want to come check it out and just see what’s here and hang a little bit and get used to the place.” So Manny says, “Cool man, let me talk to Joel.” And I didn’t have anything happening that night so I was like, “Cool, let’s do it, I’m up for an adventure.”
So we get down there and as we were walking in the door there’s some people walking out and I’m looking and it’s Minnie Driver. These guys, one of things they were rehearsing for was they are her backing band. Then I’m looking around and I’m like, “Dude this guy looks so familiar.” He’s like, “I’m Chris. I play in Blind Melon.” And I’m like, “We’ve played somewhere together” and then realized that, I think, it was 2008 and we played together at Summer Camp. They were on our stage and we all kind of met and said “What’s up.” So Brad and Chris from Blind Melon were in this band and then the keyboardist, whose studio this is, his name is Rami Jaffee. And I found out he was doing keyboards for Blind Melon, but before that he was the keyboardist for the Wallflowers. If you remember they were a big hit—“One Headlight,” there’s an awesome organ part on that. So this guy’s great, now he’s the keyboardist for the Foo Fighters and that’s his main gig. This is just his little playhouse to come and kind of mess around.
We end up checking out the studio. It’s awesome. They’ve got grand pianos, they’ve got Wurlizters, Fender Rhodes, organs and then he’s like, “Oh yeah dude, check this thing out, too. I’ve got this Mellotron from this guy who makes them in Sweden and I have two of them, but you’ve got to try it on something; figure out something for your new songs and put it on there.” I’m like, “I will definitely do that. I fucking love the Mellotron.” So, we went in there and we ended up hanging out. The drummer for this band was Dave Krusen, the original drummer for Pearl Jam. So it was this amazing band that was rehearsing and playing mostly covers for this party the next day and Rami’s like, “Dude, come on up here, you’ve got to play.” So I got to play with everybody for a few minutes and then just hang out and have some drinks. And then we’re like, “This place is cool; this is gonna be a great place to record.”
Manny and I showed up there at ten in the morning that Thursday and we stayed until one in the morning and we just crushed it. We did like 85 percent of the keyboards that day. It was just so awesome to be in that creative space and we got the Mellotron on three or four tunes, some places more subtle than others, but immediately Manny looked at me and he was like, “You have to get one of these now; these sounds are going to be on the album so you’re going to need it eventually so you should probably learn how to play it now and just get it.” And I’m like, “You are so right” and I could just see the crew like, “Goddammit, Joel you don’t need another keyboard.” Anyway, I had Rami put me in touch with the guy who made them and we exchanged a few emails and it just so happened that they distribute them from Stockholm and Los Angeles, so I was also able to get out of the sales tax because I had it shipped to Chicago to make it to the truck for tour. All the little things help. I first got it for our October tour but it’s such an amazing addition to the sound.
As far as our band goes, one thing I discovered when we changed drummers—to some extent even when Jake joined the band, and then to even a further extent when Kris took over for Mike. Kris is an incredibly rhythmic player and really there are all these crazy syncopations going and he’s doing really cool shit underneath, not just playing super spacious grooves all the time. I realized that I was going to kind of have to change how I play a little bit to incorporate more long tonal stuff. You know, focusing more on subtle things and creating textures and beds of sounds and harmonies to kind of set up the guitar players. That was one of the things that I kind of focused on more, so I got the Roland JP 8000 first which was my first kind of long toned synth. And then I got the Moog, which is really nice to for those singular notes. I had a Micro X for a little while so I could do some string stuff and then finally the Mellotron is like the complete package, this super eerie weird thing where it’s got great organ, flute, strings and voices. Do you want to see a picture of it? Do you know what it looks like?
They’re pretty big though, right?
Yeah, but this one isn’t. It’s really a very tolerable size. It’s a little bit wide. This is a digital version because those used to break all the time. So here’s like the little board here. One of the cool things is you have two different things of the same sounds and then you have a mixer that’s a knob here. You can pick two different sounds and then create a unique mix for whatever you’re doing. Then this little knob right here is a pitch bend that is so evil, and it goes down like an octave and probably up an octave, and it’s just so disorienting with stuff to really mess with that or make it just a little bit out of tune so it kind of creates a little bit of tension with the music. It’s got a little turn knob for brightness, an octave switch here and then the volume. So, there’s one shot of it with the blue light on and then here’s what it really looks like. It’s white.
Very cool.
So, I think it’s maybe two and a half or three octaves. It’s not super long but you’ve got the low and high octave switch. I think it’s really been a cool difference for the sonic palette; I’ve probably been playing it 10 or 15 percent of the time.
So we can expect to see it on the upcoming tour then?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. So that’s kind of where the recordings are at and initially what Manny will do is pick the best versions and try to create what he calls final edits, meaning the mix isn’t necessarily right but you’re listening for the parts and seeing if you are cool with everything that’s in there or if you want him to go back and find something from a different take. So we have on all this stuff probably seven or eight takes of every part that we’ve played just so there’s a little bit if you want a different mood. Or we’ll play things a different way. You never know what you’re gonna need when you’re starting so it’s nice to have a few options you can go back to.
Right now we’re in the final mixing stage of it and I’ve got to say there’s some good variety. I feel like it’s a little bit hard, getting back to Anchor Drops’ heaviness, maybe even a little heavier. There are a couple songs on there that I think are at least the heavy vocal tunes that we’ve done. “Wizard Burial Ground” of course being one that definitely takes the cake as far as heavy tunes. Jake has a couple tunes that are just crushing and awesome and I can already envision just blowing people’s minds with this shit live. It’s gonna be so cool. And then we have a couple other tracks that I think are real fan live favorites that we’ve been trying to capture the last few times we’ve been in the studio. We have a few that we’ve tried but we’ve abandoned two or three times because we just didn’t feel like it had the right energy, It’s cool to be able to go back to a couple of them and feel like we finally got it.
