Minnesota-based alt-bluegrass outfit Trampled By Turtles recently returned to the stage in their home state, marking their first shows together in nearly two years. The band is currently on their comeback tour after an extended hiatus that allowed its members to take time to explore some endeavors outside the group, including frontman Dave Simonett releasing his sophomore solo album as Dead Man Winter, Furnace, in 2017.
Trampled made their re-introduction to fans with Life is Good on the Open Road, their first album since 2014’s Wild Animals, and the record’s traditional-bluegrass-romp lead single “Kelly’s Bar.” Following up the previous album’s more subdued textures, the track made a statement to the world that the foot-stomping, fast-paced Trampled was back. As Simonett says, “After this many years of doing it, it’s really hard to sound different than yourself, but at least you’re gonna sound different than the last record you made.”
While the band was in town for a live performance at the Relix studios in Manhattan, Simonett and mandolin player Erik Berry sat down to chat about the hiatus, getting the band back together starting with a weekend cabin retreat in Minnesota, the importance of keeping things fresh and more.
This is your first album in four years, but when was the last time you guys were on the road together?
Dave Simonett: I think it rounded out to be about eighteen months, right?
Erik Berry: Nineteen months. Last time we played a show was October of 2016, but our last tour was August 2016.
DS: Yeah, because we played a couple shows around Minnesota—which is home for us—before we took a break.
And were these shows you just did in Minnesota the first ones since then?
DS: Yeah, we did kind of a surprise show in Duluth, which is where we started as a band, and then we did two nights in St. Paul.
I want to talk about the album, but I’m also curious about the hiatus. I’m sure you guys have talked about it a lot, but could you talk a bit about how it started? Was it a long time coming?
DS: Well, I think is a break is always kind of coming before it happens, you know? But it wasn’t anything we’d talked about before that.
EB: I was taken by surprise that Dave really wanted to shelve it for a long time. And, talking to some of the others guy, they were like, “I’m not.” And I don’t know if Dave was talking about it or something.
DS: Yeah. For me, there was a lot going on in my life at the time but, musically, I would say that there was some other stuff I really wanted to do. When we’re touring full time, there’s not really much time for anything else, you know what I mean? And, you know, I have kids at home. Eric’s got kids at home. When you’re home, you’re just home. You have to be. So I was just trying to fit in these other projects I wanted to do in these little windows between Trampled touring, and it just could never work out. And, you know, we’ve been doing it for a while. And it was good too—we were in a good place, and we weren’t dissolving into fighting or anything. In hindsight, it ended up probably being a really good time to take a breather.
Yeah, so that problems like that didn’t have a chance to arise.
DS: Yeah. Not saying that would’ve happened, but at least it wasn’t happening.
EB: When you hear about bands that break up with bad blood, it’s usually that they’re burning out and somebody’s unable to hold their cool together. So what could’ve been my ugly minute on the road becomes me and Dave’s ugly moment, because I tell him to go screw himself because I’m grumpy. Then he doesn’t forget that I did that. I’m sure that’s what happens to many bands out there, and it wasn’t happening to us.
DS: No, we’ve always gotten along great.
EB: The running joke is that when we get really polite—like, “Hey Dave, can you please hand me two bottles of water? Please. Thank you so much”—it’s like, “Uh oh, what’s the matter with Eric?”
DS: If you’re gonna do something for a long time, and I don’t care what it is—relationship, job, band—space is so important. I think it can be applied to most people, even just from talking to people about us taking a break—so many times, their response to me is like, “Wow, I wish I would’ve done that,” or whatever. You get going on something and things are going well, especially in a band, you never know how long the good times are gonna last. So, I think the tendency is to not cut things off. But, you know, next year, everything could change. But it’s not gonna last forever if you don’t let it breathe for a little bit. There’s no use. You gotta remember that it’s art, and you can’t beat the shit out of it and you can’t do the same thing all the time, or else nothing new is gonna happen. And that’s a really successful way to go crazy, you know?
EB: One thing that was really surprising to me was that around March of 2017, I realized my internal music monologue wasn’t very “Trampled-y.” It had been “Trampled-y” for 10 years, and then suddenly it wasn’t. I remember coming in from doing work at my place and saying to my wife, “I don’t know if Dave knew this was gonna happen, but it’s pretty cool; this is not Trampled music I’m listening to in my head.”
DS: I want to be able to create music for my whole life, and I need to have the opportunity to let that branch out in any way it wants, or else I’m gonna get frustrated.
Dave, were you having a similar feeling where you knew the music in your head wasn’t really for this band?
DS: Yeah. I mean, I made a record. I had that recording experience
Right, you put out Furnace as Dead Man Winter. When was that recorded?
DS: It came out in January, so it would’ve been the fall I guess, maybe in the summer. So, I had done that, and I wanted to put it out and I wanted to go on tour and all that. You know, whatever [length of time] it ended up being, it was perfect. It ended up being like a year of that thing, and it ran its natural course. It was great, whereas before, I was looking at, “I’ve got two weeks off in September—where can I play? When can I release my record? I don’t know what the hell’s gonna happen.” So, yeah. Most of the other guys got into stuff while we were off the road as well.
EB: Yeah, I recorded an Irish record with a guy named Teague Alexy and put together a Grateful Dead duo, where I got to use all my effects pedals.
DS: The other guys were all playing with other people, too. I think that’s really healthy, too, just to get out and play with other people. I mean, the same group of guys with the same instruments, the longer you go, the harder it is to come up with something that you feel is something new. So the other people and environments can really help to bring that freshness back.
I’m definitely curious about that Grateful Dead Duo.
EB: That was guitar, vocals and mandolins—one lead singer, who was not me. So if he was singing a Jerry tune, I’d be Bobby on mandolin, and if he’s singing a Bobby tune, I’d be Jerry on mandolin.
DS: You guys played shows, right?
EB: We played complete sets. Most recently, we played June 30th, 1995 with a couple of guests. There was a guy, “Washboard Joey,” and we made his day. He was at that gig. He was up there, wiping tears off and singing harmony vocals on “Samba In The Rain,” because he actually knows the song cold. And it was like, “Yeah!” He started to have a little moment; it was really cool. You know, just ‘cause they weren’t playing so hot in 1995 doesn’t mean they didn’t play a sequence of great songs. And that first set from 6/30/95 is a sequence of great songs.
And obviously that’s something you probably wouldn’t have been able to do if Trampled hadn’t taken this break.
EB: Exactly.
DS: At least not put that much time into it—because that takes a bit. That’s a lot of songs.
EB: So now, that band is sort of my Dead Man Winter, because I got Mark being like, “Hey, when do you got some free time?” I got some bad news for you, dude. [Laughs.]
When the hiatus started, was there ever a question of whether you’d get back together?
DS: I’d say, honestly, it was a question. But I think that that’s okay, too. If it wouldn’t have felt like that, I don’t know if it would’ve really felt like a break. On a technical level, as a band, if we want to make a record and tour, we’d start planning that a year ahead of time, you know. So, all of a sudden, even if you’re not on the road or whatever, the machine is working—it didn’t really feel like it ever stops—and you’re looking at a tour that’s maybe two years or a year-and-a-half away, but it’s still there. I think it felt real for me because there was nothing. It was the first time, I think, in our whole career that we had nothing on the books—no shows, nothing happening. So it felt like it was gone for a second.
EB: Previous breaks were really like, “I’ve got a kid being born; here’s the due date, and I’m taking off a month before that and two months after that. But, I’m hoping to get back out as soon as possible, because we need a paycheck.” And the same thing happened with Dave’s kids. And we had a break when everyone was buying homes. We were on a tour of Europe, and these poor guys’ wives were holding iPhones, going through homes like, “This one looks okay.” And I was like, “Oh, I’m glad that’s not how I’m choosing a house.” [Laughs.] But it was always real goal-oriented. The month that I had a kid born, that didn’t feel like a break. But I’m sure if you ask Ryan [Young], he thought that that was totally a break. So for all of us, it’s like, “Go find something to do, something that you wanna do.”
DS: Yeah, it was really healthy in the end.
So, when did you make the decision to come back together and see what came out of it?
DS: Do you remember? I remember having some songs and emailing everybody. It was pretty casual, though, like, “You wanna give it a shot?” But I didn’t want to just start right where we left off. I wanted to have a new album of material. So the necessary first step was for us to get together and start recording some stuff. But I think that that was as intense as it got then—you know, go to the studio and see if it works, if we’re feeling it, if everyone’s on the same page.
EB: Because people had gone off and done different things, they had new ways of working with each other. You’ve learned a different set of communication skills, because there’s other people you’re working with. Like the Irish American record I made—that guy, Teague Alexy, is really into intros and outros and having all that stuff figured out. And Ryan’s the one who recorded that record. So me and Ryan had experience, instruments in hand, like, “Here’s a way to do this intro, and here’s a different way to do this intro to the same song. Which one of these two do you want?” And I had never really done that before.
DS: My stuff has all been kinda fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants.
EB: So it was kind of neat being like, “Well, here’s a few different ways you can do stuff.”
Did you guys collaborate with your general projects, like would Dave ever send a Dead Man Winter song to one of the guys being like, “What do you think of this?”
DS: That stuff has happened before, but not really in the way you’re saying. I think that I just write songs and then decide what kind of project I want to do next. And rarely do I write toward a certain thing. It’s just, “Okay, we’re gonna make a Trampled record. Here’s the songs I have. Let’s do them in this band.” And that’s how the Dead Man Winter record worked, too, because I had these songs, but I wanted to do something musically different with them. So there wasn’t really much musical communication when were were apart from each other.
EB: No, but when Dave came in to play a show in Duluth, I sat in on a few tunes.
DS: But when I was writing the new stuff, we did get together for a weekend before we went into the studio and played a few songs that I had, just informally.
And that weekend was the first time that you guys got back together?
DS: Yeah, we had a little retreat
EB: It turned out to be really heavy, because it was the day that Tom Petty died, and it was the day after the Las Vegas shooting. I kinda had a hard time with that Vegas shooting. You know, somebody’s asking Jake Owen, “How come [Jason Aldean] didn’t stop playing as soon as he heard shots?” And Jake Owen’s like, “Have you ever had in-ear monitors in? You really can’t hear anything.” And I’m listening to him talk about that and I’m just like, “Oh my god.” I’ve played outdoor festivals in Las Vegas with in-ear monitors in, and I could’ve easily been in that situation. And I was like, “I want to talk to the guys!” Luckily that’s where I was going, where we were going. But I was in radio silence going over, so I didn’t find out that Tom Petty died until I got there. “This day sucks.”
DS: Yeah, it was just a shitty day for America.
Right. But I guess it turned into a good weekend for you guys.
DS: Well, I sat and got drunk and listened to Tom Petty for about an hour-and-a-half by the lake, so that I think kinda set the mood for me.
You guys were up in Minnesota, right?
DS: Yeah, at our banjo player Dave Carroll’s parents’ cabin. And then, you know, it felt super casual and just easy. We just showed up, everybody trickled in. When it felt right, we got the instruments out, worked out a couple new songs and cooked. It was just a hangout.
EB: Before, when we’d have to go into the studio, I’d be nervous about it. But I just have positive memories of Banjo Dave grilling burgers on his parents’ big grill and us sitting around playing cards as much as playing music.
DS: It was just playing music in the living room, which is how we started playing music, you know? And there’s a lot of stuff that was happening in our lives in the last few years, but very few living rooms were sat in with us playing music with each other. And there’s something to be said about that. I think it’s important to keep the musical friendship and not just the musical business partnership. Like, we want to play music with each other.
While you were up there, were you playing just new songs?
DS: Just brand-new songs. To me, too—some of them I’d just barely fleshed out. We started talking about the record and deciding on the technical side of things what we wanted to do. We ended up going without a producer on this one. My vision, when we were thinking about it, was to have it be like that living room, and we pretty much ended up just sitting in a circle playing songs in the studio, pretty live, very few overdubs, and just capturing more of whatever energy happens when we’re doing that together. That’s the only way you can get that, by doing it live. And we’ve always been comfortable recording live. We’re not a terribly polished group of people anyway.
EB: its really amazing how many songs on our records are second or third takes—and that means ever. Dave will be like, “Okay guys, do you want to try one? Should we roll a tape while we’re doing this?” And it’s like, “Okay, I got my chord chart in front of me, I think we’re good.” I think “Victory” [off 2010’s Palomino] is take one
DS: That is take one. I think it might have been the first time we ever played that song together.
EB: There’s a thing that happens when Trampled is is playing stuff not for the umpteenth time but for the first or second—it’s just, “Wow.” That’s the sound of our musical chemistry bouncing off each other.
DS: With most bands that play together for a little bit of time, that is a magical thing to catch, you know? Neil Young taught me, years and years and years ago: don’t beat a song to death in the studio. I’ve recorded lots of different ways, and I’m not some kind of purist or anything—I’ve sat with grids and drum machines and shit, too, and that’s fine. But, with what we do—I feel like it’s hard for me to be objective cause I’m in the band—but for me, what we have, whatever you want to call it, is a sum of all of us together. So, to capture that, there’s our sound. And there’s some mistakes in there, and that’s fine. It’s fucking rock-and-roll, man. Don’t whitewash it.
EB: I’ve always wanted to have a Trampled box set where after a record comes out, we go back in the studio a year later and play all the stuff that’s developed as we’ve been on the road. Because that definitely happens. There’s stuff that we’re doing even on the new songs now that we weren’t doing a week ago. We’ve been playing them for a week, so we’re growing stuff on them.
DS: The brain’s trying to keep them new.
EB: I’ve often thought it’d be interesting to have that first one and then, like a year later, out comes [the new versions], and now it’s a two-disc set. Which one do you like better? Cause I don’t know which one listeners would like better. I always want to have time-traveling Eric come back and be like, “Play this part here. It’s gonna make it more graceful.”
DS: In my experience, people usually attach to the first thing they hear. When people talk about their favorite bands and their favorite records, it’s usually that first record that really got you into the band that’s your favorite record from the band. And, you know, you don’t want to hear that differently. I mean, people want to hear it differently, but it’d be hard to replace. Even though I hate old records, man. [Laughs.]
Had you guys gone without a producer before?
DS: Yeah, most of our career. Our last record, Wild Animals, we had our friend Alan Sparhawk produce, and that was a whole different process. That was us wanting to go someplace we hadn’t been, and I think this time it was trying for some place we had been. But, you know, as older people.
How did it feel getting back into the studio with the guys?
DS: I felt extremely comfortable right away.
EB: It helps that we’ve all literally been there before.
DS: We were on friendly territory for sure. And I’ve grown to love the studio. The studio is my favorite thing. Those levels are probably different for everyone in the band, but if anything, it’s an easy place for us to get together. One thing we’ve learned that we actually follow through on is that we gave ourselves more time than we thought we would need. So there was no time constraint; its just, “Let’s see how they work.” I don’t remember what song we tracked first, but I remember it feeling really good and thinking right then and there, “Cool. We’re gonna make an album; it will happen.”
EB: One other cool thing that happened is that we’ve been in that space a few times, and the house engineer Nick was there when we did Wild Animals, but he was more hands-off because we had other people in those positions. And he told me—me and Eamonn [McLain] and Banjo Dave were the first ones there—he was like, “I always wanted to just take a minute and listen to you guys in that room and move you around.” I feel like we have a tendency to walk into a space and be like, “Oh, Dave you’re sitting there, I guess I’ll sit here.” And that’s all the thought that goes into it. And then, someone else was like, “It might sound better if Eric moves, but Eric sat there. Eric wants to sit there.” So Nick was like, “Would you mind?” Since Dave was ill.
DS: I had to miss the first day
EB: He couldn’t come down that first day. So [Nick] was like, “Since the first day is a wash, why don’t you guys just play in here and I’m gonna make some decisions.” And he was kind of moving us around. And then Dead Man Winter record had been recorded there, too, and Nick had engineered at that, so Nick was like, “I know exactly where I want Dave to be, what rig he’s gonna be using. I know how to set that up. I know where he’s gonna be, I know how to do Tim [Saxhaug].” And it wasn’t dramatic changes, but it was like, “Move here, move here.” And then this room was ringing, and it just sounded good from the get-go. We couldn’t try anything until Dave got there, so as soon as he walked in, it was primed.
DS: Yeah see, I just like to have it all set up for me before I show up. [Laughs.]
EB: And there was some kind of plague, once we were there, when we did Wild Animals.
DS: I was the only one who didn’t get sick on that.
EB: Me to—everyone was like, “Oh, don’t go in there.”
DS: It was the death flu while we were making Wild Animals. Almost everybody got it. Really high fever, vomiting. But the guys with kids didn’t get it, I noticed. So this time around I was the casualty.
You mentioned this a little bit, but was there anything when you got back together that you noticed other people had learned while working on other things during the hiatus and brought into the studio?
DS: I don’t think I noticed anything that dramatic. I mean, they were probably there; just because I didn’t notice it doesn’t mean its not there. But I just think it’s just a continuation in the flow of things, and everybody’s had a few extra experiences now. Those things aren’t quite as dramatic as, like, before I recorded like this, and now I record standing on my head. Its probably more internal than anything. For me it has been. I can tell you how I feel different, anyway. I felt way more comfortable singing in the studio this time around than I had ever felt with this band. And that was probably because I did a lot of different vocal things on my record that I hadn’t tried. Almost like tips for singing in the studio, exercises and stuff like that. That has really helped me. And I think going back and playing in a rock band in front of a drum kit in front of floor monitors in little clubs—it shook me up enough I think. It felt easy because of that stuff.
This album opens with the first single, “Kelly’s Bar,” which maybe sounds a little more traditional-bluegrass than you guys have been leaning toward recently.
DS: That was a little bit of the point. After this many years of doing it, it’s really hard to sound different than yourself, but at least you’re gonna sound different than the last record you made. And so, I think that was kind of like, “Okay, it’s not going to be anything like the last one.” That was my thinking behind it being first, anyways.
EB: And truth be told, Dave really [decided] on an order early on, and whenever we listened to playbacks, we listened to them in that order, so I never even entertained a different option.
DS: And it seemed to work really well.
My last question is about the tour and those first shows in Minnesota—how has it felt to be back on tour?
DS: It’s pretty early in the process, but so far so good for me. It’s been really fun.
EB: Yeah, it was kind of interesting in Madison, which was the third show of this tour. I’m from the Madison area, so I was off with my parents and some of their friends, and they’re like, “So how’s the tour been?” And I was like, “Today is the first day tour.” [Laughs.] “I’ve been gone from my house for a few days, but these other guys, they slept in their beds last night.”
DS: It’s just a couple shows old right now, but the response has been really good, and I feel like we’re playing really well.
EB: One thing—I feel like everybody’s listening, really listening. We’re listening to each other better. Our timing is better, so we’re playing better.
DS: You can always get better at that, listening to each other.
EB: And that’s something that happens when you don’t play with each other for a little while.
DS: You don’t take that for granted, you know?
