The Budos Band’s newly released third album, the aptly titled The Budos Band III, features a much darker sound than their previous efforts. This album also sees the band coming into their own, establishing more of a unique identity, as they drift away from the Afrobeat sounds that permeated the early part of their career.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Budos Band baritone saxophonist Jared Tankel and drummer Brian Profilio backstage before their recent gig opening for Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings at Celebrate Brooklyn. I found them to be very informal yet rather exuberant guys with a very fun sense of humor. It was also rather evident that they are very close, as the two would often speak in tandem, finishing one another’s sentences.
Brian Ferdman: So how does it feel to be back in New York for a hometown gig?
Jared Tankel: I’m excited. I’m ready to rock. It’s been a while. We did Southpaw—that was…?
Brian Profilio: It was March Madness.
JT: During the basketball tournament. So it’s been a while, and I’m psyched. I can’t wait to get out on that stage and bust open these people’s heads a bit.
BP: That was the best soundcheck we’ve ever had.
JT: That was an amazing soundcheck.
BP: We have the brass playing with us tonight— (Daptone Records founder) Gabe (Roth), the big dog!
JT: He’ll be sitting in with us, so that’s cool. People are showing up to expect a sweet soul gig with pretty sounds coming out of a singer’s mouth, and we’re gonna really mess with their heads a little bit.
BF: So is this a cool dynamic for you guys to be on a double bill with the Dap-Kings? You’ve taken on a much darker sound, especially with this new album. Is it shocking for a lot of people when you play?
BP: I think people are surprised that we’re even on the label. I think if we had the sound we have now when we first went to Daptone, they would have said, “Okay, guys. Beat it.” But we had more of that Latin or Afrobeat sound when we first started, and Daptone said, “Cool. We can use this, sort of like a little hitch. You know, it’s not exactly Afrobeat, but it’s close, and it kind of has that soulful thing going on. This band will fit well on this label.” And now, over the last six years, we’ve changed so much. We’ve gotten so much more wild and just…
JT: Dirty…and fuzzy…and out there.
BP: But (the way we sound) now I don’t know if Daptone would have even given us the time of day!
BF: So what’s made you guys change? Who’s been the catalyst?
BP: You know what it is? Going out and playing shows, being on the road, traveling to different places— there are ten of us, so everywhere we go is hard. You can put us in a trailer in the middle of the woods, but there are ten of us, so it’s…
Both: It’s GO TIME!
BP: All the time. So when we hit the stage, we’re so amped up, we’re so ready to go that playing laid-back Afrobeat…
JT: It’s not gonna work.
BP: So we just kept amplifying it, and increased the energy. Over the years, it just slowly grew. And when we’re in the van…
JT: We listen to ‘70s rock. Lately, all we do is roll around listening to ‘70s hard rock, and that’s just gonna come out in our music.
BP: It’s not that we’re necessarily playing (‘70s rock), but the vibe and the aesthetic and the energy of it starts coming through. It’s just a bigger, more dynamic sound.
JT: And the diversity of listening diets has always been part of this band. There are dudes who are metalheads, there are the soulheads, there are all types. But especially over the past two years, I think we’ve just become more comfortable with our influences. We’ve been playing together for a while now, so we’re more comfortable allowing those influences to come out in our writing process. It’s more of a comfort level, too. A bunch of the guys have been playing together for fifteen years, but as a group, we’ve been together for eight years. The band was started to be an Afrobeat band, but now we’ve just grown into ourselves.
BF: I read that the songwriting on this album was way more collaborative than in past albums. Why was that the case?
JT: It was a longer time period between II and III than there was between I and II, so we had a lot more opportunity to go out and play these songs live. We’ve been playing a lot of these songs live for a year-and-a-half, so it’s been a constant process of revising and rearranging.
BP: Maybe two or three years from now, a song that we’ll play tonight might change a lot, but it won’t happen consciously. It will morph or evolve.
BF: Like I said before, this album is very dark. Are you at all concerned that people will hear this and be put off by it?
BP: I think people like dark stuff. I mean, look at Black Sabbath. They are the darkest shit in the universe. There’s not a person I know who says, “Oh, I HATE Black Sabbath.”
JT: It’s still a Budos album. I know our press release says, “We thought we were going to make a psychedelic doom rock record,” which is kind of bullshit, but we did think it was gonna be something way off-the-charts different, and yet it’s still a Budos album. (Daptone Records co-founder) Neal Sugarman came in the session and said, “I thought you guys were doing something totally different. This is just a fucking Budos album!” It is darker, and now when we play some of these songs live…we’re not going way off the edge, but we’re pushing it, and it’s getting a little noisier, so maybe IV is where we’ll make the noise record.
BF: Are you gonna keep numbering all of the albums, or are you gonna stop like Zeppelin at four and then come up with regular titles?
JT: What would we call the fifth one? We’d come up with the worst fucking title ever.
BF: (laughs) Now you mentioned playing these songs live—how much are the songs changing live, as opposed to the studio?
BP: They’re changing a lot. It’s funny, I was reading some crap on the Internet with one of our songs attached to it, and I thought, “Let me just hear what people are hearing after they read this little article.” And (after hearing it), I thought, “Wow.” We only recorded it five months ago, and I’m listening to it and thinking, “Damn. I don’t do that anymore, and I don’t do this anymore.” We’re already changing it.
BF: Are you adding a lot of improv into these songs?
JT: No. If there’s one thing we don’t do, it’s space out.
BP: There’s never a time when we’re like “Alright! Let’s break this baby open! Go ahead, man!”
BF: No 20 minute “Chicago Falcon”?
BP: No way. We always know exactly where the song is. All the solos are structured and set. It’s never like “You wanna take this one? Yeah, go ahead!” That shit don’t happen. But the cool thing about the structure is that we can push that song without going…
JT: Off the rails, man. That’s the last thing we wanna have happen.
BP: With ten guys.
JT: No way. We’re not blasting off to fucking Mars.
BP: You mentioned being on tour with ten guys and it’s always a party, but you’ve been out for the last month, and you’re going out for another solid month with just this little short break in between. There have to be times when you want to kill each other, right?
JT: It’s so crazy, but it never happens. I think one big reason is that we have no problem telling each other to just fuck off. And that doesn’t even happen that much, but if it needs to happen, it does. And then we move on.
BF: I’ve heard you guys consider yourselves to be a brotherhood. What defines that for you? Is that just bullshit, or is it a real thing that you actually believe?
BP: It’s a real thing. There’s a strong bond between us.
JT: That part isn’t bullshit.
BP: (_jokingly_) We never called ourselves a brotherhood. We’re more of a cult.
BF: Some of the guys in the band are schoolteachers. (_BP raises his hand. _) You’re a teacher, so are you gigging during every waking moment of free time?
BP: Pretty much every vacation, every three-day weekend, we make something happen.
BF: Does everyone in the band have a day job?
JT: Everyone has a job, except for Tom (Brenneck) and Mike (Deller). Tom’s a full-time musician. Mike just doesn’t have a job.
BF: (laughs) Are you guys any closer to giving up those jobs? Is that a goal?
BP: No way.
JT: It’s not a goal. I think that’s how we work. That’s part of who we are. This is not a full-time thing, and that’s what makes this fun. It’s not our job, so we go out and have a lot of fun with it.
BP: I think if it became a full-time job, that’s when we’d start seeing conflicts and crazy shit. Pretty much every time we’re on the road it’s vacation time—it’s party time. Everyone’s amped up, everyone’s together, and we’re having a good time. If it were a full-time gig, I think the band would self-destruct.
BF: It must take a lot of the pressure off when you don’t have to worry about earning your keep from it.
BP: Right.
BF: Getting back to The Budos Band III, it only took 48 hours to record the entire album, so was every song worked out ahead of time, or were there some that you actually fleshed out in the studio?
BP: One—the cover.
JT: Well, two really. The cover and “Spectral Surface,” a.ka. “Nature’s Wrath.” We had a lot of it, but that was the last song that we wrote for the album, and there was a little bit of work on that in the studio. Everything else…
BP: Like we said, we’d been playing them for (almost) two years, so by the time we went to record the songs, we’d played some of them 300 times already. We didn’t even think about (the studio.) We just looked at it as another gig with a microphone there.
BF: Was it an around-the-clock session?
JT: Friday night we did 8 to 1 in the morning. Saturday was a full day, probably 12 to 12. By Saturday night, everything was really done. Sunday was used for a couple of little overdubs and two songs.
BF: Have you ever had that kind of experience before in a studio?
JT: Well, all of the albums have been recorded in a weekend, more or less, but this album was like…
BP: It was like one-takes. Bam! Done! Bam! Done! We just kept busting them out. By Saturday night we were like “Holy crap. We just recorded ten songs.”
BF: You mentioned the cover. Are we allowed to talk about this, or are you trying to keep that a secret?
JT: “Day Tripper.”
BP: Obviously, you’ve titled it differently.
JT: “Repirt Yad.”
BP: Is it technically considered a cover, or have you changed it enough musically that it is your own song?
JT: Man, if we tried to pass it off as our own song, McCartney and Lennon’s lawyers would be up our asses.
BP: Or Michael Jackson’ lawyers. Who owns that crap?
BF: Sony, I guess, at this point.
BP: We were messing around with different covers, but we picked “Day Tripper” because of that guitar-bass line in the beginning. (_He sings the opening riff to “Day Tripper.”_) A lot of Budos songs have that bass-guitar line, and (it felt like) that one Beatles song was already kind of written for us.
BF: It’s such a great cover because it’s such an upbeat, happy song, and then you put such a dark twist on it.
BP: Yeah, we gave it the Vanilla Fudge treatment.
JT: I like to refer to that song as where we started to spread our psychedelic wings.
BF: What does “Unbroken Unshaven” refer to?
BP: Us…our beards.
JT: A lot of our songs are somewhat self-referential, but..
BP: We like to say that that song…(_pause_)
JT: What?
BP: Well, “Unbroken Unshaven” can be taken a couple of different ways.
Laughter
BF: Okay, we’ll just leave it at that.
