Photo by Dino Perrucci
The line in the bio section of Umphrey’s McGee’s Twitter page simply reads: “Eternally on Tour.” A true sentiment for a band that is currently slated to play 105 shows in 2014 (and early 2015)—a number that is, believe it or not, just below their yearly average. While the road is where UM thrives, this year is centered around their latest studio release, Similar Skin, a focused, cohesive rock effort that has garnered praise from all corners of the globe.
This summer has offered the Chicago sextet a chance to show off their new musical achievements on some of the biggest stages, including a slot on the What Stage at Bonnaroo before the likes of Vampire Weekend and Kanye West as well as a sold out gig at Red Rocks Amphitheatre—their first ever. Now, they set their sights on a fall tour that finds them graduating to larger venues in major markets, with all roads leading to a massive, daunting five-night run at The Tabernacle in Atlanta, GA at the end of the year.
We caught up with Umphrey’s own Joel Cummins following the band’s Red Rocks show to talk about the whirlwind of a year and what lies ahead for Umphrey’s McGee and their fans.
I’m glad you had a few minutes available. I know it’s been little crazy the last month or so.
[Laughs] It’s been good crazy.
You’ve been literally all around the world.
Yeah, literally. Putting out the new album, you know you’re just going to have to play a lot of shows. Of course I couldn’t resist picking up a couple other shows. But it’s been pretty awesome. Bonnaroo to London to Electric Forest and then Red Rocks; that’s a pretty sweet little four-weekend run. And then of course we had Wakarusa and Mountain Jam and Summer Camp before that, too.
How was your Bonnaroo experience?
Really, really exciting this year, and a lot different than other years because I was a part of the SuperJam as well, so it was absolutely nuts. It was really exciting and very cool to see so many artists, some of them that I got to talk to and hang out with and some I got to watch and see how they rehearse with their bands—Janelle Monae and Lauryn Hill—it just brought all these great musicians together.
The practice room was this really fun environment to kind of hang out and shoot the shit with people. The funny thing is when you hear the word “superJam” my initial feeling about something like that is, “Oh, this is gonna be a disorganized, unrehearsed mess.” [Laughs] It couldn’t have been any further from that. There was a lot of thought and effort put into everything, and it was pretty amazing how smoothly it ran in the end when you consider that there were like 40 songs played over the course of 3 hours and 20 minutes or something. So that was a really cool experience for me.
Part of the tunes that I played I got to play with Robby Krieger of The Doors and the girls from Warpaint, because one of their keyboards broke and I just happened to be there, and so that was kind of cool. Just so many different vibes being thrown out there. And that song—with Warpaint we did “Pump Up the Jam,” and I think that was probably what really got me motivated for Pop a Shot the next day. That song always reminds me of playing basketball in high school or something.
Onto Umphrey’s, you played to what could be your largest crowd ever at Bonnaroo and then jumped to a much smaller room in London. How does the approach change? Or does it?
Well that’s always an interesting question. Some people ask, “Do you play a different set if you’re playing Electric Forest versus Bike Week in Sturgis?” And I feel like maybe there are little things that happen, but for the most part we just kind of try to do what we do, and really hit songs that cover lots of different eras. For a set like Bonnaroo, you always want to step up to the plate and feel like the bases are loaded when you’re playing there. You don’t want to pull out the acoustics and do “The Pequod” at Bonnaroo.
I think for the most part we just wanna set ourselves up for success, and the way that happens from night to night is certainly different in, I would say, a very nuanced way. So yeah, there will be songs that we wouldn’t necessarily play at Bonnaroo, but maybe that we would play in, I’ll use Omaha as an example, from a couple weeks ago, where we intentionally went really deep into the catalogue and pulled out some things that we hadn’t played in a while. I feel like those midweek shows—those ones on Thursdays and sometimes Sundays—are the ones where we’ll get a little bit more experimental and maybe do some things that we haven’t been doing very recently. So looking at the thing of like large versus small, I think it definitely allows you to be a little more dynamic when you’re playing in front of a smaller audience.
The first night [at Brooklyn Bowl London] we were going up against England in the World Cup, which turned out not to be in our favor. We probably had like 200 people there that night, and then the other nights were between 4 and 500. So the other two were good—felt good in the room. But at the same time, you can totally bring this down, and I think by virtue of the fact that the London audience is a little bit younger too—there were of course probably a hundred people from the states that were there, checking it out too, that were more familiar with the band—but I think generally you have more of a listening crowd when it’s people who don’t necessarily quite get what it is they’re supposed to do when we’re playing music. Our music is not the easiest to dance to, but people do it.
I feel like in Europe in general, there’s more of this sort of listening fan base, where people come out to shows and just hang out and stand there. And that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that either. But I definitely saw—the other night, Kris [Myers] and I went to see Steely Dan at The Forum, and everybody sat down until like the last two songs of the encore. And it was just so weird! You want to stand and move around—I mean, it wasn’t slow music. But yeah, you definitely notice things like the energy in the air Friday at Bonnaroo.
We talk about this a lot, about the difference of playing a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Because by Sunday, people are just super burnt, but Friday, it’s the first day and everybody’s just jacked to be there. So we’ve talked about that being—that we really like playing the first day of festivals.
How was it up there on the What Stage? I know some fans were disappointed that it wasn’t a late-night slot again.
The fans are always going to want a four hour late night throwdown with crazy lights—that’s certainly kind of how we made our name with Bonnaroo. There’s somewhat of that that I totally get, but at the same time it was an awesome step-up for us to finally be on the main stage, and to have as big of a crowd as we did at that time, it was just perfect. There was some good cloud cover, so people weren’t getting completely cooked out there. I’ll tell ya’, that’s something you’re always worried about at Bonnaroo.
Did it feel like you guys were playing to a ton of new listeners?
I did a media session earlier that day, and somebody asked me a question. They were like, “Okay, so now that you’ve played Bonnaroo eight times, what are you guys going to do different for the fans this year?” And I’m thinking—it just didn’t seem like a very improv-centric Bonnaroo lineup this year. To me, I just thought there were probably way more new ears and people that hadn’t heard us before, that hadn’t seen us at Bonnaroo. But who knows, maybe there are more people that do it every year that I’m just not that aware of. It’s kind of interesting to think about that. Yeah, we’ve played eight times at Bonnaroo but there are probably 10,000 people out there who are hearing us for the first time right now. So that’s always a cool moment for us. And one of our things, we just kind of feel like we’re this band with a strange name, and we need to just be put in front of people. And sometimes people will get into it. It’s kind of like scotch—not for everybody. It’s an acquired taste for most who like it.
Umphrey’s McGee scotch sounds like the next big marketing campaign. So, Similar Skin came out June 10. How are some of the songs—“Cut the Cable,” for instance, and you recently played “Educated Guess” for the first time—how are they coming along? Are you comfortable with them yet in a live environment? How long does it generally take to get them at least okay for the rotation?
Every song’s a little different. The whole thing is we try to practice these things ad nauseum before we play them live for people. Your goal is to make it sound like the 25th time it’s been played, not the first. We’re slowly getting better at that aspect of it, I think. But, as with anything—and especially because a lot of the time we’re both playing our instruments and singing—getting those two things down at once is usually the trickiest thing for me.
So yeah, I think we’re probably there with “Similar Skin” now; we’ve played that one enough where that’s pretty comfortable. “Cut the Cable” is getting close. I felt like the last couple performances were getting better at the vocals. Part of the challenge is not just getting the pitches of the vocals, but it’s new for [Front of House Engineer] Chris Mitchell too, so he’s trying to balance things out front. And he needs those expanses just like we do. It’s definitely a group kind of collective feeling. You know when it’s coming together and things are sounding pretty good.
“Educated Guess” is a complex tune. How much practice went into that one specifically?
Any time we’ve had backstage rehearsal gear for the past month since we’ve been on tour, we’ve been running it probably three times a day. We start out on practice gear so you can kind of work on and really hear what everyone’s doing. Get your parts down and get the vocal and the playing thing down together, and then try to move out to the real gear and play from there. So sometimes for me it’s real useful—I’m playing different keyboards in the middle of the songs—it’s really useful to be able to play on the real stuff. That’s the other challenging thing is that we’re trying to learn the music, and during festival season, we don’t really have sound checks, so we’re just working on our small practice gear and keeping it kind of intimate like that. There’s some more vocals that I’d actually like to add, but the trick is that the rhythmic part that I’m playing on the keyboard doesn’t line up with the vocals, so you have to almost get the muscle memory—automatically do one thing so that you can do the other, and it’s pretty hard, so I’m not singing a third harmony that might be there eventually, so we’ll see.
The decision to debut the song at Red Rocks was interesting. How much discussion went into putting that in the setlist and playing it?
We made a plan probably about two weeks before the album came out about which songs we wanted to start on first. We just kind of spread ‘em out over the past month, so that we had a little time. Actually, I still don’t think we’ve played “No Diablo” with the new chorus yet; we’ve still been working on that one. Oh yeah, and “Hindsight,” too. I don’t think we’ve played “Hindsight.” We’ve practiced both of those, but obviously, like I was saying, we spread them out, so we really wanted to get “Educated Guess” out there for Red Rocks. And it’s one of those things where even the week before, I don’t know if we were all 100% confident that we would do it, but we worked it a ton in the last three days coming up to Red Rocks too. Like anything, the more you do it, the more you’re trying to get to that point where you don’t have to think about where your hands are moving and what you’re playing, and to go back to that previous question, I think that’s also the moment when you say ‘okay, it’s working now because I don’t have to think about it anymore.’
With fall tour fast approaching, you said the band will hit several new venues—a trend over the last few years for you guys. Is that a product of the entire body of work or the last 2-3 years?
I think it’s a little bit of both, honestly. I really feel like Mantis was when we put it into overdrive. And honestly Kevin Browning making the move off of the road and into the office and becoming part of our management team has been so crucial because one of the things that is going to keep fans energized and interested is simply producing content, and that’s really one of his central areas of focus. And that was incredibly hard to do when you’re out on the road working 15 hours a day, running front-of-house sound for that band. It’s been a great transition for him. I feel like we’ve come up with a lot of really cool unique things that now we have somebody that can focus on that aspect of it. And he knows the music so well, so he’s in a very special position that really nobody else could do, because of his familiarity with the music. He knows the sort of thing that fans might like or be interested in. So there’s this really authentic connection, I think, that has even grown between the band and the fans, and Kevin has been a big catalyst for making that happen using technology and social media, and all these things to connect with people on a human level. It’s an amazing experience for me looking out in the crowd and recognizing thirty faces in the first five rows where I could tell you at least what their first name is.
I think you have that and I think the quality of our albums has gotten better and better. Manny Sanchez produced this one for the first time since Kevin has kind of stepped into more of the management role. He’s kind of gone more into the business or executive producer sort of vibe and Manny just absolutely knocks this one out of the park with the production. This album that we just put out here, Similar Skin, we’ve got the songs and the performances and the production all coming together in the most solid package that we’ve ever put out. There’s definitely a lot of excitement within the band. We’re really thrilled to have new songs to play, and we’ve gotten some great critical response as well as the fans being into it. It’s very difficult to get those two things to line up as well to where you pretty much have a lot of people saying, “This is some good shit. People should pay attention.”
I was asked recently if Umphrey’s was going to play Madison Square Garden sometime soon. That seemed crazy. Is it possible?
I think it’s great that that’s something that’s being brought up now. Obviously having a sold out show at Red Rocks is something that kind of legitimizes that argument. It’s one of these things where it’s like, if we can do it here, why can’t we do it in these other places? But every market is kind of its own different thing. There are definitely a few places where we’re considering an event in like a smaller arena where it’s like a 5 or 6 thousand person place, and we think that it could definitely work in a few places, and obviously with the production that we have now, we’re really confident going in that we’re gonna put on a big badass show.
Like I said, every market is kind of its own thing, and we’re definitely in the really good position of having growth pretty much across the board everywhere. Every show we try to do, we’re booking it at a place we think we at least have a chance of selling it out, with maybe like 5 or 6 exceptions a year. That’s really how you build a scene as far as touring as well, because you’ve got to teach people to buy tickets in advance. Gradually that sort of thing is happening, but the good part about it is, because our tickets are still pretty affordable, we’re still getting tons of walk-ups on days of shows when it’s not sold out yet. Those people are the ones that are like, “Okay, maybe I’ll go, maybe I won’t.” The fact that we’re getting those people through the door too is a good thing.
Overall, I think our playing in 2014 has been pretty consistently good and adventurous and interesting. The thing that we talk about is “raising the bar of the bad.” We know that we can get up to a certain point and really nail some stuff and be good, but how do you make it so the low point of a show is the high point of most other shows. That’s kind of our focus, is to keep improving that and keep improving the whole energy of the show, start to finish, and at the same time, keep it completely anything can happen. Definitely needs to be loose out there. We play our best, I feel like, when we have those sort of arrangements.
You mentioned earlier that the music can be hard to dance to if you’re not familiar with it. How much mainstream appeal does Umphrey’s have in your mind? How accessible can it be without completely selling your soul?
That’s the whole thing. We’ve had discussions about stuff like this before when we’re trying out different ideas for a song or talking about background things we could add. We’re just like, “That just doesn’t feel like something that is authentic, coming from us.” And so I think we have a vague idea of what the voice of Umphrey’s McGee is at this point, and what is it that is us at heart.
I think it would be very hard for us to make something that’s good with the top-40 requirements. We don’t really fit into those lines very well. That being said, there are always songs that are anomalies that become hits that you’re like ‘wow, the instrumentation of this is completely bizarre.’ Things like Gotye’s song [“Somebody That I Used to Know”] from a couple years ago or the Lorde song [“Royals”] from this year. There are oddball, off the wall hits that happen that way too. We’re not trying to write music that’s so obtuse and angular that there’s no melody, or no hook to it. The first couple tracks on Similar Skin are certainly kind of closer to that idea of writing a more conventional rock song. There definitely is that variation on Similar Skin, where the back half of the album is certainly more progressive and adventurous as far as the compositional side of it, and the front half is kind of more focused, aggressive but melodic rock songs.
How hard was it to get everybody on the same page for something like that? To make the album in a rock sense, like “Okay look, we’re going to write ‘Cut the Cable’ and it’s going to be 3:54.” Was that difficult for anybody to get onboard with?
I feel like we all kind of felt ourselves wanting to go in this direction. Honestly there wasn’t really too much pushback, as far as “How are we gonna get here and do this?” Once we get into the studio and start working on the arrangements and stuff, Manny’s always good at pointing us in the right direction, or making sure that Kris does something like hit the crash on the downbeat. It’s so funny because Kris is such a master of doing multiple things at once that sometimes it’s the simplest things like that that will elude him. There’s a lot of discussion as the songs are being put together about how many times something should happen, or how do we get back—I think that’s one of the things that we probably work on most, is , you have an A and a B section, or an A, B, and C section and what do you use, how do you connect these pieces and make it something that’s logical but also interesting and not completely already done.
So a lot of times we’ll try a few different things in the studio while we’re working on the pre-production of these songs, and try to see what it is that’s gonna be most effective with that. So one of the really funny ones on this is “Educated Guess” actually came from two different songs. I don’t know if they’re both up yet but they will be eventually. But those two different songs are in I think the bonus material package. So we had a couple different sections of it. One of ‘em, the part actually started out in F, and the rest of the song was in F-Sharp and so we tried it a couple times in the original key and it was just too strange with this like half-step thing. So then we did it in F-Sharp but somehow—I don’t know why we didn’t do this—but we didn’t record a version of us playing in F-Sharp, even though that’s what we agreed that we were going to do. I think we might’ve recorded the other section down a half step, but we didn’t record this one up a half step. We thought, “Oh, maybe we’ll move this down.” So anyway, we actually did that in post-production where we moved everything up a half step, so we’re playing everything in F and it’s tuned up a half step. That’s only in certain sections of the song, though, the first part.
That was one thing that made it much more interesting when we were trying to re-learn it as a band, is we’d been used to playing it a half step lower, so it really was like learning how to play it from scratch again.
You guys are throwing the annual Mashup Halloween party in Boston this year. How are the mashups coming along so far?
[Laughs] I will be completely honest with you, we usually don’t start working on this—we’ll probably get a list going before summer tour’s over here, and we have a few things that are left over from last year. We always have a running list. You just never know—things can look great on paper, and you’ll be like, “Oh my god this is gonna be so cool!” and then sometimes you’ll try it live and be like, “Well that wasn’t as cool as I was thinking…”
Have those become increasingly difficult to come up with as the years go on?
Maybe. I don’t know. They’re probably getting hard in the sense that we’ve chosen a lot of the obvious songs that people would know and like, but they’re getting easier in the sense that we are getting better at figuring out how to make them successful. In the beginning we made them way too hard for ourselves. I get people all the time that are like “Dude, you gotta play the ‘Land of Wappy’ mashup again!”
That’s a heavy one.
Well it’s seventeen minutes long. So think about, you’re like “Oh let’s run through it twice.” Well there’s your whole soundcheck. So that was not the smartest arrangement. But we were learning how to do it, so we’ve definitely gotten a little better at it, as far as that goes. But I definitely feel like the last two years that we’ve done here have been…We’ve got the “Life During Exodus” mashup that we still play sometimes, and I really like the “Thunderkiss 65,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood one [“Frankie Zombie”]. That one always cracks me up.
I like the Blurred Lines/Marvin Gaye mashup too [“Papa Can Change a Blurred Stone”]. I feel like you guys could be material witnesses in that lawsuit that’s going on between those two.
Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve looked into this, and there’s a very blurred line between what is original and what is copied, and the fact that we’re combining different parts of things at the same time. It’s one of those things that we can kind of scrape by on right now. But yeah, we thought that one was pretty fun, and it’s pretty rare that you actually get four songs that work together like that, so that was really exciting to me to have all those different parts. The LCD tune [“I Can Change”], and “Papa was a Rolling Stone.” So yeah, that one, I feel like we can only play it once, because “Blurred Lines” was happening back then and not now, but that mashup was pretty hilarious.
And you’re going back to Atlanta for New Years for, quite literally, a week of shows. What happened there?
This was a really interesting year with how everything played out because it really had to do with the days of the week. We looked at this, and doing the 28-31 this year is awful. It’s like Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We looked at that and just weren’t loving it. And I’d honestly forgotten but someone told me after the fact that Phish did this one year, back in the early 2000’s or something, where I think they played on the first. Maybe they did a show on the 31st and the 1st…
2002, yeah, it was when they came back from that hiatus. The first show was New Years.
Okay, got it. So I thought I was coming up with this really unique original idea and that it had never been done before. But nonetheless, it still had a great application for us. This way people hopefully only have to take off a day or two of work and they can see five shows. And that just never happens.
At first we talked about doing four, starting on the 31 and going through the 3rd, and the more we thought about it, we were gonna have to take a production day anyway on the 30th, and you just never wanna have the 31st as your first show, at least I don’t think. Get the kinks out, make sure everything is working technically, and then for the crew guys as well, it’s just such a long day, us playing three sets. It really just made logistical sense saying, “Alright, well let’s try to throw in the 30th too,” and voilà, we have our first ever five-night stand.
And Atlanta’s kind of become a little hub for you guys, especially in the South. The locals have really taken to Umphrey’s.
There’s a really special energy for us floating around Atlanta the past few years. It’s interesting because it’s kind of gone out from there in probably a 300-mile radius. I don’t know, the South seems to be really digging Umphrey’s right now. We had some great shows this year in Nashville, Birmingham, Chattanooga and Knoxville. It’s been kind of a good little hub of our fanbase there, so it’ll be real interesting to see what we can do after doing five nights at the Tabernacle. I’m hoping we’ll be able to come back and play Atlanta in the summer next year.
When are we going to have you guys back in the city? When’s the Garden run?
[Laughs] The Garden run. Is 2017 open? I mean that’s reasonable, right? A couple more years. Yeah, we are definitely coming back to New York in January, and if things go as planned, we’ll have a pretty cool little surprise with those shows, and see what happens.
