For Nashville-based Fly Golden Eagle, creating music is much more than simply cutting and pasting music influences into a song. Instead, they passionately mix and melt their wealth of influences – from all reaches of the country from Michigan to Texas – together with purpose in order create their own unique sound and identity.
“It’s all about the elements and the different sounds involved – you have to figure out how to make it your own,” says singer Ben Trimble. “You can’t play exactly like all the great artists you love but you can play the way you do and you can make it that style and interpret it your way.”
With this in mind they created their latest album with a twist – a long and short version. They released a 26-song album called Quartz as well as a 12-song version called Quartz Bijou. Both were released earlier this year by ATO Records. With both versions, the band takes listeners on a musical journey into their multi-dimensional sound. Each song shares a different side of the band, including spurts of soul, funk, garage rock, psychedelic rock and twang.
For Trimble, many of his musical inspirations come from growing up and living in Detroit and Kentucky, as well as being part of a religious family and listening to gospel choirs. When he moved to Nashville he started gravitating towards even more kinds of music. The rest of the band is similarly brimming with influences: bass player Matt Shaw hails from Celeste, Texas; Mitch Jones on the keys is from Knoxville, Tennessee; and drummer Richard Harper is from Huntsville, Alabama.
While their previous album Swagger revolved more around Trimble, Quartz and Quartz Bijou finds the band working more as a well-oiled unit. I recently caught up with Trimble to talk about the two versions of the album, getting influenced by Alejandro Jodorowski and more.
The band’s songs cover a lot of ground sonically. Why do you think you’re able to shift gears and make styles come together cohesively?
Honestly, everyone has multiple influences musically and I think for me I like all the songs I’m bringing to the guys. For me it all centers on what it was that was motivating the song in the first place and sort of following that. So a lot of times it’s a contrast of a jazzy section and then a rock section or something. Part of the fun on this album was putting all those together in a way that we thought works. We don’t try to force something. It all compliments each other, or that’s what I hope at least feels for us.
Do you think you’ve been able to mesh styles better as you’ve gone on?
Well there’s a lot more material on this one so it gave us the freedom to explore different things. On the 26-song version some songs are like “let’s do a straight-ahead blues song and double record the drums and do some other things that are fun that are just like a JJ Cale type straight blues song.” Where if it was a shorter version I don’t know if we would include that. Well we did use it on the shorter 12-song version. But I think it being longer gave us the opportunity to try different things and see if it worked. There was a freedom in that that was very fun.
Why did you feel the need to make a long and short version of the album?
For us the last record Swagger, we had to put out all on our own. And we only put it out on cassette and were just burning CD-Rs the whole time for people. For this we knew we wanted to get it on vinyl and a 26-song boxset vinyl is what we would essentially have to manufacture. We didn’t have the liberty to do that so the compromise was to make a shorter version, with the hopes that we can eventually have the money to do a whole boxset vinyl release of it.
The 12-song one, when it was first proposed to us, I wanted to create a different experience out of the 26. So the short version didn’t feel like it was just a chopped up version of the longer one and had its own life and was slightly different. We ended up recording another version of a song that is on the longer version. So it ended up being a good thing all in all. The shorter version feels like it’s its own thing. At first I didn’t think I would dig it but as we finished it and I had heard it, it sounds nice and has its own thing. And 26 songs for somebody to dive into without hearing of us is a lot. So having a 12-song version for people to get acquainted with the band I think is a good move too.
Do you think longer albums are a lost art these days?
Yeah. All Things Must Pass is probably one of my favorite double albums. The last one we put on cassette so we bought this cassette duplicator off eBay and it came with 40 blank cassettes and each side was 90 minutes. And they were just sitting in my room and at night I would always think “What if you made a record that was 90 minutes on each side?” So 180 minutes to fill all the tape. So that cracked the egg of “Oh we should try that and see what happens.” Which really meant just writing a shit ton of songs and starting to work on stuff a lot.
How have jambands like the Grateful Dead influenced you and the others?
Early while we were making this we got into Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty and old concert footage and stuff like that. It’s the Grateful Dead, it’s what they represented as a band. The band was special and I wished I could have experienced it back in the day. It still hits us really good and that band is one of go-tos for sure.
How would you describe chemistry? What’s it like playing with people who are from different parts of the country?
A lot of our songs are very bass and drum driven so a lot comes from there. So we work from that for our foundation, the bass player. Richard, he’s a great drummer and as a human being he’s very enthusiastic and supportive of everyone. He’s always looking to everyone for cues and everything and not just eyes closed going on his own trip. Mitch the organ player, he’s a very gifted musician and he brings the – I like to think of it – color and movement in songs.
On this album we realized for our sound the B3 is a very important vital thing because of all the harmonics involved. It has a very spiritual quality to it and on top of it all those harmonics spinning. Once we realized that we started looking into the history of the Hammond Organ and how it came to be. And it was invented by a watchmaker, John Hanert, and the whole mechanics of it is the gears and watches that they used were sped up. So we looked for a Hammond B3 that we could bring on the road and we found one.
And we just added a percussion player Alejandro Santoyo that plays congas and shakers and he’s played a lot with Latin musicians in the last several years. Latin percussion, I’ve never heard an instrument before that makes you smile and feel good. It’s a very sunny instrument. It’s the glue or tape that wraps everything together and all these gaps with everyone’s playing. Right now every show is really on and each one feels more fun than the last.
Is there a common thread that connects everyone musically?
Let me think, I’ve never really thought about it. At different points in each of our lives we were exposed to religious music. There’s certain old religious songs that all of us know even though we all grew up in Texas, Detroit, etc. We all know these religious songs. So that’s a common thread. And also just being into older music, all the great music from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. We all dig the same jams. I think everyone has that hunger to get better at what they’re doing and not to be just content. We can all challenge each other in that way too.
It seems like Nashville has been expanding more musically of late to cover a lot of new ground.
Yeah it’s changed. We’ve all been down there about ten years, well most of us. When I moved down there people thought it was predominantly country. But I’ve always been impressed and surprised with the rock musicians, even soul and funk too. It’s just a place where people can go and be with other musicians. Historically Nashville is about musicians hanging out with other musicians and they jam. We ended up coming there for education and other reasons other than that. We never moved to Nashville to make it and all started jamming together.
You recorded in a number of different environments (Bomb Shelter and “Lil’ Biv Town” in Nashville; Trimble’s bedroom; a garage in Celeste, Texas; Trinity College in Tehuacana, Texas). Why did you do it like that?
Each room has a different feel to it and different energy. When we’re going to all these different places we try to find places that we were responding to in some way and that we felt would add something to the music on some kind of conscious level which would come through to the listener and us. So we did this old abandoned college, like a failed institution. It had not a spooky vibe but it just had a different vibe to it.
And with doing a longer album the idea was going to different places would give the listener an opportunity to have different themes sonically so it wasn’t all one space. The three songs in the middle may be the college. Sonically they’re formed in different spaces.
When you were writing the album you were influenced partly by the 1973 Alejandro Jodorowsky film The Holy Mountain. Can you talk about that and why it resonated so much with you?
I found it on a YouTube journey. I was finishing around on YouTube for stuff and found the movie The Fantastic Planet which is a French film with a killer soundtrack. Then I found The Holy Mountain. I think I was laying in bed and I stood up and ever hair standing up and I couldn’t believe what…I was like “What was that?” It was so colorful. It feels rare that you find something on film like you’ve never seen and you can’t even place it in some kind of aesthetic place in what you know about film.
So early on – this was when were first making the record – we were throwing out the idea of it being a longer album. So I got the movie and started watching it and within five minutes I just turned the sound off and I could hear all these things. So it was sort of in my mind and coincided with “Oh, what making a longer record might be like.” I had a thought that we could make a longer album that could synch to that movie. And some of the subject and content in the movie was similar to what I was reading and everything. I think this record coincides with this movie based on what I was hearing and what I was seeing but I wasn’t married to it. I wasn’t like this is what it’s going to be.
I thought “Let’s keep letting this thing go and if it works out, it can synch up and it’ll be cool.” As we would keep doing that I would keep going back to the movie. And the movie would always have some sort of new inspiration for me or scene that takes on a whole new meaning. It was a well of inspiration for us while we were working on it. Once we got it done we put it together and we were like “Wow, it does synch with the movie!” After that I got into reading about Jodorowsky, his book and writing. He’s a esoteric spiritualist and calls himself the “sacred calm.” He has a whole philosophy called Psychomagic where you perform a series of events that are very theatrical. He’s a beautiful human being that has a lot of wisdom.
Why did you end up with title Quartz ?
Early on I knew the album would be called Quartz. And for a number of reasons. I had been reading about it because someone had given me a piece of quartz and I had heard it had some kind of shielding properties and could be a spiritual protecting tool. So I made a little necklace out of it and within six months I got into a really bad accident and the rock scratched my chest. It was an interesting interaction with the rock. And after reading it I read that it’s one of the most common minerals or materials on Earth but some people still attribute these spiritual properties to it. But it’s a very common rock. Like I might be walking on a bunch of quartz right now. It just worked with everything.
Did it have anything to do with all these musical styles coming together as one all encompassing sound?
Oh, yeah, that’s another way to look at it too. I like that.
The band has supported various other touring acts like Benjamin Booker, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and Alabama Shakes. It must be a nice learning experience. Could you talk about that?
It’s great. Anytime you can play for a room full of people it feels amazing and exciting. As an opener people don’t know much about you or who you are so you have this amazing opportunity to get up in front of a bunch of strangers and make a connection and have an experience with them. And hopefully them remember it and come back.
What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned through making this album?
It was cool to learn that the form something takes is produced by its function. LPs are roughly around 10 to 13 songs long. It’s for good reason as that’s what people can digest in 45 minutes on a break or in their home and you can fit everything in. We made a longer record and after that we thought it would be cool to be like “It would be fun to do a 12-song version next.” And there’s a reason most albums are 10-12 songs long. I’m not entirely sure the reason but just something about it works for people.
Also, like any other band, each record gives you an opportunity to learn about the guys or girls you’re playing with and how to work with people better. Once the album gets done it enters into the collective consciousness of people and yourself and you have the opportunity to let it do what it’s going to do for listeners and friends and all that and for yourself. After the record’s out I can hear it and learn something about myself. It’s like a painter. You can get a better sense of yourself and being alive.
