Earlier this month, Guster returned with their first album in four years, Easy Wonderful. The work is a thoroughly enjoyable and melodically enchanting work which focuses on expert songcraft, pop hooks, warm musings and moments of tongue-in-cheek imagery. The result is one of the band’s most cohesive and winning offerings to date. Jambands.com sat down with drummer/percussionist Brian Rosenworcel on the eve of a sold out Beacon Theatre show in New York, before Guster ends the first leg of their tour with a gig on Saturday night at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island. The quartet has seen its lineup change with the key departure of Joe Pisapia who now tours with k.d. lang. Their sound has also evolved over the years, slowly finding that they are more of a band that records great music and occasionally plays landmark concerts, rather than their old reputation of being a touring machine may have led one to believe. Rosenworcel is an insightful conversationalist who isn’t afraid to clarify and just tell it like it is as the man and his band head into their 20th year as a band in 2011.
RR: Guster is about to complete the last few dates on the first month of the tour supporting your new release, Easy Wonderful. How has the tour gone thus far?
BR: It’s going good. We are in Burlington, Vermont tonight, and we’ve got a guy in our band, Luke Reynolds, and it is his first month in our band. Every soundcheck has been like “Hey, let’s try to add one more song to our repertoire,” even though we’ve learned 40 or 50 or whatever. So, yeah, we’ve been breaking Luke in, and it’s been a success.
RR: Exactly. Tell me about the transition from having Joe Pisapia in the band for about seven years to now having Luke Reynolds.
BR: Yeah, a little over seven years when we tally them up. Joe is not an easy guy to dispense with. He’s an amazing musician. He plays every instrument, and he fits seamlessly into our thing, and knew exactly what to play on every song. Not to mention that Luke realized—when he inherited all of Joe’s parts—that Joe is playing the hardest part on every song. The rest of us are songwriters first and musicians second. So Luke has to step into the hardest part in every song, but he’s just the perfect guy to do it—his attitude, which is really positive, and really inspires to make everything better, and his musicianship. He plays banjos, wicked pedal steel, harmonica, and I was worried that he really wouldn’t be a bass player because a lot of Joe’s parts were bass lines, and I was wrong because Luke is an awesome bass player, so it was just a great fit.
RR: Let’s follow the Joe Pisapia thread. Guster switched studios, headed out of New York, and worked at Joe’s studio in Nashville for the Easy Wonderful sessions.
BR: Yeah, let me think about it. We moved to Nashville in 2009, and started finishing up some of the unfinished songs that we had begun at the end of 2008 in New York with David Kahne. The wonderful and easy side of that recording was definitely the Nashville side of it. The hard, awful part was the New York part.
RR: Isn’t the New York studio you used called ‘The Dungeon’?
BR: Right, no, it’s not an official thing. (laughter) We just called it that. It’s like a basement with a foundation, rock, stone walls, low ceilings and no windows. For someone like David Kahn, it can be very comfortable working in there, getting inside his computer and his brain. For the rest of us, it just contributed to the lack of vibe, and the lack of feeling it.
RR: Indeed. But, what was the original pull towards Nashville back in the day?
BR: We went to Nashville after we had done the Lost and Gone Forever tenth anniversary tour [fall 2009]. That tour had forced us to overcome many of our differences that had kept us away from revisiting the record for months and months. It’s great. We played to audiences who loved us and reminded us that “Oh, this is why we do this.” After that tour, we just got in with Joe.
[Later, for Easy Wonderful ] we had gone in with David Kahne, but then the recordings did not sound great. That was very frustrating for me. I’m a very hands on person, and I envisioned all the things I would be doing if I were producing the record. We had produced a record ourselves in the past, Ganging Up on the Sun, was mostly self-produced.
When we got to Joe’s, we said, “All right. Let’s do this. Let’s take off this keyboard. Let’s take off that keyboard. Re-do this guitar, let’s add a tambourine, let’s re-sing the vocal. Oh, holy shit. This sounds fucking amazing.” A lot of the David Kahne tracks, the ones that were started with David, had solid basics, but just needed our touch and our aesthetic. I don’t know why it took so long to just do it, but when we did it, it was very redemptive.
The other side of that is Ryan [Miller] had this unbelievable flurry of creativity, and wrote pretty much eight songs from scratch where everyone said, “Well, we have to record this. We fixed up six of the David Kahne tracks, and recorded eight of the Ryan ones, re-recorded “Bad Bad World” from scratch, and then, we had a record.
RR: Easy Wonderful is amazingly bereft of any filler whatsoever, even within the tracks themselves. All the songs seem to end right at the sweet spot, too.
BR: Well, that means a lot coming from Jambands.com. (laughter) I’m only saying that because you guys are the ones who are most willing to air it out over the song length.
RR: I’m notorious for wanting it to get as weird as possible, but, you know, there’s a flip side to that. I also love a well-crafted song that sounds like it could either be the Beach Boys, or the Flaming Lips, or, in this case, Guster and whatever it is you guys do to sound just like yourselves. There is a unique vibe to your music.
BR: Well, thanks. I’m happy that you appreciate that. On our previous record, we kind of hit the seven-minute mark [ Ganging Up on the Sun ] on a song, which was great for us. We tried to sound like Pink Floyd, and we got this Miles Davis muted-trumpet to go for a couple of minutes in the outro. It was really fun to experiment. On [ Easy Wonderful ], we were just honing in on the songs, honing in on keeping them as tight as possible, which is kind of what we do best.
RR: What about your slow evolution towards a drum kit on the songs, as opposed to your more common hand percussion used both on stage and in the studio?
BR: You know, when you’re writing music, you have to follow your muse, and it’s where my head was at as far as making these songs speak, and making the grooves speak. I know our fans, one of the things they love about us is the presence of hand drums, and, often the presence of hand drums instead of the traditional kit. I’m conscientious of that, and I like to add percussive flavors whenever I can, but, ultimately, what we’re doing here is becoming a rhythm section for the first time after years of being a band that didn’t really have a rhythm section. It’s really exciting to me, and it’s just great to see where we can take the music. If Ryan writes something on his laptop that sounds like this kind of garage band, rubber band bass with drum machines that sounds like a Squeeze song, we’re gonna just run with that because that’s something we love. Ultimately, we do what we want, and not what our fans necessarily want. (laughs)
RR: That pulls me back to your comment you made earlier—how would you define the concept of ‘songwriters first and musicians second’?
BR: Yeah, I think that’s always been true of us. I feel like the jamband label that we have had for a good chunk of our career is a misnomer. We’re fans of jambands, but we get intimidated if we’re ever on the same bill as one of them because our skills are in arranging and writing melodies. If forced to solo, we don’t really improvise; we stick to a melodic script that you can sing along to, and each one has its benefit. When we improvise, and we test our musicianship, it’s generally on stage when we kind of write a fake song in the middle of our live set. Clearly, our skill set is on the writing side, and not on the playing side. And it’s always been that way. We just went to college [Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts] and none of us had ever really trained as musicians. Seriously, I just bought a pair of bongos and put them up on my shelf. So that’s why the fourth member of Guster always plays the hardest parts.
RR: Let’s talk about that. It is late 2010, Guster just released their first album in four years, and it is a meticulously-crafted work. How do those songs translate to the stage, and how do they integrate into the set with your older material?
BR: There is a rule in the studio that you don’t worry about how you pull it off live. You just get in there and go down the road you need to go down, and worry about it later. Now, we’re in the ‘worrying about it later’ phase. Fortunately, my drum tech, Scooter, has just become really really good at sitting there behind the drum kit and playing the hi-hat, or whatever I need to complement something, so I can play on the percussion kit. Or, he’ll go and add tambourine, shaker, and hand claps, and we can flesh out the percussion side of these things live. We use our monitor engineer to play keyboards when we need an extra set of hands. I’m always surprised at how well these things can go over live. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the way we write the songs is often is we’ll be jamming in a room on an idea. The foundation is there to speak live. It’s just that when we get into the production, we don’t worry about having enough man power to pull it off.
RR: Guster was very DIY during the 90s, moved into the mainstream, got a major record deal, lost a lot of that jamband aura, and finds itself in 2010 with its sixth album. What has changed over the last few years for Guster in terms of the way the band presents its work, either via the record label, or its own marketing techniques?
BR: You know—I’m shocked that we’re still on a major label. We had a choice when, I think, we got dropped from Warner Brothers, or we left or whatever, we had a choice to pull a Radiohead and try to harness our fan base to support us, or to seek out another label. Ultimately, nobody wanted to do the Radiohead model because that was sort of like saying, “We’ve already reached everybody we are going to reach.” And, I think our music still has a lot of people out there left to discover it. Our music is evolving in ways that will help us evolve into grabbing new fans; maybe, at the expense of old ones. So, yeah, we pursued the major label thing that adds headaches like the ones we ran into with David Kahne, but, ultimately, it puts songs on the radio that I think deserve to be on the radio, and that I think are better than a lot of songs that play next to them on the radio. It was a decision, and I think that the way we built things up DIY, forming our own record label, and making a living off our web site, and being good to our fans, but we’re just not being good to our fans, and not making any money off record sales. (laughter)
RR: Guster’s video presentations have also evolved in numerous ways. Let’s discuss that content for Easy Wonderful, such as the video contest for “Bad Bad World.”
BR: When you called (I forgot we had a phoner), I was just about to post the winner.
RR: Jesus. The Jambands dude is holding some lucky fan back.
BR: (laughter) The fan contest was, literally, because we came up with one director short. Jeff Garland from Curb Your Enthusiasm was supposed to do one, but he got in a cab accident, and had to cancel his whole month of doing stuff. We shifted some stuff around. We said, “Why don’t we go around to the fans?” The idea was mine for shooting twelve videos for twelve songs. I just felt like if we could get a budget for it, we knew enough creative people who would really like the exposure. I just know that people are more inclined to press play on the video with a Play arrow than on an audio thing with a Play arrow when they’re on the computer. So I thought that would be cool.
It’s been great. My favorite video is the one that Al Jarnow did with his son, Jesse. They did it together when they were at the beach, which is awesome and resourceful and they clearly worked their asses off on it. “Hercules” has reached a lot of people because that video is just so damned cool. We definitely let people do whatever they wanted.
The only one we appeared in was the “Do You Love Me” video, which was the only one that had a real budget. The other ones had small budgets.
RR: How about the Fantastic Heat Brothers work on “This is How It Feels to Have a Broken Heart?”
BR: I thought their video was so funny, especially the pantomime part. That song needed a video like that to not take it so seriously. A lot of these [video] people reacted to the music just right. There’s a video for “Stay With Me Jesus,” which is one of my favorite songs and I was really hoping that whoever did that video was going to illustrate the story, and tell the story because that’s a unique song in the sense that it does tell a narrative-style story. Kathleen Judge, who was in charge of that, absolutely nailed it. She nailed the sarcasm without being too sarcastic, and I was so so happy to get that one, too.
RR: Guster has been together for almost two decades. How has family life, fatherhood, and the passage of time impacted the band?
BR: (laughs) Ummm…well, on the touring side, we certainly can’t tour as much as we used to, or even half as much as we used to. But we don’t want to, either. We’re being more efficient about how we tour, and re-drawing the lines as far as what’s an acceptable amount of time to be away. That part of it is just difficult and not easy.
On the recording side, we came and went from the writing process. Instead of holing up for two months working, we did four days together, took a couple of weeks off, and then got back together for a couple more days, and worked that way, which is good and helped us stay fresh, and not burned out on the writing side, and helped us stay with our families as much as we needed to.
Then, there’s the other side. How can we not make the predictable mellow Dad rock album that people are expecting us to make? Lyrically and energetically, that would be easy to do, so we resisted. We resisted that, and just kind of gravitated towards more upbeat songs and made a pop record that we’ve been wanting to make rather than a Dad rock record that we could have made.
