Photo by Tobin Voggesser
String Cheese Incident keyboard player Kyle Hollingsworth is an avid home brewer. So as he thought about ways to meld his vocation (music and in particular the release of his new disc, Then There’s Now) with his avocation (beer!), he landed on the Rock and Brew Tour. Hollingsworth is currently out West, performing with his current quartet, which also features three members of the Motet, past and present: drummer Dave Watts, bassist Garrett Sayers and guitar player Dan Schwindt. Along the way, he’s hitting the local breweries, often coordinating with his fans to do the same, which he did last month when he kicked all this off in Colorado, with the debuts of both Then There’s Now and Mountain Sun Brewery’s Hoppingsworth IPA. The following conversation touches on all this and glimpses at the future of SCI as well.
Let’s start things out with a topic of mutual interest…beer. You worked with Mountain Sun Brewery to create Hoppingsworth IPA. How did that come about and what role did you play?
Right now I’m on the West Coast continuing the Rock and Brew tour. It was a vision I had for the entire tour. When we started, I wanted to get my local brewery involved and figure out a way we could create a special event for my CD release. I’ve been working a lot with Mountain Sun in the past through different shows in Denver and Boulder and I love their beer.
So I went to them and at first they said the fans could come out and do a brewery tour. Then they said, “Why don’t we just make a beer?” I was so down with that and it was pretty much my dream, I just didn’t know how to ask.
So I got together with the head brewer Hutch. He and I made recipes together and talked about what we wanted out of it and talked about our favorite beers. Then after I put my input in I thought, “Why don’t I let him do what he does best and let him make the final choices.”
I went in, we brewed it together and got it ready for the release of the CD. Then they sold out of like 15 kegs in 5 days. I didn’t get enough and when I went it again it was gone.
In terms of your home brewing, has there been a particular style or batch you’ve been most proud of?
Mine are all very okay, not the best beers ever. That’s why I’m glad I had Mountain Sun help me. There’s a Sosa Spice I do which is coming up really soon. I am going to start doing that when I get home. It’s more of a holiday cheer type beer, pretty hoppy with nutmeg.
I’ve been thinking about this lately but I do feel there’s a connection between the way I home brew and the way I play music. I feel like you kind of have your basics under your fingers whether its keyboards or home brewing and then there’s that moment when you take that leap of faith. When you’re brewing, it’s, “Okay I know how to make beer but what’s the x factor? How can I jump off the ledge like I do when I play music in a live performance situation?” So you just kind of go for it and that when you try sassafras or that random citrus. There’s a baseline and then you take a leap of faith.
Speaking of those basics, I know that when you’re on the road with String Cheese, you maintain a regular personal rehearsal regimen. Are you able to do the same when you’re out with your band or are things a bit different?
What’s different is that I’m the main bandleader. I’m also doing a lot of the tour managing which takes up a lot of time, whether it be driving the van or making sure there’s non-smoking rooms for the bass player and vegan meals for the drummer. But I have been able to sneak away here and there to do some rehearsing. Of course I’m always pushing the band to the limit as far as rehearsing new arrangements or trying new songs. So I’m taking my passion for rehearsing and putting it on the band too and keeping everybody on their toes.
When I’m not doing that, I’m also trying to sneak away. Two days ago I went to the Stone Brewery here in San Diego. That’s one of best beers in the country and they took me on a tour and the band came out and we did a tasting. I’m going to go up to Portland and do Deschutes there, another great brewery. On the east coast we’re going to Magic Hat and then we’re going to Dogfish in the Portland area which is one of my favorites too.
On your blog you indicated that you thought you would be working up some songs with Zach Gill, who’s opening your west coast dates.
Yup. Already happened, talking about rehearsing, that’s what we did yesterday. We worked on an arrangement of “A Day In The Life” and some other stuff. We did it for the first time last night and it went really well, so we’re going to keep adding songs as we go though the tour.
I’m definitely going to learn a lot on this tour just by watching Zach perform. I didn’t know that he such a good entertainer. I’ve seen him perform with ALO but when he’s out by himself, he started out with piano and then he did an MGMT song on accordion and then he came out with my band for three or four songs. He’s really natural and he can talk to the audience without sounding cliché. Whenever I talk to the audience I’m all nervous and I don’t know what to say (laughs).
Your new disc Then There’s Now offers a variety of flavors. Was this a conscious decision to cover a broad palette and did you think about at all about reining things in?
Well you’re talking to a guy from String Cheese… [laughs] For better or for worse we’re not afraid of jumping between styles, and I kind of just let it speak for itself. I didn’t really try to rein in anything. I did have an overall vibe of “Okay, it’s going to have some funk, some G Love, Beckish sort of stuff going on here…” That’s probably the stuff that drove me to start this disc. Then in the studio we were inventing things like “All I Need” and certain little snippets came out. So I knew I wanted to have a well-rounded record as far as keeping the interest of the listener’s ear.
How does the music on this disc relate to some of your other projects? Did some of these songs emerge from your collaboration with Speech and DJ Logic?
There’s a big relationship. These songs were all written in the past two years for the most part. In those two years I’ve been influenced by what’s happening musically in all the different projects I’ve been going out with like soleside [which also featured Speech and Logic] and Fiery Furnaces. I was attracted to what Speech was doing in Arrested Development and what Logic has been doing. Some of the more hip hop driven stuff like “All Inside” is from that era with soleside.
In terms of the Fiery Furnaces, how did that gig come about?
I went to my manager and said, “I want to step outside the jam scene in this next two years or three years or whatever String Cheese decides to take off.” So I went to him and he knew Fiery Furnaces which is an indie rock band out of New York. Their music, I wouldn’t say is 180 degrees from mine but maybe it’s 165 degrees. It was only 10 days with them but it was a great experience to learn all their music. It’s still in my brain.
Let’s talk a bit more about some of the material on Then There’s Now. “Way That It Goes” is a collaboration your wife.
I had written the music and I wasn’t sure what the chorus would be. I wanted to talk about the experience of a bystander walking through a freaky city. My wife spent a lot of time in Seattle and I spent the last 15 years in Boulder ,so we made a list of the freakiest thing things we’ve seen. Then I finally figured out that the chorus was going to be, “Oh that’s the way it goes…” That’s how our life is right here.
“Too Young” offers a catchy groove and may be the closest to what String Cheese fans might have expected from you on the recording.
It’s funny, that song almost didn’t make it on the CD, although that’s one I’d imagine we’ll play with String Cheese. It’s also a song that I’ll play over the next few weeks because it’s very much in the singer-songwriter mode where you have your verses and your chorus and it comes back out. But when I was trying to figure out what made sense for the whole CD, I wasn’t sure whether to put it on but I’m very glad I did. I think that’s what people would expect of me as an artist, and it’s become a lot of fun to play.
“I’m too young to be getting old,” that’s just one of those songs where you look in the mirror, you’ve been on tour for 15 years and just feeling that experience of going through life. I’m a new dad now which is an incredible experience and now I’m forty one. Forty one…[Laughs]
Since you mentioned becoming a dad and there are images of your daughter in the liner notes, I’d be interested to hear what extent you feel that experience is reflected in Then There’s Now.
I think a lot of this stuff came out of her birth, her joining my life and my family. “Don’t Wake Me,” the song with Dar Williams was written between the hours of 2 AM and 6:30 AM when I was holding my child and giving her a bottle. I’m kind of awake but I’m also kind of in a fog and it’s a beautiful moment. Don’t wake me because it’s a great moment.
There are also a lot of tunes that didn’t make the disc because they could be an entire children’s album alone.
In your blog you’ve described playing keys on a number of classic alternative songs in mid-80s cover bands. To my mind, “She” has a bit of that early New Order vibe.
I like that, that’s the best comment I’ve heard on that one. It’s definitely the poppy song on the album. Coldplay-ish but Beck-ish at the beginning. It’s funny because in one of my first bands, Black Friday, we were trying to be more like Joy Division, the early version of New Order. We did a lot of Joy Division and we were into that punky thing.
Speaking of Black Friday, you appear on their latest disc, the group’s first in about a dozen years.
It was great. I want to do more like that with others bands. They sent me the tracks and I sat in my basement and played keyboards all over it. I had so much fun, sent it all back and said, “You can decide what you like. Here’s what I was inspired to play on it and you can decide what’s cool or not.” It was a really fun process. And of course knowing how they play it made sense for me. I hope to do more stuff with them again soon.
Had you interacted them much since you left for Colorado?
No really. A few years ago, I did an NPR performance at my old university [Towson University]. I did an acoustic piano thing with David Gans and then that night Black Friday did a reunion and we played in Towson.
Back to the album, “All I Need” is a song you composed with your band. It sounds to me a bit like a Remain In Light era Talking Heads track. Did that come out of working with the members of your band on the Motet’s Talking Heads shows?
Maybe but I see it as more of a Fela [Kuti] type groove. We were in the studio and I wanted to put a bouncy number on the CD, something in 6/8 or 3/4, so I said, “Let’s just groove in something on 3.” Dave [Watts] and Garrett [Sayers] started making the groove and I took it home and added my little kid’s xylophone on there playing a melody. Then I wrote lyrics over it about 6 weeks later.
That’s actually the most fun for me. I wish String Cheese could do that as far as album-making, just write grooves. I know the Heads did that. Then you let it sit with you for a while, come up with melody and cut and paste how you want it later.
I’d like to come back and talk about String Cheese in a minute but first, in terms of your current band, what can people expect when they see you play? On your site you have a video where you play the Talking Heads’ “Naïve Melody.”
Playing with such amazing musicians, the sky’s the limit. We have our core songs from the CD and then we have a few fun covers like “Kodachrome,” the Paul Simon tune or “Solsbury Hill.” We change it up ever tour we do, it’s based on who I’m playing with. I did some Fela tunes last tour because it was an Afrobeat band. I’m super excited about this band though. It’s going to be a growing project for me and we’re still just getting our legs figuring out what we’re all about.
Speaking of videos on your site, there’s also that one of you taking a chainsaw to a Hammond B3. Although you make it clear what’s going to happen, when I first saw it, I think I gasped. Can you glue that back together somehow?
It’s pretty much gone. It’s funny, last night someone came up to me. some random person who saw that video, not a young hippie and was very upset, “Those things are so rare, what are you doing? There’s not many of those left. I don’t care what you’re making, that’s not acceptable.” And a friend of mine posted to to an organ blog and all sorts of people were going off, “He seems like a complete idiot, there are better ways to get keys out of an organ than chainsaws.”
But that’s actually a spare, I have two B3s and that one sat in the rain outside the Motet practice space for 10 years. I picked it up a few years ago for spare parts. So I needed to get into the keys and it’s a little less exciting to shoot me with a screwdriver, so I was like, “Let’s chainsaw it.”
I wasn’t righteously indignant about it but I have to say my first thought was, “Those things are so rare, what’s he doing…” But I guess if it’s been out in the rain…
It’s been out in the rain. It’s pretty much been trashed anyway and I use it for parts.
Fair enough…Okay, I can’t let you go without asking a few questions about String Cheese.
Sure.
I’m curious, what surprised you most about performing with the band again this past summer, whether on stage or in the rehearsal room?
How natural it felt, how much it didn’t seem like we had been away from each other for two years. I guess in really good ways we realized that we have a lot in common musically. But also we’re five men married together and all the quirks, all the stuff we walked away from, some of that resurfaced. So we made sure we spent enough time to move beyond that before the shows. We spent a month and a half rehearsing but rehearsing was probably only half that time. The other half was hiking and reconnecting as a family. We purposely set out to reconnect.
Some of your conflicts were related to the musical push and pull of the band members. Was it easier to strike a balance in that regard this time?
A lot easier and it continues to be very important to us to have the outlets of our own projects to be able to step outside the String Cheese organization and feel like we can be creative. Then we can come back in and there’s less ego involved. It’s more like we’re here for one purpose, we’re completely dedicated to String Cheese and that was refreshing.
I felt like before we were starting to get a little scattered. Billy was getting frustrated, Travis was taking off with his project…But when we came together as String Cheese it was like, “Hey, we’re here for this reason. This is what we’re doing, making great music.”
There’s the new String Cheese disc drawn from past Halloween performances. What are some of your favorite musical memories of those nights?
I was involved with that a lot because it became difficult for everybody to get involved. So I just jumped in and did some of the mixing. My favorite track, I think we just put it up, is “Walking On The Moon.” Travis doesn’t sing very much and he has a great voice and he was just nailing it that night.
But there’s definitely both tricks and treats on there and thus the name Trick or Treat. They’re live performances, so there may some scary little vocal things here and there. But one of the shining tracks is Travis singing “Walking On The Moon.”
A few moments ago, you described working in the studio with String Cheese. Do you think that might happen in the months to come?
That’s what I’d like to do but we haven’t had that official conversation yet. We’re definitely talking back and forth though and there have been mumblings of recording once again but we’ll have to address how to record it and how to release it.
I’d also love to do a kids album and that’s something Billy has wanted to do. I have backlog of songs and I’m ready to go
So do you anticipate that there will be String Cheese gigs in 2010?
I really just don’t know. We’re in October now and if we’re going to do 2010 dates we’re going to have to get going. I’m hopeful but we’ll have to see, we’ll need to have a meeting like next week.
