Images by Jennifer Coleman, www.digitalsuburbia.net
It’s an exciting time to be Jamie McLean. His self-titled band’s newest album, Completely, is selling well, getting excellent reviews (including one from Relix in the June issue), and has them pounding pavement across the country, sharing the stage with the Gregg Allman Band, the Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi Band, the Drive-By Truckers, this year’s Mountain Jam, and Jackie Greene among others.
The touring, jamming life is nothing new for McLean. A member of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for nearly a decade, the guitarist struck a deep chord with fans of the beloved NOLA outfit, including tasty moments on the inaugural Bonnaroo DVD that caught many a guitar player’s ears. Travelling between the Dirty Dozen’s home base in New Orleans and New York regularly, it was in the Big Apple that he started to find his own voice again- literally and figuratively.
In May of 2005 he released a rocking debut with This Time Around, but when Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana the following August 29th, his plans would change. The DDBB’s disconsolate recast of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” proved to be his final stand with the band; apropos for an album serving as an elegy for Katrina and her wrathful Crescent crawl. Needing to relocate while New Orleans was resurrected, McLean decided to part ways, headed for New York City, and dug his bandleader shoes in even deeper.
That drive manifested itself in the strength of 2008’s American Heartache, where one could hear McLean start to hit his stride between the unique poetry of his lyrics and the hearty grooves over which they often unfold. As good as Heartache was, Completely is a much sharper focusing of what was hinted at before. Recorded marathon-style at the jam-flavor favorite Water Music in Hoboken, NJ, there is no doubt that this is both McLean’s best work, and a bellwether for goodness to come.
And so it was in the middle of two weeks of opening for the Gregg Allman Band that I had the chance to sit down and talk shop with the current lineup. For a 3-piece, they cover all the bases: McLean is the anchor and calm eye of the storm; drummer Brian Griffin has a bit of Keith Moon mystery about him; and bassist Ben Mars, the newest member of the band, is the youthful abandon. As satisfying a mix as they are on stage, they carry the same dynamic to the dinner table as well.
This serves the songs on Completely quite well. The album is a modern sounding rock record that is firmly based in the classic sonic aesthetic of the best days gone by; when the stage made or broke bands, and albums were something more than polished collateral for a label’s marketing assault. The eleven songs on the album translate well live, which is impressive considering the material was written for and by a 4-piece. Watching the three-way on stage, you get the idea that they don’t mind filling the space.
It takes a village to raise a child, and it’s the same for a band as well. Cruising YouTube, one finds a lot of these moments; a sit-in with Gov’t Mule, a posh party for Esquire Magazine, a fundraiser for the Allman Brothers’ Big House during the United Palace run. You get the point. This is the kind of fruit McLean has worked toward since the very beginning of his career.
It’s an exciting time to be Jamie McLean indeed. Exciting, as well, for fans willing to embrace a band that could, and should, be filling theatres cross-country very soon. Part of that plan revolves around a website called Bandcamp, where bands can load entire albums of music and charge any price they wish, including free. All three of McLean’s albums are loaded there, as well as a compilation of very recent live dates. If Jamie McLean and Completely are the shape of things to come, then a lot of fans are completely ready for it, whether they know it or not.
BF: Jamie, let’s talk about how you got here. You are from New Canaan, Connecticut, but your music has a southern flair.
JM: You know, it’s funny that a lot of people say it sounds ‘southern’. Yes, there was time spent with a band based in New Orleans, I guess that’s some of it. I just always gravitated towards more bluesy, soulful stuff, whether it’s southern or not, and that always hit me more than other styles.
I don’t consider myself writing southern rock. I just write what I write and I guess it has a little bit of a bluesy, southern thing to it. I mean, I grew up listening to the Allman Brothers, The Black Crowes, and a lot of the southern bands, so there are definitely influences, but I also grew up listening to Zeppelin and Cream and Jimi Hendrix. I think all the bands have a hard-core blues element, and that’s southern.
BF: Your last project with the DDBB was What’s Going On, the re-envisioning of the Marvin Gaye classic. Shortly after the album was done, you made a clean break for New York. Did you know that it was time?
JM: Before I joined the Dirty Dozen, I was a front man, writing original music and singing; and then I became just a guitarist, not singing, not writing music. And it was an amazing opportunity, but I had written two albums of original music, was getting called to go out and open for certain bands with my own group; it was something that simmered for a while. It just sort of came to a head.
Katrina definitely kind of encouraged that; everyone had to pick a different city to live in. I was going to New York every other weekend anyway, so that was an easy choice. More than anything, I would say it was something I knew in my gut that I needed and wanted to do, and that became the right time for it. And once you had all this music and you were starting to get calls, it was just the right time and I knew it, and they knew it. When I approached them, they were like “Man, we knew this was coming. We’re sad, but we’re not surprised. When you’re the next Dave Matthews Band, don’t forget about us and let us open up.”
BF: Let’s talk about the new album and tour. Completely is the first album billed as the Jamie McLean Band (JMB), and the band looks a little different now.
JM: We finished up American Heartache and started touring behind that in the fall of ’08. Pretty much on that tour was when a lot of the music for this album started to be written. On the road and off, we had a two-month spell when we were in a rehearsal studio. A lot of those tunes were written as a group during that time period, around the American Heartache tour.
[As for releasing the record as the JMB] there was a lot of thought put into that idea. The first record I wrote all the music, and the second record I wrote all the music except two songs. So it was basically me bringing in finished songs to the band, we’d play them, and everything was sort of on my shoulders in that department. For Completely, there was a lot more collaboration. Songs were written as a group and individually by the guys in the band, so it became much more of a group effort, rather than me presenting everything. And so it just made sense to kind of make the change. If it was me continuing to write all the music, maybe keep it the same way, but it’s developed into a thing where it’s a cohesive group and everyone’s contributing, everyone’s singing, so it’s a band.
Pretty soon after that tour ended, we decided we wanted to go into the studio and record it. Our keyboard player was going to be on the road with another band [Ed. Note: keyboardist Jon Solo now plays with Brett Dennen], so we decided that was a good time to get in there. The songs were all kinda fresh, a little road tested, but they weren’t getting stale. So we went in and recorded with that band, with Brian on drums. The keyboard player went on tour, and the bass player [Derek Layes] sort of hung up his touring shoes, and that’s when we first met Ben. So we recorded the record, got a new lineup going as a power trio, and now we’re touring behind the record as a trio.
BF: How did you meet Ben? I take it was in NYC?
JM: Yeah. I asked my brother [Carter McLean], who was the drummer on the first two records, if he had any recommendations, and he gave me Ben’s number, and then we just hit the road (laughs)…
BM: Jamie called me, and I was on the phone with my now-wife at like 3:30 in the morning. I get a phone call from a number I don’t recognize, and checked the voicemail, and it was like “Hey, this is Jamie McLean, got your number, wanna know if want to do some gigs. Give me a call.” I showed up, we did two or three rehearsals- actually a year ago today was the first day I left on tour with these guys.
BF: Brian, how did you and Jamie hook up?
BG: Through some other musicians in New York. We had known of each other for a little while.
JM: I got his name through Joe Russo, as in Further.
BF: Let’s talk about the trio versus quartet. To the average fan, what’s the difference?
JM: When our keyboard player initially split, we tried a couple different options. We looked at adding another guitar player, we were thinking about another keyboard player, and everything was cool, but nothing really seemed to gel as it was with the four piece originally.
So, sort of by default, things fell into a trio, and pretty quickly it felt like it was just a lot tighter, but it was a lot more open. I had way more freedom on guitar, not being held down by the chords on the keyboards. I had to handle more, but it was really great for me to able to do that. It really changed my playing. I feel like the unit has really gelled as a trio, and the music has been tight like that.
BF: Brian and Ben, does being a trio affect how you approach the material? Do you find yourself filling more space, or playing differently?
BG: I started playing with Jamie three years ago right around now, like almost three years to the day. And I feel like Jamie and I got into this thing of playing wider and bigger. I was playing bigger and bigger drums and trying to play less and less notes, and then suddenly he started playing two amps and it became this thing where it was sorta convenient that our keyboard player had another gig, ‘cause it was four people trying to play ‘big’ all time, [yet] everyone’s always dialing it back.
BM: I guess for me, it was a trio when I joined the band. I [was] coming from a real strict jazz background, just relearning to play [this style of music]. And Brian was always busting my balls- I came in and I was always playing a lot of notes, and wasn’t filling in the right places. I think the biggest thing for me was having Jamie and Brian to kind of groom me to fit into what they were doing; learning how to play around the two of them. Now, I’m starting to learn where Brian’s going to fill, and where Jamie’s going to fill, and where I fit into that, and where I don’t fit into that, you know? That’s been the biggest thing for me as far as playing in the band.
BG: I just kind of like going to hear someone, either on a recording or live, where you can hear whatever the part is, but you also just hear some ‘air’ around it, right? Like I play a kick drum and a snare drum and maybe some other stuff occasionally, and then Jamie sings and plays guitar, but any listener can sort of latch onto just a couple key ingredients. Once you start adding a bunch of extra guitars and keyboards, suddenly the air that surrounds each of those ingredients gets all sucked up, and you can’t distinguish as much what’s happening.
BF: Going into the recording process, did you just let the songs have their own life?
JM: Yeah, [that] was definitely the mindset. It was kind of documenting what we had written in the last six months. We used the same producer on Completely as American Heartache [Stewart Lerman], so we didn’t tweak too much. We sort of went in with the same recipe, but “Completely” was recorded over the course of three days, so it was pretty damn quick.
BF: Was that on purpose? Did you want to capture that immediacy?
JM: Yeah, we had time constraints, financial restraints, [but] we were so tight from playing these songs on the road, that we didn’t necessarily need a ton of time. It would be a luxury if we could just tweak and put psychedelic Wilco keyboards on there, but we didn’t. We did seventeen songs in three days, and it was a stretch, but not that much of a stretch, ‘cause the songs were already tight, written, and we knew the parts.
And that’s been the case for a lot of them. Like “Don’t Do Me That Way” on the last record, we did that in one take. That was the only time we tried to record it, and that’s my favorite “sounding” song on that record. So I don’t think time was really the issue, it’s just the time that we had put in prior to that on the road and in the rehearsal space really kind of solidified the songs.
BF: Was there anything on the record that wasn’t already road tested when you went in?
JM: “Peace and Glory” we had never played live. We had worked the song out, and had a skeleton for it, but I wrote the lyrics and did the vocals after the fact. I want to say everything else we had played live, and there are a bunch of B-sides that we’ll be putting out at some point. There’s another six songs that we recorded that aren’t on the record. But everything was pretty road-tested or rehearsed pretty heavily.
BF: What’s life on the road is like for the three of you?
JM: For as long as I can remember, like when I had bands in high school, the dream was to get a gig, play in a bar. And then the dream was like “let’s do like two nights in a row, let’s do a weekend.” And then, it was like, it’d be so cool if we could play in Colorado. It was sort of like this kind of Kerouac… I really dug On The Road and [Pirsig’s] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and all these sort of books that glorified traveling and ‘flying by the seat of your pants.’ Being on the road with this band is definitely an extension of that. To be able to play for people every night, it’s like I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. It’s the ultimate joy.
It’s amazing and terrible all at the same time; living out of a suitcase, you’re in hotel rooms; you’re stuck in traffic all the time. You know, that’s the job, that’s the work, that’s the crap you’ve got to put up with to get ‘there.’ But to plug in and play the first chord, everything else but ‘there’ disappears. I’ve been completely sick with the flu, feeling like I’m dying, and I’ll play a gig; and for that hour and a half, I feel completely healthy. So that part of it, there’s the two sides of it. Being able to share the stage with Gregg Allman, and the history there, it’s totally a dream come true. The travel can wear on you; I remember flying a lot after 9/11 and it was just like a total nightmare, so there’s that whole aspect of it, but the other part of it is this sort of Kerouac, ultimate dream of just being out there doing what you want to be doing. I totally feel fulfilled.
BG: In addition to all that, one of the things I appreciate the most about being on the road, is this opportunity to really refine your product, either personally as a musician or with the band. Especially as we’re all getting older and we’ve all got other commitments when we’re at home; we’re trying to rehearse as much as we can, but once you’re finally out, and all your stuff is back home, and all we’re doing is driving and then setting up, sound check, playing a set and then talking about it whenever we can. I record a lot of the sets and we listen to them in the van sometimes and we’re just sort of hyper-processing, really refining everything we get to do. ‘Cause you’re just in this mental zone when you’re in the van and traveling; you can keep working on details and details in such a dense amount of time, as opposed to doing a gig every two weeks or something.
BF: You’re much more in a vacuum with it.
JM: It’s a massive vacuum.
BG: And that’s on a personal level and a band level. Just the way I play has changed a lot, depending on what band it is. If I’m with a certain band, it changes how I tune drums, which cymbals I’m bring out, the way I play certain songs. And then there’s also the group dynamic, how we all play together, how we’re gonna construct a set. All sorts of different things that change so quickly in just two or three nights, as opposed to two months for a band that’s only playing a couple times a month.
BM: I guess another side of it for me is that a lot of guys I talk to talk about the “troubles” of being on the road and stuff like that.
BF: Like certain vices?
BM: Certain vices, certain attitudes not matching, like this guy’s jealous that this guy did more work, whatever. For me, I’m the young guy in the band, like I’m a kid out here, wondering “what the hell am I doing, how did this happen?” Just from talking to people, it’s been really interesting being on the road with Jamie and Brian because I feel like, again, they’ve helped groom me as a musician, but also, like there’s been times when I’ve been on the road, and I’m sick as a dog. I have the flu, and I’m in the back of the van with a trash can; Jamie and Brian are willing to pick up the slack and drive, help me carry my amp in, help me set up, and they’re like “No, no, dude, go sleep, don’t worry about it.” Or, like Jamie has to go out front and do his thing, so Brian and I will pack up his stuff.
It’s been this really cool dynamic, the three of us being out on the road, and there’s no [ego]. All of us have an ego ‘cause we’re out here playing music, so you have to have an ego to some extent. But the fact of when we come together, and we talk about the set last night, and Brian says “Ben, that harmony part didn’t work out” or “Jamie, the solo kind of went in a different direction than where I think the tune says it needs to go,” and just be able to openly talk about stuff on the road, like Brian said, it helps us define each song in its own right and really craft out parts to fit the tunes.
I know we’ve recorded this record, but I think it would be interesting to do a tour like [John] Mayer did, where he put out a record, and after the whole record tour was done, he took the band back in the studio, re-recorded everything, and put it out as a live thing. It was just interesting to hear the way it changed. I’d be interested in doing some legitimate recordings to see what the road has done in helping these tunes grow on their own. I don’t know, that’s what the road’s been for me. Like I said, I’m the young one in the band so I shouldn’t be talking about this in the first place.
JM: The guys in the Dirty Dozen always used to say we’re all soldiers, and I kind of feel that way. We’re all on the same team and we’re all in it for the same reason, and I always dug it when they called us soldiers; “you take no prisoners.”
BF: Has this lineup written together on the road yet, as a unit?
JM: Yep.
BF: Are you staging some of that yet?
JM: Yeah. I think we’ll get into the studio again at some point at the end of the year for another record.
BF: As a band that thrives on the live experience, have you found a way to translate that energy into the studio?
JM: All three records, we’ve recorded the band live. Basically, four guys in the room, laying it down, and then obviously overdubbing the vocals and some instruments after the fact. But we are playing it down live like we would on the stage. I’m not convinced that we’ve captured what we do live on a record; I’m pretty sure we haven’t.
BF: Are you fine with studio records being different in nature than live shows?
JM: Yeah, I’ll listen to studio records in general more than I do live concerts. I would like to try to get to that level. The Grateful Dead never really did it; there are a lot of bands that never really did it that are known for their live thing. I think we can do it. I just think when you’re in the studio, you’re worried that it’s not going to be perfect, but that can hold you up. If you’re constantly worried about making a mistake, it’s going to be a little watered down; there’ll be no “balls” to it. Not that that’s what we’ve done on this record, but I know we can have more balls onstage.
BG: That’s an interesting thing I’ve started thinking about a little bit recently; just hearing Jamie say the same thing. There’s some ideas bumping around that I’ve heard other producers talk about. It would be fun just to do a record that is just a trio record, like a Van Halen record, like slim-to-no overdubs in some big live-sounding room. I’ve met some producers who work, like, say you get three nights in the studio, and there’s fifteen songs you want to record. So you just play those fifteen songs as a set, twice a night, for three nights. Then you end up having six takes of each song, but it’s still a part of this fresh thing in that you played this whole hour and fifteen minute set.
BM: I kind of agree with Brian. I think it’d be a lot of fun to take this band and do a record as a trio in a live setting; maybe go into a theatre or something like that, and mic everything up and multi track everything and try it that way, and then go back and overdub vocals. I don’t know.
JM: I like what the Black Crowes did at Levon’s studio [The Black Crowes recorded the double album Before the Frost…Until the Freeze at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, NY in front of a small studio audience]. I mean, it was a concert, and it comes off that way. But yeah, it’s a totally different animal, and I don’t think we’ve gotten it yet, which I’m fine with.
BF: Completely has been out for a little while now, what’s the reception been like?
JM: Well, the month prior to the actual release, we did a “pay what you want” download, sort of Radiohead-esque. And I was sweating it a little bit, thinking I was just giving this thing away for free, which I was, but people have really responded to it. I mean, way more people than I expected downloaded it, and people paid way more than I would have expected. People were paying way above; double, triple, quadruple what they would do on iTunes, which to me, really kind of shows where the fan base is at. Obviously, only a true fan who wants to support what we’re doing would do that. So that’s really cool to see that sort of offsetting people who grab it for free, which was the intent. And I think that the people who take it for free would never have paid for it in the first place. And now they can spread it to their friends so they can get into it, they can come to the show, and request their favorite song from the record.
So the response has been great. Just on this last tour, people have come up; you know everyone has their own favorite song. It’s amazing; what I think is the hit is not the hit in other people’s minds, and what I think is my least favorite song is someone’s favorite song. So, we’ve already started to see that from the download, which has been out for two months now. We’re really psyched with where people are at. People seem to really like the new music.
BF: For a band not on Atlantic Records with thousands of dollars in the marketing budget, have you seen social media like Facebook and MySpace, as well as sites such as Bandcamp, make a positive difference in getting your music to new fans?
JM: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like it’s just the next step in the internet, really. At first it was “nobody has an email” then “everyone has an email”, then you can put your music on a website, then you’ve got your MySpace page, and now it’s just become this thing where people can have our set from Milwaukee last night today. I think it’s absolutely helped. The Bandcamp thing has been really cool, this is the first time we’ve used it, and it’s sorta like our “other” website. I don’t know how many people go and read the bios and dig into this, but a lot of people just want to click on something, get it on their iPod, and get out. People don’t have time to look at all the other stuff. So to be able to go in there in and grab all three records and last night’s set, and twenty-five other random live shows, has been really great.
And then, the social networking has obviously kind of become this kind of strange… I run into people, and it’s like they feel like they know me and we’re friends, but we’ve never met before in our lives and I don’t even know how I know this person. But they’re at the show, they’ve bought the CD, and they’re favorite song is “Checkmate”. The Grateful Dead handed out acid and threw parties, and now people are on their Facebook pages putting pictures of our show from last night.
BF: On Facebook, sometimes the connections seem really surface level. What do you think when people say things like “we love you, you were the greatest thing to come through town,” yet you might not really know a lot of these people, per se?
JM: It’s better than not having anyone say they’re psyched we’re coming to town [laughs]. It’s definitely a weird sociological experiment that’s going on right now on Facebook. It totally turns me on and turns me off at the same time. I’m still not totally sure about it, but I know it’s good for what we’re doing. If I was just an individual, I would be a little hesitant about it, and I was. I think the fact that you can put music on these things is great. For what we’re doing, it’s the perfect vehicle for it.
BF: The literature for American Heartache really built up 2008 as a big year for the band, and it was, but it seems like 2010 will be the biggest yet. Do you think this is the year that the JMB breaks through to the next level?
JM: Absolutely I do. It’s absolutely going in the right direction. You know, ’08 was good, but I feel like ‘10’s gonna blow it out of the water. It’s all timing, and it’s all the right people hearing it, just people being exposed to it. If people don’t know about it, they’re never going to hear it. I definitely feel like the ball is staring to roll a little bit, with people spreading the music. We’ve hired on new management, a new agent, just a lot of the business side; they’re massive proponents of ‘outside the box’ thinking.
The whole idea of spending $200,000 on a marketing budget, putting ads in magazines… it’s not really happening any more. These magazines aren’t existing; a lot of these magazines have folded, so the whole game has changed. You can’t just put your picture in a magazine and think you’re going to be special. It’s totally different.
We did a video [for “Cupid’s Greatest Thief”]. I was running around New York, dressed as Cupid, and people checked that out and downloaded that. The game’s totally changed, and the people we’re working with are totally into it. Absolutely I feel like we’re going the right way.
BF: Leveraging your resources, what’s the best case for number of shows a year right now?
JM: How many days a year? I think 200 is a good goal.
BF: How far away do you think you are from that goal?
JM: I think we’ll get pretty close this year.
BF: Are people are surprised when they see a band that can really play, but also plays great songs?
JM: People do come up to me a lot and say “Man, I’ve always known your guitar playing, and it’s so great, but I never knew you could sing so well,” or people will say the songs are so great. It’s like people have always known this part of the puzzle, but they never knew how good the rest of it was. And I take that as a massive compliment. It’s like another trick up your sleeve, and not like a one-trick pony.
BF: Sometimes bands that focus on the songs instead of the jams don’t cross over as easily as you have been lately. What would you say to people interested in checking you out?
JM: I would say you should check out the records, dig into the tunes, and I think once you come and see it live, you’ll see it’s a bigger, wider, louder, more stretched-out version of the record. We definitely stretch sections out, have solo jam sections, we incorporate some of that [jamband vibe]. I was definitely a fan of jambands for a long time. The playing was all great, [but] I started gravitating towards songs and vocals, and if there’s playing involved with that, that’s awesome. I think we capture both sides of the equation. We can all play our asses off, we can all sing our asses off, and we can do both at the same time.
BM: When I was in high school, I bought an Allman Brothers DVD, and I’ve always been a huge fan of them, and then I got more into the jamband scene, with Phish and Widespread Panic and all those other things. And then I started to gravitate back towards the Allman Brothers thing and Tom Petty and more song-oriented music. Recently going back to watch one of those DVD’s and being on the road with Gregg this week, something he said really kind of made me [think]. He said “there’s a lot of jambands out there, but we’re a band that jams” and I think that’s more of a description of what we do.
There’s cross pollinations on both sides. There’s jambands that only do the instrumental thing, there’s bands that just do the song thing, and I think we’re one of those bands that are in between. We have our records where there are more concise statements of the tunes, “here’s the beginning, here’s the end, here’s a little in between,” but come see us live and you’ll see some tunes where we stretch way out, some tunes we play it pretty close to what the record is. We’re more of a band that jams, not a “jamband”…you’re not going to see me take a 30-minute bass solo. For what that’s worth.
JM: A jammin’ rock band.
BF: Jamie, you’ve been a part of a lot of great collaborations. What are some of your favorite moments?
JM: One of the coolest things was the first time I went to Allaire Studios for the Medicated Magic album. For whatever reason, I shared a headphone mix with the guests, so when we showed up, there was like a menu, like “Monday- DJ Logic, Dr. John. Tuesday- Olu Dara, Norah Jones.”
Every day, a different guest would show up and I would share a head phone mix with them. I would hear them louder than anything else. I heard Dr. John smoking cigarettes, breathing into the microphone, moanin’ and groanin’ ‘cause his arthritis was killing him. Just hearing nuances that you don’t [normally] hear, like being a fly on the wall in a Ray Charles session. The records are great, but what happens when the tracks stop rolling. Norah Jones- no one knew who she was. I put the cans on, and started the song, and it was literally like one of those things where I almost stopped playing ‘cause it was blowing me away. It was like “oh, this girl from Blue Note, she’s an up and comer, and we’re gonna give her a shot.” So that was really cool.
Robert Randolph and I trading licks, and just trying to cop what the other guy was doing the entire time- it was a very cool situation. Every collaboration is awesome, man. The Widespread Panic thing was great, just to play for that volume of people, and there was a real connection there. We toured a lot with them, and they brought us in and we would rehearse. JB stepped over to me in the middle of a set on Halloween in Chicago in front of like 20,000 people, and said “Take a solo anytime you want. You’re capable of anything.” It’s the middle of a song, and I’m like “OK, the leader of the band says I can do whatever I want!”
BF: That’s some “balls on stage” right there.
JM: Yeah, so they’re all great, man. Got to play with Elvis Costello at Madison Square Garden. Pretty fuckin’ cool.
