[Editor’s Note: Here Randy Ray continues his conversation with the 30db founders, Brendan Bayliss and Jeff Austin. Be sure to check out Part One, to hear Brendan’s thoughts and read Randy’s proper intro].
Part I – A Wheel Set in Motion with Jeff Austin
But time is always a mystery: it seems, more than anything else in existence, to be subjective.
- In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, edited by Jeffrey Miller
RR: Were you surprised at how well your two different styles blended together? As I asked Brendan, it wasn’t like one person had a song and you did it in his style, and then the next person had a song, and you followed his lead. You both worked within the framework of a partnership.
JA: On one side, we have been doing it for a couple of years. Some of the songs are the record, we wrote three and a half, four years ago. It was something that I was really happy when it happened. When you meet another musician, and you have that ability to communicate like that, it’s pretty cool and a rare thing. You can try to collaborate with a lot of folks, and it just doesn’t click. You try and you try and you try, and it just doesn’t happen. I think it starts with how we got along when we first met. We were on the same page, had the same kind of jokes, we were both into the Chicago Cubs, we’re both Midwest guys, so there was an immediate rapport right there.
When we finally broke through the bubble, and were able to write, we were always trying to achieve what you just said: not have it be like “O.K.—I’m going write this kind of song, and you’re going to contribute, and you’ll write your kind of song.” If we’re going to write, let’s really make it cohesive. Let’s make it like a real entity, instead of just, well, “here’s a bluegrass song, and here’s a stretched-out real improv song.” I think if we hadn’t been able to get to that point, I don’t think we would have pursued it like we have.
My favorite thing is when you meet someone who can edit your work without it being just nitpicking. When it’s genuinely for the greater good, when you can find somebody that you can write with like that, it’s pretty rare. I don’t have a lot of (laughs)…this is the best writing partner I’ve had.
RR: Quite frankly, before I got ready to listen to One Man Show for the first time, my initial thought was that I hope this isn’t a project where the two leaders are taking out their frustrations at not being able to do this material with their respective bands. And, much to my relief, it doesn’t sound like that.
JA: That’s good to hear. It goes back to that whole thing. We just really wanted it to become its own thing, and not have it based in “well, I don’t get to play this style of music.” For me, last night [at 30db’s tour opening gig in Minneapolis] was such a cool relief to really rock out (laughs) in a different sense, and in a totally different way. That’s really good to hear, and I’m glad. That’s what we were going for. I think that’s why the project took so long to come to where it is now. We let it really develop. Nothing was rushed. Nothing was hurried. It was allowed to breathe. That’s really cool to hear. I’m glad you feel that way about the record.
RR: The project has taken a very long time to develop. I suppose, obviously, one of the main reasons was that all of the musicians were so busy—everyone from you, Brendan, Cody Dickinson, Nick Forster, and, of course, Eric Thorin.
JA: Eric has his fingers in so many cool projects. He’s producing records, playing with different bands, and arranging. Nick, of course, with eTown, and he’s building E Town Hall, so he’s been doing a lot of fundraising, a lot of traveling, his radio show, and all the bands he plays with, so the scheduling…
Once it became like something that was really real—it wasn’t just a pile of songs that Brendan and I had written (in the early days, we were trying to figure out, “O.K.—is this going to be a duo? Are we going to bring other musicians in? Do we want to try a drum approach?)—and it finally became ‘action time’, and “let’s talk,” then that was the catalyst: full stream ahead.
We mixed the record for fourteen months. We went back and forth with sequences, different ideas—bringing tracks in and bring tracks out. And then last night: we just had a freakin’ blast. We had so much fun because it was finally like “O.K.—now, it’s here. Now, let’s go out, and all the talk, and all the fun that we had envisioned what it could be, now, we actually have it in our hands to make it happen. Let’s take full advantage of these opportunities, these moments.” It was really something. My manager shot a bunch of video last night, and I was looking at it and nerding out, and it’s pretty cool. (laughs)
RR: What were some of your initial impressions that provoked such excitement?
JA: As far as technique, I got to step completely out of what I do at my other job. I didn’t play bluegrass chops on the mandolin once last night. It was a completely new realm to float around in—a lot of sonic manipulation with distortion and stuff. Also, I get to play with Brendan more often than not—we get to play our little duo sets, too—but to get to have somebody like Nick and Eric and Cody to finally stand on stage and make it happen is pretty exhilarating. There’s a lot of smiling going on in the photographs. (laughter) It’s nice. The other thing I noticed, and I was just talking about with Cody, is that [in the May 6 video footage] we are all lurching forward. We’re so ready for this to happen. That talk is over; now, it’s time for action. When you watch the video, we’re all leaning forward and looking at each other, and it’s like “Come on, come on. Let’s get it, let’s get it. Let’s grab it while it’s here.” In pretty much every different way, getting to play different material, and, also, I’ve been dying to play these songs in this way with these guys. It’s a completely different beast when Brendan and I get to execute them as a duo, but then, with a full group… [switches gears] also, too, we finished recording in December ’08, so these songs have been in all of our heads for a long time. (laughs) It was really great to finally make it an actual physical being.
RR: Let’s talk about two songs you brought to the project “Backfire” and “Automatic,” and one song you also developed with Brendan, “Lick # Six.”
JA: We did mutual credits for every tune on the record. If it was mostly Brendan’s idea, or mostly my idea, it came fully realized when we both started the editing process. One of the rarest things is to find somebody that you can not only just write with, but somebody who knows the good that can come from some addition and subtraction. Let’s subtract this last line, and I think it’ll make it flow a little better, or in “Lick # Six,” I came up with that lick and I came up with a couple little lines, and when we sat down, it was like “this could be so much better. There’s something else in this.” It was a different word—I can’t remember what it was. (laughs) I do remember him saying, “You can do better than that. There’s something else there.”
I wrote “Automatic” years ago, and it blew up and was a real kind of drone-y Jay Farrar kind of vibe to it. I thought, “Fuck it. Let’s just blow it up. Let’s see if we can just rock it, man.” And we did. When I first played it for Bayliss, he said, “Play it a little harder. Play it little louder, so I can hear it. Let’s try a different approach.” That’s where, regardless of who sings what—like “One Man Show,” we wrote together, “Always Up,” we wrote together, even though I may take the melody line, or it seems like those were solid collaborations from beginning to end. But “Automatic” is about as far as I could step out of any comfort zone. Comfort zone is kind of a weird phrase. I think you’ve got to be comfortable in your own shoes, and then, everything you step into will become somehow familiar, even if you’ve never been there before.
“Backfire” is not hard to understand (laughs) where that content is coming from [broken relationships, as Bayliss and Austin both got divorced within months of each other], but it’s the same thing. When I sat down, and penned that tune out, the way it changed and developed, and went through the process, was really a collaborative thing that happens. The shit that we both went through really was important because we knew where we were coming from, so it wasn’t like “I can’t identify; I don’t think I have anything to contribute to that because I don’t know where you’re coming from.” The fact that we both had that experience, and we both knew—“Hey, man, I know what you’re getting at”—made that flow and the writing a lot easier (laugh), if you can think that of such heavy content: “Oh, it’s kind of easy.”
RR: What about something like “Grave,” which has another pointed edge to it?
JA: Most of that was written in about five minutes. That was one of those tunes that just popped out, I’m telling you. It just kind of happened. Where I live in Colorado, in my town, there’s all these coal trains that go by, and I was sitting and stopped by these coal trains. And I was thinking, “This is just a gigantic train. There’s gotta be about 113…” and that was it. I just sat there, stopped by the train, wrote it, got to my house, finished it up, and once again, bringing it in to Brendan, and the structure and the movement, and, yeah, that one kind of blew off the page. It wrote itself. The chorus stuck with me, and went through some editing processes when I showed it to Brendan.
Man, you know, it’s so…for me, to see these songs finally coming to the stage, it’ll be cool for people to hear them, and it takes it to a different place. I think of when that song was first written, we first tried to record it as a duo, and we said, “This needs a band behind it. This needs to really move.” Yeah, it’s crazy. That one wrote itself. That was one of those ones that you just can’t write fast enough. If you look back at the original lyrics of that, it’s like all abbreviations because I couldn’t write fast enough. I thought, “Oh, shit, I better get this out, or I’m going to forget it.”
RR: I’m glad you said that because my feeling is that the classic songs that stand up are sometimes the ones that just wrote themselves rather quickly.
JA: Sometimes songs like that, I think—the other part, too, about talking about how we edited and mixed the record for 14 months, sometimes, you can mix yourself into a corner. Sometimes, it’s so in your head. When that first line came out—113 coal cars, I can hear ‘em scream—it was like, “All right, this thing doesn’t need to be overthought. It just needs to be a rocker, and comes out.” It was a relief to write it. When an idea comes, it doesn’t matter what kind of context I’m writing it for—a duo, or a bluegrass band, or a rock band—I just write it, and let it happen. Like I said, you can put yourself in a corner if you overthink things sometimes. (laughs)
RR: How about “One More?”
JA: That was another one. That one wrote itself pretty quickly, too. The time that those songs were written, emotions were so on the surface and raw that it’s almost like the indent in the paper was so deep because I was pressing—“one more, one more”—you know, that kind of stuff. That just comes from a place of straight up frustration like “what the hell’s goin’ on? Make up your mind.” (laughs) That’s where that song came from. In truth, I always wanted to write a little Bo Diddley [Austin scats the repetitive stutterstep riff sound often heard in Diddley’s tunes]—that’s the way it’s addressed in musician circles: “this one has a Bo Diddley feel.” That’s kind of my let-loose-and-hear-you-go-have-at-it, so…
PART II – STRONG COFFEE HELPS YOU FOCUS WITH JEFF AUSTIN
Chasing up and down corridors. A bit of sub-Errol Flynn work. Anti-swashbuckling. To be actually living these childhood dreams and fantasies…I have to pinch myself mentally to be sure it’s happening.
- Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years, Michael Palin
RR: What are your plans with the band at this point? Brendan alluded to the fact that you’re going to try to take 30db back out on the road in September.
JA: Yeah. I think we’re going to make that happen. We’ve got a chunk of time in September. I’ll tell ya, after even just one show, we’ve got to figure out times to play some more shows because that was just too much damn fun.
RR: Last fall, Yonder Mountain released a strong studio album called The Show, but at the time, you must have been thinking that you also had this project on the horizon, ready to take off. How do you balance all these projects in your mind? Do you take one day at a time, thinking of what you have in front of you on that day?
JA: Yeah, you know, I’m not quite sure. (laughter) It’s like that overthinking…I’m not quite sure. I just try to let it happen. After a couple of weeks when I got off the road with Yonder, and really immersed myself in all this material, I knew that “oh my God, I have to make sure I have all this stuff right.” But, for me, structure and me are at odds sometimes. Sometimes, just letting it happen is the best. Strong coffee helps you focus, as well. (laughter) Strong coffee. It goes back to the whole thing—when Brendan and I started doing this, we said, “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it all the way. Let’s really commit to it. Let’s really make this happen.”
Which hat do you put on? Try not to overthink it. I found that when I try to be really, really serious, sometimes, it just doesn’t work out so good. (laughs) You always try to take it with an air of lightness—not being lackadaisical with the responsibility that comes with it, but just trying to stay loose all day. When I try to do this: “I’ve got to sit down. I’ve got to drill these songs into my head. I’ve really got to put on the 30db hat”—it doesn’t always end up so well. You overthink everything, and put yourself in a box.
RR: But what do you envision that you’ll be doing over the next year or so?
JA: What I’d really like to do is really commit to this and make this a really legit kind of thing. The cool part is we’re all on the same page with that. Brendan and I—this is not just a record that we made, it came out, let’s just do a couple of gigs, and let’s be done with it. We both really have a desire to have this become a real legitimate band, and an entity that operates and lives on its own. Like I said, Brendan has the same emotions. And the rest of the guys in the van—they wouldn’t be sitting in the van right now if we all didn’t have the same desire to really really commit to this. Over the next year, I’d say that would be my main focus—to really see where this can go. I sound like a broken record, but it goes back to “enough talk; let’s put this into action. If we’re going to do it, let’s really commit to it.”
We’re a band. We all consider ourselves that. It’s not like me and Brendan, and then these other guys that we brought in. We are all members of 30db. We’re all in this band, and we’re all in it to win it. When that stuff happens, when a guy like Nick Forster, or Cody Dickinson, or Eric Thorin says, “You know what—I’m in it. I’m committed. I’m ready. Let’s jump in the van, and go out on the road,” that’s a bold statement from guys that both Brendan and I really admire and have a lot of respect for. When they’re willing
to stand there with you, shoulder to shoulder, you’d be a fool not to make that a focus, and not to make that something that you really see through. That’s really my main focus if I had anything other than what I do first in my bluegrass world—that will always be
part of my life, and I’m well aware of my responsibilities with that—but this is something that is pretty dear to my heart, and four-plus years in the making. Now, that it’s in front of us, let’s get after it, and let’s do it. We’re searching to see if there’s a summer date, or some festival date that we can try to pull off, and the fact that everybody’s into it is already powerful, but what it could be is what I think is exciting. It’s because all of us on our own have been through our own musical journey. We’ve all done our thing, and have these bands that we are identified with, so what a cool thing to put these five brains together, and really commit to something that has endless possibilities. We could play bars for the next three or four years and that’s where it goes, or it can turn into something else. Who knows what? It’s a pretty exciting world to live in (laughs), right now, this little 30db white cargo van kind of world. It’s pretty cool.
RR: “In it to win it” is the key.
JA: Yeah, we are. Listen—when Brendan and I were first writing, it was more talk than work. We would say, “Oh, yeah, this could happen, and that could happen,” and, finally, it got to a point where “all right—enough fuckin’ around.” Yeah, that’s the thing. When I do something half-assed, I don’t get a lot of satisfaction out of it. Material that’s this close to who I am, and who I am as a writer, and as a person, and as a (laughs) breathing being going through this life, it would be such a disservice to not be in it to win it. (laughs) That’s just kind of how it goes.
