Photo by Vernon Webb
Yonder Mountain String Band have their work cut out for them. They just wrapped up their annual Northwest String Summit at Oregon’s Horning’s Hideout, and they’ll be hosting other festivals in the Ozark Mountains and Mexico’s Mayan Riviera before the year is up. Plus there still plenty of stops left on their summer tour, and their fall dates have started to trickle in as well.
Yet all of these commitments haven’t stopped Yonder frontman Jeff Austin from pursuing a side project. The mandolin player just announced a number of Jeff Austin & Friends gigs for later this summer, and he recently played one such show at this year’s Electric Forest. There he was joined by a stellar lineup that featured Soulive’s Eric Krasno, The North Mississippi Allstars’ Cody Dickinson, Greensky Bluegrass’ Anders Beck and renowned bassist Eric Thorin. We caught up with Austin right after his Electric Forest set to talk about the Jeff Austin & Friends project, upcoming Yonder releases, the influence of the String Cheese Incident and more.
So you just had an interesting group of talented musicians with you on stage. What inspired you to get these guys together for the show?
Well, the main impetus came when they offered me the show. I tend to do these “and Friends” shows as a loose kind of bluegrass situation with a banjo and bass, and when they offered the gig, they actually said, “Would he be interested in doing a departure from the stuff that he does normally?” And I’ve played plenty of bluegrass music, so I love doing this kind of stuff. And Cody [Dickinson] and Eric [Krasno] were immediate because those guys, I’d march into the gates of hell with them. We speak the same language on a rhythmic basis and just where we’re at together, so they both said, “Yes.” And then Anders [Beck], you know he’s playing with Greensky tomorrow, they’re actually all here. So the band, for the longest time, was me, Cody, Eric and Anders.
And then I started kind of thinking. Krasno and I have known each other for a long time and it’s always been the backstage conversation: “Man we should play music together. We should do a set. We should something. We should do that,” and it was 2 or 3 weeks after the band had been set and I reached out to Yonder’s manager and said, “Is Eric, Krasno gonna be there?”
And he said, “Oh yeah, well Lettuce is playing right after you guys.” And I said, “Well, would he be interested?” And the response was “Yeah.” So, Eric just turned the whole thing into—because the main thing was for guitar, there was a hole. And I thought, “_Well fuck_, if we’re gonna have fun, might as well get one of the best guitar players there is,” And it was so nice. It was fun for me, having admired him as a musician and also knowing him as a friend, to have him sit in this room and rehearse and he’s got my songs charted out. He’s playing, and I thought, “Man that’s wild, man.”
So, that’s how it came together.
So how often do you do this “Jeff Austin and Friends” thing and how is it different from Yonder?
I think what it is, I do it more often now than I have. Yonder’s got kind of a lighter year as far as travelling and stuff, there’s a lot of kids and stuff going on now so it’s a little priority shift. But I like to do it for a number of reasons. One: I have a lot of material and I have a lot of material that’s played in Yonder, but I also have a ton of material that I don’t play outside of these kinds of groups. And it’s just because I hear it within this context. And it’s just different because Yonder’s a democratic situation, there’s four of us. And when I do this kind of thing, I get to make the list and I get to play songs I don’t usually play in Yonder. I can take different approaches, especially with a lineup like this. I write a lot of songs in the wrong context. The last song we played, “What the Night Brings,” I never wrote it with the intention of it being played bluegrass. I wrote it being like a four-minute pop song, like a rock song, you know? And out of necessity, it sped up and turned into a bluegrass tune, and it works both ways. Playing it like this is so fun for me because I don’t get to do it that often. I try to do this as much as I can because I like to stay busy. It’s good to keep me busy and focused on things. You don’t get in trouble that way. (Laughs.)
So in the next six months, Yonder has the Northwest String Summit, Harvest Festival, Strings & Sol—what’s it like taking the lead on so many festivals?
It’s wild. It’s something we kind of always wanted to do. When I go see shows, I love going to see a multi-night run of a band, especially one that varies their setlist. Like Phish, or something, I’ve seen them for 20+ years. So my favorite nights were two-or three-night runs where you get to settle in and there’s something that happens amongst the crowd, amongst the band, amongst everything. There’s a spiraling of energy that happens, that really develops over a few days.
And it’s the same thing with The String Summit, and Harvest and Strings & Sol and stuff. You really get to build the story. You don’t have to tell it all at once. You play a festival and you get an hour-and-a-half. You got tell the whole story at once. You get four days on a beach in Mexico, you get to really kind of develop it, you get to pace it a little differently and take your time. And another fun thing about that is we have songs that can be split up, start and sandwich, this and that goes into this kind of thing. With a multi-night run, it’s fun to do, like, the beginning of “Snow on the Pines” night one, and then night three, at the end of the second set, end it. Because I’m a—I’m a fucking nerd. When I was touring with the Dead in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when they’d start a Dark Star and finish it three days later, I’d get off on that shit. I dig it. And it’s fun to be that kind of musical weirdo and do that with fans that are coming to see you play.
It’s also something we’d always wanted to do. We’d always wanted to establish ourselves in places, you know? In a concert hall you can go from 500 people to 1,000 people to 2,000 people to whatever, or more in certain places. That’s a different kind of work when you can get 3,000 people at a festival and then 4,000 and then 7,000. It’s something Yonder’s always wanted to do. And we’ve partnered up with great people who’ve helped make that happen. It doesn’t happen without the partners: Cloud Nine and Pipeline Productions and stuff.
Photo by Stuart Levine
It’s been almost four years since you guys released The Show. I hear you have a new album coming soon. Can you talk a little about that?
We have a—it’s an EP actually, it’s kind of fun. We were like, not to make any kind of comparison to The Beatles—ever—but you know how they just recorded records and never toured? We just tour and we don’t make records.
Part of that came out of the fact that we fund everything on our own. And when we put out The Show, we put a lot of money into it, a lot of money behind it, and a lot of this and that and it just fell flat. It didn’t sell. It’s a mindfuck, what did we do wrong? Could this have been different? Could this have been different? And it was just the way the changing of the tide was. People were downloading music. I consciously have a weird thing about downloading music for free. I genuinely avoid it because it’s something like, “I’m gonna pay for it! I want the record, I’m gonna buy it!”
And also, you know, we don’t all live in Colorado anymore. There are three of us in Colorado and one of us in California. So the ability, when we’re home, to say, “We’ve got 4 weeks off, let’s take a week off, then go in the studio for a week,” it’s not that easy. Like I said, there are babies, there are families. I’ll be 40 next year. I’m not the 25-year-old kid I was when I started. There are different priorities in life. I want to be able to be home and retile my bathroom. I know that’s not the most rock star thing you could say, and God forbid if I would ever call myself a rock star, but I love that people are like, “What do you do when you’re home? Go rage?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I pick out paint samples. I pick out cherry wood flooring.” “What?” “Yeah, that’s what I do. That’s really what I do. I fill up kiddie pools and I garden.”
But, so, the record thing. We said, “Let’s start this way: maybe re-imagine the way you release a record. We each pick a song and we put it out. And maybe that’s more approachable, unless you’re on a big label, Columbia or RCA or any of that shit, to print up 20,000 discs and booklets and all that shit. That, to me, just seemed so—the tactile experience of record buying is starting to die off. I can sit here right now on my phone and buy Daft Punk. Right now. Done. You know what I mean? And that’s fine. But how do you transfer the music to people? So I think that the EP idea where it’s accessible, it’s 4 songs, it’s 25 minutes and ‘check it out,’ and then we can release another down the road. It’s just a re-imagining of how it all works. People re-imagine how they tour. If something’s not working in a market, let’s say we went from 2,000 people 1,200 people, what do we do new? Well, it’s the same thing with a record. “Ah, we sold 25,000 records,” which we’ve never sold, and then we sold 5,000 records, so where’s the reinvention of how to do that?
It makes no sense to, like I said, we’re funding it. There’s no guy behind a desk with a big cigar and a monocle going, “Here kids!,” throwing us bags of gold, that’s not how it goes. We’re responsible for it. And if you’re going to spend $250,000 on a record and have it in a warehouse, it’s not beneficial. These are the un-fun parts of the business. You get frustrated. You get weirded out. It’s that self-guessing, that second-guessing yourself.
Well how about a Mountain Tracks Vol. 6?
Oh man, it hit me the other day that about 7-8 years ago we said, “Let’s record every night.” And now there’s a room full of fucking everything. There’s hard drives, just terabytes of shit, years of stuff. So I don’t think that would be something that would be out of the question, but I will say the one thing, as far as transferring music to the fans, the things that we do with the live downloads and stuff, my gosh, those really move. People really buy those. And I will say, we’ll play the big shows and we won’t sell that many. And then we’ll play a six hundred-seat place in Florida and we’ll sell 2,000 of them. I’m going, “This is wild.” It’s wide open. There’s no set thing for it. Whereas I don’t think it would be something out of the question, the fact that it took us since 2008 to record four songs.
And really, the recording of the record came up by surprise. Last year we were doing interviews and people said, “So, tell me about your most recent record.” And I said, “What recent record?” And they’d say “Well, _The Show._” And I’d go, “Oh my god. Oh my. Oh my god, that came out in ’09; we recorded in ‘08 and now it’s 2012.” And it’s like, holy crap, four years in a band, that’s a lifetime.
Speaking of studio work, you guys have recorded a few tracks in the past with drums but you rarely bring them in live…
We have at certain points. We’ve been lucky to play live shows with some of the best drummers, not just drummers, but musicians in general. Jon Fishman, Pete Thomas, who was the Elvis Costello & The Attractions drummer. The guy is on stage with us who played “Watching the Detectives” and fucking “Veronica.” He’s playing the snare drum of the ’70 megahits, you know? Pete’s been with Elvis for 35, 40 years. He’s been with him since the very start and so we have been lucky to have those people on stage. Future Man is another great, great drummer we get to play with.
But there are times for myself, in particular in the studio, where I like to use it for what it is. It is not the stage. It’s different and therefore you can experiment with different things. Like on The Show, I’m not standing on stage during “Honestly” singing through a Leslie cabinet with a microphone attached to it, which I’m doing on “Honestly.” It sounds like a guitar effect; it’s me singing through a Leslie speaker with Tom Rothrock just spinning pedals. It took me a long time because “We’ve gotta sound like ourselves! We don’t sound like ourselves in the studio.” Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s a different place. You’re not on stage, you can do different things, you can try different tricks, you can mess around with things. We’re going to layer four guitars over this song. Why? Because we’re in the studio, we’re not on stage. There is that transferability from the studio to the stage that you want to have some truth to. But I think if you lock yourself into that too long, it can hinder who you are and what you want to do. Myself, I love playing with drums. I didn’t grow up listening to bluegrass music, I grew up listening to ‘80s pop bands. There’s something about the beauty of a three-and-a-half-minute crafted song that had a big hook and a catchy chorus and killer production. I love that, I love it. I also love the 45-minute explorations of a 1989 Grateful Dead show. For me, I love playing with drums. As a mandolinist, as a mandolin player, it’s easier on my right hand too. [Laughs.] I can do different things.
