“I would be down to be one of those split personalities,” declares Sam Cohen. He is referring to his love of playing with both his electric rock band Yellowbirds and in a more stripped down setting, but Cohen has already left split personality in the dust, leaning closer to something resembling hyperactive musical ADD. Just off the road from touring in an acoustic duo, Cohen was out and about in Brooklyn over the past week, performing a psychedelic rock show with Yellowbirds at Glasslands and appearing at dive bar Goodbye Blue Monday to back indie folksinger Hannah Cohen and later lead a group improvisation inspired by a film. Since his first band Apollo Sunshine broke up, Sam has not lived on the road incessantly touring like he used to, but he’s stayed equally busy with a myriad of different projects, establishing himself as a lynchpin of Brooklyn’s collaborative music scene.
Cohen had a prolific 2012, highlighted by his leadership role in The Complete Last Waltz and joining The National and Bob Weir to play Grateful Dead songs at Weir’s TRI Studios. And with a Yellowbirds album due to arrive in May and a more active touring schedule planned, he looks to stay just as busy in 2013. He sat down with jambands.com to talk some of his favorite moments from the past year and 2013 plans.
I wanted to start off by talking about your 2012. You had a packed year with Yellowbirds and a bunch of other projects, including a couple of tributes to Levon Helm. The first one was at Brooklyn Bowl, and was one of my personal favorite shows of the year. It was so soon after Levon’s death that it seemed like everyone in the crowd was still shocked but excited to celebrate his life and share joy in his music. What was the feeling onstage?
Yeah there was so much raw emotion about his passing – it was just a few weeks before. It was an incredible, incredible vibe, incredible night. I’ve never done any kind of tribute to anything before that concert and it seemed like an amazing reason to go do one. I’m a huge fan of The Band and Levon Helm specifically, so it was an honor to be a part of and I feel like everyone brought a lot of genuine emotion and their positive baggage to that concert, so it was really special.
It’s great to hear you guys had as much fun as we did in the crowd. And then in the fall, you did another one – The Complete Last Waltz on the West Coast. This time you were the musical director, the man in charge of dividing up those four historic hours of music among 25-30 different musicians. How did you approach that and deciding who would sing what and play together?
That was one of the biggest administrative challenges I’ve ever had to deal with. I think I got asked to do the concert in August… August or September. It took place in November, and the only thing that was really set up was that Ramie Egan, who was the producer and the guy who had the whole idea for the show and is friends with a lot of the guys who are the core band – Scott Metzger, Joe Russo… had talked to them, you know, “Would y’all wanna do something like this? I’ve got a hold on this space.” But by the time I got involved, everything else was spinning around that one constant – the date was set. That’s not really a lot of time for a concert like that.
For the next 2-3 months, anyone’s got their schedule of gigs or work or whatever they’re doing planned out… if they’re not gonna be on tour that week they’ve probably got Thanksgiving plans because it was Thanksgiving weekend. So we knew finding the people we wanted was gonna be a challenge. And then who was there was constantly growing… Some people, I wanted them involved but didn’t know what I wanted them to do. Other people, I knew exactly what I wanted them to sing… so it was a lot of juggling.
As the pool kept growing of who was involved, we sort of shifted around who should do what. But luckily we had an amazing core band, like totally amazing core band, all great guys who live in Brooklyn. So we were able to rehearse a ton, with just the band, so we knew that could be solid. And then as we worked in the singers closer to the show, building up to it, and it all really came together in the final hours. Which it had to, because everyone wasn’t in the same location until the day before the show.
Right. Well that’s how the best ones sometimes work. Was the groundwork laid for that during the Brooklyn Bowl tribute? It seemed like a lot of the same group of friends playing with you.
Yeah it was a lot of the same guys in the band – like Scott Metzger, Marco Benevento, Joe Russo, Dave Dreiwitz. All those guys were part of that first one. And it was great because I just sang a couple of songs. I was not part of the core group for that thing, I was like a guest, I did two songs. I felt really confident going in that they had already played a ton of this stuff. But actually so much of The Last Waltz is covers that there was still a ton of shit they’d never played before.
Did you have a specific moment from those shows that stood out as a favorite part?
I was only onstage for two songs for that first one, but The Complete Last Waltz… it was completely thrilling. I’ve never taken on something that big, and to see it come off… One of my favorite moments was after the intro with the horns up in the balcony and we had the little combo come in on the other balcony – it was mandolin, auto harp and acoustic guitar – and then the lights came up on the stage and we went into “Up On Cripple Creek.” And that was something we never got the chance to rehearse. It was just like “Put these guys up there, those guys up there, they’ll play the thing, let the lighting guy know.” And then, hopefully it comes off. And then like the lights came up, we went into “Up On Cripple Creek,” and I saw all these smiling people, from the ground to the ceiling, with the widest eyes and their hands in the air and this roar. And it was just unbelievable. Like ok, here we go, I’m going to play this concert for the next four hours and it’s totally working. I knew at that moment that it had the potential to exceed all expectations, and it did.
You mentioned earlier that you’ve always been a huge fan of The Band and Levon. Can you talk a little bit about the influence he’s had on your career?
I had a band before Yellowbirds, it’s called Apollo Sunshine. We did an album called Katonah, and that was our first album and it was really skitzo-pop psychedelic stuff. And as we were finishing that record, though we had already recorded most of it, we started getting into more raw, minimal stuff, and music more about dynamics and players working together, like The Band. Our friend came over with the DVD of The Last Waltz, and was like “Oh my god, you guys have never seen this? You’ve gotta come over and get high, you gotta watch this now.” And it totally smoked us. I just loved it.
I read Levon’s book and got deeper and deeper into that stuff. It’s always been a source of inspiration, that’s like a band at the ultimate level of what that concept of a band is supposed to be, this communal thing on wheels with a band house and everything. At one point Apollo Sunshine lived in a farmhouse in western Mass. Our MO of what the model of a functioning group of musicians was; was very inspired by The Band.
I wanted to ask you about a couple of other little tributes and side-projects that you participated in with Bob Weir at TRI Studios. How did you enjoy those?
I loved that! Honestly, I’m also a really big Dead fan. I never got to go see them in the 90’s… I grew up in Houston and maybe they were there once or twice. But I was always a fan of their early records, like tremendously. I got my first few cassettes at pawnshops and got into them from there. So that was awesome, since then I’ve gotten deeper into that band, read a lot about them. It was amazing to spend that much time with Bob Weir.
I especially loved the one we did with The National, where we actually had a ton of rehearsal in New York, really internalizing their music, figuring out how we wanted to play it, and then getting to go play with Bob Weir. We had a couple of twelve hour rehearsals and then we rehearsed maybe 4-5 hours the day of the concert, and the concert itself was close to three hours long. So it was… it was incredible. The only time he stopped to practice was to work on the form of the jam, which was so cool. He would stop and say “Oh when we would play this, there’s actually more of a form to it, it’s not all in E, it’s in E and then it’s in C-sharp minor, then we go back to E, then someone starts playing this riff and then we all start playing that riff in different permutations and then we go back into verse. So it was basically an enormously dorky musical experience and spiritually fulfilling.
As a Deadhead growing up, how did you approach playing those Garcia solos?
I mean, I just did. Learning to play guitar, I was always more into figuring out how to improvise like my heroes rather than learning a ton of their lines. I’ve never been big on licks, I don’t have a big bag of licks, solos I know… He was one of the guys who I just heard things – even at 13-14 years old – that were different about him and unique to him. His tone and the way he likes to bend the major 7’s up to the root instead of the flat 7’s up the root, just little things, idiosyncrasies about his playing and signatures of his playing… I wanted to honor that and also not try to go so deep that I wasn’t also communicating (my own) music. I didn’t want to just communicate a tribute, I wanted to play music, you gotta be yourself to do that.
Well I thought it all turned out great. And one of the things that struck me was that it seemed to be less about big guitar solos and more about group interplay, and so that’s interesting you mentioned you rehearsed heavily. What was that rehearsal process like? How did you become involved with The National and this project?
Well I agree with a lot of what you were just saying, and we were really happy about being able to make it less solo-y and more like a band playing. A lot of that is due to Josh Kaufman, who was the bandleader for that. I came in through him. He’s old friends with The National guys and they asked him to lead the rehearsals and be the bandleader for that event and he brought me in. Josh is the other guitar player in Yellowbirds and knew I loved the Dead and said, “Hey, you should do this with me.” I obviously jumped at the chance and that was that. A lot of the rehearsal was – this is how it’s been done for years, let’s actually make it more of a band section than a solo. Keep the solos short was a constant conversation.
Let’s shift gears towards Yellowbirds. You’ve already wrapped up your first tour of the year. 2013 is a month old and you’ve already been up and down and East coast. How did touring with Guster go?
It was awesome! I owe them a huge thanks for this tour because I was able to do it all by myself as far as logistics go. Luke Reynolds from Guster was accompanying me for the tour, which enabled me to fly down to New Orleans, where the tour began and we did 11 shows together. It was nice, it was Luke and I playing and then the string players Charlene Huang and April Guthrie who play cello and violin learned a couple of my songs, or one of my songs and one cover, and it changed it into kinda a chamber thing.
I was riding on their tour bus. I had a bed, I had a ride, and we were hanging out all the time. It was a ton of fun to be with those guys, and the easiest tour I’ve ever gotten to do, the cushiest. And the shows were great, the crowds were really receptive and felt like it was really connecting.
And how did you like playing those songs in the more stripped down context?
I’ve always enjoyed that. We’ve done a good amount of that with just Josh and I. Last April we actually did some shows that way opening for Guster with Josh and I. And then there was one at State College that Josh couldn’t do and I went out solo and Luke was cool enough to learn half my set on short notice and play it with me.
So that opened our eyes to the possibility that I could go out by myself and open for Guster and play with Luke. I get a big kick out of playing the stuff in a stripped down way. I feel like there are a lot of dynamics that are possible, the guitar becomes a bigger thing, it becomes the whole thing. And having strings is super cool, I never get to play live with strings, few people do. So that was a total treat.
Is that something you’re interested in pursuing more or is Yellowbirds going to stay first and foremost an electric band?
I would be down to be one of those split personalities. I’ve got the wild psychedelic rock band and I’ve got my more like sensitive guy stripped down thing. I don’t really like playing solo. I just don’t get a kick out of that. I think because of the way I play guitar, it needs some kind of accompanist, like another guitar player.
But I really do enjoy playing that way. It’s really fun. It’s a great way to connect to a new audience because the music is distilled down to just the bare essentials. This tour I was opening for people who mostly had no idea who I was, and it’s really awesome that it would be impossible to not get what someone is doing when you’re that stripped down. If they like it, that feels like a lasting connection. Not to say I don’t love playing with the full band too. I’m really excited to get back to that.
What do you guys have on the table this year?
Mostly New York shows coming up in the immediate future. We’re playing Mercury Lounge on the 15th of March, and we’re releasing the second record in May. So we’ll definitely be doing some touring this summer. So far we’ve booked Pickathon in August and I’m sure we’ll fill in some dates around then with West Coast touring.
So the new album has been recorded? Can you tell me a little about that?
Yeah, it’s the first album that I got to make in my studio, which is a place I’ve been renting for a little over a year… Josh and I and Brian, they’re both from Yellowbirds, and a few other guys from The Hold Steady and The Dap-Kings share this place. It’s got some great gear, great instruments. It’s a really small, modest little room. It’s like a musical clubhouse and we can get all this stuff done in there. So it was pretty amazing to have my own familiar place to work that was also a fully functioning recording studio. The last record was like some basics in a studio and I did the rest in my apartment. And I liked the result, but it’s pretty cool to have that same familiarity that I had in my apartment, but it’s like a real studio.
So did that open you up to including new sounds or musical approaches on the new album?
Definitely. I feel like on the whole the record has a more open sound, less congested and dense sound because I had more options. Plus I worked with an engineer who shares the room with us, Jim Smith, and he co-produced the record with me. I really admire his approach to recording and sound and together we were able to get singular sounds that we found really interesting, so I didn’t feel compelled to add a lot more. I loved the drums sound, I loved the bass sound, it was almost a question of what’s the least I can add and have this be done? And not from a perspective of speed or laziness cause it still took a long time. But from a perspective of I don’t wanna clutter these sounds. If you listen to the two records, you can see the space around everything, and it feels bigger.
One last question for you – one of the things that I love about The Color is the layers and layers of sound – with acoustic guitars and harmonies and the autoharp and everything – and it reminds me of the video that you put together for “The Rest of My Life” with all the collage images. Do you see a connection between making music and layering all those pictures together to make that video?
Absolutely. That was completely my wavelength at the time that I made that record and that video. I was really into combining fidelities, those scratchy old classical records, and then the hi-fi of studio recordings and the lo-fi of bedroom recordings and it’s all kinda mashed together on the record to what I really wanted it to sound like. Like things from different worlds and times and spaces and cutting in and out and playing all together. So yeah, I think the visual manifestation of that maybe informed the music as vice versa.
Are those videos a hobby that you have a sustained interest in?
Yeah definitely. I did the first one for an Apollo Sunshine song just on a whim. We were like “Hey we should make a video for the new record!” At the time it was new, it was called Shall Noise Upon. I was talking to my wife Sarah about it, like “What can we do? We gotta do something cool…” and she was said “Oh we should cut up nature books and make a collage video.” We started doing that and I just got super into it, like obsessed and had days when I wouldn’t even leave the apartment or even put pants on, working on the ground with it. And over the course of a few videos – I’ve done two Yellowbirds videos and I did one for Chad Stokes that’s animated that’s called “Rainsong” and I did one for Josh Ritter that’s called “Love’s Making It’s Way Back Home” and kept advancing the techniques and refining it, so yes it’s definitely something I have a sustained interest in and something I want to do more of.
