Photo by Larry Hulst
This weekend in Telluride, the String Cheese Incident will return to the stage for their first performances since New Year’s Eve. The band will be on the road for much of the summer, mostly in festival settings, with gigs at Electric Forest, Forecastle and Horning’s Hideout. On September 5 and 6 the group will be appear at the inaugural Interlocken Festival in Arrington, VA. In addition to their own performance the group will appear with special guest Zac Brown as the Zac Brown Incident. Last month, SCI’s Keith Moseley came out to Red Rocks (where String Cheese is slated to appear on July 26 and 27), to watch the Zac Brown Band in preparation for Interlocken. In the following conversation Moseley discusses the ZBB as well as the next String Cheese album and other upcoming endeavors.
You were sidestage during the final night of the Zac Brown Band at Red Rocks. I assume you were prepping for Interlocken. How familiar were you with Zac and the group?
That’s the first time I’d seen them. I first caught wind of Zac Brown Band seeing them play on the Grammys television show, two, three years ago. I checked them out and was interested in the music they’d been making. A jamband playing country was my initial take on it. Fast-forward to a couple months ago when we started talking to Mike Luba, one of our managers who saying, “What do you think about doing the Zac Brown Incident at this upcoming Interlocken festival? Part of the deal there is going to be some collaborations and crossovers between different artists.” And we said, “Yeah, great. That sounds really interesting.” I’ve always had some interest in bluegrass, country roots kind of music, so I was definitely interested. And then they just happened to be playing Red Rocks here, so I went down on Friday and checked out the show, spent a little time getting to know Zac after the show. We met for the first time right before the show, checked it out, and I spent a little time afterwards just talking about the upcoming chance to play together and what tunes we might to, trying to find some common ground.
It turns out there’s a lot of common ground there. Before the Zac Brown Band I guess he did thousands of bar gigs playing all the classic rock covers. He’s a Dead fan, there’s a lot of crossover there, a lot of common ground. So I’m looking forward to playing with him.
I know it’s still a few months out but can you give us a hint as to what folks can expect from the Zac Brown Incident at Interlocken?
I think that the idea will be that we’ll do a few Zac Brown tunes and a few String Cheese tunes and we’ll trade some verses and that will be a start of the originals. We also spoke about, if we do some originals, if we do some Zac Brown tunes, let’s try to do them a little differently than his band does them. We don’t want to come out and try to replicate exactly what they do. We might take “Chicken Fried,” which is a country tune and give it more of a reggae feel, something like that. And then as far as covers we were just brainstorming back and forth, everything from Pink Floyd tunes to Grateful Dead, Tom Petty, The Band, some classic country, George Jones, I don’t want to give it away, but those are the things we were looking up. To be continued. We’ve kind of got a rough list going and we’ve emailed a couple times since then, “Check out this tune.” It turns out Zac has an incredible music vocabulary and library. You know he reminds me a lot of Keller in a lot of ways. Obviously they’re very different in that Keller’s very quirky and into the looping thing and unique, but just in terms of being a pure singer/songwriter with a huge library, catalogue of tunes and being very driven. Those guys are similar in a lot of ways.
Speaking of Keller, do you have any plans to tour or record with him at some point?
You know, I love playing with Keller. The only thing on the horizon right now it looks like there’s potentially a Grateful Grass date or two before the end of the year, which was Keller and myself and Jeff Austin doing some Grateful Dead things. So that might happen before the end of the year. He’s also talked about doing the WMD reunion with myself and [Gibb] Droll and [Jeff] Sipe. I love that and was really proud of that project and hopefully we can figure out some time to do it. It’s all about scheduling of course and String Cheese looks to be a little busier this summer and fall it’s always hard to squeeze these things in there, but I would jump in any camp with Keller at any time.
In terms of String Cheese, when I last spoke with Kyle [Hollingsworth] he mentioned that the band was coming to grips with live material that might manifest itself in a new record. Where does that stand?
Yeah, it’s in the can and the final mixes are happening now. Jerry Harrison from Talking Heads is doing the producing. He came in and helped us in the final stages of recording and is doing all the mixing now. So Jerry and his main engineer, Eric Throngren, are doing the final mixes now and we’re looking at I’m guessing the fall for a release day. So it’s happening and I couldn’t be more excited to finally get another release out there. It’s going to be great.
Photo by Brian Spady
You recorded it in studio?
Yeah, we kind of did it in conjunction with our rehearsals last December for New Year’s. We set up at a local studio here in Boulder, Immersive Studios, and spent half the time rehearsing for New Year’s and half the time cutting basic tracks. And in January, early February we spent another couple weeks finishing up the tracking and Jerry was there for that. So yeah, it’s getting mixed, putting the final touches on it and again, what a great thing for us to have a new studio release for us coming out.
Have people heard the songs played live yet?
Most of the tunes have probably been played out in the last twelve months, though maybe they’ve only been played a handful of times. Certainly going into the studio the idea was “Here are our newest, freshest tunes, let’s really groom them into little masterpieces. Let’s really break them down and build them back up in the studio in the most creative way, to really support the song.”
The thing that I think we all enjoy about the studio is the creative process. The idea of being able to take a song and really put it under the microscope and strip away the excess, figure out what is the real essence of the song and kind of rebuild it in the studio. From a creative standpoint it’s really exciting and it’s really a telltale, eye-opening experience for the band to kind of dig in on song structure and figure out what makes it work. So for us I think it’s really energizing the band creatively to spend some time in the studio working on a new record.
Will you put that out on your own label?
Yeah, it’ll be a SCI Fidelity release.
Kyle also mentioned taking some of the live improv and turning it into new music for a record. Does this resonate at all and if so, what came of that project?
I do—we tracked a bunch of stuff from summer, fall, New Year’s run, with the idea of maybe trying to use some of those live tracks for the upcoming release. When it came down to it, we sort of had two camps of songs: we had things that were more in the EDM, electronica range and then we had the straight ahead rootsy songs, for lack of a better word. And so we decided that we would treat them as two different projects. So the tracking that we did at the end of the year, in January and February was primarily not the electronica stuff, it was the more rootsy stuff and we decided we would go ahead and bring in Jerry Harrison and give it a more traditional treatment. Kind of scrap the live idea and start from scratch with these.
Now there’s talk of the next release, which will probably be more of the EDM stuff that we’ve been working on. The idea was to maybe build off of the live tracks we already had and bring in a live producer to help us groom those into a more dance-oriented release. That’s probably the next release and I’m not sure of the schedule on that. You know it’s exciting that we’ve got so many ideas and different kinds of tunes coming out and we’re writing new material all the time in all these different genres. So yeah, look for more exciting things after the album release.
Beyond String Cheese and Grateful Grass what else do you have coming up?
I did a gig with The Contribution here in May in Denver and we’ve been in the studio tracking. We did five more tunes in Denver in April. So that project continues to work sporadically in the studio and live. That’s another really exciting thing. The songwriting that Tim [Carbone] and Jeff [Miller] and Phil [Ferlino] have been doing is really top notch. That band is different enough from anything else I do that it’s really challenging and exciting. So hopefully that release can get wrapped up. I really don’t know the time frame on that but I think we’re hoping by the end of the year.
Is Tim [Carbone] producing that?
It’s more or less Tim in charge of the production there. It’s definitely a group effort but Tim is leading the troops on that one.
Your summer tour kicks off in Telluride. By that point it’ll be about six months since String Cheese will have performed on stage. Can you talk about the process of ramping up for a tour?
The way we’ve done it recently since we’ve been playing sporadically is right before we do play again, we try to get somewhere around fifteen, twenty days in rehearsals. So it’s a fairly labor-intensive process going over the album tunes, making sure we have the arrangements down. Then we start to drop some setlists, some playlists of tunes we definitely want to hit this summer, maybe bring some things out of the catalogue we haven’t played in a while. Maybe put a few things to rest, talk up some new covers. We’re going to hit the ground running with Telluride, right into Electric Forest and from there it’s Austin, Forecastle, Red Rocks, Horning’s. It’s just about every weekend once we hit the ground running. It looks like we have a big fall coming up as well.
Can you say something about Electric Forest and how that’s evolved?
Yeah, well one thing talking to Jeremy Stein, our manager, who’s really the man behind Electric Forest, they’re expanding the forest this year, as great as it was last year. I believe he said the forest is going to be four times as large as it’s ever been before. So that festival has really blossomed and I think this year again will be much more impressive than it’s been in years past. I think we feel really fortunate to still be associated with this one and of course it’s Jeremy our manager who’s the brainchild of it all. The experience there is unlike anything I’ve ever been to, with the forest itself and the emphasis on great art installations. It feels like it’s totally cutting edge. The music is fantastic, the site’s fantastic and I’m just really happy to see that stuff continue to grow and mature into an even bigger and better realm this year.
Ever since your very first year of Horning’s, I’ve talked about coming out to see you there. If you close your eyes is there a particular year or a moment that jumps out at you?
Well every year there has really built upon the last. I’m being told this may be the last one that we’re having, after talking to Bob Horning that we may not be able to do it again next year or for the foreseeable future. I think we’ve simply outgrown the site, honestly. The talk is that this could be the last one for the foreseeable future. If you want to get out there, Dean, this is your chance.
