Back in 2008, Antibalas saxophonist Stuart Bogie founded Superhuman Happiness, in an effort “to seek joy and love through shared rhythm and melody, composed and improvised.” NPR’s World Café recently wrote that the group’s sound “takes the whimsy of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” and plops it on top of Phish-like laid-back vocal attitude and the joyful funk of James Brown. It’s all peppered with restrained brass flourishes, which sound as if any member of the horn section might spin into a complex improvisation if given the chance.” In the following conversation Bogie discusses what this all means, how the group came together and what the future holds for Superhuman Happiness.
When did you first get the idea to start the Superhuman Happiness?
SB: It was a long process. I’ve been dreaming of having this band…in 1999 I had an idea for a band, or more like an artistic organization that was kind of like a band but also able to do other things—video, theater, dance and stuff—music was the part that I cared the most about, so I started there just to get something happening. There’s a strong structure for bands, a convention for it that you can follow. In 1999 I started to think about performances that I wanted to do that involved a certain amount of drama and motion and I started to write little graphic scores of the way I wanted a whole set to feel. There was a time I started asking myself what I wanted out of a musical performance, and I’ve been moving toward it ever since.
I’d say one of the key things came in 2007 when I realized that there were a lot of things I wanted to do musically that wouldn’t work in Antibalas, which is where I was putting a lot of my efforts. I had recently worked on the songs “Beaten Metal” and “I.C.E.” with the band and we were touring England, and you know it’s always a pleasure. The band is a phenomenal group to play with. The musicianship…there’s so much subtlety that goes on. With people like Chris Vatalaro the drummer and Victor Axelrod it’s really an amazing experience. But it’s collective, which is liberating in a lot of ways and restricting in others. I started coming to terms with the idea of starting my own project. And so I went back and I said “I need to record a record, but I don’t have songs ready yet.”
So I recorded a bunch of songs that I had written before that I’d written as Christmas presents for my family. I’d written them when I was broke and working as a secretary in San Francisco—a bunch of songs with a string trio and clarinet—so I used those as my starting point for these next Superhuman Happiness recordings. I had always wanted to do more rocked-out versions of that with drums and bass and guitars and stuff. I wanted to apply what I learned about music in Antibalas—working with the brilliant musicians in Antibalas and playing a lot of Afrobeat music, and starting with a lot of Fela—I wanted to apply that to my original path of musical inspiration, which was…I wouldn’t know how to define it. But I wanted to bring it home, you know what I mean?
So when did you record the debut album Fall Down Seven Times Stand Up Eight ?
I made that in my friend’s basement. It was me and Gabe Roth from Daptone Records. So I was down in the basement working on this 8-track recorder trying to make this little record, and I even got Gabe to play tambourine on one of the tracks. [Laughs]. He was leaving for the airport and came down to say goodbye and played some tambourine.
But yeah, I got some advice from friends that I should try something different, and different people inspired me. So I pulled out all the stops and made the best tape I could make.
Anyway, so that kind of helped give birth to the band too. So I said “what’s the next step?” Now I have a record, a collection of my compositions, and it’s sort of a hodgepodge assortment, you know? There are some Mediterranean influences here, there’s some synth-pop punkiness, there’s some stuff that references Miles Davis’s ‘70s work, there’s some stuff that sounds like Zappa—some odd-metered stuff—and I had to make a decision about which way I wanted it to go. And what I’m feeling the most is writing songs with poetry and dealing with rhythms that will move bodies, which means a lot of even numbers, a lot of 8s—know what I mean? The number 8 is really important.
And I’m also more interested in what I call major minor obscurations where you’re not sure if it’s a major or a minor key. I do that in a relative sense. And parallel 5ths is also really exciting. That’s another one of those things that kind of made up TV On The Radio’s music—it’s in a major key and a minor key at the same time, and it’s all done by ear, so it’s all naturally discovered. So those are the kinds of things that excited me, and I was like “Ok, here we go, we’re gonna step in this direction.”
How did you find the other members of the group? Had you played in other bands with them in the past?
Slowly but surely I found Luke O’Malley, the guitarist from Antibalas who’s been one of my main collaborators…and he writes with me…and Ryan Ferreira, who I saw like a yin-yang of guitar playing. Ryan Ferreira likes to play long, ambient, environmental ideas. He’s extremely precise, but a quiet, sort of shadow figure in the band. And Luke O’Malley is a hyper-melodic rhythmic riff machine. So together, they form a sort of yin-yang. Now, Fela—Fela Kuti—always set up his guitars in a yin-yang—a very different one. But the essence of that relationship was something I wanted to bring into Superhuman Happiness.
Jared Samuel (Minerva Lions), who is an incredible vocalist, composer and keyboard player, liked the group a lot and wanted to join. I had such admiration for his music and his artistry that I thought I’d be crazy not to have him in there, especially if he wanted to be in it. And Nikhil Yerawadekar came in on bass. I knew him as a guitar player. He came in so quickly, and before I knew it, he knew all the songs—his musicianship is frightening.
Oh, and Eric Biondo too. Eric Biondo has always been one of my closest friends, and I’ve worked on some production stuff with him, and he and I have been in children’s groups and Antibalas, we’ve done all sorts of horn work together, and I really wanted him. I’m such an admirer of his singing, his music and his compositions that I wanted him on the writing team and in the performing group. A lot of these relationships are just friendships that are musical at the same time. They come in and out, and it’s just so much fun to work with these people.
But the last piece of the puzzle was finding a drummer, because the best drummers are so incredibly busy, and asking somebody to commit to a group that doesn’t have any paying gigs and that needs to rehearse a lot is a tall order. Especially now I’ve been a session musician for a few years, and you kind of lose the pulse of the upstart community, you know what I mean? So I met a young Miles Arntzen, and he was an Antibalas fan that reached out to me, and he and I became friends and we started playing and I practiced with him solo a few times. We talked a lot about comedy and poetry and timing and the philosophy of music and we saw eye to eye. So he and I booked a duo show at Zebulon and we started to play—we played for about 10 or 20 minutes, and then another guy from Superhuman Happiness came on, and then another fellow came up, and then another fellow came up, and by the end of the concert we had kind of initiated them, one at a time into the group.
That’s a great story. Where did the band name come from?
SB: The silent member of the group is Tatiana McCabe, a video artist and visual artist. She’s studying at SVA right now and she does all of our videos and all of our art, photography and everything. I saw that I needed a visual partner in the group. She’s someone that I was very close to and who wanted to be involved in this family operation. And she came up with a name. She was riding her bike on the beach and the beach was wide enough that she could close her eyes, and she knew that her boyfriend needed a band name…[laughs] and she gave me a good suggestion. Superhuman Happiness.
I know you said you wrote a lot of the songs before the band, but now that you have the name and you’re writing new songs, do you try to reflect that name through the music?
SB: Well I think the reason she thought that name would be good was that it’s kind of the occupation of what I’m interested in with the music, which is seeking rapture. I want to feel the ecstasy, you know. I want to be within the mathematical ratios of God. I think the things that make music beautiful are the things that make plants grow, the things that bring the tide in. And I don’t attempt to understand it, but I am definitely addicted to it. And when I realized what it is about music that inspires me, I realized that I have to serve it, and I have to try to channel it and celebrate it with as many people as I can. And that includes celebrating it with my band on stage and celebrating it with an audience. It’s a religious experience.
That’s an interesting approach.
SB: I would like to underline that the current vision for the band is that while I’m a leader, I’m operating a team of creative forces. My desire, my drive, is to create something greater than I could ever make alone. Something that absolutely needs the creative incorporation and engagement of every single person on stage, and Tatiana, and the audience, and friends. And I want that means to reach out. That’s the idea.
I want to get away from this idea that there’s a genius out there—that there’s this person who did it all himself, because that’s bullshit. We need to be proud of things as a culture, not to be divided by them, you know what I mean? I was reading Robert Palmer’s liner notes on the Led Zeppelin box set, the one with all the crop circles that came out years ago. And he said something that was so profound to me. He said that our understanding of publishing and songwriting is based on old Tin Pan Alley shit, and that it’s completely outdated. And his vision, in the efforts of our current culture—now he wasn’t even talking about hip-hop when he wrote that, but if you think about the power and the weight of a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, or any record that’s been heavily sampled, you can feel that, and you can feel that maybe this art is bigger than us. And it’s bigger than an idea that one person had. And it’s enrapturing our souls—which I believe is the purpose of the thing. It is something that I could never come up with on my own. Everyone in Superhuman Happiness is there because they offer something very, very important to the creative process. The band is run that way as a functioning business and as a creative entity.
So when you’re writing these new songs, are they collectively written with the each of the band members bringing their own ideas to the table or are you still the main creative force behind the writing?
SB: For the most part, I try to avoid anything being brought to the table. What I want brought to the table is perspective, is gist. I want everybody coming to the table naked. But at the same time, once they’re at that table, we’re changing lyrics, we’re changing melody, we’re changing forms, and we’re changing ideas. It’s a new way of writing—at least it’s new for me, and I believe it’s new for everybody else there—it’s an intentional collaboration, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s ebb and flow, but it’s very intentional in the way that we’ll start out with certain classic exercises and then we’ll transfer those to rhythms and then we kind of sit back and wait and improvise a little. And then we try another exercise, and then we’ll try a vocal exercise and see where that goes, you know? And then a hook will jump into somebody’s head.
Basically, the same way a think tank works, or people will I don’t know what they call it…the bull pen…where you get everybody together, you throw ideas around, you have a head writer who’s moderating things and kind of breathes in subjects and guides the project, but you’re working with writers, you’re working with composers, you’re working with creative people. And so that’s how we’re collaborating. Ideas are brought in, but we work with them. I would say it’s virtually impossible to take anyone out of the puzzle. The record we’re working on now, it’s collaborative—intentional collaboration.
