When New Deal bassist Dan Kurtz started focusing on his electro-pop band Dragonette, keyboardist Jamie Shields and drummer Darren Shearer were left with a lot of time on their hands. Instead of forming a regular band, the two musicians conceived The Join, a revolving collective of musicians Shields and Shearer can call upon to play improvisational dance music at any point. After spending the first part of 2010 focusing on the New Deal, Shields and Shearer will perform as The Join with the help of the Disco Biscuits’ Marc Brownstein and Aron Magner. The four musicians have confirmed a short tour through the Midwest, making stops in Bloomington, IN (3/4), Carbondale, IL (3/5) and Chicago, IL (3/6). Below, Shearer discusses The Join’s upcoming shows, his Omega Moos project with the members of Umphrey’s McGee,
the New Deal’s new live album and how Radiohead ended up in front of “50,000 jamband fans.”
The Join originally formed as a way for you and Jamie Shields to stay active while bassist Dan Kurtz played with Dragonette. But it seems like a few micro-bands have formed out of the project: The Join with David Murphy (STS9), The Join with the Duo, The Join with the members of the Disco Biscuits and The Join with the members of Brothers Past.
I think the whole purpose of The Join was to take the New Deal’s improvisational sensibilities and artistic model, if you will, and bring it to players that are also familiar with that way of creating music, but may not be doing it as much as us. The nice thing about the way that we “jam” is that, although it’s improvised, we still have a structure. Jamie teaches everyone within The Join hand signals for key changes and rhythm changes, which enables us to take the best qualities of each musician and piece them together without it being one big, loose jam. So, throughout the set, we are able to build these real songs.
If you look at The Join with Aron Magner and Marc Brownstein, Magner is the layer master—he has a way of creating lots of different layers of sound and the syncopation is really great. If you couple that with Jamie, who is also equally talented in that area, but he adds a real, almost like a lead guitar kind of feel to a lot of his playing. Then you have Brownie who just lays down such solid foundations to put all this stuff on top of it. If you had a bass player that was more wanky it probably wouldn’t work—it would be your running shoes in the dryer kind of phenomena, a bit too much happening. So the tonal mix in Brownie and Magner’s incarnation of the band is very satisfying.
If you look at like what we’ve done with David Murphy from Sound Tribe, he fills out a bit more space in the sort of mid-spectrum, as well as far as rhythmically and he also plays a little synth-like keyboard onstage. So it’s interesting. The cool thing about it is as long as we don’t come in to a show or a run of shows going, “This is how The Join is going to sound,” I think we almost always come out on top—as long as there is no pretense, you know what I mean. I remember Brownie saying to Jamie before we were about to go onstage at a show a while back, “So what are we going to start with?” and Jamie’s like, “I don’t know.” He’s like, “What do you mean you don’t know?” But there’s a purpose behind that. It’s not just this sort of thing where we’re like, “Oh we never know what we’re gonna do because we’re just so creative in the moment.” I think the second we put any boundaries or pretense behind what we’re going to do, it just changes the whole synergy of everything and we end up not pulling on the strings of those musicians.
The New Deal had a long history with bands like STS9 and the Disco Biscuits. Are there any musicians that you didn’t know well before playing with them in The Join? If so, how did that dynamic change the group’s ethos?
The Duo. We had this last minute booking to play this Re:Generation festival that Sound Tribe puts on, and we decided to play with The Duo—even though we had never played with that band before [though Jamie Shields has played in a few projects with Joe Russo]. We talked on email, and we were like, “Great, let’s do it” and we showed up, didn’t rehearse and didn’t even sound check. We just got up onstage and started playing. I really went into that show without putting any preconceptions on how I thought it was going to sound—I just started playing. To be honest, I worried a little bit about how Joe and I would play together because he’s probably the most creative, and most pure/natural drummer in the whole scene. He just sort exudes this pure rhythmic power. It doesn’t matter if he’s playing on a garbage can or playing on a drum set—he played this little steel pan drum with us on this last run we did in Colorado—it doesn’t matter he just plays, but he’s a lot busier than I am as a drummer in regards to the amount he plays at any show. But it worked right away because I totally recognized that my role was pretty much to support him—to be the clave, the metronome, the heartbeat—because the pocket is so large when I play with those guys.
To some degree I think Jamie recognized that as well with Marco Benevento, even though Jamie was taking a lot of the solos. Joe and Marco are the most creative resources in our scene. There’s a certain eccentricity to them and our role really was to support them. My purpose as a drummer is to make the dance floor move when Joe Russo is doing some big, kind of complex syncopated rhythm on top of that.
Brothers Past’s Tom Hamilton has played guitar with The Join and you also play in the Omega Moos with Umphrey’s McGee guitarist Brendan Bayliss. How does having a guitarist in the mix change your dynamic?
In all honesty, I think I first had the idea for The Join when a guitarist like Jon Gutwillig (the Disco Biscuits) would sit in with the New Deal. Those moments really made me realize that we can sort of create these little songs on the fly. The Omega Moos is a different band than The Join and Umphrey’s McGee. It started because we were good friends with those guys, and it has really taken a life of its own. The cool thing about it is that since Umphrey’s McGee’s arrangements are so complex and so well rehearsed, there is a real freedom and creativity that emerges when you take those players and put them in a totally free, creative environment. It is the same thing with the Biscuits: they have 300 songs they can draw from counting covers and originals. So The Join is an arena for total free expression. But this is not navel gazing music—it is an outward flow of music to the audience. We play dance music.
There is something to be said for playing introspective music and then there is something to be said for just playing really great, experimental dance music.
Exactly. As an aside, I really like the fact that this interview is for Jambands.com as apposed to Spin or something because jamband people are the savviest musical audiences on the planet in regards to how the music is put together, the whole look at the music from the purpose of the players, and how they come together. It’s not a fad of the month and The Join is not a typical side project either—there is a real understanding among all the musicians involved. I love playing in this genre. In the past you’ve had certain bands that were kind of fringe jambands that sort of denounced their affiliation to the jamband scene, or said, “We’re not a jamband.” But whatever—I’m so proud to be a part of this genre because it is truly all about the music. It’s not about how cool your hair is that night or whether or not some blogger really likes you so now all of a sudden you have lots of people at your show. The fans are the most loyal people and everyone gets what everyone does. And everyone also knows alternatively when you’re faking it. When you come out and you try to be something you’re not, its like the audience knows, they’re like “Yeah….no.”
Only just recently did Spin and Rolling Stone and corporate America and Canada start trying to get in on this movement that is not affected by record sales or by radio. A few years ago everybody realized that you can play music that doesn’t go away when the next Hannah Montana movie comes out. At first it was bands like the Flaming Lips and bands like Pavement that realized that and now you have people like Radiohead saying, “Put us in front of 50,000 jamband fans.”
The jamband scene definitely gave birth to the modern American festival circuit in many ways.
Look at somebody like The Roots. They have been a longtime performer for the jamband audiences, and I think there’s a lot of value in it.
Shifting back to your own projects, the New Deal toured a fair amount in the past year or so and even has a new live record. Have you found that your time in The Join has changed or focused the New Deal’s sound in any way?
It’s a good question, and I think The Join has definitely influenced some of the New Deal’s sound. There are certain grooves that Jamie and I have picked up from other players that have played within The Join. I think the biggest influence on the New Deal’s new sound, though, has been Dan’s involvement in Dragonette. He has definitely brought it a little of that electro-rock sound into his bass playing and that whole world to the New Deal. It has made me less afraid to move into these almost techno-rock moments. At times it reminds of David Murphy’s style of bass playing. But playing with Dan in the New Deal has made us a little more open and less scared to embrace some of these taboo sounds. I think it all intertwines in this big matrix of different performances.
Jamie’s played with Brownstein before so they’ve got a good musical relationship, and I think Jamie’s brought some sounds back from those bands into our sound. I’ve been trying to incorporate some electronic sounds as well into my set—just for diversification—and that has brought more to The Join’s table as well. I think the nice thing about The Join is that because it’s improvised we get to bring to the table any ideas we want.
Have you thought about recording a Join album with a mix of guests?
I thought it would be cool to do a DVD where we played a big show in New York City, have all these different guests come out and film it. Logistically that would be a total nightmare putting everyone’s schedules together, but I think that that would probably be the most realistic way to capture The Join on record or DVD. But, now that you mention it, I’m thinking it would be kind of neat to maybe throw some tracks down and get Brownie and whomever to lay their parts down in the studio and have the Postal Service approach to a studio album. The only thing is that The Join in the studio takes away from the essence of The Join, which is again creating songs in the moment in front of people.
Speaking of albums, the New Deal recently released a live album that documents a Toronto show from this past July. Why did you decide to release that particular performance?
I think we had been looking for a show that did capture our “new” sound. I think we moved into a new era of sound for the New Deal. We record every show, and sometimes we record a matrix recording where we get an audience recording, the soundboard recording and put them into a stereo kind of digital track. But the cool thing about our Toronto shows is that they are one notch down subdued-wise for whatever reason. I don’t know why but they are a lot more conducive to a live record because of that fact that when you’re at a show and it’s full on in your face aggression, its feels awesome when you’re there, but is not going to be the kind of thing you want to put in your car while you drive to work.
So when we listened back to the Toronto show we were like, “Oh, it’s got an intensity and it’s got a lot of the new aggression and new sort of like intensity but there’s also a bit of a controlled element as well.” I think that that also comes with maturity a little bit too. When we first started in on this new approach, Dan was bringing in these amazing bass sounds—he was setting up these pedals, and he was playing with a different amp. He just created an amazing wide spectrum of sound to choose from, and I think we were like kids in a candy store at that point. Now we have pulled some of that back and created a little bit more of a controlled sound. We can turn in on when we want to and off when we don’t so that Toronto show was something where we capture that new era for us.
That same idea is reflected in The Join as well. When we did the first Join show with Murphy four years ago we hadn’t hit that point yet. We were still into the deep house, although we rocked it a little bit, but we had that chillness. And then when we did that Duo tour it added this whole breakbeat element—The Duo are very break-oriented. They have a real, sort of, almost like old school hip hop groove mentality. That’s what I really like too about The Join: We can launch into this 95 bpm or 100 bpm tempo stuff and you see the heads bobbing, and you’re suddenly in a totally new mode.
