Tom Hamilton isn’t slowing down. The Philadelphia native has been in various successful bands since forming Brothers Past right out of high school, but it seems like in the past half decade or so he’s really come into his own, and now he’s not letting anything stand in the way of his vision, even if that vision changes from album to album and project to project. From his main project of American Babies, who have a new album coming out on March 18, to the Grateful Dead tribute supergroup Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Hamilton is following his muse wherever it may lead, and so far it’s been pretty good to him.
For now, Hamilton wants to talk mostly about American Babies and the new, more improvisational direction in which he’s taking them, but he’ll never pass up the chance to discuss the profound effect the Grateful Dead—and the members with whom he’s played—have had on his career. Here, Hamilton reveals the dark and hopeful inspiration behind his new Babies album and how his new view for the band has him more confident in his music than ever before.
American Babies has evolved over time. How do you think this new album is different? Where do you feel the band is right now?
There’s an identity, or at least there’s starting to be. When the band started, it was definitely more of a roots thing. I was stuck with the shitty task of having to compartmentalize my work. The reason American Babies started was because I wanted to write songs that had acoustic guitar in them, and I was told I wasn’t allowed to do that for Brothers Past. I was like, “Okay, well, I like doing that shit.” I was told if I wanted to do that kind of stuff, I had to start a new band. With my hands forced, I have to start splitting my work up between the two bands. It’s uncomfortable and shitty. It’s like spending weekends with your kids. It’s a weird thing to be put into.
You can look at the evolution of the Babies records and I guess the exponential change in weirdness had a lot to do with putting away with the Brothers Past thing, for me. It got to the point where I was making the last record, Knives and Teeth, and I realized that I didn’t need to do that shit anymore. I didn’t need to compartmentalize it. I didn’t need to pick the Sharks or the Jets. It’s all one thing, it’s all my stupid ass. I don’t need to be anything other than what falls under the umbrella of “Tom Hamilton,” you know? That’s why I think there was a pretty good jump in tonal textures and in everything as far as playing it safe from my second to my third record. This new album just continues to tread. I just don’t care, I guess. And with that comes a lot of freedom. When it came to making this record, I just wanted to make a record. I didn’t want to make an Americana record, I didn’t want to make an electronic record. I didn’t want to make anything in particular. I just wanted to make a record that I thought represented who I am at the time. And I think I did that.
The title of the record is interesting An Epic Battle Between Light and Dark. Is that tongue-in-cheek, or is it something that comes from the feel of the album?
It’s not tongue-in-cheek; it’s the real deal. There’s not very many light-at-heart moments on the record; it’s a pretty serious album. I was coming out of an incredibly awful situation in a personal relationship that was just devastating. It basically felt like I kept getting kicked in the dick. It was a hard thing to deal with. Then Robin Williams killed himself, and that really just fucking set it off for me. The guy was really important to me. I looked at what he did in comedy, and how he improvised. He was one of my favorite dudes, because he was like the jamband of comedy. He went in and just went. You weren’t going to get the same take twice. You’re going to get him feeling the moment, feeling the film, the part and the scene and reacting accordingly. That’s what we do, what all of us in the scene do. I really identify with that man. When he passed away, it was just yet another swift kick in the balls.
I have a studio here in Philly, and I have a partner named Pete Tramo. He’s a brilliant guy. We wrote this record together. Mental illness is a real thing, man, and it affects everybody’s lives in different ways. It was really affecting me and Pete’s lives in a lot of ways, and we decided that’s something we were going to talk about a little bit. Not in a fucking, “Hey, what rhymes with Zoloft?” type of way. It’s not heavy-handed, but that’s what a lot of it is—it was us. We consider ourselves survivors of depression. I feel like most artists are. We’re all fucking miserable people in some corner of our lives.
A lot of this record is how we’ve dealt with things. How I, in spite of having those times that are just the worst, am still pushing through and making a life happen regardless. It’s an epic battle between light and dark. I feel like that’s what it all is for everybody, all of the time. If that’s something that we’re going to openly talk about, that’s what it is. It’s “Who is going to win today?” every morning. Am I going to fucking come out on top? Am I going to have a good day, or am I going to have a day that I’m still in my sweatpants and binge-watching something awful instead of doing something useful with my time? I can only speak for myself, but that’s what it is, man. This record is just dipping in and out of the good days and bad days.
Do you think the record as a whole represents you being in that mental state, or you trying to get out of it? Or is it a mix of being in that state, but also hopeful for getting out of it in the future?
I feel like it’s definitely a hopeful thing. It’s not a “woe is me” thing, or at least that’s not the way I intended it to be. Obviously with the listener, everybody gets what they get. For me, that wasn’t the purpose of it. The purpose wasn’t woe-is-me and wallowing in my own shit. It was more like, “Hey dude, this is a real thing that I also deal with and that I’m sure everybody deals with, and I managed to get through it.”
At the end of the record—the last song, which is the title track—is a positive message. It’s saying, “Look, it’s not easy to have the light days. It’s hard work. It’s work to be happy in this world. You have to work for it, and if you claw for every fucking inch of it, eventually you’ll get it and you’ll get those moments that you were hoping you would have your whole life.” That’s kind of the gist. Some of it is a real drag, but overall, when putting this record together, that was the point of it. It wasn’t, “Hey, everything is shitty and I’m just going to throw this hot potato in your lap.” It was more like, “Hey man, it’s a hard fucking thing just to be a person, and these are some of the ways I push through it.”
Can you talk a little bit about how the American Babies lineup has changed over the years and how that has affected the music?
The first record was definitely more of a recording thing. I didn’t have much of an eye on touring. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on with Brothers Past because of all of the aforementioned inner turmoil, and at the time [Joe] Russo and Marco [Benevento] were also having a bit of an identity crisis and didn’t know what they were doing. I had these songs, and I wanted to make this record, so I pulled some people together.
When I did start playing live a little bit, it was basically JRAD for a while. It was me and Joe and Scott [Metzger] and [Dave] Dreiwitz for a good amount of time. Then it got to the point where it was obvious that Brothers Past was the side project and American Babies was what I really wanted to be doing. I had to look for a more permanent thing. Joe got the Furthur gig, obviously, and who’s going to blame him for taking that instead of playing with my fucking monkey ass? So from there, it was finding a more solidified situation. Which I did—for most of the Flawed Logic Tour and the Knives and Teeth tour, I had a band. In the course of those two records and the live show, it was that thing of not having to compartmentalize my work anymore.
And I really like improvising. I feel like it’s one of the few things in the world that I’m okay at. With the Babies, I was like, “Hey, I want to start improvising more with this band,” and I realized that the band I had wasn’t a very good improvising band, necessarily. Some of the guys in the band just weren’t really into it, and the other guys just weren’t good at it. They wanted to do it, but it’s a skill. It’s a language in itself.
Right before I started making the Epic Battle record, I basically retooled the entire band with more like-minded dudes—and a chick, for that matter. Now there’s a female in the band. The new version of the band came together, I’d say, about a year and a half ago. That was when I had a good sense of what was going on. Then making Epic Battle was where everything came together and solidified.
So it was really your vision that changed the band’s recent line-up as opposed to it changing by itself and affecting the music?
I mean, yeah. I’ve never been that guy. Even with Brothers Past, we had a drummer that left. Our original drummer split for a couple of years. I feel like music shouldn’t be a job. If everybody isn’t into what’s going on, there’s no reason to force the square peg into the round hole. I have a responsibility as the creative director of the band to be very open with the players and to be very open with what the vision is. I can’t fault anybody for not wanting to change with me. I change a lot. My whole career, every record has been pretty different from the last. I’m sure I’m a pain in the ass, with following my muse wherever it may go.
So when it came to the point where I wanted to improvise more, if it wasn’t jiving, then it was like, “Okay, well I’m going to find somebody who wants to do this.” I’m a fucking lucky dude. I’m in a good position in my career where I have a lot of people who wouldn’t mind playing my songs. I don’t want to force anybody to stay, nor would I force anybody out. Everybody needs to be on the same page, and once that starts not to happen anymore, it’s like, “Okay, well, what’s the option now?” With the change in the live show as well as the constant changes in the studio records, it was just time to make a change.
You’ve also played with Clay Parnell, who you used to play with in Brothers Past?
He’s not playing with us now, but he did a tour with us. You can’t fake that kind of history—fifteen years of playing together. He had off, and we were going on tour, so it was like, “Hey man, you want some work? You want to go out for a little bit?” It was just to scratch that old itch. It was a fun tour, for sure. He did half of our fall tour for 2015. It was a really fun ride. I doubt that that is going to be a permanent thing, but it was cool.
Clay likes more of the electronic thing. He’s in Particle, and that says enough. That’s more of his vibe, and obviously I fall more under the Grateful Dead angle of things. It was a blast. It was a funny fucking tour, doing that shit together again. Who knows what will happen this year? I doubt that we’re going to do it again just because he has the Particle thing. I think they have a record coming out this year, and obviously I also have a record.
Speaking of that, what is the deal with Brothers Past currently?
There is no deal with Brothers Past. It is what it is. It was a band that existed at one point in time. I’m not going to say never. I don’t see a reason to do that at the moment. I say the same thing to everybody that asks that question. I play music all the time. I am one of the hardest working dudes in the fucking business that you’ll meet. I like working with people that are the same way. I like working with people who work hard, who are focused on being a musician. If it ever got to the point where all four people from Brothers Past were into being musicians and were into rehearsing and writing new material and doing the work that it takes to be a successful band, yeah, I would certainly be open to doing something again at some point. Until then, I wouldn’t hold my breath for anything like that. I’m not into the idea of doing a one-off bullshit thing. I feel like the last year and a half that Brothers Past was still playing, we were hurting our legacy more than helping it. We were limping along like fucking Brett Favre playing for the Jets. We weren’t doing anything good, we were just basically playing because some of the guys in the band wanted to still be able to play music on the weekends. And it’s like, “Dude, that’s not right,” and it’s also not good for what it was.
We had a thing that was pretty fucking good for a certain amount of time, and I don’t want to tarnish that any more than we already have by continuing it longer than we should have. It was a cool thing. This Feeling’s Called Goodbye was a good record, we played some cool shows and that’s that. If it all comes back and all three of the other guys are like, “Hey man, we’re down to do the work,” then yeah, it’s a conversation I’m willing to have. It’s not like a “Fuck them” kind of thing. That was my band, too. But somewhere along the way I lost the locker room, which is obviously my own failing. But it is what it is. Ditka can’t go back and coach the Bears. Brothers Past is a thing that I’m incredibly grateful to have had and to continue to have in my life. If any of those conditions ever get met, I would certainly be into playing a show or something.
The Grateful Dead has obviously been a big influence on your life and music. Besides playing with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, you’ve actually played with all of the core four members of the band.
Isn’t that the weirdest thing in the world? That doesn’t make any sense. I would have an easier time comprehending string theory than what you just said. It’s fucking ridiculous.
How has that direct contact playing with them furthered that influence in your life, your music and for this upcoming album?
Profoundly. Yeah, man. We’ll get to the music part of it, but one of the main things is just work ethic. The first dude I played with was Phil. The first show that I did with him, we had a four-hour rehearsal the day of the show. We played a concert before the concert, basically. That blew my fucking mind—that this guy who was turning 74 at the time was practicing like that. It blew my mind to see how hard he still worked and how much he still cared about what was going on.
I meet a lot of jaded people in this fucking job that are my age. So you see a lot of that and you try not to let that affect you, you try not to be one of those people that thinks, “Oh, whatever, everything sucks—this industry, these people, blah blah blah.” I’m not one of those fucking people. I love my job. I love what this is, and I love doing the work. I love rehearsing, I think that it’s one of the best things that there is. But you’ll meet a lot of people that are not into that shit. So, in seeing a guy that’s in the back nine of his career to not be phoning it in when he totally could be phoning it in—any one of those dudes could absolutely go out there and play a 45-minute set of “Casey Jones” and “Touch of Grey,” collect a check and go home. But none of them do that, not fucking one of them.
Every one of those guys says the same shit to me: “Don’t worry about what Garcia would have done. It’s all about now, it’s about the moment.” They’re still about the moment. They’re still about today’s version of these songs. They don’t give a flying fuck about what they did in 1978. Who cares? It doesn’t matter, it’s about now. That blew my fucking mind. It blew my mind that these guys who are in such an advanced stage of their careers still want to go for it. They don’t want to play it safe. That is incredible. That set the bar. When you get to see behind the curtain, and what’s behind the curtain is just as fucking badass as you thought it was, it validates your belief system and your way of doing things.
So they were a very big influence just on how I ran my band. I’m not necessarily a taskmaster, you know. I like to rehearse and I like to talk things out and try to make things as good as they can be. I’ve been in bands, and Brothers Past was definitely one of them for a good amount of time—and at other times with American Babies—where people didn’t want to rehearse or thought, “Oh, it’s good enough.” After seeing and playing with those guys, that’s not a thing that I let fly anymore. There is no “good enough.” No, let’s make it good. Let’s dig in there and fucking put in the work, man. If it’s not good or not great, then let’s get it there. That was really inspiring, to see that these guys work like that. There’s a reason they’re the fucking Grateful Dead, man. There’s a reason that they were as successful as they were, and that reason is because they put in the fucking time. So there’s that, as far as work ethic and shit like that.
They also had a profound influence on this record because I didn’t want to make a Grateful Dead record. I’m in an awesome spot as far as being so associated with those guys and their music, but at the same time it’s a tricky one. If you look at a guy like John Kadlecik from Furthur, I feel like people see him and they think, “Oh, he’s the fake Jerry.” If people say “fake Jerry,” they’re referring to him. That’s a weird place to be. It is what it is, but I don’t want that to be me. I don’t want people to say “fake Jerry” and then people think Tom Hamilton. I feel like people will say “Tom Hamilton,” and people get out of it whatever there is to get out of it. Some people think of Brothers Past, some people think of American Babies, some will think of the Grateful Dead, and that’s cool. In making this new album, I thought that if somebody is going to pigeonhole me, I don’t want to make the job easy on them. I wanted to make a record that didn’t sound like Workingman’s Dead. After working with those guys and talking with them—it would be the biggest slap in the face to them or to the legacy of Garcia to make a record that sounds like that. Those guys were and are so much about innovation and trying to do something new. If you want to honor the people that influence you and tip your hat to those folks, the best thing that you can do is to not sound like them. That’s not what made them great. The Grateful Dead weren’t great because they sounded like the Beatles. They didn’t, they sounded like themselves. They loved the Beatles—the Beatles were one of their favorite fucking bands, but they didn’t sound like the Beatles, because that’s not the thing. They loved the Beatles because they were innovators. They were trying to push the envelope at all times. It was never about phoning it in.
I take my cue from that type of thing. I want to try to make music that A) I would like to listen to and B) that I haven’t heard before. Playing with those guys and working with those guys really helped drive all of those points home—stand on your own two fucking feet. You’re obviously going to be able to hear my influences if you really listen for them in certain places, but I’m not going to make it easy on you. If you listen to this record, I don’t think it really sounds anything like the Grateful Dead in any way, shape or form. Realistically, there’s a couple of guitar solo-ish things on it that maybe if people really wanted to dig in, they could say there’s some kind of thing like that, but I still don’t think that’s the case. I think this record stands on its own two feet as an album and as a genre of trying to further push what the term “Americana” means into a different direction. That’s really all I could ask for. My time with the core four has certainly helped to make sure that that was the case.
With that ethos in mind, how do you approach the Almost Dead music? Do you still want to create something new, or is that still the area where you just want to play and honor the music of the Grateful Dead?
The thing with JRAD is that it is the exact same thing. Everyone in JRAD—with the exception of Dreiwitz—has played with the guys in the Dead. Marco has done Phil & Friends shows, Joe obviously did Furthur. Scott has done Phil & Friends shows, and I’ve played with all four of them. We all know that their songbook is a songbook that is going to fucking live after them, and they know that. It’s a living document. Those songs are meant to be interpreted and stretched out until they’re barely recognizable—that’s the point of it. They don’t necessarily want people to just do what they would have done; that’s not the point of the whole fucking thing. The fact that all of the guys in JRAD know that from experience makes our job easy. We don’t try to sound like the Grateful Dead. That’s the thing. Let’s not jam like the Grateful Dead did in any time prior to now, let’s jam with the fucking ferocity and abandon that, if those guys were 30 years old now, that’s how they would do it. That’s the point. It’s not about recreating some shit, it’s about continuing the road. It’s a marathon; it’s passing the baton. There’s no finish line; the road doesn’t end, it just fades to black. You just can’t see it, so you keep fucking running. Don’t just sit there and stand on the side of the fucking road like, “Oh yeah, well I’m just going to do what they did in Cornell and whatever.” No man, fuck that bullshit. What’s next? What’s a mile down the road? I don’t know. Let’s carry it down there and find out.
You were one of the people who helped Kurt Vile start out. How did you meet him and how did that relationship begin?
Kurt is from a suburb of Philadelphia that is also where the keyboard player from Brothers Past is from, in Delaware County which is outside of Philadelphia. Somehow or other, Tom [McKee] and Kurt hooked up through family or friends of friends. Brothers Past had a house outside of Philly and we had a bunch of gear, and I’ve always been into recording stuff at home. This was the early 2000s, so home recording certainly wasn’t what it is now where every asshole just has a laptop and a fucking thing like Ableton. It was a little more involved. Somehow, Tom was talking to somebody that was playing with Kurt, and they were saying, “Yeah, we’ve got this guy and he wants to make a demo,” and Tom said, “Hey, well my buddy has some gear.” He approached me with it as a kind of favor to Tom to help his friends out, and it was also a way for me to make a little bit of cash—I was like a 22, 23 year old kid who needed some money. It was Kurt’s drummer who was friends with Tom McKee. That was how it all came together.
So I met up with Kurt, he came to my house and we hung out, talked and really got along right away. It made sense. He was coming from a different place. We were both into experimenting and experimental music. But he was coming from Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine—that kind of thing. He was heavily influenced by Nirvana; he was such a Kurt Cobain fan at the time. I’m sure he still is. And I had BP already going at that point. We weren’t crushing it or anything, but we were a functioning entity. We had started touring and I think we had first finished our first record A Wonderful Day. I was a little bit ahead of him as far as having my shit together career-wise. I was coming from the experimental jam thing, he was from the experimental studio thing.
We saw eye to eye on everything—“Yeah, let’s make some fucking cool music.” He had these fucking songs that blew my mind. The shit that he was doing blew my fucking mind. He had a drummer and a bass player that he had come in. It must have been a week where we spent every day and we had those guys. Everybody came and met at my house every day. They might have even slept there, I don’t really remember. We tracked all this shit on this digital 8 track that I had that recorded to a zip drive—like how more fucking archaic can you be? What a weird thing that only lasted for such a short time. We made this thing, and the band stayed for a week, and then after that it was just me and Kurt doing all the vocals and all of his guitar overdubs, which were quite a bit, coming from that world where it’s just walls of guitars.
He did some great stuff, man. It was a great experience, and it was obvious then that he was fucking brilliant. He’s a brilliant guy and he really had a unique angle and a unique voice. It was great. It was one of the more important moments of my development, working with him when I was that young. I think we both figured out a couple of things and ran with it. After that, we lost touch. He moved to Boston and did his whole thing. I’m sure there are plenty of articles that explained what happened with his career after that. He came back to Philly eventually. We still run into each other here and there and it’s always great to see each other, and then we move on. We keep going in our current directions.
What is your relationship with Electron, and Marc Brownstein and Aron Magner and the guys from The Disco Biscuits?
I met those guys probably in about ’98 or ’99. We were friends by default, kind of, because we were all from Philly and we felt that we should know each other. Tom McKee, the keyboard player from Brothers Past, was faster friends with those guys than I was. Then there was some drama with The Disco Biscuits where Marc got kicked out of the band or some bullshit, and he wanted to start a new band, which was kind of where the Electron thing came from. Obviously they kissed and made up and worked it all out, but the whole Electron thing kind of stuck. I guess it was a thing for Marc to be able to step outside of the band and still play his own music, which I’m sure everybody can understand. It was that kind of thing where you get to have your own situation and have it how you want it. Electron was certainly one of the more important things that went on as well, because through Electron I met Joe [Russo]. Marc was like, “Hey, I’m putting together this band. I need you to learn these 15 tunes,” or some shit. He had a collection of songs that he wrote that he wanted to play and he wanted to write a whole other collection of songs. So he said, “Hey man, learn all this shit and then show up at this rehearsal in New Jersey at this guy’s house.”
That’s basically where I met Joe, I showed up at the rehearsal and he was the drummer. That was 2000. We ended up collectively chipping in and writing in the rest of the Chemical Warfare stuff. It’s like a collection, a rock opera kind of thing. It was cool to be a part of shaping those tunes and help arrange them to get those things going for Marc. That was the conduit of all of us starting to work together—not just playing the same circuit and knowing each other but actually playing together. From there, it kind of just went. I became better friends with Aron and Jon [Gutwillig] and the rest of the Biscuit guys. I shared a studio with them for years. We had a studio in Philly for three or four years. I produced their Planet Anthem album at that studio. I recorded my Flawed Logic record there with American Babies. With Brothers Past, we did a box set collection called Everything Must Go that was also recorded there at that studio. It was great. I met a lot of people through that studio for a long time.
Throughout all of it, the Electron thing was always something that maybe every couple of years we would always come back to just as an excuse to play together. Everybody always had their own thing—the Biscuits, and I had my band, and Joe had his band, but it was an excuse for us to all get back together to play and have fun once in a while. It was fun. It’s a good time and it’s a low pressure gig. We know each other so well and we enjoy doing what we do. Then Joe obviously got busier with the Furthur thing, so that’s where [Mike] Greenfield stepped in. It was the obvious choice, he knows the style, he speaks the language. It’s nice to just have this thing that is what it is. We all enjoy it. Philadelphia is an interesting city that way, being able to go from Kurt Vile to The Disco Biscuits to The Roots to Hall and Oates. It just goes. It’s nice like that.
