San Francisco-based folk, blues and rock duo Two Gallants have spent the past dozen-plus years defying the limitations that come with that size of band with increasing acrobatic and dynamic tenacity. For long-time childhood friends Adam Stephens and Tyson Vogel, who played together since they were 12, entering their thirteenth year together as a band is no excuse to slow the pace down.
On Feb. 3 they released their fifth studio (and second on ATO Records) album, We Are Undone, and are setting off on a lengthy tour across the country and Europe. The band spent a month with producer Karl Derfler, best known for his work with artists like Tom Waits, at Panoramic House in Northern California to record the album. The album showcases the tight finesse chemistry they’ve built over the years and a continuing mature outlook in songwriting with lyrics that try to make sense of the shifting nature of the world.
Prior to the release of the album and the start of the band’s tour, Jambands.com caught up with Stephens to find out more about this latest chapter of the band. He starts out by explaining, “We haven’t been doing very much the past year. We recorded the record. It took a little bit longer than we planned for it to come out. So we’ve been laying low and not having too much excitement.”
Was there a reason the album took longer?
It was just one of those things that happens, that you’re not always in control of. And there were a lot of people involved. We wanted the record to come out sooner and it just didn’t work out that way.
Why did you guys decide to title the album We Are Undone ?
It kind of implies the feeling of contradicting or something. It has multiple meanings to me, about us as a species running headlong blindly into some sort of future. It’s a constant desire to keep growing and running and expanding, like without any real objective in mind. It came out at the same time when everything is unraveling in the world around us. It’s falling apart, which is doing the same shit we’ve been doing for centuries now.
Was there a specific point where you felt this?
I guess ever since I developed an awareness of my surroundings and interest and concern for the world. I don’t really remember when that was but pretty much ever since then.
With that kind of subject matter, do you think the lyrical content is more serious then past albums?
No, I don’t think more serious, necessarily. It has a different subject matter but as a band I think we’ve always been a little too serious perhaps to a fault at times. So I don’t think it’s really any different kind of attitude. I just think thematically it’s a little different from our past albums.
What typically makes a song complete for you? What are you usually looking for songs to do? Has that changed since you started?
I don’t really think of songs as ever being complete. Completion is not something I look for. There comes a point where you need to record them, so settle with whatever state they’re in and they’re something you can be happy with for awhile. I don’t really use the word complete when describing songs. I don’t ever think of them as being done.
The new album has a nice balance between rockers and ballads. Do you set about with that kind of thing in mind?
I take it at a song-by-song basis. The songs just arrive and make themselves what they want to be. And if it’s not working out, like if it’s not a good song and not worth it, then it probably won’t end up on the album. But I don’t think whether it’s a balance between loud and quiet songs, that doesn’t really determine if it’s going to be used.
With the recording of the album was it pretty similar to past sessions or were there anything different this time around?
Yeah it was pretty different. It was the first time we ever recorded not in a city. It was recorded in the past in San Francisco or Oakland. We recorded this up north on the coast. And we were living and staying in a studio so it was a lot more of intensive, involved experience, which I think we both enjoyed quite a bit.
How did Karl help push or influence the band’s sound during the recording?
He didn’t really push us in any way. I just think he understood pretty early on our sensibility and our interests as far as our tastes. He had a pretty good understanding of what we wanted the album to sound like. He supported us in most of what we did and we put our faith in him in a lot of ways. It was all together a pretty healthy experience, healthy situation or condition in which to record.
You mentioned in an interview that he helped the band move past some of the restrictions that come with being a duo. Could you expand on that?
There’s limitations or restrictions with just having two main instruments. They’ve always, I thought, pushed us to play our respective instruments in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t. It’s kind of compensating for any instrument that might bridge our two instruments. So I tend to play guitar with a much more rhythm, or at least I try to, kind of a lower end rhythmic style in some ways. Tyson tends to play drums with a bit more melodic style. And then we, in a way, sort of play each of each other’s parts. When it’s going well we find a nice bridge between. The limitations are challenging and we’ve embraced the challenge, is what I’m trying to say.
What was the most challenging song on the album to write?
The title track on the album, the first song. I think it’s the song we’ve been playing the longest so it’s the oldest song. But I didn’t write the lyrics for it right up until we recorded it. It just never really seemed to make sense to me. I couldn’t put my finger on the song. It wasn’t really revealing itself to me at the time what it wanted to be about. So that was a bit nerve-wrecking because up until the very end I didn’t really know where I was going to go.
You’ve known each other most of your lives. Could you talk about how your music chemistry with each other has developed over the years?
I think we have the really the good fortunate of having gone through most of our respective development musically. We’ve done it together, like almost every step of the way. We both started playing music when we were around 12 and have pretty much have been playing with each other every since.
I think that’s helped us adapt to each other’s respective changes in the way we’re doing things. But when we started this band I think the both of us were…it goes without saying that we were pretty young and naive and following along and holding onto whatever was happening. We didn’t even know we were starting a band when we first started. There were only two of us and that didn’t seem like a feasible thing to do.
But then we kept on getting offered shows so we kept on playing. And when we started playing, Tyson had just started playing drums and I had pretty much started writing songs. So a lot of it was new to us. There was a lot of discovery at the beginning for us and the excitement of it can fade a little bit after awhile. So we’ve been following whatever impulse we have to change the way we do things and change our style, to keep it alive for us. But at the same time we try not to think about it too much. It’s not my favorite thing to dwell on.
Were there any revelations in regard to your chemistry with this new album?
I can’t say there were any revelations for us or me personally. If anything, it kind of reinforced a lot of opinions that I already held. I think we already knew how not to treat a recording experience as too much of a different experience than performing live. With a lot of technology these days, it’s really easy to want to do away with all the flaws on the record and clean them all up. You can lose track of the performance that way and deprive it of whatever life it had before. So it’s something I always believed in but it’s hard to do it sometimes. You can get lost in the process of making a record. And I think with this album we stuck with it pretty well and I think it sounds live and I think that’s what we were hoping for.
How has coming from San Francisco influenced the band?
Well, from the start, having both grown up in the city, it was a pretty natural thing to play music and I guess do something a little different. It wasn’t some kind of defiant act, even though our parents didn’t necessarily approve it at first. On a bigger scale, with growing up in the city there were a lot of people just doing a lot of interesting stuff. There was a lot of music everywhere and a lot of art everywhere. And there still is, though far less and far less cultural relevant. It was a very encouraging place to play music and write regardless of what may come out of it. We were pretty lucky to grow up in the city, probably influenced me as much as any of the other factors in my life.
It seems like a pretty diverse scene.
Yeah. It’s all over the place now. It’s hard to really put your finger on it, like it used to be. When we first started playing there were a lot of bands in the punk scene that we got associated with because we would play with them. We played any show we could. We played a lot of free shows and street shows and a lot of house shows. A lot of weird and interesting bands playing together all the time. That scene has been thoroughly eradicated from the city unfortunately. To me there isn’t quite as much of a vibrant scene as there used to be. Mostly because there are far fewer opportunities to play in San Francisco.
The band’s been on a few labels (Alive Records, Saddle Creek, ATO Records) over the past dozen-plus years. What are some of the biggest things you learned through being on different labels?
We’ve been fortunate to have a pretty close relationship with the people at each of the labels we’ve been on. I think that’s an essential thing. Not to just have a close relationship but then see eye-to-eye and know that they genuinely respect your music and what you’re doing and are engaged and interested in what you’re doing and not just popping out records. I think that’s far more important than getting a big advance or something like that.
What are you looking forward to most this year?
I’m just looking forward to going on tour again. It’s been awhile since we’ve done a full tour so I’m just excited to get out and play music every night. You can lose appreciation for what you do out there when you don’t play music every night and having people come out and see you and hopefully get something out of it. Pretty fortunate circumstances to find oneself in.
