Up this week is Gayle Ellet from grand old instrumental prog band Djam Karet. As you’ll see Gayle is a seasoned prog veteran (this is the oldest band I’ve interviewed for the site so far), and he’s got a unique perspective on what it means to “make it” as an indie prog artist.

Ben Sommer: Hi, this is Ben Sommer with BandsLikeRush.com. I’m here with Gayle Ellett from the band… you’ve got to help me with this. I don’t know what to…

Gayle Ellett: I pronounce it as Djam Karet.

Ben: Got it. I saw the phonetic spelling in your Wikipedia entry and it’s Djam Karet. Okay, I got it. It’s great.

Gayle: Great.

Ben: Anyway, Gayle is a kind of impresario of this long-running prog band that has been around for quite sometime and I’m excited to talk to him for a few minutes for the site. Gayle, for those fools who have never heard of your band or yourself, won’t you give us just a brief intro what you are about.

Gayle: Sure, our group, Djam Karet, was formed about 26 years ago in 1984 and we had 15 CDs out so far and we sort of play progressive music. We play such a blended style and so sometimes the music is either jazzy or metal or electronic and we pull some different veins. In the early years, all what we did was totally improvised music with no preplanned structure in any of our rehearsals or gigs and we did that for years, and then slowly we started adding more structure. As you can tell from listening to our music, we have a big focus on trying to make the ensemble sound and not be to just to set our instruments and rip solos over. We just are inspired by the music of our teenage years that we listened to, but we don’t want to be copies of them, but we are obviously influenced by Pink Floyd and King Crimson and also rock groups like the Allman Brothers and standard and jazz fusion groups like Mahavishnu Orchestra and electronic music with Tangerine Dream. So that’s kind of what we’ve done.

Ben: Yeah, definitely, when you said the word “ensemble” here for sure and some of the reviews I’ve read, they have that ensemble sound, and I confirmed it with my ears that it sounded like you record everything live as a group, even in the studio. Is that true?

Gayle: Only on the record they have the full sections that we record everything live in the studio. Almost with all of our albums before are really all done one track at a time with the drums first and then other instruments. So we do it so much and we do, I hope, well that it sounds very like we are all playing together, but it’s almost always one track at a time, even hopefully it doesn’t come across that way.

Ben: Wow – in your older stuff  it sounded like everyone was locked in, but not to a metronome. How does that work? Is the guitar first?

Gayle: We never use the metronome, but we will usually record the drums first and then what we will do is everyone in the room will play our instruments, just in the headphones so that the drummer can hear us playing along with him but no sounds bleeds into his drums.

Ben: Right.

Gayle: What we record is just a scratch track of all of us with grubby tone, just plugged into and blended together onto another track so, and the drums are free to speed up or slow down over time. We don’t care about if the tempo is creeping up a little faster over time. You know we don’t. It’s just – we are trying to have it played by hand kind of feel and not an ugly technical feel.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, well, if you were to simulate a live band, the recorded sound, that will be the way to do it.

Gayle: Absolutely, and I think in the future, we are going to try to do more bass drums and maybe guitar at the same time because it did work out really well in our most recent CD where we all play at the same time and we had ended up doing the overdubs on this particular record. Because we actually do overdubs since I play a guitar and keyboards, but I can’t play them both at the same time, obviously.

Ben: Right, yeah. That’s always a trick.

Gayle: Yeah.

Ben: So when you were throwing out some similarity, your influences, you threw some names that are telling. The one thing, the non-Western element that in a lot of music and is quoted in a lot of the reviews with things like where I don’t hear a lot of odd meters which sometimes you hear in certain non-Western folk music, but the non-Western modes you use a lot with different types of scales. Where did that come from?

Gayle: Yeah, we do play a lot in 7/4 and other rhythms, but we play them sometimes so fluidly that it doesn’t sounds like they are odd rhythms. But one of our bass players, Aaron writes a lot in the other modes besides the major Ionian and Aeolian modes that normal Western likes to assume. But I also I write a lot of traditional world music for my day job, which is to do music for TV shows and film projects and so in that way I have spent a couple of decades studying a ton of world music as part of my main job of writing music at home for that kind of thing, and also the rest of the people in the band listen to a lot of traditional folk CDs around the world, in general, because we like listening to Polynesian music and South American music and Eastern European music. So there is so much of that stuff that creeps in and influences our style so much.

Ben: Right, right. Yeah, when I said meters, I do hear odd meters, but it’s not math rock where you are switching around and being avant garde about it. There is a lot of non-Western music that have odd meters that stick to them and so they are just kind of like part of a dance sequence if you will. That’s what I hear here.

Gayle: Well, one thing, you know, in many ways we are trying hard to make music that, on the one hand is fairly complicated or very complicated, but on the other hand it’s still flowing and grooving and so we are trying to not get that effect of that math rock thing where it’s just tedious. We are trying to balance flow with complexity and simple with complex parts and solo and melody and juggle all those things and keep them kind of under control but all still very vibrant at the same time.

Ben: I want to hear about your day job. I interviewed another fellow from the LA area for BandsLikeRush’s sister site, BandsLikeZappa.com. He’s a commercial jingle writer, but actually a reality show scorewriter.

Gayle: Right.

Ben: It’s his day job and it sounds like you’ve got a ton of credits and experience in that realm. How does that start?

Gayle: It started about 20 years ago when my friend’s brother became a TV producer, an assistant TV producer on ESPN and they needed some instrumental music for some surfing shows and so we submitted some stuff and they liked it and then they said, “Oh well, now, we’ve got a skiing show in the Andes and we need Peruvian folk music. Can you do that?” And I said, “Well, I listen to that stuff all the time and I’ve got tons of those instruments here and I play a gazillion of instruments anyway. Give me a few days and I will send something in.” And I did and they liked it and I thought, “Well, this is doable.” And if you listen to a certain style in music like Balinese music and that Peruvian and I thought I can make it unique which couldn’t take weeks or months then you write new compositions in those styles and also some of these songs within public domain. For example, with Traditional Chinese songs, you can do covers of them.

Ben: Oh, good. Yeah, that helps.

Gayle: Yeah, so sometimes I do covers and stuff and sometimes I write original music and put it out on libraries and directly put it into shows and film projects and it’s a struggle for anybody. It’s hard.

Ben: Yeah, I know.

Gayle: But you get to work at home, which I love, and that’s awesome.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So the band is so old and if you look it, you know you started from cassette tapes just like I did when I was in high school we recorded in the garage. I’m just curious because I’m a musician. A lot of the people listening to the podcast are musicians. Throughout the years, what has been the mission or strategy for this band? Has it shifted? Did you go through a period where you tried to make it either big or make it a sustainable career? Where does the band fit in with this day job you are doing now and in the past?

Gayle: Well, we’ve been really lucky in that. We’ve always been motivated to play totally self-indulgent music without any concern for its popularity or salability or anything. Especially when you start off playing totally improvised music for years, you are not trying to make accessible music, but you are trying to play music at a higher level and learn and get better at it. It’s just that early on we put out the cassette and the CD and enough sold that it supported to pay for itself and funded the making of another one. So if people didn’t buy our CD, we would still get together and record, but it just wouldn’t get released. So we’ve been really lucky that our goal has never been to be successful and popular and so far it worked terrific. If we want to be more popular, we would have shorter songs. We aspired to be a certain kind of band.

Ben: Yeah.

Gayle: A bank like King Crimson or Pink Floyd or Yes. That was a visionary band with lofty visionary goals and we try to work a lot on with theme & variations – compositions and arrangements – and pursuing those goals is very rewarding and I just had no interest in trying to play pop music and I never listen to it. Almost all my CDs are instrumental.

Ben: Yeah, I noticed.

Gayle: Most people don’t listen to instrumental music at all.

Ben: It’s true, except as background and that’s your day job.

Gayle: Right.

Ben: So that fits perfectly.

Gayle: Yeah, sure. Right.

Ben: Well, at least, did you have a new CD or do you have any events or gigs coming up you want to plug, your website, if nothing else?

Gayle: Now, we have our website, djamkaret.com, and we hardly ever gig so we have no gigs you find in the future, but we’ll work on another record soon and I just like to encourage all the musicians that are listening to pursue recording more. Get your own home studio and get working at it and it will you if you get pro tools and after you made three or four records, you will start to get good at it. I mean, it takes a long time to learn but it’s learnable and I just say record.

Ben: Yeah.

Gayle: Why play live? Why play live? It doesn’t get you anywhere.

Ben: Just do it right. Well, great. This has been great talking to you, Gayle. Thanks for your time.

Gayle: I absolutely appreciate it. Let’s talk more sometime.

Ben Sommer: I’m talking today with a Brit, another Brit, two in a row this time, to Tony Buttermead.

Tony Bodimead: Bodimead

Ben: Bodimead, sorry, from the UK band Lime Shark. Tony, I just referenced an interview to a London-based fellow last time, and it seems there’s more and more good prog rock coming out of the UK. Tell me about yourself, your band, and what you guys are all about.

Tony: We’ve been going since I think 2002, 2003. That’s what from the very beginning, although I had to try different people out, different personnel to see who would work. With some people, they start falling by the wayside, but the bass player and I are still going. We’re sort of rock but we edge on prog, and we’re constantly told we sound similar to Rush, and I mean, to be honest, Rush is one of my favorite bands. I’ve always enjoyed them like from the early years. And I supposed it must be embedded in me and I can’t help it. It’s just the way we play and the way we arrange songs. It’s not that I don’t like, but I’m not keen on playing any covers or songs that sound similar to or like a general sound that some rock bands have. And I think Rush is similar to that. They don’t do the norm, they just sort of play what they know on all sorts of directions, which keeps it interesting, and I guess we are the same. The only difference being I think is that our songs aren’t very long. I mean the longest one we’ve got is just over five-minutes, I think.

But if remember rightly now, when I’ve seen Rush in recent years, some of their songs are ups and down, they sort of I think they can learn how to keep the interest more. They are not that self-indulgent anymore. But I’ve actually enjoyed all the changes that the band had done. But there are always similarities with Rush, and people tell us so.

Ben: Well, if you ask a purist Rush in the last decade or so, it’s not really a straight ahead prog band anymore. I mean, not many of the lead prog band of the 70’s and 80’s are anymore.

Tony: Prog, it is funny, isn’t it? What I keep on getting told is that prog should have a mellotron. We should have lots of voices and if there were sounds where I think the word progressive is all about development and pushing forward and progressing, and I think Rush have always done that. And then we’re trying to do something. We’re trying to assimilate things ourselves. We don’t stick to any one style or sound when it comes with changing things and there is like an underlying sound that we have which I hope we can keep. With the whole thing, it’s very, very difficult to get an original sound these days.

Ben: Yeah.

Tony: There are a lot of bands. You can put an album on and then another album by another band and sometimes it’s hard to tell who is who. So I think to have a proper identity is quite important especially these days.

Ben: True.

Tony: Otherwise, you are just getting lost in the quagmire of rhythm with all these different bands.

Ben: True. Have you ever heard of a funny blog post recently? A younger person was saying, “I went to see a prog concert. I saw LinkedIn in concert.” Well, not LinkedIn. Cancel that. That just went to the brain. Linkin Park.

Tony: I love the energy of Linkin Park. They definitely got a great energy.

Ben: Yeah, but are they prog?

Tony: No.

Ben: They’re very hoppy, right? I mean, yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I like the bands in that vain. Do you know Paramour? Who knows?

Tony: Yeah, and they seem to be quite popular.

Ben: But the punch line of the joke is, “They are not really prog, why do you call them prog?” “Well, because they had a laser show in the concert.” So, it’s mellotron, its laser show. I mean it’s very gimmicky.

Tony: Entertaining the public and the public are very fickle. I mean everyone has got a different opinion about what’s what and this is how they should sound and how that should sound. I mean, I think what you’ve got to do if you’re in the band, you just got to try and remain true to yourself and just do what feels right to you and just hope the people get along with what you’re doing. I mean, there are bands like YOU that are sort of going an awful long time because of the general public. I think it took them a while to catch on what my best time. I remember seeing these guys playing in little parks with only a few people on the audience but eventually they started picking up and people caught on. And that’s why I think they are in their sixteenth year or something like that like U2 or maybe more now.

Ben: So, tell me how do you guys go about writing?

Tony: That’s an interesting one. We don’t really have a writing process. The songs come in all different forms. They sometimes come just from a couple of lyrics. Sometimes, I’ll just be messing around in the studio with a bass line, like we’ve got a song called Blind Side and that kind of out with me in the studio just playing my bass for distortion effects unit and I was just messing away, and then it all started coming together and while we’re writing, I was writing it with the guitarist who was no longer in the band. His father died while we were actually working on the song, and he felt compelled to write some words about that, about how it was strange that one day your dad is there and the next minute you dad is sort of on the other side and it’s sort of just a strange feeling realizing that he’s no longer there. You can’t talk to him anymore. And that’s where the spot where you feel like on the blind side of. And so there is no sort of warning.

There’s another song, Burn. We just got thinking about one of the guys shooting our road crew and he’s a motorbike enthusiast and he loves the freedom of being on a nice bike and that starts off that one and Paul, the bass took me out into a field where we put like a laptop computer and he had me record his motorbike until he passed down the country lane and that’s how we start the song off live. We’ve got a sample of his motorbike.

Ben: That’s like the Van Halen. Do you remember? Panama is about a car and they’ve got clip of Eddie Van Halen’s blue Lamborghini in the studio.

Tony: I think if you’re sensitive to all of the different things, you can get ideas from just about anything around you. But there is set way. I just pick thing out there sometimes. But the thing is you’ve got to remain open to it. You’ve got to keep on doing it to pick these things. It’s so much like songs are there you’ve just got to find them. That kind of feeling sometimes because it’s so much they really like themselves. It’s very strange.

Ben: Yeah.

Tony: It’s very strange, it usually happens about two o’clock in the morning.

Ben: Speaking of that, I mean how long have you been doing this night owl operation?

Tony: Yeah, we’ve just get back from Belgium. We’re doing a festival out in Belgium supporting Blaze Bayley, and every time we do a gig, and we would have a line of bands with a supporting headline acts. We noticed things about our equipment on how we can maybe get the setup done quickly because you’ve got a certain amount of time to put your equipment onstage and set up. So I’ve always working on ideas on how to make the equipment more practical and easy to set up and faster to set up for that moment, it’s two in the morning and making cable loops . We use midi pedals. We don’t have a keyboard player.

Ben: Oh, yes.

Tony: We sort of trigger things at our feet in the sequences, that’s a Rush thing actually and we need to get it set up quicker in a festival situation, so that’s what I’m doing at the moment. I’m just putting the new cable group together and to simply sequence the rig together to knot these cables.

Ben: Very cool. I sure hope you don’t have a day job then with that kind of schedule. What do you do?

Tony: No, what I do? I’ve been in bands in the past and I have record deals and things, so I invested the money for my deals in the past with my royalties and I bought properties around the area where I live and I rent them out so that I can have an income while I can get this band where it needs it to be. I’m very aware that sometimes bands don’t make any money. Sometimes they can but generally they have to survive basically, so, I got myself a situation where I get a small income that keeps me going, so I might just carry on doing this.

Ben: Brilliant.

Tony: Yeah.

Ben: That’s the way to do it. So, you just got off a tour or a brief stint, festival stint, what’s up next?

Tony: We’ve got more festivals this year. I’m in UK so far, although our PR lady says there’s one over0 in Germany but I don’t know any details about it yet, but we’re trying to do more festivals this year because we’ve come from a four-piece band to three-piece and we’re really enjoying it. It’s making us all work a lot harder, but the feeling is great onstage, so we’re going to pursue that. And we thought it might be good to take off and show up to a sort of lot of audiences so we are just trying to do more festivals this year.

Ben: Cool. Where would people find you online?

Tony: Limeshark.com.

Ben: Easy. One last stupid question, what is Lime Shark from?

Tony: So, Lime Shark, we were on holiday in Australia, and the bass player was dangling his legs over the side of the boat and he didn’t get bitten but he got nudged by something and he looked down and there was a huge shark below, and I don’t know what it was but it looked lime. It actually looked like lime green. It frightened the life out of us actually. So that’s where we get the name from.

Ben: It’s good as any, very good. Cool. Well, thanks for talking.

Tony: Okay, very nice of you, Ben. It’s nice to talk to you as well, Ben. Cheers.

This week I speak with Bjorn Egelius from the Swedish instrumental prog trio – therhythmisodd.

A couple things that set the band apart:

• They record live – together – in the studio (why is this such a rare thing now?)
• They’re…Swedish
• They’re….Big, bald and scary!

All jokes aside, the band is putting out fantastic instrumental prog rock, with the heaviness & virtuosity of a great prog band like Rush, and the spontaneity of a great fusion band like Mahavishnu Orchestra. Enjoy.

Ben Sommer: Hi, this is Ben Sommer with BandsLikeRush.com. I’m here with Bjorn Egelius from band Trio, which is an abbreviation for The Rhythm Is Odd. It’s kind of a cool name. It’s a cute name. Bjorn, just say hi and just tell the audience a little bit about the band, where are you from, and what you’ve been up to lately.

Bjorn Egelius: Well, as you said, my name is Bjorn and I’m from therhythmisodd. We are kind of a progressive fusion/rock from Sweden and Scandinavia, Europe. Lately we have released our second album. It’s called the Raw Material and it will probably hit the market soon. We have it out for sale on iTunes and other online stores at the moment, but they say it’s on the way to a couple of Web stores in the US

Ben: I had it on my shortlist to interview you guys and I noticed you started publishing a video or two on the Web. Are these for your upcoming album?

Bjorn: Some of them. That’s our second album, which is out now. The first one was released under TRIO, it’s called From Nowhere To Eternity. When we released that album, it was on the fall of 2008.

Ben: Right. Now, you are power trio like a lot of great progressive rock bands with Rush being the primary one. You have a very heavy sound, a very kind of a raw sound, which I like. It sounds like you play and record live as a group and you don’t do much over-dubbing. Is that correct?

Bjorn: Exactly. We don’t do that at all except the voice prompts.

Ben: Right. Now, you managed to fill out the sound very well, but what’s great is to hear just like Rush. With the great Rush songs, even when it involved the guitar solo, even on the recorded albums or the studio albums, its sparing on the rhythm guitars, backing guitars. It’s just a real power trio and the bass sound in your band is very strong and very thick and it kind of fills up the texture. I really like that.

Bjorn: Thank you.

Ben:  Are you the bassist?

Bjorn: Yes, that’s right. Actually, we try to capture a certain kind of feeling when we do this live also because for bass and drums, it’s more than one instrument. You can’t separate them too much and the guitar needs to be around those so you get this special feeling of music. I think live is the way to do this.

Ben: Live in the studio, you mean…

Bjorn: Yeah, yeah, live in the studio, of course.

Ben: Agreed, agreed. So you are not the first non-American band I’ve interviewed, but I haven’t interviewed too many. I have interviewed a few. What’s the scene like for progressive rock in Sweden?

Bjorn: It’s evolved. We seemed to be getting popular, especially in the US and so on, but since Sweden, it’s population is not so big. There is not so big audience for this kind of music.

Ben: Oh, really? Where are your fans come from for the most part if not Sweden?

Bjorn: They are located according to the sales figures usually in the US.

Ben: Now, I heard the opposite from some of the American bands I’ve interviewed. They say, “Oh, you know, we don’t have much of an audience in the US, but whenever we go to Europe to tour or to play, people go nuts.” That’s so funny.

Bjorn: Yeah, imagine that. Because you will be more exotic if you are some kind of band from America or at the same time, in this case, where American audience if the band comes from abroad. It gives it a certain kind of attention out there.

Ben: Oh, that’s a good point. That’s probably true. Cool. So your new album comes out soon. Do you have any events coming up, well, not that it makes any difference to my audience unless you are coming into the US, but anything special aside from the album release you want to talk about?

Bjorn: No, we haven’t got any performance or tours at the moment because we are going to focus on the album.

Ben: Right.

Bjorn: And if the album is actually released you can order the CD right now from downtown. In a week or so we can already come at Logic Store or CD Baby.

Ben: Oh, excellent, great.

Bjorn: Yeah.

Ben: Well, cool. I’ll plug the site and shoot everyone over to your Bandcamp page as soon as it’s released and the best of luck and contact us when your next album is released as well. We’ll talk again.

Bjorn: Yeah, we’ll do. Thank you for your interest around that. I really enjoyed talking with you.

This week I speak with Simon James White – front-man and namesake of the UK prog-pop band SjW.

Simon’s greatest asset is his voice – a pure but meaty tenor that sounds like a hybrid of Jon Anderson and Jack Bruce. He’s a good bass player too, though unlike many bass-fronted bands his songs are balanced and guitar-driven rockers. The Rush similarity here is obviously to early and late era albums.

Ben Sommer: Hi, this is Ben Sommer at BandsLikeRush.com.   I’m here with Simon James White from UK – of many different musical projects including his eponymous band SjW.  Simon, welcome, won’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself in music and the band.

Simon James White: Thanks Ben, it’s great to be here.  I’m a musician from West London originally.  I’m very much influenced and inspired by all the great kind of rock bands and progressive rock bands of the 70′s and in some cases the 80′s and somewhat the late bands as well, and I like music hopefully in the  spells and traditions of the bands that I very much grew up loving and admiring.

Ben: Great, and I also noticed the website linked at your email bassface.co.uk.

Simon: Yeah.

Ben: You seem to have a lot of other projects.  I see you’ve got this Traffic Experiment, that you are involved in, of course, then there’s SJW, but then you’ve got bass lessons and guitar lessons.  What’s your main kind of musical activity do you think?

Simon: Well, I mean my main musical activity, of course, is writing music, original rock-based music but as you’ve probably know, Ben, it’s very difficult at the moment for musicians to exist without having lots of different arms to what they do, so to speak.  So I spend my time doing things that are music related.  I’m very open about these things and part of that, a part of the thing that I do is I teach.  I like to work with people in another musical collaborations and I already like to keep myself busy if I possible can.

Ben: I hear you.  Your latest album with SjW was this year or am I reading this wrong.  It’s going to be released this year?

Simon: Well, the new album which is originally titled Heavy Cargo and we are not necessarily set on that title, but at best it’s the working title.  That’s due for release this year and the previous album The State of Delirium was released in 2008 and we had an album in 2006 called Talk on Corners as well.

Ben: Right, you have some notes and the kind of the pre-release PR that you are taking a more progressive experimental turn from what I see published on iTunes and iSound and Spotify.  So is that true, and if so, what’s the reason for that?

Simon: Well, for me, the State of Delirium album, they are a little from the new album the Heavy Cargo album. I mean there has been a sort of a steady growth throughout the albums in terms of opening up musical jammers in the progressive side, I guess.  The first album wasn’t a progressive record particularly, but it was never intended be a progressive record.  I already had a very healthy and progressive music at that point, but I just made a conscious decision being the first release.  I didn’t want to make it too progressively leaning further for lots of reasons, but my own reasons mainly, and certainly the State of Delirium album was a step in the more progressive elements of what I do.  And then of course, the new album, yes, I kind of decided to let it all hang out really and it’s a slightly heavier record than the State of Delirium album.  It’s certainly a slightly more progressive record as well as serviced.

Ben: Well, cool.  So quantifying musical terms, what do you mean by heavy or progressive?

Simon: Well, in terms of heavy, I suppose I speak about it in production really.  We certainly went for heavy production sound on the new record.  Certainly, the guitars are much heavier in terms of their head tones and in terms of voice quality and when you combine that all together too, what you would come up is a much thicker and much denser album.  The writing is quite different on the new record.  In the State of Delirium album, which I don’t have any chance to listen it, it’s quite an impression kind of airy-sounding really and it was specifically written like that.  But this new record is structured in a very different way to that record and lots of those elements to come to the fore really.

Ben: So the arrangements and the texture is more of what you’re referring to.  I hear what you are saying with texture.  State of Delirium is pretty well balanced and not over-engineered.  I don’t hear a million different things going on.  It’s very straight ahead.  Is that what you meant?

Simon: Well, certainly, in terms of the production effects on that record, yeah.  It certainly, textually these records are a lot bigger.  And with the guitars they play a much more kind of predominant to the role in the new record as well.  It’s just got a lot more depth to it.  Just in terms of the actual production really, it’s absolutely yeah.  I mean, we tend to use a lot of technology in terms of what we were doing as well, so there are lots of sequences happening.  And that again, didn’t happen on the State of Delirium album, but it was probably a little more subtle.  Certainly, this time we’ve really brought back a lot of things to the forefront of the record as well.

Ben: So do you, on your site, you have bass lessons, you have guitar lessons.  Your site is called Bass Face, so you seemed to be a bassist at heart.  Are you playing a guitar as well on all these tracks?

Simon: Well, the way I work, Ben, is that I pretty much write the majority of the music.  So for the last record, I wrote 25 to 30 new tunes for this record.  I very luckily have the types of guys in the band I worked with.  Mitch Gasser is a fantastic guitarist and Tom Price is a really good drummer as well.  So I then take my works to those guys.  And we will then make our own decision in terms of the materials that we use.  So the last or the new record has 12 new songs on it, although it has 25 songs, and that would be a band kind of decision and a management decision in terms of what of those songs are used.  But certainly at the additional section, I pretty much seemed will have them put everything together absolutely.

Ben: Oh cool.  So do you record demo tracks on guitar or all those things or is it in the end, are you just bass and then there will be supporting guitar tracks.  And if so, who’s your guitarist?

Simon: No, now, I would tend to write and record everything and put out the initial arrangements at home on a small Mac-based studio system and I will program jams.  I will play guitars.  I’ll play bass.  I’ll sing them and do those kind of things, and then at a later date when those tunes are ready in their entirety, I will then involve the rest of the band in terms of passing slight modifications, rearrangements, and just how the song is going to appear on the formal record really.

Ben: Cool, cool.  How long has this been going on in this solo work?  Well, it’s solo, but collaborative, which is a nice mix, by the way.  I’ve been talking recently with several, and I have another site like BandsLikeZappa.com for solo or impresario-type guys where I’m in the same camp as a musician.  Its easy to get your vision cooked up in the mad laboratory of the studio but not so easy to find likeminded fellows who would support you.  I don’t know where I was going with that, but let me just circle back and ask: is that the way you’ve arranged it?  You mean the band is named for you, but is it collaborative?  Do you have guys who are on the payroll?  Are you successful enough to support these guys in the band, or are they just you know mates and support you morally and then as you try to get your solo career going?

Simon: Well, I think in terms of the concept of the solo sort of identity, that’s not so much that paint it.  The fact of the matter is that is that as you probably well know, the existence of a band is a very, very tricky state of affairs really, and if you’re someone that has an idea, if you’re someone that has a vision for the kind of thing that you want to do, then really the onus is on you to take responsibility to enable that really and that’s the only way I see it.  I don’t see this as a solo one-man band-type deal.  What I see this is me just being the person in the band that takes the decision to primarily drive this thing forward, and I’m person that takes that responsibility on my shoulders and I’m the person that enables that to happen.

But in terms of the band-side of things, I’m very lucky.  I have two guys that I work with who play with me because they enjoy what we do, and also I play with them because I very much enjoy what they do and respects what they do and what might be as well and so there is a nice balance between the two.  It’s not quite a solo if you put it into that perspective.  Certainly, it was never intended to be that way.  It’s very much a band when the band can exist and when the band can do the things that it needs to do.  But what I am about intend to do when it is in a situation because the guys are based in other countries and things like that.  What I’m trying not to do is have a situation where we’ve got too much big time, so I will physically take responsibility for ensuring that this things moves forward regardless of any other circumstances.

Ben: Right, it makes sense.  It sounds like a great arrangement.  Your influence – I can’t quite place it.  I mean, you’re playing bass and you are singing slightly progressive, at least with the stuff you have published is rock in a very high tenor range.  And that immediately says, “Oh, Geddy Lee with Rush template.”  But there’s something else about your voice I can’t quite place and I haven’t just do a long enough, and there are some other mix of influences I hear, at least in the vocal quality.  Has anyone compared your voice to anyone else?

Simon: No, not particularly.  I understand that there is a guy who’s name I can’t remember his name.  There is a gentleman who is in a band by the name of Soga who shortly people have kind of pointed out that my voice is quite similar to.  I mean, I was really born with a voice and that voice has the timbre quality that your voice has and I certainly wouldn’t ever kind of say I would put what I do with the likes of Geddy Lee or Robert Plant or with whomever it happens to be really.  I certainly have a wide range of things with voice is I like in the way that I’ve developed my voice in that regard is simply by trying to add a little bit of all the great vocalists that I enjoyed growing up and that could be Geddy Lee.  It could be Phil Collins.  It could be Jack Bruce.  It could be any number of people.

Ben: Right.  Right, now I hear.  I used to call it Geddy.  Well, he’s still is kind of a lore, a lot harder and actually he was younger, but you definitely not aware of him yet of the rounded tone.  Even though the pitch you register is quite the size.  It’s like Geddy’s or Stings or any of these guys you mentioned that you are playing.

Simon: I mean, it’s absolutely not a clever thing.  It’s where I’m comfortable seeing actually my speaking voice is relatively low and so it comes quite surprising when I can kind of hit some of the notes that I can hit, but it’s that where I thought naturally.  I’m very distinctive about these things and I believe that this should be a very intensive process, and it just so happens that both of the melodies and notes were the ideas that I chose to sing for those particular types of songs.

Ben: Well, I mean it’s true it’s great.  You don’t have a high speaking voice and it’s a blessing to be able to wail up to sing that high because just rock music is traditionally is a high tenor voice is rule of the roost.  Probably just because it naturally cuts through the thick rock texture and the frequency, that where it’s suits best and so those are the reason that people would rather playing to Sting because those guys just stand out.

Simon: Absolutely yeah, you’re quite right now.

Ben: Tell me about this Traffic Experiment.  Your kind of other project seems interesting.

Simon: Yeah, I mean Traffic Experiment is very much born of the real old school whatever you would call it, a very old school kind of progressive records really where the idea of a record is that it’s very much an entertaining itself.  So if you are listening to the likes of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd or something along those lines, it has long jaw mouthed passages that the album itself is incredibly long.  It’s 17 minutes or something like that, an intriguing album which we put together a way to enable that sort of expression.  So it’s a really nice harp back to kind of albums that you just don’t tend to hear.  And from a basic point of view, I played bass on that record almost entirely and I tried a lot of the other backing vocals and harmonies and some of the highest stuff as well, so it was a very nice thing to do that record, and I’m actually very pleased with the end results.

Ben: Yeah, cool.  How do you approach composing?  Well, first of all, how do you approach composing in the first place songs?  It sounds like you cobble them together in rough cuts and like you said in your home studio.  Do you do it differently between your solo stuff and this track experimental album?

Simon: Well, luckily for me, I’m not responsible for them on writing all the arrangements on the track experiment album.  One of things that I really enjoyed doing with that album is playing the role of a section musician really.  I was probably responsible for providing the bass lines.  I was responsible for making the album jolt together in that regard, but actually Stuart Chalmers who wrote the album worked in a very, very similar way to me.  He has a very small studio where he is and he would send me the first kind of templates of the tunes through and I could then make a valued decision with the parts that I like and with parts I didn’t like and the parts that I thought I could probably improve a little bit and I can then bring more to the album.

Ben: Cool, that’s a good helping mix of the lead man and a session manager and that sounds interesting.

Simon: Yeah, it’s nice to be able to do both and they both really present different challenges and we have to really approach it in a different way which I believe is the key to encourage the musicians to be really unique to be able to exist within any given situation.

Ben: Great, so what news do you want to plug, your website or the release if anything for the listeners?

Simon: Well, I’d like to let everyone know that we do have out albums already and all are available all over the Web and over the Net.  They are like at places like iTunes and all your regular kinds of online digital distributors.  I’d like to sort of thank everyone out there that actually takes the time to listen to the music, not only produced by myself or any band out there that’s trying to do the kind of thing we do, and all those people that supported, buy it and physically paying for the music as well, so you really have to understand I think at this point in time it’s really important the band to receive that kind of support from the people that enjoy listening to their music.

The new record is out.  If anyone would like to, there are going to be ton of information on www.bassface.co.uk and there are lots of videos out on YouTube.  Before we end the keeper and get away with your videos from the State of Delirium album and we’re contactable.  I’m contactable if anyone would like any further information and then please feel free to say hi.

Ben: Cool.  Great.  Well, it’s been great talking to you.  Thank you so much.

Simon: It’s been my pleasure.  Thank you very much, Ben.

Today I speak with two guys from the Wichita-based band .end of story. The last few bands interviewed for the site were clear-cut “Bands Like Rush”. Today marks a return to an earlier tradition on the site: me featuring bands who its a bit of a stretch to call “like Rush”. As you’ll hear in the interview, I frankly admit to Skot Reed – lead singer of the band – that I just stumbled upon the band while listening to Rush channel on the web radio station iSound.com.

Nevertheless there is great similarity between late-era Rush (i.e. Snakes & Arrows, Caravan, etc.) and .end of story’s sound. We even hear a story from Skot how he got his early start in cover bands singing Rush covers – apparently in his youth he had the kind of clear, piercing tenor vocal range that made him a natural stand-in for Geddy.

Ben Sommer: It’s good question. So I was going to go there eventually in the interview, but the short answer is I’m browsing through bands on Jango and iSound, and you came up on both when I was on the Rush channel.

Skot: Oh, I see. Cool.

Ben: That’s a stupid answer and then the honest answer is it’s a pretty oblique relation musically for sure, and so another part of the answer is – I like the music.

Skot: We are both big Rush fans.

Ben: But maybe you are not consciously emulating them, and is Rush not your biggest influence, do you think?

Skot: No, not even close nowadays, but Dave and I, we played in our first band together back when we were in high school, and I won’t tell you what year that was, but let’s put it this way, we were learning everything off of Hemisphere in our high school band. So we were both big time Rush fans, but over the years, and I couldn’t even tell you what the last Rush record I bought was. The influence has changed. That’s just the way life is, but it certainly not that I dislike Rush in any way, shape or form. When I write songs, never am I trying to emulate anybody for that matter, but certainly not Rush.

Ben: Right, so that’s fine. I’m in the same boat with you frankly. I mean, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Rush, but it’s odd that I started this podcast a year ago when really my heyday for loving Rush was in college and high school and probably it’s kind of same with you.

Skot: Right, exactly. It’s one of those things though. I mean, they were such a big influence back in the day when the music was so different and just so unique and so inspiring, but no matter where they go or what they do, they are always going to love them no matter what they do, even if they put out a record that stinks. If you are a fan, you are a fan. Do you know what I mean?

Ben: Right. So tell me about End of Story..

Skot: I started End of Story almost 15 years ago. I was living in Seattle for a while when I moved back from Seattle in 1996, and I had been doing cover bands for years and years and years. As a matter of fact, Rush was one of the bands that we covered because some of my natural vocal characteristics, especially my vibrato and my range, it didn’t matter. We could play a ZZ Top song. And the first thing I hear when we came off stage was, “You sound like Rush. You sound like them, I mean, totally.” So we went with that and started covering a bunch of Rush, and then I actually started trying to emulate Geddy Lee and in the cover bands that I was in years.

But anyway, I had played covers and toured the country and done that thing for years, and in Seattle, basically when I live in Seattle, I did a lot of wood shedding, just soul searching and a lot of practicing and I started writing a bunch of new materials in a whole different style on a whole different approach and when I got back to Wichita, I contacted some musicians that I had worked with previously and End of Story was formed in August of 1996 and there has been some member changes over the past 15 years with several drummers, a couple of bass players. Dave and I hooked up, and that will be seven years this March since we’ve been back together and that’s a done deal. Between the two of us, nobody is going anywhere.

So we put out our last record called the Sonic Blueprint. It came out in January of 2009 and after that record came out, our drummer promptly quit. And yeah, we had spent a year making a record and you rehearse and get everything ready and you go play one show and he’s done. That’s a whole another story, but…

Ben: Stinkers.

Skot: Yeah, we’ve been auditioning drummers coming up on two years and we’ve worked with a couple of guys for a length of time here and there, and so far we’ve just not found anybody that A) approaches the music the way we do, and B) they don’t just have the same priorities as we do.

Ben: Right.

Skot: Although Wichita is the biggest city in Kansas and there are a lot of incredibly talented musicians, they are all spoken for, the available talent pool is really shallow in our area.

Ben: Right.

Skot: Anyway, we’ve got three records out. The first EP, just a four-song EP came out in 2000. That was myself and a different drummer and bassist. The self-propelled record, and this is kind of a long story, but this is where we are headed so this self-propelled record was a 17-song project that I started in 2002 and throughout this project, a lot of things happened that put the breaks on it. My father passed away. I had lost all creative energy, so right in the middle of this thing I took a little hiatus. About the time I was ready to get back to it, the drummer left. The bassist and I talked about carrying on. I just decided I wanted to finish the record on my own. I already had the drum tracks recorded. So I finished seven songs of the 17 and then my son was born.

Ben: I know what that does to any career.

Skot: Yeah, I got you. And so anyway, the project just got shelved and it’s just been sitting on a computer and there are seven songs that were completed. I did everything on them, except the drums. I played the guitar, the bass, the vocals, everything. I mixed, mastered, blah, blah, blah.

Ben: Yeah.

Skot: And when our drummer left, when the drummer that was playing with Dave and I left, we’ve been writing new songs for a new record, but then we decided, “Hey, do you know what? Let’s open up this Propel deal, finish up some of those songs that never got completed. It’s almost done. Let’s just put it out as a full length.” So we went back and Dave played all the bass lines on all the songs. We’ve put his background vocals on everything, so it’s just as much like what End of Story is today as possible. And I’m doing the final mixes and I’ve got some final mixes to do and then the mastering and hopefully this one is just going to be a digital release with iTunes and whatnot. But hopefully it will be ready to hit iTunes sometime in March.

Ben: Cool.

Skot: Yeah, we just found out that the cover art for our last record, the Sonic Blueprint, which has amazing art work on it. He’s on board to do the Self-Propelled release as well, so hopefully he’ll have some art together for us about the time I’m finished with the mastering and we would put that out. So anyway, the Self-Propelled started in 2002 and we are going to finish it in 2011, so it’s nothing like dragging our project out for a while.

So – I got so burned out on working in a studio for everybody else because it seemed like I was always doing everyone else’s record and giving everyone else that extra time and the extra effort and getting nothing done for myself, and I left the studio business to focus on End of Story, and lo and behold, we put out a full-length record in a year, so I don’t miss the studio business. I enjoy doing it just for us.

Ben: Oh yeah, so you have a sugar mom in there, a career mom?

Skot: No sugar mama. Between Dave and myself, we’ve collected so much gear over the years. I mean, we are set up. We can make records for the rest of our lives and never need another tool.

Ben: Well, that’s not what I mean.

Skot: Well, yes, I’ve got a good wife.

Ben:  Now, I wasn’t speaking about the gear. You are right. You probably have gear if you have been in the business, and even if you didn’t, it’s so dirt cheap. That’s not what’s precious anymore, it’s the time.

Skot: Oh yeah.

Ben: You said you were still in debt, was your wife or significant other or whoever taking care of the bread and bacon?

Skot: Oh yeah, yeah, with that one. My wife is an accountant and has been for years and years. So it just made it more sense for her with the college education and whatnot to go to work and make the money. She’s got the education to make more money than I can and it just made more sense for me to stay home and take care of the kids instead of trying to pay daycare. By the time we paid daycare and all of that other stuff, my job would be pointless anyway if I was working. So I home schooled the kid and I’ve got a great bonding with my son for all the years that we’ve spent together.

Ben: Great.

Skot: I wouldn’t trade it for the whole world.

Ben: Cool, cool. So Dave, what’s your story. Skot said in the email you had both admitted being Rush-heads, but he said you are especially a Rush-head. Is that true?

Dave Eichman: Yeah, yeah. My story is I grew up in a musical family. Skot and I are about the same age. I’m a year older than he is and as he said we went to school together and had our first band ever together when we were teenagers in high school. We just went separate ways over the years and hooked back up once or twice and this time for good as he said about seven years ago. But yeah, I grew up with three older brothers and they listened to Black Sabbath, Grand Funk Railroad, Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, and stuff like that, and so those were my early influences and later Rush came along and I was hooked on Rush right away. I was KISS freak for a short period of time when I was a teenager.

Ben: Did you see them? Didn’t they used to tour together? Did you see them live?

Dave: I know they did tour together. I never saw Rush with KISS. I had seen them twice in Wichita many, many years ago, but Rush was not with them.

Skot: That’s just been great.

Dave: I have seen Rush a couple of times. In fact, I just saw Rush last year here in Wichita. Skot wasn’t able to go to that show, but I enjoyed it. But Geddy Lee, as a bass player, is one of my big influences. I picked up the bass just by happenstance. A friend of mine who lived across the street loved his bass thinking that it would be cool to play. He never tried. He found out it was hard and every time I went to his house, I just started picking up this old Kay bass and it just called to me every time. I started going over there just so I could play his bass and that was the important part of the friendship and I was hooked. I just took right to it and I just started playing and playing and playing and I was kind of self-taught at first, but I played in jazz band in high school and I went to study music at the local college there at Wichita State University. And so I’ve got a little bit of academic background.

Skot: He’s leaving out the important part. He had to go to Jeff Berlin’s Player School of Music in Florida and spent a week doing intensive study with Jeff Berlin.

Ben: Yeah.

Dave: So that didn’t hurt.

Ben: When was that?

Skot: Anybody can do that if he’s willing. He does that twice a year and I just decided I wanted to do it. That was what? Three years ago?

Dave: Three years ago this past September, I went and that was nice.

Ben: Cool.

Dave: It’s all about academics and jazz. No matter what you are doing, no matter what your art is, no matter what genre you choose, if you know the academics, you know where it will take you further. And that doesn’t hold true for everybody. There are many talented musicians that do amazing things without all the academic training. But for me, it was good and it definitely helped me to get where I was.

Ben: Cool.

Dave: So yeah, with Rush, I used to sat down and learn Geddy’s parts like Skot said back to Hemispheres, back in high school and even with some of the older albums, I just used to play along with that stuff until I got those bass parts down. Geddy Lee was just one of my favorite bass players. He was probably my single biggest influence, I would say.

Skot: I just realized the very first song that I ever learned all the way through on guitar was a Rush song. I think it was called Death If I Can. Is that Newsletter? Corrosive Steel or something.

Dave: Yeah.

Ben: Yeah, the thing with early Rush is – they have a nice combo with the early stuff – easy to listen and really play with the basics, core progressions and rhythms, but it will also take you to another level.

Dave: To quickly finish my story is that again, seven years ago, I got back with Skot. I had quit playing for about seven years. I didn’t do anything musically for seven years. Somebody got me to start playing again, but that was short-lived, and then I hooked back up with Skot. I have day gig and like you I’ve got four kids, two grandkids and I work 45 hours a week and we would spend as much time as we can with the music and that’s it. That’s kind of our deal.

Ben: Cool. Well, congratulations for being the first grandfather on the podcast.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, that’s almost five years ago I was a grandfather.

Ben: Wow! Wow…

Dave: And I’m a young grandfather, let me just say that.

Skot: Yeah, well, you see that’s why we don’t post pictures on our website or anything like that because so many young people now, they don’t listen with their ears. They listen with their eyes. They watch the TV. They watch the videos. They watch YouTube and all that kind of stuff.

Ben: Yeah.

Skot: And you are talking to two guys literally who are approaching 50 and it just turns people off. It turns the young set off. I mean, “Dude, do only granddads playing in your band? Are you playing in that band and that’s cool?”

Ben: Now, that’s funny. You are playing in a really contemporary style, and I’ll be honest, guys, when I checked out some of your photos, I was like, “Oh, he’s an older guy like me.”

Skot: Yeah.

Ben: Cool, I don’t give a shit because I’m nearing 40 myself. I know it’s great, but is it…

Skot: It’s only on the outside.

Dave: Yeah.

Skot: We are young inside.

Ben: Yeah, well, you sound like you are putting it down in your songs like any youngster, but maybe it’s just a little tougher to get respect because you are playing in a genre that even now is still dominated by the young kids whereas if you are playing more straight ahead prog, maybe it’s more expected to be an old codger.

Skot: Right, well, that couldn’t be helped. But we’ve got attuned on the Sonic Blueprint called Rewire, and that’s what that song is about. It’s just close your eyes and listen, and what the hell of difference does it make what we look like, just listen because if you listen, it’s not like we are playing classic rock.

Ben: Yeah.

Skot: So many other guys our age that we grew up playing with, if they still play at all, they have resigned themselves to weekend warriors and going out and playing their two or three sets of classic cover tunes to drink some beer and make a dollar or two and that’s it. That keeps them connected to the musician inside them and that’s all they require and that’s not Dave and I. I don’t care about playing anybody else’s music. I get asked a lot, “Come on and sit down with us, man. Come on and hit me again.” No, I don’t remember. I couldn’t play a covered tune if my life depended on it right now. I vowed in 1995 I would never play another cover again and the only one that I’ve played is the remake of Argent’s Hold Your Head Up that we did on our first EP, so that’s not my thing.

Ben: It sounded you and Skot were kind of burnt on the cover tune scene anyways.

Skot: Oh yeah, yeah.

Ben: That’s why. So I’m curious what comment you made earlier Skot that you got tagged as the Geddy Lee sound-alike when you are singing. Let me guess, and let me ask, what other singers have you been compared to, because I’ve got one or two in mind.

Skot: Well, the first one that I get compared to all the time, and I mean all the time, and I don’t hear it, I don’t see it. It’s a compliment, but I just don’t get it. It’s Layne Staley from Alice In Chains.

Ben: Of course.

Skot: Is that what you were thinking?

Ben: Of course.

Skot: Yeah.

Ben: It’s your highest compliment. I mean, Geddy is cool and all. He’s got great range, but he’s got that shrill wail to him. Layne Staley, that guy is mindboggling with his tone and his soul. Do you know what I mean?

Skot: Oh yeah. Well, you see, you are talking to a guy that’s been doing this for 33 years. So when I was doing all the Rush covers, I was 21 or 22 years old. I didn’t have any natural rasp or growl in my voice. What I have then was crystal clear voice and I mean, I can sing any note you wanted me to sing. It didn’t matter how high it was. I was just a 95 pound kid that had a high voice and my naturals or broader characteristics were totally Geddy Lee and they still are as far as broader is concerned, but as my voice started to change and I got older and it would start to break up and rasp out a little bit, it drive me insane, “I don’t want that kind of voice. I don’t want that kind of voice.” And finally, I just said, “You know, I’ve got to face facts. I’m not 21. My voice is going to do what it’s going to do. I’m just going to let it be what it is.”

And I’ve just completely gotten away from trying to keep it crystal clear and pristine and I let it do what it does and sing from my gut and sing with the soul. And as comparison to Layne, I’m not a huge Alice In Chains fan.

Skot: I don’t reallylike them. I mean, their first two records, Dirt and Facelift, I enjoyed both of those records, but after that I’ve never bought one of their records and quite honestly unless the song on the radio is from those two records, I’m going to change the channel.

Ben: Yeah.

Skot: It’s just me. I mean no disrespect to them or to Layne or anything, but I don’t hear the Layne Staley in my voice at all, but it’s got to be there because I hear it all the time.

Ben: Yeah, it’s there. I’m in the same deal. In fact, it’s funny. I’ve never been a huge Alice In Chains fan. A couple of tunes in the early albums, yeah, they were cool. I never loved them that I have to even put down money for them. But I don’t know what struck but for the holidays, you went to talk about cover songs. I’ve been reading about some success that no-name Indies bands like us have gotten doing cover songs and I thought, “Holiday cover song?” And I was in the gym and Man In A Box was playing, which actually I was never crazy about that one over the other tunes or early tunes they had but I thought, “Man In The Sleigh, Christmas Paradigm.”

Skot: You have a point.

Ben: If you are a fan, you could hit my side and check out the stupid music, the song paired with video I did.

Skot: Okay, good.

Dave: That’s cool.

Skot: Well, I have one Alice In Chains album. Actually I should clarify and that’s Dirt and I’m definitely a fan of that record. I love it. I’ve listened to it a thousand times.

Dave: Man In The Box was the first Alice In Chains that I covered back in the day, and of course, there are several, but that was the first one.

Ben: You will be horrified with my vocals. I had to lower the key as whole tone and I’m still breaking up at the top.

Skot: I will definitely pick it up.

Dave: Absolutely.

Ben: Cool. You gave me your lowdown on what’s going on now, but do you have any imminent news or gigs you want to plug?

Dave: No, no gigs because we have no drummer.

Skot: Yeah.

Ben: Right.

Dave: We have a young man that’s going to come in and meet with us this weekend. Basically what we boiled it down to when we do auditions or whatever, when people calling, “Hey, I think I can play in your band. Let’s jam.” “No, we’re not having it roll. Let’s get together. Sit down and talk and get to know each other a little bit and see if we are all on the same page here before we waste a bunch of time.” Because over the past two years, we just dealt with so many people that, “Yeah man, I’m ready to go. Let’s do this thing.” And they roll in and, “Well, I didn’t really have the time to work on all of the songs, but I think I can wing my way through these two.” And it’s like, “Oh, for God’s sake, we would do this again.”

That whole level that it could work is if you are totally committed. We get together twice a week, but there is plenty of homework. Skot is probably the creator, mastermind, songwriter, engineer and everything there for End of Story, but I do homework at home all the time.

Skot: Dave practices more than anybody I’ve ever met in my life.

Dave: I’m a practicing guy.

Skot: Yeah, when we meet these drummers, take all the time you want. Just make sure when you come in, you are ready to go. Six weeks later, they come in and they can’t even play one song.

Dave: Yeah, it’s terrible.

Ben: Have you ever thought about hiring a ringer? I mean, that’s what I do. I have a guy who I’m simpatico with and we are friendly enough and he is into my music, but I don’t have a steady gig for him to commit to, and it’s just easier for me to pay him some money to come and then just tear it up. He reads well. So I can use that to my advantage to short cut learning. So have you thought about that?

Dave: Well, there is a couple of guys like that here in town that we could use, but that’s just not what we are all about.

Skot: We are looking for the third family member.

Ben: Yeah.

Skot: Dave and I, although we are not related, we are closer than any blood brother I could imagine having, and that’s the way our last drummer was. We spent 2-1/2 years with him and he was total family and when he left, it was devastating. It was like a divorce. It’s horrible. We are not looking to do just get out and play for the sake of getting out and playing. We want to do to words. When we hit the stage, you’re going to believe it. You’re going to believe everything we do, everything we say and saying whatever. And that comes with three people, and it’s in their soul and there is nothing wrong with it, with the other approach. That is just not us. That’s not our thing, plus, first of all, and I hate to this because it always comes out as being arrogant or whatever, but it’s not necessarily the easiest stuff in the world to play as we’ve discovered by over a dozen drummers failing to do so. And we use a sequencer live.

We use an ear click track and I’ve got a Mac and Rack that all the stuff from our CDs like shakers or tambourines or any kind of crazy vocal effect or anything that’s have real prominent picture on the CDs, I call it the icing on the cake, all those tracks are on that computer directly off of our CDs and because we play to a click, we just need the front house mix, the line right off the sequencer and all those things you hear on our records, all the little nuance is that the people don’t really think about all that much, it’s all right there as it’s playing live. We’ve had younger guys go, “Oh, what are you, lip synching?” No, then you don’t get it. It’s not like we are standing up there with the guitar parts and bass parts and everything else on the sequencer. We are just a loud live.

Dave: Loud and live is just life.

Skot: Yeah, it’s loud and live and in your face, it’s just all the little nuances are there as well, and you see, that’s the thing. The bands in this town, there is a bunch of good ones. Don’t get me wrong, but they is like one other band that even remotely approaches it the way that we do, and a lot of guys just can’t get head around it, around the we play everything to a click track regardless, period, and it’s a pro show, man. We don’t go out until we are ready, “Well, hey, if we can put 12 songs together, that’s enough to book any place around here.” “Well, no, not if you are in End of Story.” Now, we roll in with 30 songs and we have enough to do two one-hour sets if that’s required and it’s not that we’ve, “Hey, if we should put this together so quickly, let’s go book a show.” We don’t get out of the rehearsal space until we own it, and we are large and in charge and that’s the way we’ve always been.

Ben: Nice.

Skot: We are old school stuff. I mean, I’ve toured in the eighties when you toured with a semi-trailer, even though you are bar band. You’ve got 300-400 lights in your live show and fog and spotlights and drummerizers. I always tell people I graduated from the Judas Priest Academy of Excess. My guitar rig, at its largest point, was eight Marshall Cabinets and four heads and a 24-space rack full of stuff. We don’t do anything sort of, and it kind of limits us where we are at as far as just geographically. There is just not a lot of people around here that can pull it off, or that want to. I think it’s more of a mindset than anything.

Ben: Yeah, I mean, I have been in smaller areas like that where it’s just slim pickings, but when I went to Amherst, MA -  which is definitely a college town when I was going to grad school. Of course, there are a lot of talented student-musicians, but they are mostly not capable of doing really advanced stuff, but the youth and energy of being around that kind of area. It sounds like you would be better off. You get your trade off. You are close to family on Wichita, but you’ve got to deal with the limitations.

Skot: Right, exactly. You see, that’s the thing. We’ve got so many roots here with family and that kind of thing. We are not going anywhere. I’ve done that. Like I said, I went to Seattle and tried that for awhile and what I found was in Seattle, there a hundred million more musicians that they are in Wichita, Kansas, and what that equate to is a hundred million more flakes. In Seattle, you don’t rehearse in your basement. You rent a rehearsal room for the night. Back in 1995, it cost $25 a night to rent a room and sometimes that we have a small PA, sometimes it wouldn’t, so you would spend days, weeks, going through ads in the local music papers and whatnot and you would talk to these people on the phone that you would swear, “You are connected with a brain. Oh my god, this is going to be one. I will rent a room and I’ll meet you there at 8.” He never showed up. You never hear from then again.

Either that or you are pulled into the same kind of a situation. They talk like they’ve got all these experience and show up and they can’t play and you say, “Oh my god.” Anyway, that’s why I said earlier, I ended up doing more just wood shedding, just sitting on the edge of the bedroom playing guitar nonstop and coming up with a different approach to writing songs because trying to put a band together up there is completely futile. But our roots are deep here, so we are not going anywhere and that’s why we are patient. We are fortunate in that I play drums a little bit enough that I’ve actually recorded a couple of songs for End of Story and then also I program very well. I had lots of years of experience with programming and we’ve got several songs that we have demos out on the Net right now that the drums were programmed and countless drummers have asked me, “Who is playing that?”

Ben: Yeah, I get that, too. I get my drummer. He plays a midi, an electronic kit recording midi, so I’m able to later remap and tweak as needed, but I still get that natural human feel because it’s not a sampler. It’s really a human playing. I just record digitally instead.

Yeah, it looks like we are on the same wavelength as far as technology application of it and a psychotic commitment to excellence of not compromising, so it’s good to meet you.

Skot: And Dave and I don’t mind getting together and just sitting around drinking, but if we want to make music, we’ve got to do something, so the programs are done and let’s make a record, whatever it takes.

Ben: Now, you are here.

Skot: Aside from the Self-Propelled project that I’ve talked about that hopefully will be out in March, we’ve got I think nine, maybe ten songs for the next CD, so hopefully we’ll have a live drummer before we start recording the next record, but I mean, we’ve almost got enough material for another full length that obviously wouldn’t be out until next year sometime with the way we do things. So the music never stops flowing. It’s kind of we are dealing. I have got one right now that Dave hasn’t even heard. I wrote it tonight with the drum machine and my guitar to throw this at him.

The way I think about writing music is I don’t really consider myself as writing anything. I consider that I’m a vessel that songs getting dropped on occasionally. It’s like the songs are out there floating around and by some divine grace I get to be the guy to bring it to life, to bring it to fruition. I have songs that I have almost no memory of even writing. It’s just they came so quickly and so naturally it’s like it was all done for me. I just had to bring it out, to put it down on tape or whatever.

We are supposed to be finishing up the Self-Propelled record and it’s so frustrating because I’ve got a lot of work to do to get this record done, but at the same time, all of a sudden, I get that new song dropped on me and I can’t ignore it. I can’t just say, “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t work with this new thing because I’ve got other work to do.” So I kind of put the Self-Propelled mixing on hold for a few days and I’ve been working on this new tune, which will be on the next record.

So anyway, like I say, the music never stops flowing and we’ll never stop making it, even if it’s just the two of us. We long to play live again, but that’s where I’m most at home is on stage. I’ve been a natural born hand since I was a little kid and I mean that’s where I light up, it’s on stage. I enjoy doing the studio stuff and all that. It’s nice to be able to do that. It’s nice to be able to make records, but there is nothing like just the amps blowing your pant legs and people in front of you are singing your courses. There is nothing like it. Hopefully this year will bring us a drummer and more live shows because we are really anxious to get back to that.

Ben: Cool. Well, good luck.

Skot: All right, take care. See you.

3rdegree is a New Jersey-based prog band, though with members across the country. They blend jazz-pop, hard rock and prog rock in an unusual way.

In this podcast, we chat with band guru Robert Pashman, and hear two tracks from the band.

Ben: This is Ben Sommer from bandslikerush.com. I’m here with Robert Pashman with the band, 3rd Degree. I mix it up because your website address has a lot of those additives “online”. Your band isn’t 3rd Degree Online. It’s 3rd Degree.

Robert: Right.

Ben: I can tell from your bio and profile that you’re a or the lead guy. Honestly, I had trouble figuring out who’s the lead singer, who’s the guitarist. You’re a guitarist, but what’s your role in the band?

Robert: That’s about the only thing I don’t play in guitar. I’m bass. Additional keyboards I would say; mostly synthesizers. The main keys, the main meat and potatoes sort of piano, electric piano and stuff like that is the lead singer, George Dobbs. I was only the lead singer on the very first album in ’93.

We got George for the second album in ’96, then the comeback album in ’08. We’re working on our fourth record right now. The lineup went from a trio to a quartet for the second album.

I’m the holding down the fort, manager sort of dude in the band. But I’m the recording’s packing vocals, bass, and some extra keyboards.

Ben: Cool. Your bio shows a long history. You guys were old high school buds. You started out way back and you’re still together through various iterations, right?

Robert: The drummer I was working with up until just recently I got together with in the middle of my four years of college. Then Pat, the guitarist, who is currently in the band, he’s two years younger and he was just starting college. It was definitely around college, although none of us ever went together to the same school.

Ben: Tell me about some of your musical influences. In the podcast, I always include one or two track so people can judge for themselves. I’ll pick and choose my favorites. I had a few ideas when we exchanged emails first. It sounded like I was kind of on track with the prog and alternative jazz, pop maybe influences. But what you do dig and what do you think you feel or hear in your own music?

Robert: When I started out in the band, it sort of preceded that I took a few songs from to start 3rd Degree with in 1990, the very end of 1990. It was Rush. It was all the usual suspect prog bands. I was maybe at that point just getting into maybe Gentle Giant, finally sort of acquiring that taste of their complexity, which deluded me for a few years prior.

But I was into the normal bands: Yes, Genesis, King Crimson – definitely the 80s King Crimson was something I liked a little better; Red, I would say.

We added Pat. It was 1991. We couldn’t help but be a little bit touched by the whole grunge movement, so a lot of the guitar in our first two records, I would say, was influenced by a lot of what was going on there, like Sound Garden and Pearl Jam; Sound Garden the most because they’re, in a way, prog. They play in odd times signatures. I always found them to be the best of the bunch.

There was a weird juxtaposition of my 80s, digital, synthi hangover into the grunge. We were always big on having a strong hook and some good melodies and lyrics. That’s sort of what the first record was all about.

You had my vocals, which probably didn’t sound like him, but I was very influenced just by the melodic feel that Geddy Lee had. To me, the first record sounded a little bit like Rush meets some of the grunge things that are going on, along with the more synthy side of Rush which they were sort of moving out of at the time as well.

The mid-80s period Rush was a big touchstone for where we were going.

By the second record, I think you had the guitar ticking a little bit more, the keyboards with us being a little more additive. And we had a much, much more soulful lead vocalist on our second album, a very strong soulfully vocalist that even muddied the waters even more. He didn’t write that much on that album, so just his vocals you get that soulful, Stevie Wonder, 70s, Steely Dan kind of thing coming in.

But I think with our album that came out two years ago, a lot of those songs started right at the tail end before we broke up in ’97. A lot of that you hear a lot more because George wrote a lot more of that stuff, so you hear more of where he’s coming from with the songwriting, a lot of those people he might sound like when he sings.

That’s where we start sounding even less like Rush and people say sort of a west coast sound, like a slick – Ambrosia is a good thing to think about because they were a prog band that was west coast. But they were slick as any Super Tramp album. A lot of that sort of stuff.

Then in the 90s, beyond grunge, we were picking up a lot of the retro guys like Jellyfish and Jason Faulkner and a few of those bands that were out in the mid-90s.

Ben: You have more exposure to more prog than I do probably, because when you talk about west coast-produced prog which you’re probably right, although since Steely Dan is closest to me, when I hear these odd and abrupt harmonic changes particularly, I don’t usually associate that kind of thing with too much prog and more complex harmonies, and a little bit of the funky soulful almost jazz vocal turns sometimes. That’s what I was hearing. The stuff that’s on your website is the most current stuff.

Robert: I’m forgetting a very big influence. King’s X. In King’s X, you have the soulfulest guy in the world singing on top of the heavy metal band that’s tight as can be. Beyond one or two albums, they didn’t really go with the song lengths too far past the four or five minute mark.

That’s one of the only things I don’t think we’ve done. We haven’t really gone past six minutes, but with our new album, I think we’re going to get beyond seven with maybe four songs. We’re definitely stretching more out because we know where our audience is now.

Ben: Where is your audience? What do you mean?

Robert: We’ve made in roads, let’s just say, in the online prog community that resides on a few different websites, the different websites that review different bands that are still out there doing prog. There’s symphonic prog, there’s eclectic prog, there are all different branches of prog and there’s festivals. We’re down to about four festivals that are yearly festivals around mostly Europe and the U.S.

Ben: That’s interesting. I heard the same story from this other band I interviewed, Mars Hollow.

Robert: Oh yeah, they’re cool.

Ben: They’re playing the festival circuit all the time.

Robert: They got two festivals this year.

Ben: So you know about them?

Robert: Yeah, they got on Prog Day which we were on a year earlier in ’09. Then they got ROSFest, which is a little better. Probably the second-most attended festival.

Ben: Was this the one in Mexico?

Robert: Oh, that’s right. They did that one. I don’t even count that one. Yeah, then three. But ROSFest is the one in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The big one NEARfest in Bethlehem every June. That’s a tough one to get into. It’s not even being a good band. It’s very international. So if there are eight bands, maybe two of them are American. They like to mix it up, and everybody really appreciates that. They’ll have one sort of prog band at 11:00 a.m. and then after lunch, they’ll have some other Zappa-like band. They really mix it up.

It’s all up to the people who run the festival. It’s their money on the line and they can choose who they want. We were kind of surprised when Prog Day called us. We definitely gave them our stuff. We give all the festivals our stuff and say, “Hope you like it.”

I hadn’t known anybody personally from just meeting people from that festival at all. I didn’t really know anybody, telling them about us or anything. Lo and behold, they called us and said, “Come play Labor Day weekend.”

Ben: You described you’re carving out a bit of a niche, engaging fans in that niche. You’re touring. Are you guys making a living at this?

Robert: No.

Ben: Do you want to? Is that your objective?

Robert: No, not at this point. I think in the 90s, and it might have been what broke us up, that might have been the goal then, to “make it.” We were just getting so hard on ourselves that, at some point, we just broke up. It was too much weight on our shoulders that was put upon ourselves.

And it was pre-Internet. We broke up in ’97 right when people started getting email addresses and getting much more web savvy. It was really hard. Even though we’re right outside Manhattan, it is very hard to find the people who would like us. We were just throwing shots in the dark playing in New York City, New Jersey. We went all over. Not as much as do now, but we went all over the place trying to just play places, but we weren’t finding anybody.

Ben: This is what I hear from people. Online, there are so many tools and ways to locate and pinpoint where your fans are. Do you just go where the fans are now to play?

Robert: Yeah. If somebody buys something from me and I have to send them something, I make a note of their address and they join the mailing list. I can tell that way. Facebook is really great. You could send out an announcement on Facebook to just people in certain states. You don’t want to have to bother everybody about a certain show that nobody is going to go to because it’s too far away. So you could do things like that. ReverbNation.com is really good about that. Those are some of the best sites.

We just played up in Connecticut. It was a two and a half hour drive north. We played down just south of D.C. Those are the two shows we did this year. The Connecticut one was a little less attended because we had to do an early show on that. They stuck us between two bands from around D.C. It was 8:00 p.m. show and we went on at 9:30 in between two bands in the area. We drew pretty well. It just so happens a lot of the people that like prog, there seemed to be in the corridor, the BosNYWash corridor – Boston/New York/Washington.

Then of course Prog Day is down in North Carolina. Even if you stretch it that far, it’s still all within a reasonable driving distance. If you know you can play it, 100 people, they’re prone to like prog in general, then you’re at a pretty good starting point. That was not happening in the 90s.

Ben: It just wasn’t happening or no way to find out about it.

Robert: There were festivals that started up in the mid 90s. There was Progression Magazine. There was another one; I forget. Some in New York. There were magazines, physical magazines, that would come out bi-yearly. We would actually send them our stuff, but it just wasn’t as many websites and as many people.

I think a lot of people lost track and thought that there wasn’t much going on. A lot of people now that are into prog, they’ll have stories where they’re like, “Oh, in 2000, I got on the net more, I got a computer. I just found out all these bands were still doing things in the 90s from the 80s.”

Echolyn was the big band. In ’95 they got signed to Sony and we were all thinking that was a very cool thing that happened. That didn’t work out too well, but a lot of people know who they are, so they got a pretty big profile. Discipline was a big American prog band in the 90s out of Detroit.

But I don’t remember a whole lot about the bands out there. We were doing it too, to a lot less success than the two bands I just mentioned, but they’re sort of peers and they’re of similar ages; those two bands.

Then I guess Spock’s Beard came in the late 90s. By that point, I think people were on the Net and just able to find what they liked, basically.

Ben: True. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s the way things are shaped up now with technology, and able to find fans even if you’re in this obscure, largely-ignored niche, it’s a great time to be doing what we’re doing. Don’t you think?

Robert: Yeah, definitely.

Ben: This has been great talking to you. Do you have any events? I know you had a release a couple of years ago. Anything coming up you want to advertise, or at least just plug your website even? Go right ahead.

Robert: The website is 3rdegree. No double D’s. 3rdegreeonline.com. From there, you can connect all the other sites where you can friend us, follow us, etc. The new album is about two years old now. It’s called Narrow Caster. We’re working on the follow up.

We’re debating over releasing songs one by one as we finish them, rather than a whole record, although those songs could end up on our proper CD at some point. We’re just debating that whole thing.

It’s kind of weird. I think that most of the people that are into us would see a download and be like, “I’ll just wait and get the whole album.”

Ben: Interesting. I can give you some insight. I did the same. Well, I’ve never released an album, but I just did it dribs and drabs, a track every month or so. Then just this weekend, I’m going to finally publish the CD and make the whole thing available for paid download.

Who knows what it would be like if I had a following to start with like you do. It’s definitely worth experimenting with. It keeps the trail warm, versus it’s hot for a little while, then it’s cold for a long time.

Robert: It’s debatable. We’re going to be on a Yes! Tribute CD out of Italy early next year. Those are little things. Not a whole lot of people are privy to them.

You’ve got to figure out what’s worth your time to do. A band like us, we’re busy. It takes us so long to do stuff because we’re scattered around the country. Our guitarist is in L.A. We just work slowly because of real-life events. We really got to think is it worth to spend a few months recording a cover song for a tribute album. Will the exposure from that be worth it or should we get our own album done three months earlier?

It’s weird tradeoffs you’ve got to think about. With a few of the things we’ve done lately, we’ve got to push back this new album. It’s really something we need to focus in on.

Ben: I wish you luck, man. Thanks for again for talking. This has been great.

Robert: Same here.

This week I interview three members of the Philadelphia-based prog band The Tea Club, and we discuss their new album release Rabbit.

Like the last band I interviewed – The Mercury Tree -I’m really in love with their music. Its amazing how talented some of these new prog bands are.

Some striking characteristics of the bands sound are:

• All-analog sound production – no digital gizmos or ProTools involved
• Retro synths and organ – from veteran indie and prog rock producer (and Yes veteran) Tom Brislin
• Big harmonic and textural palette
• Prog-ish rhythmical complexity
• More Radiohead than Rush similarities – especially the Thom Yorke-ish vocal melismas of brothers Patrick and Dan McGowan, as well as the wandering song structures, much less crisp and definite than Rush
• Lyrics – very egg-heady and more poetic than Neil Peart’s

Ben Sommer: I am here with three members of the band, The Tea Club. They are relatively new, but not so new prog band. I’ll just go around the circle here. I have Dan McGowan who is a guitarist and vocalist, Becky Osenenko who plays the keyboards and Pat McGowan who is also a guitarist and vocalist. You guys are siblings, I gather, correct?

Dan McGowan: Yes.

Pat McGowan: Got it.

Ben: So Dan, why don’t you just tell me a little bit about the band how you came to, where you are now?

Dan: Yes, yes. Well, the band was formed in 2003, so that’s what? Seven years now.

Pat: We’re going to be seven years.

Dan: Yeah, seven years it’s been around, but we didn’t record our first album until 2008 and we just released our second album earlier this month, which is called ‘Rabbit’ and we have a bit of a new line up now. Becky plays bass on the album, but now she is playing keyboards. We have a new drummer whose name is Joe and a new bassist and a new guitarist. They couldn’t be here tonight. Our new bassist, unfortunately, has some kind of a horrible toothache. It sounded pretty bad. I think oral surgery is going to occur at some point, so poor guy. Yeah, the new album rather we’re really trying to push and we’re really proud of it. It has Tom Brislin who played keyboards on it and Tom has played with some pretty big prog bands like Yes and Renaissance, so we’re really excited to have him on there. That’s how we did it.

Ben: How did that come about?

Dan: Well, we met Tom through Red Cole from Echolyn, which we got in touch with Echolyn when we released our first album because we got a lot of comparisons to Echolyn, but we have never listened to them and then we took a listen and we’re like, “Oh yeah, these guys are really good.” So we kind of contacted them and kind of becoming friends and we mentioned to Brett that we’re recording our second album and that we were thinking about having keyboards on it and he suggested Tom, because Brett and Tom have played in some bands together before that.

Ben: Yeah, so Becky, what were you doing if this guy was playing keyboards in the album? Were you backing him up, or are you still on bass at the time?

Becky Osenenko: I was playing bass on the album, and then we decided that we definitely needed to feature keyboards in the band so I switched that and I’m also better on  keyboards than bass.

Ben: Perfect. You guys, your line up is pretty big, did I count three guitarists in there first of all.

Dan: Yeah, the guitarists.

Ben: Why the orgy of guitars?

Dan: Well, for one, which is right now the band has a lot of friends, but basically our closest friends altogether and Jim, the third guitarists, guitar concession, we just realized, “You know what? Let’s try it.” And it kind of freed me and Pat up a little bit, we’re singing more as opposed to have to concentrate on singing and playing the guitar at the same time, but we’ll see what happens since we stopped writing new materials because it’s going to be a lot bizarre, but I’m excited for it.

Ben: Now, as you were talking, I was thinking – “that’s a lot of people out on stage”. But when I think about it, it’s pretty much with any recorded products these days – with layers of guitars like plywood, so it’s certainly a good thing to be able to reproduce at least some of that layering live when you guys play in the band.

Dan: Absolutely, yeah. It gives us a little more of a safety net, I think, with having so many people on the bands playing and it is with some of the lot of the stages that we play are way too small for six people, especially considering Jim is like a pretty huge guy. He’s like 6 foot 4. He’s trim though. He is a trim guy.

Pat: He’s tall.

Dan: Yeah, he’s very, very tall. He barely makes sense, but, you know.

Ben: I’m curious, who sang vocals on this. You have a MySpace page, the first track up there is this song called ‘Simon Magus’. I don’t know if its a Bible reference?

Dan: Yeah, Pat, why don’t you go up for this one?

Pat: Simon Magus is a real Gnostic teacher back in the first and second century, at the end of the first century and into the second century AD and he does make an appearance in the Book of Acts, the 8th and 9th chapter of the book of Acts. He had an encounter with Peter, the apostle, and he was a real person and he was a real religious figure at the time. He kind of came in to odds with the emerging Christian church as Gnostic teacher. In the Bible he kind of gets slapped down by Peter who kinds of slaps him down, but there are other accounts of a duel between Peter and Simon.

Dan: A smack down, if you will

Pat: A smack down and he has rumors of smack downs, and we were just fascinated by the character and we kind of give a couple of different accounts throughout the song. With the lyrics, they kind of jump from one perspective to the next, and there are biblical encounters in there as well. There was Gnostic text that was called “The Revelation of Peter” in which Simon and Peter have their religious smack down. We included some of the lyrics in that as well. It was just a big kind of a nerdy lyrical content as far as revealing a kind of corny nerdy book that we all read when we’re not writing music.

Ben: You mean the Bible or the heretical alternatives.

Pat: I guess a little bit of all of it.

Dan: Yeah.

Ben: Cool, but definitely I wouldn’t call it nerdy, nerdy in the nicest sense. But yeah, that’s a pretty ambitious topic and the attempt to include not just your own text, but then the set facts from history, I mean, that’s downright, I don’t know, almost old school.

Pat: Yeah, certainly. There are enough songs about girls and drugs, so we’ve decided we will try maybe something else.

Dan: Some obscure biblical tract.

Pat: Yeah, break open the Bible and start bothering people with that.

Ben: No, it’s cool. Who’s singing it from that song?

Pat: We actually switch up. Dan sings the first half. He wrote the lyrics and contents in the first half of the song. I sing a little bit of back-up harmony, and then the song in the middle kind of breaks down and goes into a little guitar instrumental and then it changes the whole mood and pace of the tune, and then I pick up the lead vocals at the second half and finish it out until the end of the song and then Dan does the back-up vocals.

Ben: Is it just my bad ears today, or do you guys sound kind of similar when you’re singing?

Dan: Yeah, we have gotten that. I guess it’s the brotherly thing. We try and switch it up and we try and kind of like… I don’t know, I know I try to sound intentionally different sometimes and kind of try to differentiate myself from Pat, but I guess the way to kind of tell is that I wind up singing a lot of the quieter stuff and Pat kind of he’s the yeller. He’s the screamer.

Pat: Dan is just typical, really.

Ben: Cool, it’s pretty impressive. Now that I know that the kind of the back story is even more super prog nerdy, but really in a good way, and so I would like to put people on the spot and see what the react to. So when I listen to some of these key tracks, I make some notes to myself. The sound is kind of retro-analog, so I don’t know what kind of engineering you’re doing this. I like it and it doesn’t sound over-compressed in the modern style, so I like that.

Dan: Yeah, we intentionally did that. Everything, but the vocals was cut to analog. The vocals we wound up doing digital just kind of to save time. The producer that we worked with, Tim Gilles, he did the first album too and he’s the owner of Big Blue Meenie Studio where we recorded it and he is a big believer in that retro sound. He is a huge prog guy and he really drew a lot into us because it’s how we were like 20 years old and we’re looking into a Gentle Giant, and he was like, “Oh cool, these guy are freaks.” So he likes that kind of retro. We both like it. We got lucky.

Ben: Oh yeah, he did get lucky because, I mean, you can’t mistake a new sound. I guess you could mistake it for a historical relic that someone has pulled out from the 70s, but I like it, and of course, the retro synth…

Dan: That’s how I like to listen to music. I really don’t like the way a lot of new recordings sound. Yeah, it’s certainly like when you said the compression, over-compression, and I really don’t like the way a lot of vocals sound with newer bands and horrendous autotuning.

Pat: We got together with Tim, and we all were really on the same page. Tim kind of got the mojo of the band that we kind of came from the old school, I guess. But we didn’t want to get stuck in the past and get labeled as a Genesis’ cover band, not that there is anything wrong with that, but he really understood where we were coming from and we didn’t set out to make an album that sounded like it was recorded in the 70s, but in some cases it did, it just drew the equipment that we use and just some of the techniques that we used wound up kind of being old throwback to the way the used to make records back when you actually have to play your music.

Ben: So the retro synth-organ as it synched voices et cetera, make a little bit more sense now that you described that you had an old hired hand on the recording.

Dan: Sure, that was a lot of Tim. The way that Tim and Tom worked, Tom would basically just play and Tim would kind of like, “Oh, why don’t you go for this sound?” Oftentimes, then Tom definitely had his contributions, don’t get me wrong, but there were a lot like, “Let’s go with Pendergrass, organ, you know what I mean with stuff like that. He’s very hands on with the production from the keyboard. For the most part, Tim isn’t very experienced with them. He’s not like a sit in the room, hands-on producer, but occasionally, when he sees it fit, he will sit in the room and he will play the producer role as the material is being cut to okay what’s being recorded and in that case with Tom, we only had two days with Tom, so everything you hear on the album, Tom recorded in two 10-hour days. It’s pretty amazing. The guy is just insanely sane when we got this when he began.

Ben: Wow! So Becky, how do you think you’re going to reproduce that live with all those big instruments? I mean, I’ve seen you guys had the analog version of those things, what are you going to do with live, Becky?

Becky: Well, I would pretty much have it figured out now. I took a lot with what Tom did and just kind of made it kind of my own style, so that I can still credit Tom, but have it do my own thing.

Ben: Are you going to be using just the synthesizer with various canned kind of emulated versions of what Tom played, or are you going to do the actual instruments there or what?

Becky: No, I’m just re-creating it on the keyboard.

Dan: Yeah, that’s pretty much all we have right now.

Becky: Yeah.

Dan: I mean all the Mellotron stuff was there, which is cool and like all of the main parts. There’s a part where you’re kind of like this is the real highlight that we try to re-create and the rest of it, Becky had a good time just kind of re-writing some stuff and like she said making it her own.

Ben: I always get to ask people this, do you guys do this full time for a living. And if not, what’s the back story of your lives? I’m always interested to hear that.

Dan: Damn you, Ben.

Ben: Sorry.

Dan: We’re trying to make illusions.

Ben: Yeah, I know but honestly sells. Trust me.

Dan: Music is the “thing” in our life. It’s just doesn’t really pay the bills yet. It’s a kind of a rough thought. I mean, we just work crappy jobs during the day, so that we can play, but it’s basically we do it all for music.

Ben: Well, that’s good. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a classic recipe for getting somewhere. If you got the talent and ambition, and you just then minimize all the other distractions in your lives, that’s the way to make it.

Dan: That’s what we’re trying to do. Really, we’re having a go at it. And so far we’ve gotten some pretty positive response in people. So it definitely keeps us going.

Ben: You may have to cut down on the number of guitarists in your band you need to support, though.

Dan: Yeah, we’ll be stringing in and getting them tuned up.

Pat: We have lots of tuners that we bring on stage, lots of tuners.

Ben: Human tuners?

Dan: That’s the next step because we have roadies who would come up and tune our guitars in between songs.

Ben: Cool. I only ask because it’s interesting. I wouldn’t feature a top band who didn’t need the help, and the fans don’t need to discover the band they’ve already heard. So I always ask that also because I’m in the same boat. I mean, I’m doing this because I love prog music and I’m a hopeful artist myself. This is for my own curiosity. I want to see what other blokes are doing.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, you know, thank you. It’s great to have that support.

Ben: You guys mentioned in your email you have this album, “Rabbit” was just released. Aside from that, and if you want to plug your website and Facebook, MySpace, whatever, please do, but do you have any events that are coming up people should know about as well?

Dan: Well, we’re playing in Chili’s once a month with bar show. Murph’s Bar is at Saturday November 6, next weekend and it’s sold out there.

Pat: Yeah, we’re trying to play in Philly a lot. It’s always a great place. We also have a show at the very trendy bar in Philadelphia called Kung Fu Necktie. It is home of many Hipsters and that’s coming up December 7th. Yeah, that’s sort of a big show that we’re trying to plug right now.

This week I speak with primary song-writer, lead singer and guitarist for the Portland, OR based progressive rock band The Mercury Tree – a band that I’m very excited to feature.

Not only is the song-writing inventive and original – not at all a clone of any classic prog band like Rush or Yes – but I myself identified with many of Ben’s musical interests:

• Jazz-inspired technical chops
• Complex rhythms (not just complex musical meters)
• Organic shifts in tempo within a song

The last one got me really going on an almost academic tangent in our interview – on the topic of composer Elliot Carter‘s metric modulation technique, the late medieval musical style of ars subtilior, and the analog between organic tempo changes and key changes (i.e. harmonic modulation). Really geeky stuff, but hopefully equally interesting to you folks in the audience who like to hear “inside baseball” shop talk between two talented (did I say that??) musicians.

We hear two tracks from the band’s latest EP “Descent”: Running the Gamut and Preconceived Notions. I can’t emphasize how great these songs are, so please take a listen and patronize the band’s website.

Ben Sommer:  You guys are from Oregon, right, Ben?

Ben Spees:  That’s right.  Well, actually, I moved here from Arizona, but I have lived here for about six years.

Ben Sommer:  So just tell me a little bit about the band, what your guys’ histories and background is, and what you guys are up to right now?

Ben Spees:  Well, basically, I moved to Portland looking for more like minded musicians, and so I was able to put an actual band together back in 2006, and that was with Mike Byrne and James Crutcher.  Mike has since gone on to be hired by Smashing Pumpkins, so we’ve gotten another drummer since then.  Basically, we’re trying to make really progressive interesting music, so that it doesn’t fall into any of the current clichés, and like one of the things I think that’s really interesting is just all the potential in odd meters and different rhythms that have not really been exploited in popular music. So I think that’s the big thing we focus on.

Ben Sommer:  Rhythm is kind of the main piece or aspect of the music you’re interested in these days anyway?

Ben Spees:  Yeah, certainly when I started out, I can play really fast.  So one of the things I could do there was to play strange rhythms.

Ben Sommer:  Right.

Ben Spees:  So even though I’ve gotten faster since then that has always been something I thought was a little bit different.

Ben Sommer:  Right, if you have a good sense of rhythm and you can execute even just at a fiddling level.  Yeah, I know what you mean.  You can mix it up.  This is funny.  I’m exactly the same way.  I wax and wane how fast I can play on the guitar with two musicians, but I’ve always been obsessed with rhythm and very extreme scenarios.  In fact, I was listening to some of your songs.  Listen, I’ll be frank.  I think this stuff is great.

Ben Spees:  Oh, thank you so much.

Ben Sommer:  For, I think, the same reasons it is produced solidly in the prog rock kind of style, but it’s got those nuances which are probably interesting to people once schooled and pretty even someone like me.  It really keeps your mind busy and appeals to all your senses, so the rhythm is definitely one important thing.  You guys change that meters a lot.  You change up tempos, which is even more unusual.

Ben Spees:  Right.

Ben Sommer: What is your approach to changing tempos?

Ben Spees:  Well, it’s funny.  We’ve gotten so used to changing meters that we really don’t even notice it, and I think if you have a pretty strong melody or something strong going on melodically around the meter change, it really kind of hides it and makes it feel a lot more natural.  So basically, we’re very accustomed now to playing like five or seven, so it will be pretty common to try switching to something like that.  But occasionally, the different meter at same tempo will feel, like even though it’s the same tempo, it might feel too slow or too fast, so we might end up having a slight tempo change like, let’s say, from 105 to 95 just to make it feel more natural internally.  I’m sure there is probably some mathematical logic behind that.

Ben Sommer:  There is.

Ben Spees:  But I’m not grasping it yet.

Ben Sommer:  So this is one of the techniques I use all the time.  I mean, I’m totally over-educated in music, so my gut and my knowledge kind of joined up at one point.  That what you’re describing there is what some people call metric modulation, so you know how when you modulate from one key to a key that’s related, there is usually a pivot chord or several that both keys have in common, which you use to kind of ease the transition.

Ben Spees:  Right.

Ben Sommer:  You can take the same analog by saying here is the tempo or whatever it is.  I think the ones you described are probably related where one value in this tempo or whatever it is 16th note, triplet or whatever, has a common value in the other tempo, and then basically the note stays the same, so you’re going dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.  Now, I’m in dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, but then I could be dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and the tempo is totally different.  Do you know what I mean?

Ben Spees:  Yeah, absolutely.  I’m sure there is some stuff like that going on.

Ben Sommer:  I’m sorry.  That was ridiculously academic, but I’m just so excited to see someone doing this kind of neat stuff.

Ben Spees:  Oh, no, actually, I don’t find it academic at all.  It’s quite applicable to what we’re doing.

Ben Sommer:  So you moved to Oregon.  So you’re for music to find likeminded people.  What was wrong with Arizona?  Why Oregon?

Ben Spees:  Well, in Arizona, I lived in Phoenix basically because I got hired by a game company there.  So that was the only reason I lived there to begin with.

Ben Sommer:  Okay, you’re a developer by your day job?

Ben Spees:  Right, exactly. So I mean, there is some things about Phoenix, but it’s pretty sprawled out.  It’s very hot obviously, and there is not much of downtown scene, although they have tried to improve it.  Certainly there is no obvious network to plug into the music community.  I can pretty much think of one famous band, Jimmy Eat World from Mesa, but it’s not really like there was any community surrounding that.  So it was a pretty frustrating place to try and be in a band.  In Portland, I guess, had an image as very Indie-friendly and a place with open-minded people, and I think that’s obviously what I felt like we needed for the kind of music I wanted to make.  And I guess I’ve been proved right and wrong because I definitely have found some great people here, but overall, I’m a little bit surprised people aren’t as open minded as you might think, and certainly for a band that doesn’t fit into any obvious genres, it’s a little bit hard for people to figure out whether it’s cool to like you and stuff like that.

Ben Sommer:  That’s funny, I think.  I mean, I live near Boston.  I think it’s a similar scene.  It’s very a thriving Indie scene, but the kind of music you and I are really into is always going to be on the edge, on the margin, and like so many things in the community, there is extreme tolerance for things that are buried within a narrow band, but anything else outside of that, you always going to have trouble.

Ben Spees:  Yes, yeah, it’s certainly a difficult question to know how to make any sort of appeal to the mass market.  Since I don’t really know what to do with that, I tend to just look at people as individuals, and as individuals, gosh, there is an amazing creative open-minded and really great musicians here, and we have found some bands lately that are even semi-similar to us, so that’s been a really great development.

Ben Sommer:  Cool, cool.  So you’re the guitarist and you’ve got two other guys or three other with a girl named Liz Kuhn by what’s on your site who subs in for some minutes.

Ben Spees:  Yeah, it’s sort of a four-man band now.  She played flute on a couple of those songs.

Ben Sommer:  Okay, yes, she sounded like…

Ben Spees:  What’s that?

Ben Sommer:  She sounded just like kind of ringer who came in to play wood winds, but the core is the power trio, right?

Ben Spees:  I wouldn’t say she’s a ringer, just like out of respect.  We certainly appreciate her contributions, but it was sort of fine experiment to have a flute on some tracks.  I don’t know, what do you think of the flute?

Ben Sommer:  I don’t think I’ve gotten there.  I’m down with Track 3 on your BandCamp page, which is the www.themercurytree.bandcamp.com, and maybe I missed it.  Was she playing on either of the first three?

Ben Spees:  It is in Julienne during the heavy riffs section, but it’s sort of an ambient loop kind of a thing that’s going between the speakers, so it’s kind of a textural that you might have to listen to it more closer.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I definitely heard like textures, and if I listen closer, I might have discerned those.

Ben Spees:  It even sounds like a synth really.

Ben Sommer:  Right.  That is what I’m going to say.  I probably wasn’t listening close enough to really discern if it was a synth or a flute or something else, but I was going to say the drummer, and I mean, you’re a quite a good guitar player, so I know you’re knocking yourself early, but you’re very good, but these guys who are playing in the rhythm section are sick.  I mean, here’s the thing, I run this site, BandsLikeRush.com, so it’s kind of a goofy angle, but that band Getty and Neil are two of the greatest in their fields, right?  They are great.

Ben Spees:  Absolutely.

Ben Sommer:  But these days, I’m just sorry there.  Just the talent is just so insane, and I would venture to guess that your drummer is playing stuff that’s more subtle, more nuanced and just as chops and is just as sick as what Neil could do.  And your bass player, too, I mean, they both got the kind of the extreme jazz fusion chops that you’re hearing on some of these players with the bass tone is great.  I mean, it sounds like you have six strings.  I don’t know if that’s true, but he’s got it wired.

Ben Spees:  He’s absolutely good there, yeah.  He started playing six string about a year ago, and part of that was I started playing baritone guitar, so we want to have some lower notes.  But with the high string, we have just a lot of prisms with really clever things that he can do, especially with tapping.  So yeah, absolutely, I’m humbled to have those guys play with me.

Ben Sommer:  So that sounds interesting, so with six string, the bass gives you two lower strings or one low and one high?

Ben Spees:  It’s like a five string, which has the extra lower string, but it has an extra high string as well, so extra string on both sides.

Ben Sommer:  Right, okay.  Cool, and baritone guitar, now, I’ve never laid hands on one, but what is that like?

Ben Spees:  Basically, it just allows you to tune lower without having problems with the strings getting rubbery or intonation problems, and it’s actually wasn’t originally [cut audio 00:11:28] to play lower.  But I came across this tuning called new standard tuning, which when I told people about it, they’ve almost never heard of it but it was invented by Robert Fripp, and the basic idea is you tune the guitar in fifths instead of fourths between each string.

Ben Sommer:  Like the violin or a cello?

Ben Spees:  Exactly, exactly, and because of how high you end up going, you need to start from a lower point in order to be able to get up to the high point.

Ben Sommer:  Oh, I see, to cover the right range with similar ranges of guitar.  Neat…

Ben Spees:  Right.

Ben Sommer:  So…

Ben Spees:  So it’s cool.  I actually have the range of a seven string with this baritone tuning on a six string.

Ben Sommer:  And it’s a different instrument?

Ben Spees:  Really the difference between a baritone guitar and a regular guitar is just the neck would be a couple of inches longer, so it just increases the string tension and it’s designed a little bit differently to accommodate the different dimensions.

Ben Sommer:  What song…

Ben Spees:  I’m sure the pick ups are a little different tune.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, what songs on this album that you use the baritone on?

Ben Spees:  Well, Running the Gamut is only the song on this album where I use it.  It sort of has an identifiable sound during the heavy riffs during the chorus, and then there is also a new song that I posted on our Facebook page called Interstitial, and that’s all tapped baritone.  That’s another thing about the baritone is because the neck is larger and that makes it easier to tap and also the fifth tuning allows for some just amazing shapes in the fifth tuning that sound beautiful.

Ben Sommer:  Wow…

Ben Spees:  So that’s been a major area of my interest.

Ben Sommer:  Neat, neat, neat, so the music again, like I said, I gave you some examples of why I like it.  Well, it’s mixed and engineered very well.  So first of all, I’m curious who did that.  Did you guys do it, or do you hire someone?

Ben Spees:  Yeah, I did that myself.  I started using Pro Tools about nine years ago, and I just started off recording myself, but I just tried to kind of raise the bar higher and higher, so I’m really pleased that you think it sounds good.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, it’s good.  I mean, I’m in the same boat.  I am totally self-taught, but I decided to try to learn and it’s great to hear someone like yourself who is all-around do it yourself and is sounding really good.

Ben Spees:  Thanks a lot.  Yeah, I’ve done a few projects for some other bands, too, which I think had come up pretty well.

Ben Sommer:  Good.  Is that just for fun or for profit or both or to improve your skills?

Ben Spees:  Well, I can’t really.  The people I work with can’t really afford to pay a large amount of money, so it mostly my friends and they kick me a few bucks to be nice.  But despite that I still think the stuff we came up with is competitive sounding.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, yeah.  Going back to the music, it’s not only you mix up the tempos, the meters, which is classic prog style, but you’re also mixing up from a more melodic style, textural style, and then typically when there is an instrumental interlude in these tunes, I’m hearing some dissonant harmonies, which is really cool with more angular ideas.  That’s where the kind of crazy rhythms come in, and it’s even on the verge of metal, so I’m curious what was your favorite music growing up and now to come up with that kind of mix of styles?

Ben Spees:  Well, it’s funny.  I’m really not that into mouthful, although there certain metal bands I love like Meshuggah, although even then I prefer to listen to the instrumental parts more than the vocals.  But really that’s only something I started to appreciate more recently.  When I was a teenager, my favorite band was REM, so I was just obsessed with like the chiming guitar sound and the sort of dreamy and mysterious atmosphere that they created.  So, of course, now, I look at them in a different way.  I’m like, “They’re not really that technical.”  But at the same time, you don’t necessarily have to play with ridiculous techniques to make a really effective song.

Ben Sommer:  Absolutely right.  You’re right.

Ben Spees:  But I think if you can, that’s even better.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, so maybe that where you’re with some of those diverse and stuff where there is a more melodic and textural vibes going on.  I was about to lie to myself saying I could REM in that.  I really can’t.

Ben Spees:  Well, I’m not Michael Stipe, that’s for sure.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, although the vocals, that’s the other thing.  If I were to criticize one thing about the mix, and I normally don’t do this except for like stuff I’m really excited about, so I guess take it as a compliment.  It is a little lost, and I would like to hear more of it, and I’m wondering if it’s not the mix, your vocal is being lost.  You seem to have a range squarely in the mid-range with baritone, and I’m struck with very few prog bands and singers who don’t follow the pattern of the Jon Anderson or Geddy Lee with very high registered tenor wailing vocals, do you know what I mean?

Ben Spees:  Right.  Well, yeah, I mean, I can’t sing in falsetto, and I’ve tried to sing in higher range, but honestly, sometimes I just feel like it comes out as strained, and I don’t want to sacrifice any sort of genuine emotional quality or natural humanistic quality just to reach some operatic high note.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, I hear you.

Ben Spees:  Although, of course, I love to be able to sing like Jon Anderson or one of those guys.  I sort of try to stay to my strengths.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, that’s the smart thing.

Ben Spees:  And I think as far as the mixing, yeah, I might have had the vocals a little bit louder, but it was also one of those things where we wanted to make sure nothing would detract from the impact of the bass and drums since those were so strong and they were really driving a lot of the excitement.

Ben Sommer:  It’s true.

Ben Spees:  So I don’t know.  It’s possibly we might do a little bit of re-mastering or something in the future.

Ben Sommer:  You see, I’m the same way, and I hope you would take it in the spirit it was offered with that little tidbit.

Ben Spees:  Oh, absolutely.

Ben Sommer:  I hear what you’re saying.  Again, I was hearing all sorts of really neat things in the bass and the drums, so I hear where you are going.  Well, that’s so funny.  It’s like the inverse of typical cookie-cutter mixing advice you get from pros, “Start with the vocals.  Vocals is always the most important.”  But not always.

Ben Spees:  Yeah, well, gosh, I’ve read so much on different people’s opinions about production techniques, and honestly, for every person if he says you have to do it one way, you can find someone else who says no, that’s the wrong way to do it.

Ben Sommer:  Right.

Ben Spees:  So I mean, I’m not making a pop record.  I’m not Frank Sinatra.  I think when people come to a live show, probably what they’ll be most impressed by is the instrumentation, and hopefully the vocals are a pleasant edition for that.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, definitely.

Ben Spees:  But not necessarily the focal point.  I would love to be able to get a back-up singer, though, because I love vocal harmonies.

Ben Sommer:  Right, right.

Ben Spees:  And hopefully at some point, we’ll be able to arrange that.

Ben Sommer:  Maybe I didn’t listen close enough.  I didn’t hear a ton of vocal harmonies in the recorded product, am I wrong?

Ben Spees:  They’re mixed pretty low, and again, this is where we didn’t let the vocals or harmonies to overshadow anything, but in some of my older work, they’ve even a lot more prominent.

Ben Sommer:  Right.

Ben Spees:  I used to kind of get over the top with the fun of over-dubbing your own voice.

Ben Sommer:  Yeah, it does get a little weird, but to your point, I think having the vocal double or backed up live is always just an impressive kind of performance.  I’ve just found that live vocals and harmony have really done really well or even things like live horns just really make a show with rock.

Ben Spees:  Yeah.

Ben Sommer:  So you’re out promoting this album or do you have any events coming up you want to plug or your websites, et cetera?

Ben Spees:  Oh, yeah.

Ben Sommer:  Go ahead.

Ben Spees:  If you go to our website at www.mercurytree.net, we’ve got our shows listed coming up.  We’re playing on several shows over the coming months in Portland.  There is an EP-release show on September 18th at Oak Grove Tavern and then some other stuff listed after that.  And also on there, there is a link to BandCamp where you can stream all of our music.

Ben Sommer:  Cool.  Well, this has been great talking to you, Ben.  Thank you so much for joining me.

Ben Spees: Thank you, Ben, it was great talking to you, and it’s very interesting.

Ben Sommer:  Cool, all right, I’m going to press stop…

Heavy Glow is a power rock trio from San Diego. I talked with their guitarist, lead singer and primary song-writer Jared Mullins this week. As a musician myself – approaching 40 years of age – I’m always impressed and more than a bit jealous when I speak to young turks like Jared who seem to have all their ducks in a row career-wise and are focused driven to succeed in music. My cop out is usually that I have a family to support and can’t force my them to squeak by on Ramen noodles salvation army clothes just so diddle away the hours on my music career. Talking to young guys like Jared occasionally is good antidote to this crappy attitude – it helps jolt my ass out complacency.

Anyway, I really like Heavy Glow’s music – it’s slightly edgy, mainstream enough to not require repeated listens to get into – and has an absolute affinity to early Rush music. In fact, I’d describe the band as Cream crossed with early Rush circa Fly By Night, only with a white-boy baritone blues singer.

We hear two of the bands songs from their last self titled release Heavy Glow: Grinning In The Dark and Trailin’ St. Judas Blues

Ben Sommer: I’m here with Jared the lead guitarist and the singer for the band Heavy Glow and this is www.BandsLikeRush.com.  Jared, why don’t you just say hi, and give us a brief intro to fans who don’t know of your work, and what the band is all about, what you’re up to, et cetera.

Jared Mullins: Yeah, definitely.  Heavy Glow is a new rock band with classic-rock vibes, very similar to bands you hear like Rush and Cream and all those good guys.  We’re based in sunny California.

Ben: In San Diego, right?

Jared: Yeah.

Ben: Cool, so tell us a little bit more about your music, your approach to recording and where you are in your career.  Clue into the people who are listening to this, Jared and I talked last week, and I totally screwed up my computer set up and lost the recording, and so he and I are trying to relive this great conversation we have last week, so that’s why maybe kind of giggling to each other.  I see that I remember you Jared telling me a bit about how you got an interesting new experience you had recording your last album with the famous producer, and then we also talked a lot about your approach to promoting.  So if you want to hit any of those in any kind of order.

Jared: Yeah, definitely.  Well, I’ll just ramble, and if I ramble, you just must let me know, but Heavy Glow is a new band.  We put out to EPs.  The first one we recorded in 2009, and after recording, it was Stevie Salas, who is kind of my mentor.  Stevie is well known for working with basically everybody in the business.  He is first and foremost a guitarist.  When Stevie was 18 or something, he was up working in a record label up in Los Angeles.  They’ll sleep on the couch and George Clinton wakes him up and says, “Hey, I heard you can play funk guitar.”  And that was basically what started him off.  So he played with George Clinton for a while.  He played with Rod Stewart.  When Mick Jagger went on his solo tours, he decided to have Stevie as Keith Richard’s substitute or whatnot.  So we actually worked with him and went up to Velvet Revolver’s studio, and it’s good that we then got a six-song EP in four days, recorded old school the way that I like it.  Everybody is set up in the same room live with guitars, bass, drums, and we did some vocal overdub and all of that kind of stuff.  We just recorded another EP.  I guess I adjusted to it, but it’s about a year ago actually.  When that came out, we did that in one day with the same kind of set up where it’s just the whole band is in one room, and everything from mike the way it’s used to be.  We’re really just going for that very real and authentic vibe from the music, and I think it goes well with the style of music that we have.

Ben: Yeah, definitely.  You guys are a power trouper.  That is just a stupid term, the power trio.  The style, there is no fuzz or frills, and bands, that had nothing to do with you, but like early Rush, before they got into the additions to the synthesizers and other different instruments.  But recent bands like Green Day, well, I don’t know. Maybe there is a bit of similarity between your styles, but I always envy those small-type trio bands or quartets who their music, whether it’s live or recorded is the same, it’s simple.  It’s almost like you guys consciously have to avoid all the neat tricks in sonic gizmos you can bring into the studio to experiment with your sound and you can do something big to keep it simple, I’m sure, and that allows you to go through recording a whole album in one day as you will play it all live, which is the vocal overdub, and then it will also allows you to recreate the exact same experience live.  Is that a conscious thing with you or what?

Jared: Yeah, part of it is forced.  We’re four musicians, so we can’t afford the biggest producer that’s working with cold players or something like that, and I don’t even know that I would want that really.  I’m very really happy with the stuff that we put out.  I think it translates well.  I was even listening to Nirvana last night and even Ryan Adams yesterday, and I think the best music is the kind of music where if you listen to it immediately, you can’t help but feel something.  Even listening to Nirvana, there is not really much changes.  They are three-piece.  The bass isn’t really that good.  The drum is okay.  I never reflected Grohl as awesome a drummer until he played stuff, but the songs are pretty much always the same as the power chord bit, but always it’s something about the way it sounds or whatnot to get me listening to it, though.

Ben: I know what you mean.  I feel the exact same way.  Kurt Cobain is a raunchy guitarist because he’s kind of like an updated version of Neil Young.  But yeah, I agree, there had been music that’s odd Rush-like almost. [00:05:23], but yeah, I like it.  When you said you don’t have a lot of money for a lot of big-time producers, well that doesn’t mean you need to limit yourself in the studio.  I and others, we play a lot of different instruments where we use various creative synthesizing type approaches, so you could do that with the same budget, why don’t you?  Because you’re not just interested in the style?

Jared: I could, but I don’t know what I listened to that has something on it already.  I don’t know that anything I’ve really gotten into has that in it, and I don’t really consider it like an option for me, I guess.  I don’t know.

Ben: Yeah, or with keyboards, it’s something I don’t understand too much, but keyboards or if you play ukulele, or you could even layer the vocals in a thicker way than you do currently.  From my ear, when I was listening to music, I don’t hear too much over the top vocal harmony.

Jared: Yeah, exactly.  And at first if you had it more than the second one, I don’t the second has anything.  But we’re actually midway through recording an album now, and we’re using very tasteful keyboard and Hammond organ and that kind of stuff and doing some vocals and stuff too, so a new crop of vocals and stuff, so it’s a little bit different.  I don’t know, for some reason I get the skids and anybody’s synthesizer.  I just think 80% of it is in.

Ben: Well, it’s funny because back then the synth meant a handful of usually cheesy sounds that was the only sound, that’s what synth meant.  Now, synth means, for instance, I record with both synth, but I use various plug-ins that sound exactly like a vintage Rhodes or a B3 or the really cool old vintage synths like the ARP, et cetera.  Of course, you and I can probably name plenty of great classic rock songs with those instruments in them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean cheesy, although I understand the skidoo feeling you get when the word comes up.

Jared: Definitely, we’re actually using a lot of, I guess, the word is weird, I don’t know.  We’ve got some parts in the new album with [00:07:47 that sound] in it.  We’ve got some parts with kazoos actually.  Before you called me here, I was actually embarrassingly making my kazoo with some of the CDs that we have over here.

Ben: You’re practicing?

Jared: Exactly.

Ben: Why did you have to practice kazoo.

Jared: It got a very small sweet spot on it.  It’s really weird.

Ben: That sounds like a line out of the next final tap, I’m sorry.

Jared: Yeah, it should be, huh?  And we’re going to use some stylophone, too and things like that, so it should be fun.

Ben: Neat, so I already alluded to it, but what I hear in you guys is music, and what I think the fans of Bands Like Rush will like it is the in or the angle with anything Rush-related in Heavy Glow, and when I heard it, I thought, “Well, here is kind of, you know, there is a lot more to it.”  I think those influences you list on your site are probably closer to the truth like Cream and those early 70’s hard rock plus some of the punk influences, but early Rush with the first two albums plus a little bit more prog change up, even in that early Rush but with the baritones, vocalist versus Getty Lee’s wail is how I would characterize this.  It’s very cool, so you mix up the rhythmic and harmonic elements more than other bands who sound like you guys on the surface.  What’s your approach to doing it?  Are you guys that conscious or is that just a music you hear on your head?

Jared: It’s probably a little bit of both.  I have a really good rhythm section.  Dan and Joe are really good at turning the beat up in their head.  Do you know what I mean?  We’ll just turn the whole thing around.  And in some of it, too, it’s just we don’t want to do the same thing over and over.  So I think with the music, there is a very tasteful prog rock element, in the sense that it’s not your typical three-minute verse chorus, verse chorus with immediate bridge kind of song.  It’s straightforward without being…

Ben: Predictable.

Jared: Yeah, it’s not predictable, but at the same time, I don’t want to make music for musicians only, do you know what I mean?

Ben: Yeah.

Jared: We could very easily get off on doing a 10-minute jam, and it would be really cool for us and the musicians in the room would high five us at the end of the night, but I don’t know.  It’s all like instrumental masturbation, I don’t know.  I’m just not…

Ben: Yeah, the funny term I heard though, they call it ‘achievement rock’.

Jared: Yeah, I would much rather just have taste volumes in the music.  It’s something that might throw you a little bit for the sake of subtlety, but it doesn’t throw you so much that it’s distracting.

Ben: Right, cool.

Jared: Yeah, I appreciate the comparison to Rush, too.  The first thing that I think of when I think of Rush is working, man.  I think we probably talked about that the last time too.  But I can’t tell you how many times I’d be working outside or something and then that song would come on, and I was just go with it.  It’s actually the best thing I ever…

Ben: Yeah, that’s exactly the vintage I was thinking of.

Jared: Yeah, and it’s very super simple song.  I think there is a really cheap archs, and then the guitar solo breaks often are almost kind of a riff, but the guitar solo is so hooky that it catches up anyway.  It’s got that jam prog rock bit to that, I don’t know.

Ben: Oh, I agree.  So what’s up with you guys lately?  Do you guys have any big gigs you want to promote or events or albums?  You alluded to something you’re working on now, but now is the chance, anything going on?

Jared: Yeah, definitely, we are halfway through an album right now, so that should be out here, hopefully, in the next few months.  It’s going to be our first full length.  We’re pretty excited about it.  Our last EP, ‘The Filth & The Fury’, was just nominated for best rock album of the year here in San Diego.  Every year San Diego has a music awards.  They’ve doing it for 25-26 years or something like that.  Not only it, you see, it got nominated for best rock album of the year, so that’s just the big news here lately, so I’m pretty excited about it.  If any of your listeners have not heard it yet.  They should go and check it out definitely.

Ben: Cool, I always include one or two songs.  I think by picking the favorite or two favorites and intersperse them within our conversation.  Cool, great, so Jared, this has been great talking to you.  Again, we’ll stay in touch and thanks for talking to us.



The Vital Might is a Boston-based prog rock/punk trio. Today I speak with the Vital Might’s guitarist, singer and primary song-writer in the band – Andy Milk – hitting on several topics near to my heart:

• The recording & production process
• How to achieve a “big” sound as a prog power-trio
• Stylistic mixing/matching in a composition: i.e. moving from grunge to pop to metal to pretentious prog – all in one song
• Andy’s vocal affinities with Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon

We also hear two full tracks – a whacked out track called Make My Day from the debut album, and a heavy late-Rush style track Phantom Spaceman from their latest album Red Planet.

Ben: So I’m here with Andy. This is Ben from BandsLikeRush.com. He’s the guitarist. Is that right, Andy?

Andy: Guitarist and singer.

Ben: Right, for the Boston-based band, the Vital Might. Andy, welcome, won’t you just give us a little insight into what you’re band is all, and what you’re doing lately.

Andy: Well, yeah, we’re based out of Boston. We’ve been together with the band for, I think, about five years. We put out a record on our own called ‘Obsidian’ back in 2006, and then we had some personnel changes. We have a new album called ‘Red Planet’ that we put ourselves and it was put out again by 10T Records. We’re kind of all over the place as far as what we think our style is. Some people say prog. Sometimes we say that, you know, we don’t. That’s what we set up to do it, but it just comes across that way sometimes.

Ben: What else do people say?

Andy: Some of our influences are being called out like, you know, I’m fan of like Minus the Bear, and even like heavier stuff like Mastodon, but I’m also into like some singers and songwriter stuff like Jeff Buckley or Ray LaMontagne. I mean, we haven’t really heard either of those last two, but you know that’s…

Ben: Well, even if you haven’t heard someone to call you out as sounding like a particular band, if you have have that influence combining those two or three bands into one – that usually equals “prog”. If you’re doing anything off the beating path with harmony, melody, with content, theme, rhythm, you’re prog almost, you know, at the first level anyway.

Andy: Yeah, yeah, and we play live. We’re either too loud for the bands we’re playing with or we’re too quiet for the bands we’re playing with because our set can go from, you know, like singer/songwriter song to like odd time heavy lots of loud guitars and cymbals.

Ben: Right. When I was listening through your work online, I heard kind of a live sound. I don’t know if you guys record all live in the studio, but it sure sound like it has a kind of that vibe and energy. So am I right or wrong on that, first of all?

Andy: I think a chunk of it is live, but yeah, definitely do some overdubbings. I mean, we’re a three-piece band, so we chunk up the guitars and there is a couple of fun try. I do my actual own harmony, so you know.

Ben: You can’t get away from that.

Andy: Yeah. We try to get it live with people, you know, there are live shows. They’re what we’re all about until we recorded anything.

Ben: I heard that, which is kind of a punk approach, but yeah, you hear three or four guitar parts and the same voice doubling. It obviously gives it away. I also heard the metal and kind of a post-grunge vibe, the pop-ish melodies at times. So I hear what you’re saying when you’re saying as soon as you have an unusual or unhealthy mix for the touring gigs anyway.

Andy: Sometimes I even just do exactly opposite of whatever the last thing we just wrote or worked on.

Ben: You made a point that you’ve played out and played live as a band before you even recorded something. Although these days, there is so much of “mad scientist musician in basement recording and refining” than “doing”. You then either leave it in a locker or form a band and doing something solo. So are you traditional in that respect? Are you band oriented?

Andy: Yeah, I mean, most of the projects I’ve done I had one band for many years like at the end of college, and that was a little bit more mad scientist. The Vital Might actually kind of came out of the break up of another project I had and I sort of took the songs I liked – and some other guys liked them too – and kind of organically formed the band that way.

Ben:  So who does the songwriting? Is that a split thing or do you most of it?

Andy: I do most of it.  I’m definitely the structure guy of the band. I bring in the riffs, and maybe some lyrics, and then we kind of all bash it up together, then the other guys have a good chunk of the songwriting, especially since I can sort of play bass but I definitely can’t play any drums. So then I need their help.

Ben: So you leave the rhythmic complexities up to your man on drums.

Andy: Yeah. For sure.

Ben: When you say that you start on the performing stage and then try to translate that and go record later, how do you decide what to overdub, how to produce the recorded product and then how do you translate that back, if at all, to the live performance?

Andy: Oh, yes, actually, it’s an interesting kind of progress that our songs have gone through. A lot of times, we have some harmonies written. If one of the songs is a specific song we play out a lot, then our bass player and drummer – Evan or Rick – they kind of jump in and they’ll throw in a harmony just randomly at a show and then we’ll be like, “Oh, yeah.” You know, we don’t often sit down and practice and like too many harmonies and those later parts and then, when we get to recording, some songs are so new that they have no harmonies written. We work with a producer and we all kind of come up with the harmony and layer ideas. We even throw in a couple of guitar parts in, and then, once the finished product comes out, we’ve heard it so many times in the studios and really come to love it. I also focus on getting a big guitar sound like – as well as in the studio

It’s actually been a comment we frequently get after our shows: “Wow, I can’t believe you guys are three-piece.”

Ben: How big your guitar sound is?

Andy: That’s what people are saying. I guess, we never really know since we’re not in the audience.

Ben: Well, you say you can’t do two guitars live. But have you explored it? You can do anything these days with trigger samples.

Andy: Yeah.

Ben: You know, I heard a demo from a podcast I listened to of this new harmony pedal – a device that will harmonize the voice according to key. I mean, it was uncanny. You could hardly believe it was just a lead voice with harmonics around it, so have have you ever messed with anything like that?

Andy: Yeah, I played around them a little bit. I think, maybe with that kind speaks a little bit of punkishness where I don’t necessarily want to do too much fake stuff on stage. But that’s me. I don’t mean to label it that way because. Just for the fans, I think we just move around, we jump around on stage while our shirts are sweating out by the end, so you know, we put a lot of energy. Some of the mellower songs have a lightness to them on stage. But in our live shows, we play more of our louder/faster stuff.

Ben: Right, so you can get away on energy and a big amp sound instead of pyrotechnics & triggered sounds.

Andy: Yeah, you know, I’ve already got more pedals than I should – for the kind of stuff that we’re playing. I don’t want to have to do too much on stage beside playing.

Actually, when we first started, I had a delay pedal that I would hook up.

Ben:Y ou need a guy in the background to manage all that gear live, you know.

Andy: Yeah. I’d love to have a guy like Mars Volta has – he just does sound manipulation live. Like he just takes the stuff that comes out of the vocals with some keys on guitars and then swirls them all around like…

Ben: Wow. I didn’t know that.

Andy: Yeah. The original guy passed away, but I think they’ve got a new guy that does that stuff.

Ben: Wow, when I went to grad school for music (of all things), I had a friend who would perform improvised electronic stuff. He would just sit there with his computer set up, and do these absolutely nutty things, live/real-time.

So I have a couple of specific questions only because I listened to a bunch of your songs and maybe you get a kick out of here on what I hear.

Because I’m a musician. I can never tell what my own influences are. It’s almost like a baby where you can’t tell your own resemblance in him, because you’re too close and you need someone else’s opinion.

Andy: Right.

Ben: So, I heard System of a Down. Are you fans of them at all?

Andy: Oh, yeah, definitely.

Ben: Great. I mean, it wasn’t obvious. I don’t take it like you’re wearing it on your sleeve. It’s just I love that band, too, when I heard that, definitely in there. The vocal, you have a funny, well, it’s not funny, it’s a good kind of mix, a kind of a poppy style with a bit of roughness, you know, so it’s almost like a punk Simon Le Bon, that guy from Duran Duran.

Andy: All right. I like that.

Ben: I thought you’d like that, but overall I think the element I hear the most is the kind of symphonic textures that are all overlaying, It’s the big guitar sound, with the kind of more personal and emotive lyrics than you usually hear with most prog rock. So that struck me more like Radiohead or even The Who maybe.

Andy: Okay.

Ben: But lastly, this one song, I think it’s called Make My Day, is the song. That thing is weird. I mean, I dont’ know what to compare it to. Only Zappa can compare to that, so where does that song come from, what it’s all about?

Andy: That’s actually our original bass player. He is no longer with the band, but still a friend who is around. He wrote that totally. He wrote everything about it like apart from the band and he kind of brought to us and then, you know, when we were recording it, you know, we definitely were like let’s really weave this one out, and you know, we recorded that. That was our first album. We recorded that at like a private school up in New Hampshire like in the Windsor in New Hampshire and we actually got to use their theater that the kids would put on shows. And it was like old like 150-year-old theater that, you know, they claimed was haunted or something.

Ben: Wow.

Andy: So we really tried to like get the vibe of that place. They had like an electric piano thing there had all these weird sound effects. We actually recorded all the sound effects that were on this old like electric, you know, synthesizer thing and we kind of mess with that stuff when we came back to the studio.

Ben: That’s cool, wow, what a story.

Andy: Yeah.

Ben: Yeah, well, anyway, this is a weird song. It wasn’t too far out of field of left field, but it was just struck me and another thing I noted down, which is always worth noting is a double kick that would put Neil Peart to shame, so everyone else is always saying Neil Peart is the greatest and this is a Rush site, so I ought to give a nod to your drummer. It seems that he’s maybe part of late crop of drummers who have just the technique, at least, with the feet but also with the hands. It’s just sick. I mean, the level of skill in most, you know, hard core metal or prog drummers these days is incredible.

Andy: Yeah.

Ben: And then here’s another guy that’s pretty awesome.

Andy: Yeah, well, I’ll make sure Kraker knows about that. Right before our band, he was in the metal band and doing a lot of double kick and then, you know, before that he was playing jazz.

Ben: Oh.

Andy: So you definitely hear jazz metal would kind of combine in his style for sure.

Ben: Yeah, those are two techniques to go for it, if you’re going to go for it.

Andy: Yeah.

Ben: You can do anything. It’s like a history degree. You can do anything with it.

Andy: Yeah.

Ben: Cool.

Andy: I can play tone wild thing on the drums, but that’s about it. I can’t do any of this crazy…

Ben: Oh, that’s a good line. That was probably samples of some pseudo, you know, similarly lame, you know…

Andy: Yeah.

Ben: Oh, it’s Wild Thing.

Andy: Yeah, and it’s like it’s from…

Ben: Yeah, we’re dating ourselves there. Cool, this has been great talking to you. Where can the people find you online?

Andy: www.vitalmight.com is the best spot and that kind of links out to Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and PureVolume and all of that stuff.

Ben: Cool. Do you have any shows or anything else specific people should know about?

Andy: Yeah, we’ve got a couple of shows in September. We have one in Boston on September 17th at the Middle East.

Ben: Oh, cool.

Andy: And then the next night on Saturday, September 18th at Kenny’s Castaways in New York City.

Ben: Cool. I’ll put them on my calendar and see if I can make it. I live in the South Shore, so you and I are locals.

Andy: Oh, cool, cool.

Ben: Yeah, excellent. Well, thanks for joining us. Take care.

Andy: Yeah, thanks for having me.