The past three years have not been easy for San Francisco’s Tea Leaf Green. Original bassist Ben Chambers quit in 2007. The band switched management and split from their record label. And, as a result, toured less which led to the hard-earned buzz surrounding them noticeably dissipating. It was something of a perfect storm.

“It was a major struggle,” says guitarist/vocalist Josh Clark of the many transitions that Tea Leaf Green has endured lately. “Definitely a difficult time for sure, but I’ve never questioned that this is the band I want to be in and this is the music I want to make.”

Tea Leaf Green hasn’t been the only band wrestling with change. For the past decade, the entire music world has been in a rapid state of evolution. The decline of the record industry brought on by digital music greatly affected the band’s decision to leave their record label. Styles are constantly going in and out of favor with fans and, like the rest of the jamband scene, Tea Leaf Green suffered from a downswing in appreciation for the genre as a whole.

“I definitely feel there was a retraction,” says keyboardist/lead vocalist Trevor Garrod about Tea Leaf Green’s popularity in the past few years, “and I kind of feel there was a retraction all the way across the board for that whole scene that we came up in. In fact, we’re one of the few bands that are still around from those days.”

The quartet, which formed in 1997, rode the post-Phish jam swell right up to the crest where they played for 10,000 people at Bonnaroo, opened for Trey Anastasio and Dave Matthews Band and headlined multiple nights at San Francisco’s Fillmore. The wave crashed somewhere around the end of fall of 2008.

With the exception of established heavy hitters like Widespread Panic and moe., as well as a few younger acts like the Disco Biscuits, Yonder Mountain String Band, Umphrey’s McGee and STS9, jam music became marginalized over the past few years while indie rock blew up. The music landscape was changing, but so was Tea Leaf Green – it’s no coincidence they’ve been able to survive both the music business shake-up and the jamband decline to become 13 year veterans of the scene. The secret to their success: songwriting.
“When we first met, I was all about instrumental exploration,” says Clark. “As I get older, I’m definitely much more about the song. We have our share of goofy songs from the early days of the band – which I love, too – but it got to the point of, what am I singing about? Why am I up here? Why am I dying? Why are my relationships failing for this if I’m gonna just goof off? I think we’ve all been seeking more meaningful music to put out, and we discovered that we’re good songwriters.”

Good songs will always be in demand. And it’s not like the band has abandoned the jams. Live, and on records for that matter, they still go way out there, but songs are no longer built around improvisations; it’s the other way around now. In the past few years, Tea Leaf Green became less of a jamband led by Clark’s guitar and more of a rock band led by Garrod’s California soul vocals and hook-heavy compositions. “We’ve been able to combine the two [songwriting and jamming],” says Clark, “and I think that’s why we’re still here.”

Change is rarely easy, but it’s the only way to grow. For a band, there’s no bigger change than a new member. When Reed Mathis, one of the live music scene’s most talented, in-demand bass players left Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey to join Tea Leaf Green in November 2007 after original bassist Ben Chambers quit, the band’s DNA was altered dramatically.

Mathis started playing with the band immediately, while still making time to honor previous commitments with JFJO. In August 2009, he left his Tulsa, Okla. home of 23 years and moved in to the Tea Leaf Green house near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach where Garrod and Clark have lived for years; drummer Scott Rager lives just over the bridge in Oakland. It’s been a long road, but as Clark happily announces, “We’re a full band again. But it takes time to get somebody up to speed on 300 songs and also to get to know each other musically and personally. [For] a band like ours, with the amount of improv that we do, it’s all communication and instincts.”

Mathis entered the group excited about its potential, but sensitive to the delicate dynamics of a band. Having co-founded and been a driving force behind the wildly experimental Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey for 16 years, Mathis was already a master of improvisation, but his confidence as a bandleader was shaken. He no longer wanted to lead, he wanted to learn.

“I really came into it wanting to receive their message more than impose mine,” he says. “I knew how to impose mine. And really, in Jacob Fred, I started imposing it more toward the end. So it was kind of like a cool flip of the script. And a chance for me to say, ‘OK, I tried that and I saw the result, let’s try the other approach.’”

Regarding the first year, Mathis says, “I pretty much sat on my hands and tried not to make the steering wheel do anything it wasn’t already doing.” But as everyone became more comfortable, he gradually stepped up his creative presence. “So far so good,” he says.

The learning curve for Mathis was expected, but the time it’s taken the rest of the band to get on solid ground was a bit of a surprise, at least to Garrod. “It’s been kind of a journey for me, just learning how the sound of the band has changed,” he says. “It didn’t really register for me that if one quarter of the band changes, then the sound of the band changes. It’s taken me like two years to learn how to play again in this new context.”

The band was already pushing toward new, more mature musical horizons. The addition of Mathis galvanized the transition, adding new colors to the equation, creating deeper musical shades of Tea Leaf Green. “The music is getting heavier,” remarks Clark. “It’s getting darker.”

Garrod adds: “We’ve become less funky than we were; which I’m cool with. We definitely aren’t in the same place we were two or three years ago. I feel much more like an adult now. I always felt kind of like a kid before, but in the last couple years I really feel like I’ve finally grown up.”
In June, Tea Leaf Green released Looking West, their first album since 2008’s Raise Up The Tent, which was recorded just a few months after Mathis joined the band. Looking West doesn’t include any new material and instead features 13 previously unrecorded Tea Leaf Green staples. “It’s almost a best of record,” says Garrod, “but ‘Best of’ songs that have never been recorded.”

The band has written a bunch of new material with Mathis and started working on the next album which will include those songs, but Looking West was the record they needed to make now.

Following the departure of bassist Ben Chambers, the band had to relearn who they were. For the past few years, they’ve been hunkered down, out of the public eye, rebuilding. Now, they’re ready to come out and show off TLG 2.0. But first, they needed closure.

“It’s kind of the final chapter of the pre-Reed Tea Leaf Green years,” says Garrod. “This record is the last chapter of our past and it’s allowing us to look forward to the future, looking to the West as the future.”

Cut entirely in-house, Looking West is a major departure from the resources they used on 2008’s Raise Up The Tent and 2005’s national debut, Taught To Be Proud. Instead, the new album was recorded in a very relaxed atmosphere at the small studio Coyote Hearing in Oakland, produced by Mathis with Garrod’s help, mixed on Mathis’ laptop while on tour and released quietly on the band’s own Greenhouse Records.

With the advent of cheaper, high-quality recording technology, there’s a strong argument to be made for bands recording and distributing records themselves. “When it comes to those record labels, you really gotta start rethinking their use in this modern world,” derides Garrod. “They’re kind of just becoming parasites. It got to the point where it was like, ‘Who invited you to the party?’ And we’ve gone the route of having an outside producer, and honestly, that didn’t really make sense to us either – they didn’t really seem to do anything.”

The result, according to Mathis, is an “extremely psychedelic” album that was cheaper to record, more fun to make and one that and everyone in the band seems to agree it’s their best, most representative effort yet.

Though Looking West might serve as the new Tea Leaf Green’s official coming out party, this is a band that earns their bread on the road and onstage.

“I feel like right now it’s really gelling,” says Clark. “The last couple of tours have been really amazing. The best music in an improv situation is when it’s like a flock of birds and everybody just sort of turns instinctively here and there. And I think we’re getting to that point with this band – with the new Tea Leaf Green right now – and it’s real magic when that happens.”

No one’s noticed how far the band has come more than Mathis. “It’s like a different band since mid-January,” he says. “We turned some kind of corner. Some sort of thing that was hanging on by a pinky toe let go and suddenly made a world of difference.” (Mathis suggests listening to the show from 4/9/2010 at The National in Richmond, Va., as an example of the band’s progress.)

It’s hard to say exactly what’s changed with Tea Leaf Green. Evolution is a slow, gradual process. But everyone in the band is unquestionably feeling it. The hundreds of live shows, countless hours of practice, recording the new album and being together constantly have created the environment necessary for the band to develop into their new form. “We feel like we’re finally a band again,” says Garrod. “We know what our sound is again.”