Photo by Jay Blakesberg

Bassist Rob Derhak shares his thoughts regarding moe.‘s new album, his iPad and working with Kid Rock’s producer

Working out the La Las
We started working on WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LA LAs in August at Dreamland studios outside Woodstock, N.Y. It’s this cool, little residential place in an old church – basically, we moved in there for a few weeks and just hacked it out. [Laughter.] Most everything [that we recorded] we had played live, even if it was only for one or two shows. We had producer John Travis [Kid Rock, Sugar Ray, Social Distortion] come in and listen to all of our material and he picked the stuff that he thought would make the best sounding album – not necessarily the fan-favorite songs. We came back with our own suggestions and re-worked everything in the studio. It was a bit laborious, but it ended up being rewarding by the time it was done.

Old School Aspirations
We hadn’t done anything like this for over ten years – where we just came in and did an album song by song and didn’t have some grandiose idea of how the album was going to work together. We wanted a producer to take the reins so it would have freshness to it. We were strained for ideas that we hadn’t thought of and we wanted somebody to come in and take the stuff that we had and turn it into something that he thought sounded cool. We wanted to go in and be a little more traditional in our approach to doing the album.

Kid Rock’s Crew
We had never met John before we started working with him. We went through a list of producers and interviewed a few of them and, finally, picked a guy that seemed like the best fit for us – somebody who said the right things and had the same goal. One thing that interested me was that he did the Kid Rock album Devil without a Cause, which had the song “Cowboy” on it. There’s a lot of different influences, changes and weirdness in that music, and he turned all those things into a really cool sounding, different album. I thought that might be good for us. He would say, “I don’t care if you guys want to make it 20 minutes long but do something that keeps my interest.” That was the M.O. for every song on the album: Keep it interesting; don’t stay on one thing for too long.

Lazarus
[All of these songs debuted in the past two years except] “Lazarus.” When I suggested we put it on the album, [guitarist] Al Schnier was like, “Really? That song’s like 10 years old.” And I was like, “it’s not that old.” For some reason, I thought it was only a couple years old. And then, I realized – after we started working on it – that it was a 10-year-old song. But it ended up getting a new verse and a whole different solo section and different parts. It changed enough that it’s not even the same song anymore. So I renamed the song “The Bones of Lazarus” because my brother wrote a book by that name, and I thought it was appropriate. This is a stripped-down to the bones version of the song. We also recorded “Skrunk” [from 2007] but Al didn’t end up being really happy with it, so we cut it.

iPad Inspiration
The idea to play “Crab Eyes” on iPads live came from me thinking up a scam of how we could get moe. to buy us all iPads, which our manager didn’t take kindly to. [Laughter.]. We’re always trying to think of something new to do and something that has the potential to reach outside the jamband world. We had a friend that worked at Apple and he brought an iPad to one of our shows and showed us Garage Band [on it]. I was like, “We should play an entire song as a band [on those]” and that idea festered. I think it was Al who was like, “This is the kind of thing we should actually video and get on YouTube.” It grew organically in our mind.

Music City Mentality
The only song we haven’t played yet is “One Way Traffic.” Al and I have done a bunch of writing sessions with other writers for publishing purposes. I had written that song with a guy in Nashville, Tenn., and initially, it wasn’t supposed to be a moe. song. The original version we have is this sweet acoustic thing. I sent John three or four songs I had written on my own and he latched on to that one. We hammered the shit out of it and turned it into a rock song.