Reel Time: The Budos Band
As his longtime instrumental outfit gears up to release their seventh LP, and simultaneously bring their eighth full-length effort past the finish line, guitarist/ producer Thomas Brenneck looks back on the surreal seven years since he relocated to the West Coast.
Switching Coasts
THOMAS BRENNECK: We recorded Budos VII in November 2023. I’ve been out in California for a minute now but, of course, the band started in New York, where I’m from. I moved out here, unexpectedly, about seven years ago. There’s a couple of reasons for that but one of the main reasons was that a longtime collaborator of mine is Mark Ronson, and he basically approached me about coming out here. He’d rented this studio in Hollywood called Sound Factory, which has been around since the ‘60s. I was playing a gig with Lee Fields in LA—Mark came to the show, we were hanging out and then he was just like, “You wanna get breakfast tomorrow?” And then he asked me what I thought about moving to California and being the staff producer and a writer at this studio he was about to rent.
There was no way I could say no to that opportunity, but uprooting from New York was like a punch in the stomach. I never thought I’d leave New York, but my wife was also born and raised in Pasadena, Calif., and LA and our first kid was about 4 when I got this proposition. We moved to Altadena, Calif., and I worked at Sound Factory with Ronson for about three years. It had its good times and it had its bad times—I was in a deep depression between leaving New York City and losing my friend and collaborator Charles Bradley, who had just passed away when I moved. So there were a rough couple of years in there—it was hard for me to find my place. It was a different world—New York was very insular, as far as the crowds of musicians I worked with. I have The Budos Band and Menahan Street Band, and we all play on each other’s records and the records we produce. Leon Michels produces records, I play on his El Michels Affair records and he’s a part of the Menahan Street Band with me. If Budos needs a bigger horn section, then we get Dave Guy, the trumpet player on Jimmy Fallon. We are old friends from when I played in The Dap Kings—he’s a forever Budos member.
So there’s this tight-knit group of people, and when I first moved out, I didn’t really know what to do. I just kept going back to New York once every two months or so for weeks at a time, and I recorded music that way. But, long story short, those three years weren’t very productive— I was still getting my bearings in LA, working with these people that were more in Ronson’s world, which is much more of a major-label pop world. It took me a while to navigate those recording sessions and those writing sessions and learn how to produce records like that.
Old Friends and New Spaces
TB: After three years of getting my shit together in LA, the pandemic hit and stopped everything. We moved out of Sound Factory, I put all of the recording equipment that I’d acquired over the past three years into storage and I spent about a year finding a place to rent and building a recording studio—it was really hard to look at commercial spaces to build a studio during the pandemic, with real estate brokers and everything. I finally found one and got the lease on this place in Pasadena about three years ago—and then it took another nine months to get a permit to build the studio coming out of the pandemic and all this time for my engineer to wire it, and we weren’t able to do our first recording session at my new place, Diamond West, until February 2023.
During the pandemic, my family also grew, and it was getting harder to leave LA to go back to record in New York. But as soon as I could, I flew back to see the [Budos Band] guys. We hadn’t seen each other or played a gig in a couple of years because of the pandemic, and the first thing we did was we went into our studio, The Diamond Mine in Queens, N.Y., and we cranked out a six song EP—which was also our first record since leaving Daptone and recording for Diamond West Records, the label [Budos Band baritone saxophonist] Jared Tankel and I started.
Loose and Raw
TB: The EP was super loose and raw. We hadn’t played together or even rehearsed for so long, but we were proud of it, especially for a pandemic project. And then, that November, Budos came out here and we did VII. I had that whole year to break in the studio, and I recorded multiple projects before the Budos guys came out here. It was exciting. The band had never come to LA to make a record—I’d always gone back to New York, to the studio I have there. We treated it like a getaway. Our families weren’t there so everyone had a little more freedom to hit the studio and write and record.
For the EP, I had recorded some riffs and basslines on my phone and our bass player Dan [Foder] also came in with a phone full of ideas. The way that Budos writes is usually from the rhythm section first, and then we add the horns on top of the rhythms. A lot of great ideas also came out of the excitement of us all just being in the room together again. It’s evolved over time. For Budos II, III and V, and also Burnt Offering, we all lived in the same city and were rehearsing all the time—we’d play a song live and record it. With the EP and VII, we were really writing in the studio. It’s not great to come in with a fully formed song; it has to go through the Budos machine. I’m the producer and I’ll come in with ideas, but it’s a melting pot of influences because there’s a generation gap in the band. I’m the youngest one and I’m 43, and our trumpet player, Andrew Greene, is 53. That guy grew up on heavy metal, whereas I grew up on ‘90s hip-hop and then I fell in love with soul music. Now, I’m a deep-soul record collector and I try to get these guys to make our shit sound like Zamrock from the ‘70s, from Zambia.
Also, everyone is spread out now, doing different shit. Our drummer [Brian Profilio] plays in a country group sometimes, and half the band loves metal. I’m like, “What if Budos went to Turkey? Let’s make a fucking song that sounds like Turkish psych-rock from the ‘70s.” For Budos VII, I knew I wanted to push us toward Fela Kuti, James Brown and The Meters, our bread and butter in the early years, before the band got heavier. Aside from like Black Sabbath, I don’t personally listen to a lot of heavy guitar music. So I’m always looking for different references to keep up with the heaviness that the band wants to go with. But I found it in Zamrock. There’s more Black Sabbath in that music than there is Fela. We’d record the rhythm tracks first and then do a few days of horns. Everyone was throwing out ideas and working on the melodies.
A Refined Heaviness
TB: Our heaviness is more refined now—and fuzzy. The textures and the playing are high-energy. When we first switched over to a heavier sound with Burnt Offering, there was this rebellious spirit. It was a big sonic departure from the first three records that Gabe Roth made for us, though it wasn’t the most fun experience for me since it was my first time producing a Budos record on my own, without Gabe, and we ended up mixing some of it back at Daptone. I didn’t have a grip on it yet, but the cool thing was that the band steers the production, even when I am at the helm. There’s a camaraderie behind it.
We have a new percussion player, Rich Terrana, who was the drummer of The Frightnrs, this reggae group from Queens. They are an incredible band, incredible musicians. Unfortunately, their singer passed away before their debut record even came out, so it’s a tragedy. We brought Rich in, and he had a really big effect on the sound. All of a sudden, even though there’s all of these fuzz guitar riffs, there’s this percussion giving the recordings this old-school Budos element. He’s also an unorthodox percussion player and that has had a big effect on our drummer. We’ve gone through some growing things, but now we’ve really become the kind of band that has the discipline and the patience to go into the studio, write a song and record it—soup to nuts—in a few days. That’s a great skill to have.
For Budos VIII, the band came out here in February to record. We had no songs written when we went into the studio, similar to the way we did VII. With VII, we recorded 12 songs in a few days. They’re these bangers, which are really short and to the point—two-and-a-half or three-minute numbers. It’s like, “There’s the riff, there’s the rhythm. Here comes the horn head.” There’s no bullshitting. This time, we wanted to stretch out a bit, like we were scoring a film or making something a little more cinematic with this long, slow breath. The idea was to record fewer songs and put more effort in their construction and the arrangements. So they’ll be longer but not boring. We ended up recording about seven songs in two and half days or so. Then, on the first morning we were working on the horn section, Brian texted everybody at like 9 a.m., and was like, “Yo, I think we need one more song—we need eight songs for VIII, not seven. I have this idea for a song that would be different from the other seven songs. So we went in at like noon and executed his idea quickly. A great song came out and then VIII suddenly had eight songs and we were like, “This now feels like a vision.”
Surviving Another Apocalypse
TB: My studio in Pasadena was totally fine and totally removed from the fires that hit LA in January, but my personal story with the fires is crazy. We had this recording session for VIII coming up. And then the fires happened. My house didn’t burn down, but all the houses around me did. My family evacuated and went to the desert, where my mother-in-law’s place is. But I stayed and fought the fires with my other neighbors. The house next door to me was on fire, and I fought to keep that fire from spreading to my house. By the grace of God we were OK, but there was no water. The fire hydrants were empty. My neighbor’s house was from the ‘40s and she was a hoarder. It was like all these things just added up to that house burning for two and a half days. I was fighting for dear life to keep my house from catching on fire. The whole neighborhood was decimated. I can’t live there and now I need to sell my house—I immediately had to rent a place for my family somewhere. We already had the VIII session booked and the guys were like, “Is it safe to come out?” I didn’t want to selfishly say to the rest of the band, “I need this,” but it was like, “I just lived through the apocalypse, my family is squared away, come out here and let’s make a record because, never in my life, have I needed a fucking weekend with the Budos more.”
Nobody canceled, everybody came through and the energy was incredible. We were gonna make this record regardless, but, after living through something like that, getting together with that group of friends—making music together and being able to tell the story of what I went through over a bunch of drinks—was therapeutic. It’s instrumental music so it is hard to tell what seeps in but, going through something like that and letting go of a million possessions, what’s important in your life couldn’t be clearer. Playing music has so much meaning and so much depth. And even though it’s not something you can touch until you put it on vinyl, it’s still empowering. And, goddamn, everyone has been through a lot the past couple of years—pandemics, fires. Usually, when someone in the band says that they have an announcement, it’s like, “Who’s having a baby, who’s getting, married?” But the past couple of years, we’re on to a different phase of our lives. And I’ve got to say, making these records back to back has been like therapy.
Intentionally Self-Titled
TB: Our first record was self-titled and had a volcano on it. That became Budos I. And when we did the second record, we wanted to stick with the artwork being nature, so we had stars on it and named it Budos II because of the artwork. And then it was like, “I guess that’s what we do.” For Burnt Offering, our fourth album, we wanted to make a change. We weren’t working with Gabe and wanted to break the mold, so we very intentionally changed it. We called our fifth album Budos Band V but our sixth album is called Long in the Tooth. Brian titles all of our songs, and he wanted to reflect how we were getting older. We did a couple of EPs along the way, but VII felt like a strong Roman numeral and it’s the same for VIII. We aren’t sure if we will end up calling it that but, for now, its VIII to us. When we first started, if you told us that we would make eight records, we’d be like, “Get the fuck out of here.”
