Our annual Summer Stars series features a variety of groups making the rounds on the festival circuit. Today we feature Tea Leaf Green. Earlier in the week, we checked in with moe..

“We’ve Got Some super-fresh, spontaneous, sort of crackly energy that you get when you’re just exploring something, and you don’t really know what it’s going to be yet,” says Tea Leaf Green bassist Reed Mathis about the band’s new studio album, In The Wake. Since the late ‘90s, the San Francisco-based five-piece have made a name for themselves with a brand of energetic rock rooted in the live improvisation tradition.

For the first time, TLG entered the studio without “road-tested” songs. “We could try different beats, different sounds and different arrangements because we literally had no idea how the songs are supposed to go,” Mathis explains. During the yearlong process, the members went into the studio separately to record their parts and build on each other’s ideas, a process
keyboardist Trevor Garrod refers to as “sculpting the same lump of clay.”

The group’s eighth studio effort is emotionally heavier than their previous releases as it deals with the band members’ simultaneous miseries. “Our lives just kind of line up and that’s part of the empathy that leads to group creativity and improvisation,” says Mathis.

“We think this is a super interesting and cool record, and we’ve also discovered that we’ve created this great platform to launch our jams off of,” offers Garrod. The band made a decision not to perform In The Wake’s songs until its release but will play the album in its entirety during select shows throughout their extensive summer tour. “This is the best material we have,” Mathis says excitedly. “When we finally perform this stuff, it is going to explode.” *

Album for a Hot Summer Night: Anything by Lightnin’ Hopkins (Garrod); Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks (Mathis)

Summer Drink: Sierra Nevada (Garrod); Vodka tonic (Mathis)

Festival Stops: Summer Camp, Bella Mente, Harborfest, more.