The Core: Zach Gill
The ALO singer/keyboardist and longtime Jack Johnson sideman is pushing through the quarantine with the help of his own brand of “cocktail yoga.”
PANDEMIC ESSENTIALS
I had the nuggets for the songs on my [new solo album] Cocktail Yoga for a long time. I have this folder where I stick all my instrumentals called “cocktail yoga.” My studio is in a garage, but I have all this wood paneling and some friends who are pretty into making cocktails so that is never far from mind. I love yoga and a lot of these instrumentals reminded me of lounging and stretching. There were a lot of little unfinished pieces, but I wasn’t sure what they were. I thought, “Maybe I’ll write lyrics for these,” but most of them started off as little experiments in the studio that had been sitting around for a couple of years. A few were brand new during the pandemic—when everybody’s gigs were canceled, I just started writing and practicing. Every time I worked on one of these songs, it just felt good. I’d go for a bike ride and hear the birds and decide to record them and bring that back into the studio. It was the real lockdown period when you weren’t really supposed to go anywhere or do anything.
I played all the music myself; I kept thinking that I would get a real drummer or better guitarist to play on them. But I never did. And part of the fun was learning about each instrument. At first, I thought that it was going to be either “cocktail” or “yoga,” but then I was like, “They can exist together.” Especially during the pandemic, both cocktails and yoga have become integral. Now I’m taking a break from both for a little bit, but there was a time when they were the best medicine I had. [Laughs.]
WAVES OF EMOTION
Our last Animal Liberation Orchestra gig before the pandemic really hit was at the Warfield [in San Francisco] with Leftover Salmon. It was a big show—Wavy Gravy was there—and it was awesome, but there were some people who bought tickets and never showed up. There was this strange feeling going into the show—everything had just gotten canceled in Washington. We were doing a tour with Twiddle, and we were supposed to go up there the next weekend. And we were like, “God, this isn’t looking good.” And then, sure enough, a couple of days later, it was just this cascade of like, “We’ll just reschedule all these gigs for December.” And then, everybody realized at some point that it’s not gonna be over so quickly.
It’s funny, as a touring musician, the thing that I probably craved the most was time at home. It made me realize that I’ve been burnt out. So all the time at home has been immensely nice. I’ve just been a songwriting machine— working on musicals and Cocktail Yoga. I’ve also been reading a ton, going on long walks and philosophizing with old friends on the phone. But then it gets scary when I think, “Am I retired? What happens when it all turns back on? Do I even want it to turn back on? Will it be different? Will it be better?” So it comes in waves.
In some ways, ALO is already used to the distance. I’m in Santa Barbara and the rest of the guys are in the Bay Area so we rely on FaceTime. But so much of the band is about getting together to rehearse for our shows and, without the shows, it’s been hard to see everybody, although we’ve still been making time to do it.
HUMANITY MOVING INTO THE FUTURE
My hunch is that the festival scene and club infrastructure that we were all used to is going to get shaken up. But I am also envisioning all of these musicians at home woodshedding. I just watched the new Robbie Robertson documentary Once Were Brothers; Albert Grossman had The Band on retainer, paying for them to live in Woodstock. And I think a lot of musicians have thought, “Imagine if we could just work on music without worrying about touring?”
I’m hoping that the infrastructure of gigs will realign and we will have all this new music. It might be the Wild West for a little bit, but that could be cool too. Some of the bigger production companies aren’t gonna wanna take a gamble on stuff, so maybe we’ll start to see more guerilla, pop-up things. It could be a nice reset. All the institutions that have been built up since World War II are under question now.
Sometimes I think about this thing that happens in ALO: Since it’s a democracy, there’s often a presenting of songs or a presenting of parts. Depending on the initial creator’s attachment, they might find themselves fighting to justify the way they feel about something. Then you realize, “Actually, the reason I feel this way is because I thought this whole other thing. But now I realize that wasn’t clear in the concept that I presented.” So you ideally try to make it better, but then you also might realize that the idea you had just wasn’t that great. [Laughs.] From politics to welfare systems to where people should live, everything’s being questioned. It’s nice that we can all work from home, but we are also totally dependent on screens now. The choices we make are going to set the course for humanity moving into the future.
RHYTHMS OF DEMOCRACY
Choosing what songs to bring to the band and which ones I should save for a solo album is tricky and I struggle with it a lot. I write a lot—I have a lot of ideas and some of them are awesome and some of them are definitely not. [Laughs.] I drink a lot of coffee, and I’ll just get so excited about all these new songs. Then, I’ll show up to rehearsal and say, “I’ve written 20 songs!” And the other guys tend to show up and say, “Here’s one or two that we want to try.”
In the beginning of ALO, because I always had a lot of songs, it was easy to be like, “Here’s a new one—and here’s another one.” But as time has gone on, it’s become a more collaborative process. I started to think, “This one’s too personal, so it should go in the solo category.” But, at the same time, sometimes the more personal songs are the best songs because they speak to people in a different way, so I’ll bring them to the band. It’s a strange process and we’ve gone through lots of different waves because we are a democracy. We’ve thought, “Should we just vote on the songs?” But that also gets into this weird apples and oranges thing. Yet, we’ve found a rhythm where—since we’re all invested members of this thing and we’re all equal members and we all bring different strengths to the band—we can find the best way to utilize that. We’ve been in this band for 30 years—when Eddie Van Halen passed, the first thing I thought about was seeing Dan [“Lebo” Lebowitz] play “Eruption” when we were in high school. We would do “Eruption” into “You Really Got Me” and it was such a crowd-pleaser.
SUBURBAN COLLEGE ATTITUDE
[ALO’s] been recording online— we have some music that we started before the pandemic that we’re finishing up. We’re trying to figure out if we should make a virtual album or EP. There are different things that we have chased at different times. There have been times where we have said, “This song is really catchy. If we made it a little more catchy, it can fit into this category.” Recently, there’s been this idea to do some longer-form songs. They’re definitely in there, though only a couple have fully manifested. I think it’s partially because they’re so long and we get so meticulous about things. When a song is 20 minutes long and each section is under so much scrutiny, it takes a long time to get through it. So I hope those ideas come to fruition. I also think being involved in the whole Terrapin Crossroads scene has affected [drummer Ezra Lipp], [bassist Steve Adams] and Lebo in a rad way and that has rubbed off on our music.
It took me a while to really get into the Dead. By the time we started going to Dead shows, we were in junior high and it was pretty late in the arc of the band. When I went to college, there were people who were all about the Grateful Dead but I didn’t get it; I hadn’t quite discovered it, whereas I got Phish right away. Phish made sense to my suburban college attitude. [Laughs.]
It wasn’t like watching Jim Morrison parade around the stage or someone like Eddie Vedder, who was doing something I could never do. Watching the guys in Phish I was like, “I can learn to play my instrument well and I can be creative and thoughtful.” That whole H.O.R.D.E. generation, with Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors, felt like my generation, whereas Dan’s dad took us to see the Dead.
Over time, though, we’ve all come to appreciate the music of the Grateful Dead and the scope of not only their live shows but also their studio albums. I was just watching the Hilary Swank movie Away on Netflix about the first trip to Mars, and “Ship of Fools” came on in the background. It hit me just how amazing that song is. I think a lot of people missed that in the ‘90s because things had gone so far.
FRIENDS FOREVER
I listen to The Beatles station on SiriusXM a lot and think about all these groups of high-school friends who found success playing in bands during their 20s. It seemed pretty common back then; the uncommon part is that we’re still together and evolving [in ALO]. We’re not like the Eagles who, at some point, solidified into the show that we see today. I sometimes think, “What is my role in this band?” It used to be that I was the singer, but I’m not the singer anymore. I definitely still sing a lot, but so do other people. My role has changed. And, in the same way, Lebo has always been the instrumentalist but I just made an instrumental album. [Laughs.] But that’s the beauty of it; there’s a freshness there. Paul McCartney tells this story about seeing John Lennon in his leather jacket and thinking he was the coolest person ever because he was 14 and John was 16; it is funny to think about that year and a half making a difference.
We all have our oldest friends, but it’s unusual to bring your oldest friends with you into your adult professional life. Most of the time, when your adult life starts, the band falls apart; the egos come out. ALO’s been lucky enough to ride through those waves together. There were moments where certain things almost broke us up but those moments have actually made us stronger.
