"We had been playing full time for over five years before we got signed in 1994. At that point, we probably had about 70-75 originals, and over half of them never ended up on an album,” Lo Faber recalls, while describing the material that appears on the band’s first studio LP since 1997, This Fine Town. “We played a ton of these tunes live, and our audience really knew them and loved them, but they just never ended up on an album. That was OK because the jamband crowd often prefers the live version to the studio version. But there’s something about a tune being on a record thatlends a sense of familiarity. Sowe ended up not playing theones that didn’t make it ontoa record as much and, in somecases, they just drifted out ofthe repertoire entirely.”
Almost a decade after reuniting, the group decided to rectify this and revisit some of those never-recorded songs for their new release.However, one complicationwas that Faber (guitar, vocals),Aaron Maxwell (guitar,vocals), Jon Bevo (keyboards),Dan Pifer (bass) and Tom“Tomo” Osander (drums andpercussion, backing vocals)were unableto convene for a collectivestudio session. So theyrecorded the parts in theirindividual studios and thenassembled the material.
“We’ve done that so much now that we have it down to a system,” Faber explains. “I start out by building a guide track that will have sequenced parts. I’ll play all the instruments. I’m not a very good drummer so I’ll use a drum machine to start off, but, if we’re doing a song we’ve already played live, I’ll listen to what Tomo played and duplicate it with the drum machine. Once the guide track is done, I send it to him, and he takes out the drum machine and adds his drumsand percussion, and sends thatback to me. Then, I make stemsfor the rest of the guys, so theycan cut their parts along withthe live drums.
“We’re always thinking about adding new ideas, too. We want the songs to be true to the original versions that we used to play back in the day, but we also want to be open to adding new sounds and flavors. Typically, the guys will cut their parts and they’ll give me a lot of options, a lot of different guitars and keyboards to work with. Then, I go through a long process of picking and choosing, and editing. Usually, the last thing is: I redo my own vocals from the guide tracks, or Aaron redoes his vocals, and we add some harmony vocals. Everybody’s in their own studios adding their parts, so sometimes they might get ideas that I then put into the guide tracks. On a song like ‘Peanut Butter Jar,’ Tomo added all this percussion that soundedlike Remain in Light, and thejam just took off from there ina direction that it never reallyhad live.”
This Fine Town
“This Fine Town” is a ska tune.It’s got a rock-steady beat,which is that four-on-the-floorkick drum and ska feel, and itborrows the bassline from anold Augustus Pablo dub classicdance track.
Like a number of our songs,it’s really about our fans, andthe people of Ridgewood, N.J.,who used to come in to NewYork and see us early on. Thetheme is that the suburbs lookso nice and genteel but, whenyou get down into the nooksand crannies, there are allkinds of disturbing things andaberrant behavior.
Nothing Left to Lose
“Nothing Left to Lose” is written by our bassist, DanPifer. It’s one of only two songsthat he’s written over thecourse of the band. It’s a funkytune and we really renovated iton the record with some ‘80ssynth stuff, so it came alive in alittle bit of a different directionfor the album. Jon Bevo addedall the synth stuff and that wasreally cool.
Stupid Hat
“Stupid Hat” is an instrumental that has long been a mainstay of our live shows, although it never appeared on a record. I wrote it back in the ‘90s as a real technical challenge for the band. It’s a mostly composed instrumental with some sections that are open to improvisation. This is one where there aren’t a lot of overdubs; what you really hear is the five of us playing our instruments, just as we do live.
The biggest challenge recording it was that there are a lot of tempo changes; those come from the live energy and it’s hard to summon up that feeling when you’re tracking it one instrument at a time. Tomo and I had to spend a fair bit of time going back and forth on the guide track, making sure that all those tempo changes felt right, so we would be able to duplicate the live energy that people are used to hearing.
Peanut Butter Jar
“Peanut Butter Jar” is a longtime fan-favorite. I wrote it when we were poor and living in an apartment in Jersey City. Tomo used to subsist on, basically, nothing but peanut butter. So I wrote it about him and his peanut butter jar, and it’s a party anthem. It’s not a very deep song; it’s a song about peanut butter, but it’s good times, man.
Circle
We had a really long hiatus from 1999 to 2010, when we didn’t play for about a decade—with the exception of one night at Wetlands when it was closing [in 2001 and two tribute shows for longtime fan Paul Ducharme in 2009]. Then, when we reunited in 2010, I went back to a lot of oldlive tapes and archive.org andstarted listening to our earlymaterial. That’s when I cameacross this song called “Circle”that I had completely forgottenI had even written. It was likehearing somebody else’s song.
We only played it live maybe two or three times, so it’s actually different from a lot of the other ones, which we played live a lot back in the day. The reason we didn’t keep playing it live was because we thought it was too technically challenging, but I don’t know why we thought that because the two versions of it that I could find really smoked. It’s a Latinesque, challenging kind of song with a lot of instrumental lines, but it really rocks.
“Circle” is influenced by the Joe Jackson album Night and Day. It’s a wonderful record, in which he dropped all the guitars, so it’s pretty much piano, bass and drums. It’s got Latin elements, it’s got jazz elements—but it’s a really unique fusion. I just loved that record, and so did Tomo, so I wrote “Circle,” trying to be somewhere in that style. The lyrics, to me, are a little bit Steely Dan snarky-ish.
Cheap Utah Blues
“Cheap Utah Blues” is a song that was inspired by a photo. Remember the days when you had a big pile of photos printed out on these little glossy three-by-fives instead of just seeing them on a screen? We had one of those of a friend of ours named Ed Looram, who managed us briefly. In this picture, he was in this tawdry-looking kitchen at a party with a cup of beer in his hand, looking like he was three sheets to the wind. To me, the picture made it look like he’d ended up in Utah as an alcoholic in very seedy circumstances. We were watching a lot of David Lynch at the time, so the whole song was an attempt to summon up the very rundown, desperate, drunken scenario he was living in. It’s really a song about being drunk at a keg party in Utah somewhere. It’s got another one of those early GSW signature instrumental middles, with a slightly Zappa-esque sound to it.
Flame
“Flame” was originally recorded for the Red album [1996]. We liked it a lot, but it just never made it on to a record, so it didn’t end up getting played as much because it didn’t have a lot of familiarity for our audience. I always used to sing it back in the day but, on this version, we had Aaron take over the vocals. I’m always trying to get Aaron to sing more—he also did it on “6:15.” Another thing we do a lot more than we used to is sing the whole song together, Simon & Garfunkel style. That’s also what we do on “Circle.”
6:15
I had wanted Aaron to singlead on this song for a longtime, and I said to him: “Now’sthe time. We’re recording thesong, so why don’t you try todo this?” Hopefully, once it’son the record with him singing,he’ll also have to learn it wellenough to sing live.
It’s easy for me to sing the songs I’ve written because I know them, so I’m the singer by default. For Aaron to sing one of them, I need to entrust it to him, and he needs to really spend the time to learn it—but I love the way he sounds when he sings my songs. Back in the day, he had a much higher range, and I liked to use those high notes. So if I wanted to use them in a song, he would have to sing it. Now, my voice has gotten better because I haven’t smoked a cigarette for 18 years, and I can hit those high notes pretty well myself. He’s got a real jazzy, soulful tone, and I have a more country/ bluegrass tone.
This article originally appears in the July/August 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.
