Track By Track: ALO _Tangle of Time_
“On past albums, we’ve had these sessions where we get together and write together,” ALO guitarist Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz explains. “And, with this album, we already had so many songs from this recent break that we were already into. We just started sharing demos and we ended up with way more songs than could possibly even fit on a double album. So we kind of rolled with that. We had these demos and then started playing them, and ALO-fied them.”
The results appear on Tangle Of Time, the group’s first album since 2012’s Sounds Like This and first studio effort after all four band members devoted themselves to other projects. While selecting songs for Tangle Of Time, they also decided to sequence the album for a vinyl release. As a result, the first six songs and the final five work within the time constraints of an LP. Speaking of time, that’s also a concept that found its way into many of the group’s songs during a period when three of its members turned 40—Lebo, bassist Steve Adams and key- boardist Zach Gill. Drummer Dave Brogan hit that mark a few years ago.
Here, the four musicians talk about the compositions that they contributed to the record.
There Was a Time
Gill: I was reading a book about the town I live in, Goleta, Calif., that may have even been called There Was a Time. I was reading about the Chumash Indians. You can go up the hill where I live and into the mountains and there’s a cave that you can explore, and there are all these paintings by them. I was imagining the Chumash communities that were living in Santa Barbara, because Santa Barbara is a really nice place to live. And then I realized that 15,000 years ago it was also a really nice place to live—things really flourished there. Then when the Spanish came, it was good for them, too. I’ve been bugging out about how you can drive around the town and see that some of the names are Chumash, some of the names are Spanish and some of the names are very American. It shows the different ways that people name the places they live.
Push
Lebo: I wrote “Push” a little while back. I played it a couple of times in a different form. It just felt so ALO, so when we started talking about tunes for this record, that was one of the first ones out of my pile that I thought I’d put forward to everyone. Groove-wise, I think it has a fun, ALO vibe. A big priority for me when I’m bringing songs forward is making sure that they’re going to fit the band.
If we’re going big and dancey or maybe doing something a little more introspective, then the kernel of it is that ALO is a fun band, musically. If you listen to a lot of the lyrics in our tunes, they’re dealing with heavy things but it’s presented in a fun way, sonically. Sometimes I think about how blues music or a lot of country is that way. They’re talking about their wives leaving them, but they’re still doing it with a little step in it. I feel like, at its essence, ALO is the same way—we talk about dark stuff, but we present it in an “up” way.
Not Old Yet
Adams: I’m constantly trying to figure out which ideas seem like important ideas when I’m navigating through life, and I come up with a lot of ideas that are like, “Oh, that could be a song,” or a little catchphrase or something. I remember I was on this hour-and-a-half drive between Oakland and Santa Cruz. My body was kind of sore and the check engine light came on in my car. So I started thinking of this idea that things are just sort of passing through time and eventually deteriorating, and I thought, “Has the car run its course?” So I began thinking and got to the point of “I want to be positive about this and I want to give everything its full course. I’m not old yet; this car’s not old yet.” That kind of became the summary of all of these lines, and I worked with that and came up with a story. I was thinking about my parents and my grandmother, my nieces and nephews, and just being a kid and being old. I was thinking about all those things and trying to wrap up a song with all those ideas.
The Ticket
Gill: This was originally called “Retro Futuro.” It was inspired by a book on time travel that I read a couple of years ago called The Anubis Gates [by Tim Powers]. I’ll be honest: I’m a little hung up on time travel, and this book looks at time travel through these Egyptian mystics who had cracked some holes in the space-time continuum so they could get in and out of certain eras. There was a guy who kind of went Jurassic Park, like the millionaire who gets this idea to sell some tickets to this thing.
That was the start of it and then I began thinking about the different ways that people time travel in our own lives— whether they just hop on an airplane or even the rise of future-primitive kind of stuff. I thought about people grabbing aspects of the past and combining them with the present to create something new. So that’s sort of what it’s musing on, and then, while it’s happening, you’re dancing.
Simple Times
Gill: “Simple Times” was written when I was on tour with Jack [Johnson]. It was a long tour and I brought my family for a lot of it; which was really cool but also exhausting. We were almost done with it— we were in Hawaii and had a couple of days to chill out, but everyone was jet-lagged and my four-year-old daughter, Ellie, was waking up every morning at 4 a.m. ready to go. So I’d get up with her and play guitar while she hung out.
Originally, the song was called “Garlic Peach” because I started thinking about this time where me and my buddy Rob thought it’d be funny to order garlic peach smoothies. But then the smoothie lady didn’t even question it. We thought we’d get some reaction like, “WHAT?! Garlic peach?” but we got nothing. That story was in the original first verse.
Keep On
Adams: We were calling this song “Keep On Groovin’” for a long time because it had that tagline in it. “Keep On” was also kind of written on demand. We had this fan club called the Hot Tub Club, and, for one special segment, we offered to write a song or a single for the first 20 fans that signed up. They gave us some information about themselves—where they were from, what was important to them and what their hobbies were. I took it as an opportunity to practice songwriting because I’m not as experienced in that department as much as Zach or Dan. One of the guys heard it and said, “Dude, we have to record that song.” And I thought, “Are you sure? It’s about this girl in Tahoe—she’s a fan.” It was specifically about her. I was thinking about massaging the lyrics a bit but, at the end of the day, I didn’t have to because we just pulled out a couple things and it was pretty broad. I thought it was cool that the guys wanted that one to be in the mix and we kept it in there.
Coast to Coast
Brogan: I wrote the lyrics and my buddy Ben Malan wrote the music. It was a demo that he had made in his little home studio, and I was like, “Wow, I really like that.” It kind of reminds me of some ALO stuff that we do on the funky end of things. So I grabbed it and wrote some words to it, but the words came fairly late. I just had the chorus for a long time and one verse that I was repeating over and over. Then, I finally just sat down and started hammering out some lyrics. When I write lyrics, it’s pretty stream of conciousness. There’s rarely a concept—the concept kind of fills itself in as I go.
Sugar
Gill: It’s a little love song about how sometimes you say something that you mean to be taken sweetly, but someone doesn’t really believe it because it’s too sweet. It’s about people being too cynical so that it doesn’t taste like sugar, even though the truth is that it really is that sweet.
Undertow
Lebo: “Undertow” is another song that I’ve written in a few formats. My original version was a lot darker and heavier. But what was really cool was that we just started playing it in the studio one evening and it sort of took on a different character. Some of the heaviness and the rock side fell away, and I was stoked because I was like, “This is always what I’ve wanted the song to be,” and then I rewrote all the words after that.
A Fire I Kept
Gill: I would say that’s one that was sort of weaving its way around in my mind for a long time. It started with Captain [Robert] Ballard, who discovered this ship in the Black Sea. He had been searching his whole life, and I started thinking about people and their lifelong pursuits of things and how that impacts other aspects of their lives. I started thinking about the reasons people do things, so it’s kind of a lot of feelings all at once, and that’s the song that came out of it.
Originally, it was really long. It had a lot of verses—the first verse was about the mast of a ship, and the second verse was about a friend hiding underneath the sink when he was listening to these adults talking about getting a divorce—people just throwing out the reasons they do things. That sort of prompted the song, and it marinated in my head for a long time.
Sometimes, I think that it’s also about the band, and how you get together with these guys and you have your hopes and your expectations for what making an album will be. But in the end, it may be about just putting out something just to be together and to make something together. It could be like, “Why even do it?” Everyone’s got all these different things going on, and it takes us all away from our families and our other projects. But there’s a reason we keep coming back together. You kind of know when you have that feeling, and you go with that feeling. Forme,attheendofitall,I think it’s some version of love.
Strange Days
Gill: Originally, I was working on some music for a National Geographic film called Arctic Tale, and this was a song I had started for it. The movie follows a baby polar bear and a baby walrus as they deal with the changes in their landscape because the ice is melting and they’re crashing through ice. That initially inspired some of the lyrics, and then it became about other things, too. We put a version on theOne Percent for the Planet [compilation], but we decided to see what would happen if we took a fresh approach. I played ukulele on it, and we thought that could be a nice acoustic moment. The song came out so nice and sweet, and it’s one of my favorite ones to listen to on the record.
