As they close in on the 20 year mark, moe. steps out of their recording confines by, ironically, holing up in an old church and hammering out a record in isolation. Departing from the live matrix approach taken on recent efforts, this time, they took to writing pretty much an entire new album in one drawn out session. And they left the rambling jams for the tour (the 2nd half of which kicked off last night) and set out to make a 70s roots-rocker, complete with layered themes, self-contained chaos and some of the best concise songwriting the band has ever produced. Hell, they took classic radio rock one step further – releasing Sticks and Stones on vinyl. As guitarist Chuck Garvey explained to Glide recently, none of those steps were accidental.
You debuted quite a few songs on the first leg of the tour. How has it been for the band playing them for the first time live, and how has the response been?
It’s been great. It’s definitely different for us to be going about things this way, but the songs, right from the get go have been really fun to play and I think the response has been very good, especially to the more rockin’ stuff..people have been into it. Yeah, everything has been going great. Sometimes you wonder if you are going to have the same impact playing it in front of an audience as you do recording [in the studio], but a lot of it’s been really fun.
I’m sure you saw David Fricke’s Rolling Stone review…
Ah, yeah I did… (laughs)
I won’t read it back to you, but I wanted to get your reaction to the Mick Taylor/Keith Richards comparison?
Well…you know, I’ve always been more of a Ron Wood fan (laughs). Yeah, that’s great actually…and to a certain extent, that mindset was in play while we were coming up with parts. Whenever we write songs…with two guitarists in the band, you kind of have to think about parts interlocking, and pushing the song…and this time we definitely did it with style that’s reminiscent of The Stones…I can definitely see that. So it was pretty much right on the money.
He also refers to ‘Conviction Song’ as a strong ballad, and rightfully so as it’s one of the standout tracks. For an album that was more or less constructed during the recording process, why bring that song in – one that was written some time ago?
In a general sense, it fit kind of the overall vibe of the album…the mindset that we were in, where we were thinking things were going to be more straight up, a little bit rootsy, or a stripped down rock ‘n roll album. And it seemed like a good compliment….something that would fit with the other songs.
The same thing goes for ‘All Roads Lead To Home.’ I wrote that some years ago as well, but it’s only been played like a handful of times. But even though it was an older song that we wrote before, it was something that kind of fit with the spirit of everything else that we were doing.
What was the songwriting process like during the recording sessions?
Basically we set ourselves up so that we could wake up everyday and just start playing and working on ideas. The process was like…at one point, Rob [Derhak] said, ‘let’s write a rock tune.’ And we were like, ‘alright, that sounds cool, let’s do something that sounds rocking.’ And Al [Schnier] would come up with like a riff, and we’d come up with the B part or make a bridge to it..so it was really like a stream of consciousness type of thing.
So we’d play it for a while, and the way that we were set up, we could multi-track our rehearsals and then maybe let it sit for like a day, or maybe two days, and then come back to it, and maybe listen to what we did or start rehearsing the arrangement that it previously had. So it was really just kind of…we’d work on it, and we’d kind of like exhaust our creative focus, and then step away from it, then go back and finish it off – make an arrangement that made sense. But it was a really fast process and a really fun way to work.
How did you determine when a song was done? When do you decide to stop working on something and just leave it alone?
For some of the songs…for ‘Queen of Everything’ for example, we were rehearsing…we made up an arrangement and said, ‘this is the way its going to be. We’re going to do the verse here, a bridge here…’, and then…maybe we wouldn’t even come up with the ending for the song, which that possibly happened for ‘Queen of Everything.’ We made an arrangement, but we didn’t decide on the ending. And it was just so we had a working version that we could play through. We weren’t even trying to get like a take. And that’s what ended up – the recording of that…80 to 90% of that is the rehearsal, we ended up keeping it. At one point Rob said ‘I like that.’ Just because, basically it’s not too precious…we didn’t squeeze all the life out of it. There were mistakes in it, it’s raw, but it’s also kind of fun because of that.
So there were songs that were done like that, and there were other songs where we would play it and we were just like, ‘that doesn’t feel quite right,’ and they would get refined a little bit more. But the end result was something that we could play and then listen back to it and say, ‘ok the arrangement is tight enough, but we don’t want to fuss too much over it.’
But it’s hard to say when something is done. ‘Cause you can constantly come up with little tweaks of different things, but the faster you work, the foundation of a song is stronger I think. When you just kind of like make it work, without a whole lot of extra frilly things going on (laughs). And if it works in a really stripped down, fundamental way, you know the song is gonna work no matter what.
How did the setting – the old converted church – play into the whole recording process? And how did you find that space?
I don’t know who actually found the building – I thought it was our manager Topper, but I’m not completely sure about it. But basically we needed a space that was conducive to all of us living and working and having it be a very relaxed, creative environment. And with that in mind, the church ended up being a really good example of a building like that, that kind of fulfilled our needs. We all slept there, cooked our meals there, and then whenever we wanted to write or record, we’d just walk into the main part of the church, where the congregation usually sits, and that’s where we had all of our recording equipment and instruments set up – and we’d just wake up everyday, make coffee, and then walk into this big room and start playing.
It was great, because it’s not a studio where you feel like the clock is ticking, and money is hemorrhaging (laughs). And it’s someone else’s space…It’s more of an institutional environment I guess. Everything is really well defined. And this space, it’s more like a tree fort (laughs). You know, where we can hide and create music. It’s just much better for us, because we were very relaxed, and actually while we were writing and rehearsing the songs, everything is getting recording.. So then the recording process sort of becomes invisible. We’re just being creative and its being documented, and then all of a sudden we have recorded takes of these songs. So it was definitely an inspirational way for us to go about it. It worked out well for us. It’ might not work for everyone, but it was really good for us.
You’re releasing the record on vinyl…have you had a chance to listen to it yet?
No, Rob did though, he bought a turntable just so he could listen to it (laughs). And he said it sounds amazing. I’m kind of looking forward to it. It took me a while to kind of kowtow to the whole mp3, iTunes kind of thing…and I can hear the difference. I think a lot of people have sucked it up the past couple years, and the convenience factor of having 100s of albums on your laptop is amazing, I think it’s killer. But at the same time, it’s not as good as CD quality, which is not as good as a tape master. When you listen to this stuff…like when we would record and listen back on our mixing setup or our recording setup, it’s really great. That’s the elemental, pure version of recorded music. And it really sounds like you’re there. So every step of the way, you’re kind of losing a little bit of that. But I do feel that, even though it was recorded digitally, I feel that analog is a very good way to listen back to music. I don’t know, I haven’t listened to our record on vinyl and I’m looking forward to that, but it’s a debate that rages. I’m sure there are people who will disagree with me, but I’m definitely a firm believer in analog as much as is convenient I guess, and unfortunately it’s very convenient to go digital.
So going along with that…in a time of rapidly declining CD sales, when most people are consuming music in file format, why the decision to release a vinyl record?
Well, there are a lot of things at work here, and they really all tie together with the spirit of this album. If you noticed, there are ten tracks, it’s less than 45 minutes long, it’s really an old school recording in a lot of different ways. We recorded a vast majority of tracks live, the whole band playing together in one room. We did it in a format that’s only 45 minutes long, 3 to 5 minute songs. We released it on vinyl. The vibe of the music is more of a 70s kind of feel…so in a lot of different ways its coming from that perspective, where albums used to be that length and they used to feel that way.
And we did that for a lot of different reasons. One is that the attention span of people is really not long enough to digest like a 72 minute CD. It’s kind of the maximum retention of a compact audio disc. And just because the disc can hold that much information, doesn’t mean that’s a good format for music recording. At the same time, back in the day, vinyl could only hold a maximum of about 45 minutes worth of music, depending on how you did it. But that was the maximum allowable at that time, so I wonder if people said, ’45 minutes is too long to hold my attention’ (laughs). So the debate probably still holds true – if you have 72 minutes, should you use it.
But it’s kind of a classic way of looking at the recording process, having the album be that long, having the songs be done in a specific way, and releasing it on vinyl, it all pretty much ties together.
You’ve played Radio City Music Hall now twice for New Year’s Eve. How much of a pinnacle is that for the band?
It’s just a great experience. We like making kind of a tradition out of some of our shows – for a long time we did the Thanksgiving shows in New York City, and that was something that we looked forward to every year, and I think something a lot of our fans looked forward to. Playing in that building, especially I think that was the 70th anniversary of Radio City, it was just…I mean, the place is just amazing. It’s got a tremendous history, and it’s wonderful to play there. We had such a great time last year that we basically said ‘I hope we can do this every year’ (laughs). I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be the case, but it really was like that last year, and again this past year. It’s just really fun, I think the fans really love it, and it’s an amazing space to put on a show like that, so I hope we can keep going back.
Now that you’ve reached the 17 year mark as a working band, with families, commitments, demanding schedules, everything else going on…what’s your perspective on the whole journey and your career as a musician?
I love the fact that I don’t have a boss. I love the fact that we have creative control over our art in a way that we don’t even have to answer to a major label, or any kind of record label – we’re just responsible to ourselves. And I can definitely say we are deeply grateful for the fact that we have very loyal, great fans.
Yeah, this is a great job (laughs). It’s weird, ‘cause at one point it was our hobby, and then we quit our day jobs and that made it our career, and in some ways, when you make something your career, it takes a little bit of that fun, escapism out if it. But really, if you could ask for a job, this is a really great one. It’s very hard, because we travel so much and it’s a lot of work, but I would rather be doing this, and doing it how we are doing it on our own terms, than doing anything else. I’m really glad that we can do this. 17 or 18 or whatever years into this, I’m really glad we can keep doing it.
For more info see: moe.org
live photos by Mike Wren
