On November 18th, the second studio album of trio Mike Baggetta (guitar) Jim Keltner (drums), and Mike Watt (bass), is being released as Everywhen We Go. It marks the recurrence of a particular kind of experiment where three strangers brought some material into Big Ego Studio in Long Beach, with Chris Schlarb producing, and blended ideas with improvisation to create an entire album. The first album, titled Wall of Flowers, didn’t have a planned follow-up but when revisiting unused material from the first session, instigator Mike Baggetta suggested a second release. Keltner preferred a new session entirely, and Everywhen We Go was born.
There’s an added layer of historical development beyond just getting a “dream team” together in a studio for this experiment. Since Keltner preferred not to tour, taking Wall of Flowers on the road meant a new experiment, bringing in Stephen Hodges, which resulted in new music, and eventually a new band, too, called Main Steam Stop Valve. All of this came about because Baggetta considered setting up a session where strangers worked together to see if enduring and interesting music could be created. I spoke with Mike Baggetta about these threads of development and the DNA that Everywhen We Go shares with Wall of Flowers as well as the new growth it represents.
HMS: For me, the biggest surprise is realizing that you did a first album of this kind, then went out and did a live show approach to that, and now have managed to do another album under these same outstanding circumstances.
Mike Baggetta: And that live show was what became a different band.
HMS: Did you always know that you did a second album along the same lines if you could?
MB: No, and it’s a funny story. When we did the first record, with me, and Mike Watt, and Jim Keltner, called Wall of Flowers, we only had one day to make that record. So one thing that we did was to improvise live together and make up music, listening, reacting, and playing together for two and a half or three hours. When I went back and looked at the music that we had tracked, I ended up hearing a lot of things that could be separate little pieces. So I chopped that longer improvisation, found good beginning and ending points, found musical elements that we were all playing, recomposed new material based on that, and then overdubbed that on some of the pieces. On the Wall of Flowers record, there’s a piece called “I Am Not a Datapoint”, for instance. That’s one of the pieces that came out of this improvisation.
There was another two hours of material left from that improvisation that had never been used, so over the course of lockdown, one thing I did was that I went back to the unused material and began chopping it and overdubbing. I turned most of it into what I thought was a whole new album of material that I found interesting and compelling from that first day. When it came time to commit to making that into a separate album, I had sent it to the Producer and Owner of Big Ego Studios and Big Ego Records, Chris Schlarb.
Jim Keltner heard it and, to my best understanding, he said, “It sounds really great, but it sounds dated. I think we could do better.” So then we started talking about doing another session. We ended up doing it in the first big lull in Covid, in Thanksgiving 2021. We did another full day. I came in with a couple of new songs, Watt wrote a new song especially for the occasion, and then we did further improvisation which I transcribed, recomposed, and overdubbed. That’s really the story of how the second record came about. I kind of thought that we’d never do another either, but it was cool that it was Jim’s suggestion that we give it another shot!
HMS: Does the album Everywhen We Go have any DNA from that original first session in it or is it, in the end, a totally new thing?
MB: It has a little bit of DNA. The two solo guitar pieces on them, including “In the Center”, are actually from the first session. I did a day of solo recording a day before we did Wall of Flowers. One other piece of DNA was the guitar intro to “Measure of a Life” and also the song was something that was composed based on that original session but turned into a new song.
HMS: That’s so cool. It brings in an extra layer for those who listen to both and want to see connections between the two albums.
MB: What’s interesting about doing a project that has a life beyond one record is that you get to hear an evolution in the musical communication between everyone involved. Also, you get to hear how songs are written by the group over the passage of time. It was a little odd for me to do a one-off record for that reason because I really like bands and I really like the life of bands. I love hearing how things change, so it’s especially cool to me that we got to do a second record with that group.
HMS: Wasn’t it also a connecting thread that these two guys, Watt and Keltner, hadn’t worked together before, and you had never worked with either? Was that intentional when putting the first session together?
MB: Yes, exactly. Chris Schlarb, who is a longtime friend of mine, was starting a label and asked if I wanted to do a record, and I said, “Sure, but I want to do something I’ve never done before.” So, basically, that was the idea of making a record with someone I’d never met. I had always thought that every great record that I had ever heard had been created by a band where everyone was best friends. And that was why the music was good. I had this idea well into my 30s! On records where people were called out of the blue, those records left me feeling cold. The ones that really touched me seemed band-based.
I was talking to a great friend of mine, David Torn, who mastered both these records, by the way, about his record, Cloud About Mercury, which is one of my top five albums. I assumed that all those guys had been best friends since grade school or something, but he told me that he didn’t know any of those guys when he made the record. That really blew my mind. Then I knew it was possible for somebody to make an amazing record with people they hadn’t known for decades. I wanted to try this idea and see what I could learn from it. Previously I’d just been making records with my friends.
I had been listening to both Watt and Keltner for most of my musical life, and when I heard them play certain things, I thought there was a shared something in the way that they played with people in a rhythm section. There were some similarities that I thought would be really cool to hear them do together. They’d never met each other before that first Wall of Flowers session, so it was a real selfish experiment, in a way. [Laughs] My involvement was, in my mind, incidental. I got to hear this ultimate rhythm section together.
HMS: What was your reaction to walking in there that day? Was it, “I can’t believe I did this.” Or was it, “This is awesome!”
MB: Probably a healthy mix of both. I’m pretty business when it comes to getting the music made. I worry that I’m not going to be able to hang with great musicians, but all I can do is be myself and do what I do. One thing I’ve learned a lot is try to allow the music to happen, to let it happen. That’s a deceptively difficult thing, but I’m getting better at it.
HMS: For both sessions, did you write a lot of music before you came in?
MB: Oh, yes. For Wall of Flowers, I think I came in with a stack of songs. We only did two of them from about nine. The rest was based on improvisation and a couple takes on that song, “Blue Velvet.” It was kind of cool that we didn’t use it. It was over-written. It was written to sound a certain way, and I realized that day in a big way that that’s a real mistake. If you want really special music to happen, to write in such a way that anybody can play it and it will get the same result is to miss the point of the moment. You are in the moment with particular individuals. With that in mind, coming to the second session, I had a better idea of how both of them work in a recording environment.
So I wrote a couple of songs thinking about how each of them play, to me, in my ear. The title track, “Everywhen We Go” and “Measure of a Life” were written specifically for only those two guys to play. I just knew that there was a strong vibe immediately with those songs. Watt said he’d write a song, and he brought that, and that was really cool. The rest was a couple more improvised pieces and those two solo pieces I mentioned.
That was kind of terrifying to me. I don’t think I’d ever gone to a recording session with the intention of making a record and only brought two songs. I was trusting that we’d fill it out with good playing and things we composed in the moment. That worked out.
HMS: When, in the context of recording of Everywhen We Go, did the Main Steam Stop Valve touring happened?
MB: The most recent MSSV was in 2022. MSSV is a separate band, but it evolved from Wall of Flowers because I wanted to tour that album. Jim [Keltner] doesn’t really travel, but Watt was interested, so I reached out to Stephen Hodges to see if he wanted to play drums for us. We wanted to see what would happen to that material with a different drummer, but we also added music specific to that band.
That tour was in Spring of 2019, and it turned into the Live Flowers album from MSSV, the first MSSV recording. We did another short tour at the end of 2019 to work out some new music that I’d written just for MSSV. After that, we made a studio album, Main Steam Stop Valve. We were going to tour that album in 2020, but we postponed until Spring of 2022. We worked out new material on that tour, and then did sessions to record a new MSSV album that will come out Fall of 2023.
HMS: That’s amazing I’m glad you all are continuing with that. What was the difference for you when playing the Wall of Flowers stuff live than experiencing it in the original recording session? Did you play the whole album?
MB: Yes, on that very first 2019 tour, we didn’t know that MSSV would become a band. It was just a celebration of the music. I never wanted Stephen Hodges to feel like he was subbing, since he has his own craft and his own sound. The music is going to change, especially if you want the music to reflect the individual personalities of the people making music. Which I do. It’s always going to be an evolution. That’s one of the things I love most about music.
With Hodges in the band, this was a different take on the music. We played some of the stuff from Wall of Flowers, but we also added new songs, and we did a couple from Watt’s first opera, Contemplating the Engine Room. That was a really influential record to me for a lot of reasons, and the impact and effect of it on me at an early age in terms of how I make music was the main reason that I wanted to ask Hodges to do the tour with us. I was floored when he agreed to do it and when we became a band, it became a very cool thing for me.
HMS: You’re involved in a number of projects, from recording to live playing, and also with different collaborators. Are both the studio and live playing equally comfortable to you?
MB: Recording and studio and performing live in front of an audience is always different. For the project with me, and Jim Keltner, and Mike Watt, we’ve never played live, and who knows if we ever will? When we do Main Steam Stop Valve, that’s different music, but even when we record versus when we play live, they are a little different. There are things you can focus in on when you’re recording, like maybe you’re thinking about the timelessness of the record as something that people can come back to. But the live thing kind of feeds off of the energy of the audience. I’ve been doing both in so many different settings for so long that I feel like I do have a good rhythm for both sides of that.
I think it is a Yin, Yang kind of approach. It would be weird to have one without the other. Even though they are so different, they both kind of inform the other activity. Even right now, I’m on the road doing a couple of duo performances with Ava Mendoza. That’s all improvised music and another chance to really listen and create something in the moment. All of these things require different musicianship and skills get used in different settings, but I like that because it allows me to be able to work all these musical muscles out in different settings. I think the balance of all those kinds of aspects is important.
