The Runaway Grooms’ Zach Gilliam on How Touring Shaped Their EP ‘This Road’ (INTERVIEW)

The Runaway Grooms are a Colorado-based band who began large-scale touring right after the pandemic lifted and played a large number of shows in 2021 and 2022. The experience was a crash-course in many lessons about supporting each other, and themselves, under demanding conditions. The experiences of this time shaped their upcoming EP, This Road, which arrives on February 10th, 2023. In fact, touring played a big part in both the themes of the songs and in the manner in which it was recorded. 

The Runaway Grooms consists of guitarist and vocalist Adam Tobin, keyboardist Cody Scott, bassist and vocalist Zach Gilliam, drummer Justin Bisset, and guitarist and vocalist Zac Cialek. With a combined background in Blues, Folk, and Jam band music, as well as a mutual love of the great outdoors, the band’s music conveys a fairly upbeat outlook on life, even while looking at some of its more challenging elements, like surviving in the wilds of touring. I spoke with Zach Gilliam about the stories behind The Road, and in particular, how he feels their recent single “Heartwork” sums up their experiences creating the EP. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: You all have been pretty busy, since you had a release in 2020, and one in 2021, and now This Road is coming out. You have not let grass grow under you. Are these songs that you wrote and recorded in the past couple years?

Zach Gilliam: “Heartwork” was a song that we wrote and recorded in the studio in about an hour, though we had completed all the other songs. Our Producer, Jeremy Horn, is also a worship leader, at a church in Memphis, Tennessee, so he went out to do that and said, “You got the studio. I’m going to come back, and you guys are going to have made some magic!” We woke up that morning, and “Heartwork” came to us, and within an hour, maybe two, of writing that song, we recorded it, which was really cool. 

The rest of the songs on the record were probably written and finished around February or March of 2022. We wrote them while touring in 2021 and 2022. 2021 was really our introduction, as a band, to national touring, doing 98 shows that year. Prior to that, when the band started, it was mostly local shows and breweries, and different ski towns here in Colorado. 

HMS: In a way, you’re documenting a big developmental period in the life of the band with This Road, which focuses on this encounter with large-scale touring. 

ZG: I would say so. The record is called This Road because that name was fitting. Really, all the inspiration behind almost all of these experiences were drawn from our experiences together on the road, including “Heartwork.” We have a song called “This Road” on the record that’s about traveling, and so is “Here I Come Again.” An instrumental track on the record, “Mr. Ford,” was inspired by playing a show in Nashville with Robin Ford, who is an amazing guitarist and singer. He’s played with some great people and is a phenomenal artist who inspired all of us. We left that show and wrote that song. Really, everything on the record is about our experiences out on the road. 

HMS: Some musicians have written about touring and conveyed their life experiences that way, but the fact that your introduction to big touring happened right after the pandemic seems significant, too. It’s a particularly tough time that you faced to do it. The life of the road is very un-glamorous most of the time, but at the same time, it seems like a big part of a band’s development.

ZG: Most definitely. In my own personal experience, I remember being in sixth grade when I started playing music, and I was dreaming of playing guitar on stage for a lot of people. That was just my dream as a kid. I got into it and got obsessed with guitar. It’s always stuck with me. Our keyboardist Cody, however, played piano a little bit, but he joined this band with no touring before this. None of the other guys in the band had really toured before this, whereas I lived in Nashville before, and in Nashville and Memphis, I was touring with several different bands. So I started that journey around 2010. 

But when you go out on the road, there are so many reasons to continue to do it, but there are many less glamorous things about it, especially the time element. If you’re in relationships, and away from home, that’s part of it. There are so many real lessons to be learned in life through that. We learned things like, “How much time can we be out on the road that is supportive of our mental health?” There are questions about being sleep deprived, and always on the run, and the way that impacts your physical and mental health. I think we did almost 120 shows in 2022. Between 2021 and 2022, we really learned that to support our physical and mental health, we needed to tour in a particular way. We needed to tour for certain periods of time and set guidelines for ourselves to keep us thriving and passionate about what we’re doing. The road can easily drain that out, especially if you’re not cultivating a supportive environment for everyone.

HMS: Absolutely. Especially for newer and younger bands, the instinctual thing is to go all out because you’re gaining momentum and you’re afraid of losing opportunities. But that, then, is the implosion point for a lot of bands. 

ZG: Yes, you start to see your music everywhere, and you think, “This is great! This is cool!” You start to feel that traction, and you start to question whether to let up on the gas pedal. But in order to survive, we have to have a balance and support. You have to ask, “What are the most important things?” For us, it’s going to be happiness and mental health. The reason that we all met each other is because we all ended up in Colorado, chasing nature in the mountains. We enjoy being outdoors and skiing, climbing, and mountain biking. When you’re in a 15-passenger van, you’re not bringing your skis. We need that distance and to be outdoors to be balanced. In fact, today, I’m going up into the mountains snow-shoeing. It’s very important to us. 

HMS: That’s a pretty fundamental personality-element to have in common. It does contrast with a lot of what you have to do, but your music is pretty positive in its focus, and from the footage I’ve seen, you’re very focused on bringing that experience to audiences. I can imagine it would be difficult to do that if you didn’t have a source of that in your own life. 

ZG: Things will reflect on stage, in performances. If things are not healthy individually, or amongst each other, if something’s up, and we’re missing balance, that’s something that’s definitely transparent during a performance. We are all people who wear our hearts on our sleeves, but I would say that we do a good job of nurturing that balance. Music is extremely important for all of us, but the other things are valuable too. Through this record and through touring the past couple of years, we’ve really learned lessons about this. 

I also agree with you that, overall, our music is fun and uplifting, with a positive message. There are some songs that dive into some deeper stuff. On the first record, “James in the Wind” is about a good buddy that passed. “Heartwork is a song that came out of a hard situation. We decided to go down to South Florida to tour since we’d been to everyone’s home state except Cody [Scott’s]. We had to make a lot of stops in between and we were planning to stop through Memphis on the way home to make this record. We played our last show and hit the road and the transmission gave out. We had probably made it 30 minutes down the road, it was Sunday, and we didn’t know what to do. 

We ended up having to get a rental and leave the van to be repaired, then when it was done, we flew Cody back down to grab it. He drove it to us since we had three more shows. We played the first show, and within 48 hours of getting that van back, that transmission went out again. It was midnight in the middle of Alabama wanting to go to Colorado. At this point, we got it fixed locally, but it was complicated. As a beginning band paying for a new transmission twice, it was working on us. That’s part of being on the road and it happens to everybody. If you’re out there, these sort of things are going to happen to you, and you just have to get through it.

HMS: I can’t believe it happened twice!

ZG: We pretty much spent our savings on it, which was intended for this record. Thankfully Jeremy said, “Just come here and we’ll make a record. We’ll deal with the money later.” Which was amazing. He had so much compassion and grace. He’s an artist as well, and he’s been on the road, and he’s been there. Between the transmission problems and being on the road together for two months, it was a lot, but me and Jeremy got down to talking and he mentioned this word, “heartwork”. He said you’ve got to work on yourselves and being loving and supportive to yourselves and to others, like a family. That word stuck with me, and it felt heavy. We were going through the ringer, emotionally. We’d been away from our partners for months. Boom, the song “Heartwork” came along, and it’s so relevant to learning those lessons of the road.

HMS: It’s really clear from this that the story of making this album is as much a part of the road as the album itself. That’s crazy! If you hadn’t been working with someone like Jeremy, the problems of the road would have kept the EP from even coming about.

ZG: No doubt. It’s so great, also, to have the ear and an honest opinion from someone you really trust like Jeremy. The vibe of the studio and the interactions effected the other songs, too. The energy in the room really contributes to what you’re laying down on the track. These songs were live takes. Cody does organ and piano, and for recording purposes, he’d do one for the live take, then add the other. Jeremy was like a coach, making little suggestions. 

HMS: The first story you told, saying that he went away to do his service and let you all just work in the studio, says a lot about him, too. He believed in you! I actually thought that the song “Heartwork” sounded a little Soul or Gospel in places, and that fits right in.

ZG: Towards the end of that track, there’s a kind of group chant, “Heartwork is hard, hard work.” Isn’t that the truth! Jeremy sang on that with us, and it was great. We got into a room around a big condenser mic, and this was the culmination of the record. Everything else was already finished, and this was the last day in the studio. It was such a great inspirational feeling.

HMS: Are these songs that you all have played live yet?

ZG: We like to try things out before we set them in stone. For “This Road”, we played it in different ways, with different variations, parts, and sections, before we went to record it. We did that for live audiences while on the road. We took notes and discussed them. These songs will evolve through live performances, aside from “Heartwork” which was written in the studio. As of now, we have performed all of them live at some point.

HMS: Obviously, the song “This Road” is your title track, but why do you think that one is so full on this album, as a ten-minute song? Had more development gone into it?

ZG: We had written “This Road” long before we came up with the record title. In discussion, we weren’t sure if we’d name the record that. We were also pretty passionate about “Jenny” and “Heartwork” being featured tracks, which we have released as singles. But “The Road” ended up being a connection between all of the songs and the inspiration behind all the music that’s on the record. So it’s a connector rather than really a featured track. 

The song itself is one that we love, and has a Blues inspiration, which is my background in Memphis, Tennessee. I was raised on The Blues and started playing music on Beale Street. It’s part of my heritage and part of my story. The other guys in the band come from more of a Folk and Jam background and are inspired by The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers, but those all have a foundation in the Blues, too. So that’s our foundation, too. Half-way through the song, it kind of drops out into what we like to call “outer space.” It’s like you’re floating. You’re just out there. That’s just who we are and it was cool to tie that element in with Blues and some cool lyrics that mean a lot to us from our stories on the road. It is ten minutes! We’re not interested in creating music that fits into a particular box.  We want to be honest and transparent about who we are and I think “This Road” does a great job of that.

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