The picture on the wall says as much as Woody Ranere could in any interview. Bathed in a gray background, Lake Trout stand dreamy-eyed and stoic, just days after recording their first four-song demo: Ed Harris’s baby face is topped by a cleanly shorn matte of black hair; Ranere and Matt Pierce eye the shutter intently, both free of the ten years now etched into their faces; James Griffith is still young and shy; Mike Lowry sports a head full of dreadlocks that stretches halfway down his back.
Since that picture was taken at their nascence, Lake Trout has traveled a long road to somewhere. Now, with their newest album, Not Them, You, quickly gaining attention and critical praise, they’re closer to their future than they are to their past, but they’re still stuck somewhere in between, waiting for the world to follow around the last of their many sharp turns. Almost ten years since their first visit to Richmond, VA’s Alley Katz, they sink into the same couches and laugh about the picture and the years it hides. Harris is asleep on the opposite couch. Lowry, while he’d hesitate to admit, sometimes seems the slightest bit embarrassed by his former choice of coiffeur. Griffith, once the shy bassist who stood in the stage’s shadows, now bangs his head and blows huge sighs from his lungs on every other downbeat. Though his face shows a few more years than the relic on the wall, Pierce has probably changed the least, though Ranere runs a close second, still the dark and handsome frontman, and still quiet and reserved.
In the years since that first press photo, Lake Trout has grown from a sometimes naïve bunch of hometown Baltimore kids merely reflecting their ever-changing influences to a mature, focused band of rock careerists still working on an elusive sound that is finally within their grasp. The classic rock seeds of their youth and the jazz and hip hop flavors of young adulthood merged with electronic inspirations on 2000’s Alone at Last, but the band didn’t find its own sound until it wove those digital threads into the ghostly indie rock of 2002’s Another One Lost.
Legal battles and distribution problems mired AOL in obscurity and set the band back commercially at least a year. While waiting for a lawsuit with their previous label to suss itself out, they released the album on their own, selling it at shows and through their website. When they finally signed to Palm/Rx and the album reached curious ears, many were stunned by the band’s abrupt stylistic shift, but the band that made Another One Lost was a long time in the making.
Not Them, You finds Lake Trout settling in to that identity. Without the inspiration of personal romantic turmoil, singer and guitarist Woody Ranere’s eyes and ears were opened to the social and political turmoil of the day. Of all the times I’ve seen Ranere, he’s been sick more often than not. He absorbs things and does his best to purify the air around himself and those he’s close to. It’s nice that someone’s willing to take that on, and while it doesn’t take much guts to write an anti-war song, it does take a lot to release it to an entire population, nearly half of whom are likely to disagree with you.
While his singing voice is clear and resonant, Ranere speaks in whispers, and after two weeks on the road, a regiment neither he nor any of his bandmates have been used to lately, it is run ragged. With more East and West Coast dates on the horizon, he lowers his whisper to a hum, and I lean in to make sure I’m hearing him correctly. The faintest grin crosses his lips when he discusses Lake Trout’s past. While he obviously enjoys the nostalgic trip into his and his bandmates’ youth, he and the rest of the band are reluctant to have their past misinterpreted yet again. In the familiar, cold and dusty Alley Katz attic, Ranere risked his voice for a forty-five minute conversation about birthing two year-old babies, changing lenses, and making music during the last dying days of the music store.
Let’s talk about the album a little bit. This is more of a song-based album than you’ve done since way back—the first couple of records. Do you think the album is dying in the whole iPod/iTunes era?
Yup. I think so. I don’t know that that had any bearing on why we made more of a structured, song-based album, but I do believe the attention span of the average listener is much shorter. I think being able to download songs off the internet, and peer-to-peer, and sharing, and all kinds of stuff, just makes it more about a single. You never have to buy an album. I think that there will always be people who are going to be interested in the album, in the artist as a whole, but I don’t think that’s really being taught anymore. Not that it’s taught in school or anything, but the whole concept of—you go to a record store and go into the listening booth and just put on the record and just sit there with your friends and listen to the whole thing with your friends and go “Yeah! I gotta get this!” and you go through the whole experience, because this is what the artist wanted. I don’t think that’s being passed down, you know? What’s being passed down is well, you can fit 100 songs on your phone, and you’d never make ten or twelve of them from one artist! You know, you have 100 artists.
Do you think part of it is just because people don’t have time to sit down and listen to a forty-five, fifty-minute album anymore? Or people feel like they don’t have time, even if they really do?
Yeah, I think it’s probably both. You know, I resisted, but I have an iPod and I love it, because I travel a lot and I have 5,000, 8,000, 9,000 songs and I find myself struggling to listen to this whole album, and listen to this whole album, and sometimes I’m flipping around and I stop myself. Still, it’s so easy. So it’s not necessarily a negative thing, it’s just—I like the idea of an album because it’s a bigger, broader statement than you can fit into a three minute song. And it also feels like it allows artists to evolve more in their career. They do this album with ten songs that are from a similar vein and are cohesive, but then they move on to the next. Otherwise, it’s like you’re dealing in singles. They all seem more all over the place, or you have to be more consistent in one sound and go, “Well, that doesn’t sound like—!” I don’t think it’s necessarily an evil thing, I think it’s just—it feels a little limiting.
Was it a struggle for you since with this album you wrote more lyrics than you had before?
Yeah. It’s always sort of a struggle to write lyrics for me, because you’ve got everybody in the band you want to please, [and] you want to please yourself. You want to make sure it fits and does justice to the music that you and your band have worked on—getting your sound for many years and then a year or so of working on specific songs. So the pressure is not, “Oh I wanna please everybody.” The point is that I want to do justice to the music, and that’s where the pressure is. I always want to hopefully continue to get better and go into some slightly different directions. I think also on some of the earlier stuff I wrote, it’s more about relationship type stuff, and that stuff seems to just pour out of you when you’re in a reactionary mode to some thing in your life. A lot more of these lyrics, I was feeling sort of more like an antenna, you know? Sort of collecting general conversations and thoughts and stuff between friends and bandmates and family and lovers. It took a lot more thought and figuring and distilling things…
b]Was there something that precipitated your writing the lyrics for “Pill”? The sentiment that’s expressed in the song is something that’s often expressed by social commentators. Was there anything in particular that inspired you to write that?
Nothing very specific, but I think that there was a period where I was watching a lot of news and watching TV and commercials and just being aware. If you just flip through magazines and decide to change the lens of how you’re looking at them, a bunch of other things pop out, like the way women are told how to look, the way men are told how to look and dress and smell. All that shit just pops out. If you ever really start to pay attention to it and all the sides, it’s overwhelming. There was a period where I started to watch all these documentaries, like Fahrenheit 911 and Control Room and The Corporation. I watched these all in a period of maybe three or four months. Supersize Me was another big one that was really affecting to me and to a lot of people I saw them with. I had a lot of discussions about them, and it just sort of seeped in there. I never really wanted to try to be overtly political, but with all the stuff going on with George Bush and elections and corruption and all that sort of stuff— And I wasn’t going through any kind of personal turmoil, which I think also opens you up to everything else that’s going on. You’re not so self-centered. The last thing I ever want to do with my lyrics is be preachy or anything like that, but just sort of saying “This is how I’m looking at it” in all my discussions with friends and family and people I care about. It sort of felt like a lot of these weighty messages that are out over the airwaves are being distilled by a lot of people listening in similar ways. So, it wasn’t anything specific. I think I might have seen this one ad in some magazine about some super hard-body, carved person that probably spends their entire livelihood working out three or four hours a day, and they’re saying they got liposuction or took this pill, you know. I don’t know, but it seemed to jump out at me.
That’s the first time you’ve really put it out like that. Were you apprehensive at all about putting that stuff out? Were you nervous about how it would be received?
Yeah, I mean it definitely crossed my mind that people could get angry or wanted a sort of political scream, but it never— Because I knew it wasn’t an original sentiment and I just wanted to be slightly artful, hopefully. [When we were] recording it, Tony Doogan, who produced the album—when we were recording specifically “Pill”—we were working on the vocal and discussing some of this stuff, you know. He’s from Scotland—Glasgow—and we got into this really good conversation about all the things we were just talking about and those lyrics and saying how he really dug them and that kind of thing. So I felt like I wasn’t making this up. You know, I’m not looking to gain allies, but I think it hopefully may be something that will spark a conversation or something like that. But no, I’m not nervous, because—maybe if our last album had sold two million albums and a bunch of people were waiting for this album, maybe I’d be a little more concerned. Right now we’re just making music for ourselves and the couple people who want to listen, so we know we don’t have this sort of pressure.
A buddy of mine and I were listening to the album together and he commented on “Forward March”—again, the idea that it’s not a new sentiment, the anti-war song. What did you do to try to make that your own rather than just repeating what so many people have said?
I don’t know, I mean, I didn’t really try to say “Hey, Mr. President, you’re fucking up.” I was just trying to say the Captain, whoever that is—whether it’s Republican, Democrat or your boss or somebody in some form of power in your office building. Whatever. Who knows? To me, in a way, it’s more a comment on fear in general in our environment in the United States and using that as a tool and a weapon, rather than war. I know it’s “Forward March,” but this war—war in general and color-coding alert statuses and stuff like that—is a way to instill fear and get your agenda across, no matter what it is. Because I don’t know what the statistics are for presidents being voted out of office during war time, but whoever is in office is going to have a lot more success with whatever agenda, you know? Putting intelligent design in school systems because people are going to be gung ho for the president. The war might be secondary to that.
The song seems to me to be much more critical of people than it is of the leadership itself.
It’s also like, “I wanna do something this time,” which kind of points that—if it’s me who’s singing or it’s from my perspective—that I haven’t yet; that I’ve been standing on the sidelines and not doing anything.
You’re just as guilty as everyone else.
Yeah, and I think also it’s just pointing out that I’ve been on the sidelines. I think a lot of us are, and people who are aren’t getting enough attention. And it may be—you know, it’s been said a hundred times, a thousand times before, because war is not the answer. And there’s a reason for it, and hopefully people will say it. Well, hopefully people won’t have to, but people will continue saying it more and more. I was just watching the Bob Dylan, Scorsese thing, and it was just amazing, so inspiring to watch that and just say, “Those guys and all those people in that community believed that music could really change awareness.” And it really did. And you know, today I feel like, like you were saying earlier about iPods and downloading and music being sponsored—like tonight we got fucked by Kool cigarettes. Somehow they’ve got things hanging here, and everybody’s about the single, and rap now is about gold chains and all that kind of stuff. I think music doesn’t have that sort of mass power it did or could have had, because people don’t believe it can, even though for some people, it’s their entire lives. There’s nothing more emotional or emotive than a song or a lyric or something like that, and that will be true for a lot of people always, but I think for the general population, fancy cars and quick cut video will dominate, and songs— You know, I don’t think music will be given the power it could have or it used to.
You guys have been around for I guess 11 years now—’94, right?
Yeah, that was before I joined the band and before James joined. We were just talking about this picture behind us, which was in ’96. That’s when we recorded our first four songs to cassette tape. So yeah, long time, but we’ve all been playing together in other bands or other forms of this band.
So you’ve had a tough career that’s been interpreted through other people, myself included, but I’m interested to hear your story. If you were to explain where you guys came from and where you are now, what would you say?
Um, I would say—that’s a long answer. From what perspective?
Well, you all have been really frustrated with a lot of the press that you’ve gotten, and you’ve been pigeon-holed in one place or another. A lot of people have bought that and the consequences have been frustrating. How do you reconcile where you’ve been and where you are?
Well, we started off as five guys who were really good friends and played in several bands and realized that what we wanted to do more than anything else was have us five play together and figure out a sound, you know? I think a lot of bands get together and somebody sees somebody from across the room and they’re wearing the same tight jeans and leather jacket and have greasy Outsiders hair, and they go, “Hey, let’s start a band!” And that’s just as legitimate as any other reason. But we got to know each other in college during school, and Mike and I went to high school together and started playing in a punk band, which was all about just playing and trying to discover our sound. It was sort of more through music that we got together, and we just started playing, and what we did at the time reflected stuff we were listening to. Like [when we recorded] our first demos and albums, we listened to lots of Al Green and John Coltrane and Zeppelin, and some of the songs came from that. Then we sort of got into— One of our roommates when we all lived in this big house was a drum ‘n’ bass producer, and he was always giving us mixed tapes. We had a lot of friends in the Baltimore sort of rave scene and we were going to a lot of those and ended up playing some weird shows, like hip-hop [and raves]. I mean, we just played. We played everywhere we possibly could. We did whatever, because we were searching for a sound. I think we arrived at a lot of places, and we could pull it off, but we always had this joke that as soon as we started doing something, and as soon as we started catching on and our numbers started doubling, we just got bored and we went on to the next thing; we’d lose our crowd and we’d get it back in another scene, and it was really just about us five trying to just find a sound. I think that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
In terms of us being mislabeled or talked about as coming from another scene that bothers us, I think a lot of it is just—you know, it’s understandable, because we had friends that threw really big festivals and they said, “Hey, we’re gonna pay you a lot of money to play in front of a lot of people. What does that sound like?” Well, that sounds great. And then a year later, somebody approached us and said, “Hey, have you ever heard of this word ‘jamband’?” Well, no, we had never heard of that term. We started playing before that existed and that was a way somebody decided to try to label us, and out of that scene of live music community sprouted a million bands that we didn’t relate to in almost any way musically. But we liked to play in front of people and we just sort of played. We weren’t really concerned at the time what it was called or what the scene was and stuff like that. I think later, it gets frustrating because it feels like lazy reporting. Somebody just said in some paper, “Lake Trout, they’re like new jazz.” And if you listened to any of our albums in the last five or six years, you couldn’t come to that conclusion. But people Google us, and there was a time we had a lot of hits when we were playing in front of a lot of people at some outdoor kind of hippie fest. And that’s what’s gonna come up. It’s slowly been changing. We’ve played with everyone in the world now—from the Pixies, Live, Dismemberment Plan, Sugar Ray—I mean ridiculous people, none of whom were in that jamband scene. Our thing is we’re gonna continue to play to whoever…anybody that likes jambands and wants to hear us, that’s awesome. We’re probably gonna continue to play our friends’ festivals that put us in front of a lot of people. We’re happy to do that. The part that’s frustrating is that we get written about—you know, people Google us and some article comes up from six years ago and they’ll just sort of regurgitate that onto the page, and it’s just sort of lazy. You know, I’d be fine if somebody went through every song on our new album and said this and this and just hacked it to death. It wouldn’t feel good, but at least I know we were being judged on what we’re doing now and not what took ten seconds to come up on some search engine.
A lot of that resulted in people who would be into you never giving you a chance because of what they heard from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. A lot of what some would call snobby indie rock magazines have this vehement hatred for anything associated with jambands. Why do you think that is?
I guess…I think that being cool has got to be the A number one thing, and somewhere along the line, “jamband” or anything associated with it got on the uncool list or the uncool side of things. And that’s where it’s gonna stay, because people want to keep it there. They must have something to gain from keeping something cool and something not, you know? I’m not sure.
Because of Lake Trout’s artistic fluidity and the fact that you’ve changed so much so often, you’ve had fans fall by the wayside along the way, and I know that’s something that you all are very conscious of. What have you done in the past to consciously make an effort to hang on to those people. Or do you just sort of carry on?
I think the fact that we still allow people to tape our concerts whenever they want. Even though people complain about us not playing certain songs, our setlists are made up of songs that span six or seven years of our playing, you know? The fact that we might not play a song from our first album or our second one is really because it just doesn’t fit. We’ve even talked about revisiting some of our songs and making them new and stuff like that, and we have done that to a degree with some stuff. And then the fact that with our release in the UK of this album, we have it paired with sort of a live, ambient, improvised album that’s going to be available for sale when we play shows. So for anybody who’s into that era, when we were doing a lot of hip-hop and that more ambient, beat-driven kind of stuff, it’s out there. People can get it. And we also book, in certain states—New York, Philly, DC and Baltimore—we still put on shows that are still entirely improv shows that are based on the ambient and down tempo kind of stuff, and we get great responses from anybody that wants to come. We’re very conscious of doing that, and we still love to do that, and I hope we’re gonna make sure that’s always a part of what we do. But also, I think a big thing is being honest. Be on stage and be honest. I mean, even though people call out “On My Way to Work,” which is a song we did probably almost nine or ten years ago, it just doesn’t make any sense to us to play it at that moment, you know what I mean? I totally understand, people pay and they want to come and see you, but I don’t pay to have a band be my personal jukebox. I do like if they play some songs from that era. I always sort of—I apologize. You know, I love those songs. I loved ‘em when we wrote ‘em and I still like ‘em, but in our set, sonically, melodically, they just don’t make any sense any more. That would be more jarring to the flow of the set, and we do try to shape this sort of art to the set that people always comment on. They’re like “Your shit really rises and falls,” and you can only do that when you really pay attention to the song order and go in and out of the instrumentals into vocal songs and stuff like that. It’s sort of a tricky thing to do. I think if we were just gonna say “All right, we’re just gonna drive ahead,” we’d probably just do sets in all vocal. But I think it’s important to incorporate a lot of things we’ve done in the last several years, and the instrumental stuff is definitely part of what we do and will continue to do. I mean, the title song of our newest album is an instrumental song, so that’s just sort of saying we’re respecting that.
The instrumental songs on the new album are a little bit more evident. On the last album, every song flowed from one song to the next, and it was kind of a continuous thing, whereas this one is a little bit more song-based. Was it a tough decision to include some of those more instrumental songs? Was there ever a question where someone said, “Maybe this won’t go with what’s there”?
Yup. There are ones that were in the line-up and were rejected and taken out because of that reason. But I can think of two specific ones: there’s one that comes out of the song called “Now We Know” that’s sort of a vamp kind of thing, and to me, it comes in the same tempo and it really flows out of it, so that becomes sort of one piece. It’s not even differentiated in terms of a program note or a tracklist. And there’s one that comes out of “Riddle”—this sort of tinkling bell comes out and it flows and then dissipates into nothing, and the next song sort of comes out. So to me, there is a flow. I think there is a flow certainly to some of those things, but several of our songs do start a lot harder, especially something like “Forward March,” which has this super hard start. There’s a couple that have really strong endings, and that’s just the way those songs were built. I think we have a couple points on the album where things flow in and out and then there’s a break. To have a constant flowing thing was not a goal, but to, um…I don’t know, I feel like the instrumental stuff on the album also sounds really different from the other stuff, and I think it sort of gives your ears a break. I remember when we were mastering the album, we were doing it in order and—just when you do really critical listening, you get this sort of aggressive, compressed, blown out sound of some of the vocal ones, and then you went to this really open drum sound. There’s almost this break for your ears. Really thinking of it in terms of an album and not so much that things flow rhythmically. It’s like staring at orange for ten hours, and then you look away—and I don’t know what everything looks like, but—you know, you look at red or something for a while and blues don’t look the same. We changed it up tonally as well, so you can give your ears a break. That was something I didn’t realize we were doing until we started doing the order and it became evident. So I do believe there’s a flow, but it’s not the same kind of flow as the other albums.
You played a big role in producing the last album. Was it hard for you to give that up on this one?
The truth is I didn’t really give it up. We just had some more people helping us. Which is great. But myself and Steve Wright—who’s mixed all our last albums—we remixed this album and you know, you have a lot of say and a lot of control as to what things end up sounding like, and if you’re remixing, adding all kinds of stuff— I was right there with Dave Fridmann and Tony doing it and going back and forth and saying this is what we think, this is what we think. And the reason we wanted to work with Tony and why it would be cool to work with Tony was, we talked about it and said we obviously had a very specific idea of what we wanted. We did demos for these songs in my home studio, and a lot of them—we based a lot of the sounds and direction off those things, so it’s like we really had the germ ideas for all these songs, and a lot of the sounds, and we took it to someone who could give us a fresh perspective, which is great. So, yes, in a sense, but I still was pretty involved, and it wasn’t like “Well, this is the way it’s gonna be,” you know? Coming from Tony or Dave, there was a lot of communicating, and that was exciting.
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Were there any songs that changed drastically from the demos?
I think maybe “Shiny Wrapper.” The epic became more epic, and the small became smaller, you know? All the melodies and stuff, like that one melody took off, and there’s a real moment when we play it. I remember Dave, whatever we were doing, whenever we’d do a rough mix, we’d send him stuff, and he’d sort of tell us what he was thinking. And he really responded to that one. Nothing changed incredibly drastically, but everything really just became— I think we distilled the essence or sort of blew out the parts that we’d written, you know? If we had a part that we really wanted to become epic, we just went way over the top. We had to go fifty times bigger and louder than you’d think, and I think that’s part of the reason it sounds a little more song-based; because we said, “Well, what’s the idea for this song?” It goes small and then it goes huge, like in “If I Can.” It started off with just an idea; Ed had the idea. He just wrote this simple guitar part and he said, “I really have this idea of just going real small into real big.” And I pieced it together, did all the vocals, wrote it, and did a sort of mock up of it, and everybody was like “Yeah!” And then we went through with Tony and blew it out even more. And then we remixed it, and I went back and added even more vocals to it. To just go bonkers on it. It was fun.
Now that you’ve worked with Dave and you did the All Good Festival the same night as the Flaming Lips, is there any chance of a tour? I know they haven’t actually done a full-fledged tour probably in four years.
Yeah, if they do a full-fledged tour; yeah, there’s a possibility. Steven Drozd, when we were up there, he was living up there, and we were having barbecues and belly flop contests at Dave’s pool, and we sort of became friends. That All Good festival was great, because it was this extreme weather, and we all showed up and everybody was just soaking wet and totally muddy, so we all huddled underneath this tent, and since we knew Stephen, he introduced us to everybody and we hit it off immediately. They sat behind us during our whole set, and when we came off, they were giving us hugs and saying, “That was great” and all that kind of stuff, and we felt like “Hey!” We just immediately hit it off with them on a personal level, and besides the fact that they’re our idols, we were totally kissing their ass, and who knows? It would be great. I don’t think it would be that far of a stretch to see that happen, but you know, nothing official has been discussed.
What are y’all’s plans for the next year? I was talking to Ed on the phone a couple weeks ago, and he sort of said that everybody felt like you needed to release more stuff more frequently, etc. Do y’all have any plans to?
Oh yeah. I think we’re really gonna change the way we release music. I think we tend to look at things sometimes a little too preciously, which is to a degree my fault, because I’m sort of a tweeker and a perfectionist, but you know, we all are, which sort of slows everything down. But I think we’re going to really try, maybe instead of releasing full-on full-length albums, we’ll just do a series of EPs and get ‘em out much faster and try to cut out the middle man. You know, I don’t know that we’re going to—after this album with Palm, we’re going to be off the label, and I don’t know that we’re going to run and try to jump into another situation, because the way music is being disseminated—the way it is right now, or at least if you’re on a record label or something like that—is dying. The internet is the way. Or a live show and stuff like that. I think it’s kind of a shame. I feel like we’ve never worked with people—with a label or management—that ever really helped us take advantage of what we could do in terms of the amount of music we can put out. I’m in a position right now where I have this home studio and I work out of another studio where we’d be able to do things for a lot cheaper in terms of recording and still keep it sort of high end, and start putting a lot of stuff out, ambient albums and more. You know, when we write a vocal song, when we get four or five songs that we think work together and flow and make a lot of sense, we’ll just put it out and just keep doing it and not waiting so long. Because we went through, with our last album, getting sued and all this shit, it was like birthing a two year-old baby, you know? And with the whole attention span thing— Somebody wrote some article, you know, “Love the album. Love the album. But there’s too many tracks on it.” And that seems absurd to me, but it’s just interesting how people’s perception is changing, sort of maybe going back— It’s funny, you know? We used to be contained by the length of a phonograph, and then when CDs came out, albums could be seventy-five minutes long, and now people are going back to shorter and shorter songs and smaller albums and stuff like that, so we’ll just sort of beat ‘em at their game releasing EPs. And EPs always suggest something bigger coming, so maybe if you just keep suggesting something bigger coming, maybe we’ll do well.
What about touring? Why aren’t ya’ll doing a New Years show? Is it something that just didn’t happen?
Usually someone will approach us about doing one and it’ll just seem right. We didn’t really want to take it upon ourselves to do it. I think the last couple years—you know, the last one we did we really enjoyed. I was with my girlfriend. People were with their girlfriends and their families, and it was just like, “Oh, this is fun, too,” you know. Because I think we did five or six New Years in a row where we played, and it was great, but I think right now we’re sort of enjoying having that night off and playing the day before in Baltimore. We’re all looking forward to a quiet New Years.
What about after?
We’re going out to the west coast for a week of shows. We’re doing two in San Franciso and two in L.A. and I think six or seven shows on the west coast after that. The larger plan sort of depends on what our label and management are going to help us do, and right now it’s not much, so we’re going to have to make our own plans.
