Tag: recording

Jason Eady: Down to a Single Point

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There are two songs about dying on Jason Eady’s new I Travel On, but he insists this isn’t a downer album. Neither the contented “Happy Man” nor the rambunctious “Pretty When I Die” flinch as they depict the end of life, but Eady says the songs “put a positive spin on it. I think they’re both very positive songs. Live life to the fullest. Leave it all on the table when you go.”

Positivity was the conscious theme of the Fort Worth-based singer-songwriter’s seventh record, yet these songs aren’t naïve or blindly, blandly uplifting. What makes I Travel On so poignant and so memorable is Eady’s willingness to look something like death right in the face and find that silver lining. “It’s going to happen to everybody, so why not talk about it? It doesn’t have to be this unspoken thing that’s sad and depressing. Life is life and death is just a part of it. That shouldn’t be ignored.”

It helps that those two songs, along with every other one on the album, are expertly and even jubilantly picked and strummed and bowed and plucked and sung by Eady’s road-hardened touring band, with special guests Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley. “This album,” Eady explains, “is very specific to our last year. We traveled so much during that time, and we listened to Rob and Trey’s two records, which were a big part of our lives at that time. So it seemed like the perfect thing to call them up and see if they wanted to be on the record. These two guys were with us out on the road, even if they didn’t know it.”

Just as Eady writes within the parameters of positivity on I Travel On, the band played only acoustic instruments: guitars, bass, drums, Dobro. Their limited arsenal forced them to be more creative, to find new ways to use their instruments. As a result, the playing on these songs is somehow both loose and tight, technically precise yet lively, focused but eclectic. “We all sat down, miked everything up, and just went for it. There are no punches, no overdubs, nothing. When you hear something on the record, that’s what happened.”

The record is a document of getting lost out in America, gauging the climate of the country touring out-of-the-way places like Calaveras County, California, which gets its own song. It’s about finding silver linings in the gray clouds overhead. It’s about traveling on. And it has one of the finest album covers of the year: an evocative and psychedelic image that was one of many subjects he discussed with the Bluegrass Situation.

First of all, can you tell me about “Calaveras County”? What about that place inspired you to write that song?

That song is a mixture of some things that happened last year and another thing from my childhood that I always wanted to get into a song. We played a festival there last summer, which was the first time I had been there. I fell in love with the place. We were touring up the California coast, and every place was blazing hot. But it was breezy and nice and the weather was beautiful. The people were great. We had a chance to catch our breath and relax. The night before the show we had a big bluegrass jam. When we were leaving, it just struck me how awesome the place was.

Of course, the name Calaveras County doesn’t hurt. It just sounds good. I wrote the song when I got off the road. I can’t really write much on the road, so I just collect notes and thoughts. When I get home, I sort it all out. And the first thing I did after that tour was sit down and write that song.

What’s the other story? The one from your childhood?

There’s a verse about the man in the multicolored Volkswagen bug. That’s a true story from my childhood. I was maybe 6 or 7 and my dad was driving us through the Mojave Desert. We had run out of gas, and it was thirty miles to the next gas station. This was before cell phones, not that cell phones would have done us any good out there. So my dad had to hitchhike to get gas, while we sat in the pickup on the side of the road. People just kept flying by him and flying by him.

The guy who finally stopped was an old hippie who looked like Santa Claus. He was driving a Volkswagen bug and every single panel on the car was a different color. He gave my dad a ride into town, and then he gave him a ride back and wouldn’t take any money for gas. This guy goes sixty miles out of his way just to get us a tank of gas! That always stuck with me. My dad called me the other day and told me he couldn’t believe that I actually remembered that story.

How could you forget something like that?

It was my first experience of not judging people on appearances. This guy was nothing but helpful. Completely selfless. I’ve always wanted to get him into a song. I tried before to find ways to mention that story, but it never fit until now. It just went with the spirit of “Calaveras County.” The people up there had a similar spirit to them: Anything you needed, they would run into town to get it. They would do anything to make sure you enjoyed your stay in their town. The song fell into place pretty quickly.

I get the sense that most of these songs were written pretty quickly.

I did something this time around that was pretty terrifying. We booked the studio before I had the songs. So I gave myself a deadline to write this record. We got off the road in October, then we went into the studio in December. I wrote them all in those two months in between. It was a challenge, but I’ll tell you what I love about it: This is a very intentional album. These songs were all written in the same space, so it makes for a very cohesive record. I didn’t have to just take the best twelve songs I’d written in the last two years. Everything was written to be on this record.

A lot of the songs relate to things we did over the last year. I didn’t realize that until later. I called it I Travel On because that’s what we did. That’s where the spirit of the record comes from, and I think every song is about getting from one place to another, whether it’s physically traveling or mentally shifting ideas. “Always a Woman” is a good example. It starts off very tongue-in-cheek, very dark, but by the end of the song you’ve traveled from that idea to a very different idea. You’re using the same words but putting a positive spin on them. You move from one position to another in that song.

It inverts the country convention of the woman doing wrong to a man.

Well, I didn’t want to be negative on this record. That’s not where I’m at in my life, and the world doesn’t need any more of that right now. I wanted this to be a positive record. With that song, I didn’t know where it was going after that first verse, but I knew I wanted to take it somewhere different. I didn’t want it to be a dark song, so I had to find some way out of that.

You’ve mentioned that you recorded these songs completely live in one take, with no overdubs. Was that a difficult process? Were there any songs that proved especially hard to get through?

“Always a Woman” for sure. It’s a one-chord song, and I knew when I wrote it that it was going to be tricky. How do you make a one-chord song interesting for four minutes? I just do the same picking pattern for four minutes. Who wants to hear that? For that reason it was the last song we recorded. It was a daunting thing, but I think they all did an unbelievable job of finding ways to change it from verse to verse and add dynamics. Kevin Foster on fiddle did these things where he muted the strings but still rubbed the bow against them. Rob Ickes did something similar on Dobro. It sounds like a distorted electric guitar. I think some people just assume that’s what it is, but it’s all acoustic. I think everybody thrived under that constraint. It made us all more creative.

Way off topic, but this is one of my favorite album covers of the year. What can you tell me about that image?

It’s one of my favorite things I’ve done since I’ve been working in music. For years I had this concept, but I’m not a visually creative person. I can barely draw a stick figure. But I had this idea and I took it to a couple of graphic artists. It’s this universal concept: Everything starts from many, then filters down to a single point, then explodes back out to many again.

You’re going to have to elaborate for me.

Genetics is an example. It took an infinite number of people to get to me being here right now, and from here I’ll have offspring who’ll have offspring and it multiples back out. Events are the same way. All of these events in the history of everything have made this conversation we’re having right now possible, and then from this conversation will come other things that will spread back out. It’s a universal idea. It applies to everything.

But the only visual idea I could come up with was an hourglass, which I didn’t want it to be. But then Casey Pierce, who did the video for “Why I Left Atlanta” and documented the sessions for I Travel On, he’s a graphic artist and his work is very abstract. That’s exactly what I was looking for. I explained the concept to him and what you see on the cover is his first draft. As soon as I opened the email, I couldn’t believe it. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. He got it all. He got the vagueness of it.

It’s very different from your typical country album cover.

Yes, but Casey made it look like a road, like you’re going down the road and these clouds are in front of you. The road is disappearing into the horizon, which goes along with the title of the record. That’s the beauty of what he did. There’s a lot going on inside of it. It’s art.

Photo credit: Scott Morgan

Reading the Room: A Conversation With Trampled by Turtles

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Trampled by Turtles are living up to the title of their newest album, Life Is Good on the Open Road. The Minnesota-based band parked the bus for nearly 18 months after touring behind their prior album, 2014’s Wild Animals. Leading up to the new project the six-piece group gathered at a lakeside cabin and rekindled their connection forged over more than a decade of performing together. Those positive vibes carried over to the new album, which emphasizes their exceptional acoustic chops. On the afternoon of their Ryman Auditorium show in Nashville, frontman Dave Simonett and mandolin player Erik Berry visited backstage with the Bluegrass Situation.

I know you cut this new album live-to-tape, but I was still surprised to see it took just six days to record it.

Simonett: We were surprised too. We had two weeks booked in a studio, which I think for a lot of people might be fast as well. For us that’s plenty of time, usually. But we ended up mixing the whole thing while we were there too.

Berry: Yeah, there was a dinnertime meeting where it was like, “Gentleman, I think we’re done. We got one more song to record tomorrow.” “Really?”

Other than just the general efficiency, what’s the upside to that?

Simonett: I enjoy lots of parts about live recording. I like to do it quite a bit. When I produce other people, I try to get bands to do it as well. It’s always spoken about in a vague way because I think it’s really hard to describe. But you do capture some kind of energy, a vibe. People play differently, if you want to get practical about it, when they’re all playing with each other, rather than playing to something that’s already been recorded.

The rhythm is one. You’re not following anything, you’re all just kind of moving in the same direction at the same time and it’s elastic. Nowadays it might be considered risky because it’s so easy to make things perfect now. But I’ve never felt like that really benefits that many people anyway. But especially us who have been playing together for a while. When we all sit and play and look at each other and play with each other, it sounds different than if we don’t, I guess.

Berry: To add to it, we hadn’t played together for about a year, outside of the weekend retreat we did. To build on what Dave’s saying, when people are playing together live, there’s also something different when something’s happening for the first, second, third, or fourth time, than when you’re playing that tune for the 50th time. Stuff grows on it; they move together differently.

Simonett: Yeah, I’ve always loved trying to capture a song before people start to really think about what they’re doing. Before people come up with parts to play. Before it gets dissected too much. It’s cool to see what happens naturally. I’m burnt out after a fifth take. That’s as far as I want to go.

Dave, how do you introduce your new songs to the band? From what I understand, you had songs already in your back pocket when you got together to record. How do you show the band, “Here’s some songs I’ve written”?

Simonett: That’s about as simple as that. Sit down and…

Berry: I use the phrase “coffee house ready.” Dave’s got them to a point where you could go to a coffee house and play the song.

Simonett: Yeah, I can play them. Core structure, melody, lyrics are pretty much done. And then I just sit there and play it a few times, and people join in when they feel like they have the hang of it, and it’s pretty organic.

That seems cooler than recording a little demo and emailing it to everybody.

Simonett: Yeah. I do that too, just so people can get the vibe, or at least know what’s coming – maybe if I have the song done in time to do that kind of thing. That is a nice thing to be able to have. I don’t think the real learning of it happens until we are all in the same space, though.

Berry: The real benefit of having stuff in advance is like in “Annihilate,” where I have a part that I wrote on it because I had the time to think about it.

Simonett: I also don’t know how to write music down on paper, so it’s all pretty simple anyway.

You guys seem to operate a lot on instinct. Is that something you had to develop and learn?

Simonett: Oh, I think it’s the absence of learning for me. I don’t really know any other way to act.

Berry: I hate the word “easy,” but there’s been a certain easy chemistry that all of us have always had with each other. On the very early shows, I’m like, “That’s pretty good. I could see doing that again.” So there’s something like that, too, now that it’s 15 years down the road.

Simonett: There’s a lot of bands in the string band world, if you want to call it that, that are amazing at that kind of stuff. I guess I don’t want to list examples because I’ll probably leave somebody out, but I think we’re pretty comfortable being a band that’s not that. It’s maybe more song-driven than upfront-playing driven, if that makes sense. That’s just where we naturally fit, I think.

Berry: I’ll name a couple names. When we first started, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I went across the street from where I worked to the Electric Fetus Record Store in Duluth and said, “I’m just getting this bluegrass band starting. I don’t know what to listen to.” So they sold me a Bill Monroe CD and they sold me a Yonder Mountain String Band CD. They were like, “This is your basis. Here’s what’s happening right now.” That Yonder Mountain disc was Mountain Tracks, Volume 2. That’s a live one. There’s some really great stuff on there. It didn’t take me very long for me to realize I couldn’t play like that. [laughs]

You guys are good at reading the room by now, I’d imagine, after 15 years on the road.

Simonett: Yeah, I think so. It’s always kind of a mystery. You can play the same set list two nights in a row and the response could be completely different. My goal as a performer is to get as far away from caring about that as possible. Any true performer will tell you that you can’t please everybody and that’s really not your job anyway. My job onstage – I don’t view it as to be up there to make everybody in the room happy because I can barely keep myself happy, you know? But I feel like we tailor to rooms, though, with our set list.

Berry: If we were going to do a set that no one was going to watch, I think that what we would prefer to do would be like, “OK, let’s take a break with a little slower one, now. Now we’re going to kick it up again.” I think people like our tastes. We’re pretty lucky … I don’t know, I’ve had to come to grips with it, too, because people aren’t shy about letting you know they’re disappointed.

Simonett: They love it, actually.

Berry: People have been telling me after shows that it’s bullshit that we didn’t play “Song X” or “Song Y” since the year 2005.

Yeah? What do you do when that happens?

Berry: You play a 90-minute show. If you have more than 90 minutes’ worth of material, the odds of dropping a song are high. … If we played every original song we have, that’s a four-hour show. That’s not going to happen. So I could challenge any Trampled fan: “Here. Write your ideal set, 24 songs.” I know that I could read it and be like, “But you left off… Now you know how it feels.”

Simonett: A listening crowd – it’s a weird relationship, man. It feels great generally. I like performing. It took me a while to like it. I still get freaked out about getting up on stage. But I enjoy the act of it now. But you can’t go up there with the illusion that everybody in the room is going to enjoy what you do. I think if you start thinking about that too much, you start changing yourself and you’re really close to becoming a cover band.

Do you mean like a cover band of your own material?

Simonett: Of ourselves, yeah. To just go up there and try to do what you think people are going to like. That’s not the point. For me, I like to think as an artist, I want to be able to feel totally comfortable. This tour is a good example – to go up and play new music every night. That’s holding on to still being valid in some way.


When I listen to this record, there does seem to be a sense of motion in the writing and the songs. Do you agree with that?

Simonett: I agree with it, yeah. I think even the title. But all of that came about after we made it. It’s happened to me before. You write a bunch of songs and make a record and you have no clue of any kind of thread that binds them all together until you put it in order and listen to it. “I guess I was singing about traveling a lot.” [laughs] I don’t really notice it as it’s happening.

Listening to “Thank You, John Steinbeck,” I heard a reference to the book Travels With Charley. What are the literary influences you draw on for inspiration?

Simonett: Steinbeck is really high on my list. That book in particular. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve done this, but I used to read that book before every tour. Hopefully this isn’t too long-winded of an answer, but after a certain amount of time touring, maybe the traveling part of it starts to lose its sparkle a little bit, and you forget … It’s amazing how easy it is to have a life like this become predictable, which it’s not supposed to be. At least I don’t want it to be that way. [I want to] remember that it’s still an adventure. You’re still roaming around the world playing music. I think the core of that book is appreciating the adventure of a road trip. It made me want to pack my camera, you know?

Photos by David McClister