Umphrey’s McGee and Moon Taxi
Feb.14-15
Fillmore | Silver Springs, MD
Fans who have followed Umphrey’s McGee for any period of time know that there are only two guarantees: you never know what you’re going to get, and Umphrey’s always delivers.
How else can a band be relentlessly innovative in both music and fan relations for 13-plus years? The latest expected twist arrives in the form of their newest studio album (and first with ATO Records) Death By Stereo (9/13), the follow up to 2009’s Mantis. Mantis surprised fans with a collection of music never before played, and surprised the music industry with an innovative marketing campaign that catapulted the album past the Heatseekers chart, debuting at #62 on Billboard’s “Top 200” chart without any radio play or television appearances.
Death By Stereo‘s concise melodic approach and accessible songwriting is everything fans had hoped for, but not what anyone expected. Death By Stereo is disarmingly straightforward. Sure, you can dance to it, but the clever arrangements, meticulously crafted chordal interplay, and virtuoso instrumentation put Umphrey’s McGee in a category all their own.
“Our live show is malleable and every night is its own thing, where you never know where things are going to go,” keyboardist Joel Cummins explains. “People aren’t used to us playing three-and-a-half to four-minute songs back to back, so this album is a completely different experience than our live show, which is certainly something we were trying to do.”
Whereas this band’s stellar reputation is based on marathon concerts that mix original, technically demanding tunes with complex epics and, playful covers (ranging from Toto to Metallica), it has chosen the same kind of attention to melody, songcraft, and musicianship that make those artists stand apart. Umphrey’s chemistry, however, is something all its own, built upon a relentless live schedule of 100-plus shows a year, a solid base of musical training, and friendships that go back to when they walked in the shadows of the Golden Dome at the University of Notre Dame.
“The thing we realized pretty quickly is that music is secondary to our relationships,” guitarist/vocalist Brendan Bayliss points out. “If our relationships aren’t strong, it heavily affects the music. Some bands don’t speak to one another, they aren’t friends, and I just don’t know how that works.”
While competition was admittedly slim when they formed at Notre Dame in 1997, the band immediately became a campus favorite. When Umphrey’s moved to Chicago, it brought its Fighting Irish bonafides with it, so its initial hometown Windy City shows were packed to the gills with South Bend alumni and friends. The underground network of tapers helped spread the word about the band, and the ND connection also served the guys on the road.
“The first time we went out west it was crazy,” Bayliss recalls. “It didn’t matter what town it was — we knew somebody. I didn’t realize the reach of Notre Dame until after I graduated. I didn’t appreciate Notre Dame when I was there. Back then, I wouldn’t be caught dead in Notre Dame gear, but now I’m swimming in it and I wear it with pride.”
These days, the band plays for crowds from all over the US and beyond, and incorporates a sophisticated mix of cutting-edge technology, including a stellar light show. Its Stew Art concerts redefine live music as we know it, with fans texting to choose the direction of the band’s set, while the four-quarter UMBowls (each quarter has a different interactive theme) have quickly become landmark events not to be missed.
Umphrey’s tight-knit relationship with its rabid fanbase includes the band making recordings available of every live show since 2006, monthly podcasts, an extremely active presence on Facebook and Twitter, and digital “Easter Egg” hunts. This has led to a strong following throughout the U.S. and to successful international tours of Europe, Australia and Japan, where fans screamed out song titles even though they couldn’t speak a lick of English.
To date, the band has sold more than nearly 2 million tracks online and Death By Stereo will only increase their reach. The album is produced by sonic wizards Manny Sanchez (Smashing Pumpkins, Fall Out Boy) and Kevin Browning, whose deep knowledge of analog and digital gear has helped the band craft its sound for years. With the band members also assisting with production, DBS was recorded at Sanchez’s The IV Lab Studios in Chicago, with the exception of the raw Rolling Stones-y “Wellwishers,” which was done at Cinninger’s home-studio in Michigan.
The band now makes it a habit to keep at least some material fresh for the album, and the powerful one-two punch of multi-layered “Miami Virtue” and hard-charging “Domino Theory” do so on DBS. Umphrey’s also offers a muscular studio version of “The Floor,” which was an indisputable hit of 2009s Rothbury Festival where the band had 40,000 fans captivated. Moving from the Zeppelin-like groove of “Conduit” to the soulful “Booth Love” and the panoramic “Deeper,” DBS reveals an incredibly broad range to the band’s songwriting.
Bringing it all back home for both fans and the band, the album closes with “Hajimemashite,” a song that’s title translates from Japanese as “nice to meet you” and whose origins can be traced all the way back to the band’s earliest days.
“‘Hajimemashite’ is one that we’ve been playing since our first show,” Cummins says. “It’s morphed and we’ve given it a unique studio treatment that captures its essence, but isn’t how we play it live. I think that will have some resonance with our fans. I like the idea of getting our fans excited with a mix of new and older material.”
One of the perks of Umphrey’s McGee is that it allows the band members to be fans themselves, having shared the stage with heroes like Huey Lewis, guitarist Stanley Jordan, John Oates, and jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman, to name a few. Umphrey’s has even backed Lewis, gospel legend Mavis Staples and Sinead O’Connor for a classic version of “I’ll Take You There,” and they are regularly joined onstage by their peers.
“I can’t believe that we are 13 and half years in,” Bayliss points out with a mix of wonder and pride. “If someone told me that I would have been thinking: ‘No way! But sign me up. I’ll take it.'”
Moon Taxi
Exclusive Interview
Here is a throwback interview of sorts from a few months back with the Nashville based synth-pop-jam-rock outfit, Moon Taxi, is one of the best rising acts on the live music circuit. The group has long been known on the jam scene and recently garnered national recognition with their last two studio releases, Cabaret & Mountains, Beaches, Cities. Trevor Terndrup (Guitar, Vocals) and Tom Putnam (Bass) of Moon Taxi spoke with the creator of Live Music Daily, Andrew McConnell, to discuss their new album, their short-term & long-term ambitions as a group, and their evolution as a band.
Moon Taxi’s original sound is progressive-jam-rock, as exhibited in Live Ride and the sound has since evolved.What was it that led the group’s sound to evolve to what we hear on Cabaret and Mountains, Beaches, Cities? Also, could you explain the recording process for the new album?
Trevor: I think there is a definite point where we decided to start writing to write songs more suited to a studio scenario as opposed to live. Up until then we had just concentrated really on just performing songs live and that really affected the writing process because when you are writing songs for live performance like that is what you think of.
You think of what is the best way to get the biggest reaction out of the biggest crowd, and you are not really thinking about a studio effort, which involves more cohesive songs put together, and better arrangements for a studio setting.
That really marked sort of a big, not more of a turning point, but more of a pivot in our writing. You know we were concentrating on how to really put songs together in the studio and we started not writing songs together as a group in the band practice room, but we wrote them, constructed them, sort of at a computer with drum loops instead an actual drummer and we looked at the whole song as it is as opposed to bit and pieces of songs like we would do if we were trying to figure it out live.
It really changed kind of the whole scope of our writing process and expanded it, now we have two really solid studio efforts. Sometimes when we play the songs live they don’t sound exactly the same, but I think we learned that about great bands. That they have songs that are great in the studio and live they might not translate as well, but that is part of it you need to have kind of long lasting studio records that you can really be proud of, and we had already had the live performance in the bag for awhile.
So it was around that time we writing for Cabaret that the songs changed and the arrangements got tighter, stronger, and really started concentrating a lot on melodies. Vocal melodies and instrumental melodies, but mostly just catchy vocal hooks. You can definitely tell from our early stuff that we were not as concentrated on that, we were focused more on live progressive rock. Now it is more like progressive-synth-pop-rock, but live it gets real dirty still.
Tom: We still have to go into a room and figure out how to play these songs live and it is not like that process takes any less time. We just are not all in a room anymore [when writing songs], but we still have to do that part and arrange them for a live setting, sometimes takes awhile.
Trevor: Now we are doing that after the fact, we are kind of almost learning our own songs to play live.
Andrew: That was a very thorough answer…actually answered another question I had.
Trevor: Yea I was hoping to just knock out the whole interview with one answer (laughs).
How were you able to come up with another full-length album with such a quick turnaround (one year later)?
Tom: I think it is because, once we saw what we did in Cabaret we kind of already knew how to do it and how to approach it.
It did not really take us that long, we knew who we wanted to mix it. It really was not anything difficult. We also have lots of people writing lots of different things. I know Wes, Trevor, and Spencer are always writing. I write stuff too, so there is always song to kind of choose from, at least the beginnings of songs that we can do a demo and we can turn that into an actual track.
There is a theme of travel in a lot of your songs. Is there something with Mountains, Beaches, Cities that is special about each of these places together or each one exclusively, and how does this tie back into your overall theme of travel that dates as far back as Cabaret as seen in songs like “Let’s Go Back”? In general, what was the theme of the lyrical content you wanted to deliver in Mountains, Beaches, Cities?
Trevor: Yea I totally get what you are saying, the theme of travel is very prevalent, and it is kind of a thread that ties both Cabaret and Mountains Beaches, Cities together. Whereas, Cabaret the travel vibe was more like places that you have been to.
Mountains, Beaches, Cities is less contemplative and more hopeful, you are kind of setting your sights on these destinations that might be in your immediate future or a goal you can try to attain, that is what I feel like when I sing “Change”, it is not really talking about traveling, but it is thinking about things you may be able to improve on in yourself in the future. Nonetheless, we have never actually been to “Morocco”, but the word itself, when I say it, I can almost taste the word. It is something you are yearning for, that exotic journey. So I think that is the main difference in traveling aspects. There is sort of two elements there, places you have been to and places you want to go. In this one we were concentrating on places we eventually want to go to.
Tom: All that said Andrew, I don’t think that was intentional, I think it is almost like a subconscious thing that is coming out in all of these lyrics.
I know you’ve said guys were trying to stick with a sound you developed on Cabaret and you decided to stick with a similar sound for the newest album, but in what ways would you say Mountains, Beaches, and Cities is distinctly different? Also, Trevor how has your song writing evolved over the course of the past studios efforts?
Tom: As a whole, I think Mountains, Beaches, Cities is much stronger than Cabaret because it is a more fluid piece of work. Whereas, Cabaret there are still some things we are trying to hone in our sound, that in hindsight may not have made the best record, but in this newer album I feel like we got a bunch of songs that really fit a lot better together.
Trevor: Even on Cabaret there were some songs that had some groggy elements to them, I would say “Pennies From The Grave” is one of those songs, it was like a relic from the past… where is goes from 7/8 into 4/4 and has these really elaborate passages and that kills live and was a song we would perform live pretty often…then when we got into the studio it was pretty cool, but it already had an identity. It is hard to divorce the live song from the studio track if you have already been playing it live. So a main difference was that we were not playing any of these Mountains, Beaches, Cities tracks live before we put the record out. We learned them after we put out the record or maybe right beforehand, but none of them had an identity before the record. That is the huge difference.
I think 2014 could be Moon Taxi’s year, I know you just played String Cheese Incident’s Hulaween and have some upcoming dates with Umphrey’s McGee in February, what are Moon Taxi’s short term goals for 2014 and what are the long-term goals?
Tom: We really want to do some international stuff next summer, particularly Europe & the UK. Play some bigger festivals again, I really want to set us up for 2015 to be the biggest year, where we are a potential headliner for certain festivals, that is really long term goals. In the short-term we want to keep doing what we have done and get some bigger slots at festivals and get some really good tours with some really good bands, do some co-headlining stuff. We are going to play out West I think at least at some point. Just spreading the web more, we have been around the Southeast forever, we are just getting into Texas and that is going really well, really excited to come to Dallas. Overall, spread what we have done in the South to the rest of the country.
*A Special Thanks to Lauren, Dawson, Tom, Trevor, and Bennett