Exclusive Interview
with Jason Spooner
Jason Spooner is a superb singer-songwriter with an unwavering combination of instrumental deftness and a strong understanding of the song writing process to bring listeners an all encompassing “full” sound like none other. Jason took time to speak with Andrew McConnell of LiveMusicDaily regarding his new album, Hammond B-3 organs, the Grateful Dead, and life on the road.
The song Fireflies off your latest album seems like a celebration of all the positive aspects of live the time we spent with friends and family. Is the song about one specific experience you had or just a combination of those special types of moments in general?
Jason: I think conceptually it was sort of me trying, to as a songwriter, have a happy suffix. I think as a songwriter you tend to write more about songs that are not morose but you know you write about things that have you thinking and contemplating. On a summer day you just want to pick up a mountain bike and baseball bat and forget about song writing. So it’s important to sometimes channel that.
So getting into verses and lines and choruses, I mean I grew up in a very rural part of Connecticut actually. My dad was a teacher and then administrator in a school in Connecticut in this gorgeous little valley called Hidden Valley. I grew up in a very rural setting with a beautiful river running thru with ponds and fields and trails. It’s just a gorgeous place to grow up. So you know I tend to write the lyrics broad stroke enough such that people could remember from summer time, whether from you’re from the south or north or west. The bullfrog colony across the lake. The fireflies out in the sky, and that kind of thing. Oddly enough one of our radio buddies out in Montana said there aren’t fireflies out there [laughter].
I alluded to Black Eyed Susan on the country road. All of those things when I sing those lines and when I wrote those lines, in my minds eye I have a very specific place of seeing fireflies when I grew up and bullfrogs and those kinds of things. I think everyone has those summertime touchstones that they can relate to. And I think that is why the songs resonated is because everyone can relate to that. Everyone loves summer; everyone loves the campfire, the bullfrogs and the country road. It sort of speaks to youth and summer memories in your youth when they were just endless. You know summers a time when you’re so busy. But when you’re a kid it’s not.
Could you kind of discuss with me how the warmth and the tone of the Hammond B-3 organ? Have you found that the instrument can bring a song some new life?
Jason: For one, I mean, we have a very talented keyboard player who actually plays organ at a church every Sunday. When we were a trio and made our last couple of records, every once in a while. It was kind of nice—some one played Wurlitzer on one tune and somebody came in and played piano for another tune. I’ll never forget one of the guys we got to play keyboard, I said oh yeah I’m hoping on this one you can play the organ. And he looked over at the organ and was like “uhhhh”, and I didn’t realize that like just because you can drive an automatic sedan doesn’t mean you can drive and 18-Wheeler.
It’s got it’s own thing. It’s like a tractor man. You kind of have to know how to drive and kind of ride the thing and get different sounds and vibratos. I played some organ on one of my old records and I didn’t touch any of the dials. But hearing someone who can really dig into an organ is a really special thing. With out question the organ doesn’t sound like anything else.
Every once in a while you’ll hear a record and you’ll be like what is that? A Wurlitzer? A guitar effect? When an organ is playing there’s just no question of what it is and where it’s coming from. The physicality of the Leslie speaker, and what happens, and you know, it’s just a really fascinating thing. It’s an instrument that you feel it’s got depth, complexity, it’s got soul, it can add sort of a warm sort of happiness to a tune, or it can add a darker, kind of funeral-esque kind of thing to a tune. You know what Warren did with Fireflies was really warm and kind of uplifting.
But then there are a couple of tunes, you know Red & Green, where it’s just kind of screaming organ, kind of just like bam! really like hammering the thing. Intermingled with the guitar parts, and that added, that was almost more like of a violent vibe. And then in Blindside, we always joked that the kind of bubble he’s playing in the one drop part of the tune, is really kind of happy uplifting, just kind of reggae 101. But then he drops into this super; we call it kind of like, the count Dracula solo. You know it’s right out of like count Dracula’s castle. Originally we were like do we keep that? Then the more we lived with the tune we liked it because it was so unique and it kind of added another dimension to the tune.
Bob Marley and the Whalers, the Funky Meters, the Allman Brothers Band, you know so much of the music I consider pretty sacred is pretty organ centric. I mean you know I love Phish tunes, the Grateful Dead.
Just to finish that thought, in the band one of the unique things about us is even though we’re kind of like a rootsy songwriter band, what ever you want to call it—Americana—whatever, we come from pretty different corners of the map in terms of music.
You know I grew up listening to Neil Young and Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel and um, a lot of Jim Croce, and Gordon Ledford, and you know, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder—you know songwriters—The Beatles. And then you know kind of got into more jammy bluesy stuff in college. But you know my band mates definitely. The drummer is huge into James Brown, The Police, a bunch of roots reggae stuff. I hadn’t dug into that too deeply until meeting Lee Copeland.
There’s a passage in one of your songs that sounds kind of like the Grateful Dead, you go into detail us about the role they play in your approach to making music ?
Jason: Yeah that little instrumental break—absolutely. Jerry’s just a master. Some documentary I saw one time about Jerry Garcia. Some reputable guitar player said you know the cool thing about Jerry Garcia, his tone; this is a really unique thing and I haven’t noticed with a lot of guitar players, is his tone is pretty much identical on an acoustic guitar vs. electric guitar. Not his tone necessarily but it’s something about the way. I mean if you hear some of his leads on the Grisman stuff, and then when you hear some of what he does with The Dead, it’s something about, I think, I think what he does, I would like to actually go watch some video, but he plucks the guitar pretty darn close to the bridge, and I think it’s got like kind of a pluck, planky plucking sound that you don’t get when you’re right over the sound hole. That was something that was interesting but you know there are definitely jam bands that I think that definitely are tipping their hat, maybe even a little too much to Jerry Garcia. Sometimes people can go kind of far with it, where I think, you know, to me after all definitely, probably the merging of, the vibe of the tune, the first time I brought it to the guys I think I referenced The Dead. Unlike any other band I ever heard they had an ability to play a slow tempo tune and just make it rock. You know Tennessee Jed and Ramble on Rose, you know.
TO be honest with you my biggest influence probably more so than either Garcia or trey, is JJ Cale. JJ Cale, I can raise my hand, and say I’ve copped many a JJ licks and I’ve studied his approach and honestly one of the things, I mean um, one of the things about this record, because, I promote it for sure as a live record. All of the chord takes—guitar bass drums keys—I did on the floor, everything was live. It’s much more of a live record than we’ve done in the past. One of the things I’ve always loved about JJ Kale, he was a little out of his time with the studio stuff. I just love the textures that he gets from two or three guitar tracks. If you look at After Midnight, or Crazy Mama, and there’s a song off of Trubador called Cherry, and if you listen to that song, you’ll realize it has this soupy simplicity to it. But if you really listen he’s doing like 5 different guitar things, and they’re like perfect tones and they’re perfectly mixed—everybody kind of lauded that guy for the soup. That was kind of what he was known for, kind of just that lush playing of soundscape.
Do you have anything in particular you’re looking forward to for this tour? What can your fans look forward to?
Jason:Well the Western leg of the tour, markets we’ve kind of hit up over the last decade or so, it’s worth going back and visiting some places that we love and also kind of breaking into some new spots. I mean we’ve definitely played Spokane and Mezzula and Whitefish before. But we’re breaking into Butte and Boseman this time.
And a lot of it is going where we have good radio support because when you’re a band from the East Coast and you’re touring out West I mean it’s tough to make it. Again, it’s tough if you’re a newer emerging band so working with radio stations is a way in to getting some attention. And all those markets happen to be places where we’ve had good luck with radio.
But it’s going to be cool to kind of, you know, we’re playing a new room in Butte, a new room in Boseman, we’re getting some sort of festival kind of thing in Seattle and then kind of a cool little roots room in Portland that we’ve haven’t played before. Then we’re heading onward to Los Angeles and San Diego. I think people can expect to hear a lot of tunes from the new record. We’ve been in situations before where we make a record and we’re only comfortable playing 5 out of the 10 tunes live, I mean last night up in Hollowell Maine, we just played the record from beginning to back and everything sounded pretty damn good. Beginning to end, it was nice we just kind of rolled right through; we hadn’t done it beginning to end like that. We never really sat down and played the whole thing. It felt really good. There’s a lot of variety so people can expect to hear stuff off that record. And you know we’re definitely psyched to go back to Jackson, Sunvalley, Montana, Idaho, I mean everywhere we’re going it’s all just spectacular scenery. It takes a lot of effort to get an East Coast band out there especially when you’re an emerging band. But once you’re there you just love it. We love touring the West.
Is there any album that you remember blew your mind that made you decide you wanted to play music?
There are two sides to that. I started in poetry and song writing so there’s definitely that side to it; I think some of that early Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel kind of stuff, but just in terms of as a 6 or 7 or 8 year old kid, putting in my Dad’s A tracks on his old stereo. I think you know one of the first times I kind of reckoned with the power of a song, you know the simple lines in a three and a half minute song could be so groundbreaking.
Paul Simon, I mean, you know major connections being made in my head as a kid, you know someone feels the way I kind of feel. And someone is painting an incredibly deep picture for me in the course of a three-minute song. And that’s what made me say I want to try this some time because it’s such a powerful art form. And from a performance standpoint I think Zeppelin would be up there I feel. Fully reckoning with Led Zeppelin really did it. Four guys in a room making sound, you know, it’s just so badass. And probably Neil Young as well—he was a culmination of everything for me because the lyrical stuff but kind of the raw, some of the raw stuff, his electric stuff. Definitely some Neil.
Very interesting interview, enjoyed it greatly.