Congrats on Empire Central. I finally watched a couple of music videos from the performances and recordings. I didn't even know it was that many people playing music together.
It's a lot, yeah.
You're lucky, because there's only one bass guitar, right?
Well, there's one electric bass, but at any moment one out of five people could be playing bass. There are key-bass players and baritone guitars. You never know where the sound is coming from!
How many musicians did you have playing on that?
There were 19, or 20 with Bernard Wright sitting in.
I know you've done a number of albums with an in-studio audience. Has that been a conscious thing to keep the performance aspect of the music happening?
Yeah. The heart of it is that the band is a live band. That's always been where the energy and magic has occurred, when we've been playing in front of people. We were doing the normal thing, going into the studio and making records. We did this for three albums; the first six years of the band was like that. At a certain point there was this thing of, "How can we represent the live experience in an album in a way that isn't a 'Live at…' record?" There's the whole thing of dealing with the sound of this massive PA. How do we mix it so that it sounds beautiful? It seemed the best of both worlds would be to make a studio album live and bring the audience into the studio rather than bringing the studio to the audience, which is what most live albums are. That's how we came up with this concept. I guess we first did it in 2009 with Tell Your Friends. We stuck with it and tried to make it better every time. We did it on Ground Up, We Like It Here, Sylva, and two Family Dinner records. At a certain point, we got to feeling like we couldn't do this every time. I believe strongly that when you change the process, you change the product. I also don't like this idea of finding something that works and doing it over and over again. It starts to feel more like McDonalds than David Bowie. I thought it would be good to change up the process. So, we did two studio records, but we did each one of those in a different way that was unconventional. Then we did Live at the Royal Albert Hall, which was a more traditional live record.
Right.
After six years of not using this format, we went back to it with Empire Central. It's coming back into our comfort zone, in a certain way. Then, of course, we did many things with this record that we've never done with any of these live in studio records. Every time it has to be different. That's what we try to do, even when we play live.
What were the main differences in the process for Empire Central?
Empire Central is like the live version of our last studio record, Immigrance, in a certain way. The idea behind Immigrance was that we were going to have everyone in the band playing live, but we'd never have more than one drummer playing at a time. On [the previous album], Culcha Vulcha, we had two drummers playing in unison at any given moment. On Immigrance, we had one drummer playing the verses, one drummer playing the choruses, and one drummer playing the solo section. That's what we did live on Empire Central. The drummers are switching on the downbeat of every section.
Holy shit.
Yeah. If we're making a studio album, there's the luxury of changing snares for the chorus, or changing bass drums, depending on what we want for each section. Of course, when we play live with a single drummer, we don't have that luxury. Rather than it being this super frivolous idea of, "Let's have everybody on every track," because we can, the idea is, "How do we use this to our advantage in a way that a producer would use it if they were making a studio record?"
Watching the videos, I didn't see sheet music. How were the arrangements done of who comes in on which sections, or who takes the lead?
We do it in rehearsal. There's no sheet music. Everybody learns everything by ear. The idea is that everybody learns the whole song. If we need to make changes, we can do it without someone having to say, "Give me ten minutes so I can learn this." We never have two people playing a Fender Rhodes sound at a time. It's always one person playing organ, one person playing Rhodes, one person playing a synth, and another person playing a melody. The truth is that sometimes we see these comments online about, "I don't understand why they're doing with 20 people what they could do with eight." The idea is that when you make a studio record, you layer. We're just doing the layering live. At any given moment, sometimes there are only four or five people playing. If you watch the footage, of course you're not going to see a lot of shots where people aren't playing, because we don't choose the shots where someone is standing there looking at another person playing! [laughs] The idea is that we use the musicians and instrumentation at our disposal in the ideal way. We don't do it to make everybody feel good, where everybody plays all the time. Also, we don't ignore people. We treat it as if we were doing a recording session, like, "How many keyboards would we have in this section? Okay, let's do that." That's the idea.
How did you choose to work at Deep Ellum Art Company [in Dallas, Texas]? That space looks awesome.
We recorded at an old electric factory in Holland for Sylva, in a church for Family Dinner 2, and in a theater for Family Dinner 1. We asked ourselves, "Who has a space that we can work in that is cool?" It's more about the people and their commitment to helping us realize the vision than it is about the space. They can have a beautiful space, and if the people who own it are uptight then we can't realize the vision. The Deep Ellum Art Company people were totally on the same team with us. They did anything that we needed to make it possible. It's an unconventional situation, and it requires unconventional requests. It was amazing.
Nic Hard was the engineer on this?
Yeah. Nic and I have probably done 40 records together, at least.
I'll ask him more questions about this, but that must have been a lot of inputs?
[laughs] I think it wasn't actually that crazy. We were somewhere between 90 and 120 tracks. Nic and I did a record [What Heat] with my other band, Bokanté, with Metropole Orkest, and we had 240 tracks. It was crazy on every song. It wasn't small, but it was manageable!
Did you mute parts that had been recorded live to help with the arrangement?
It happened more when we first started doing these records. Now, I think the band is a lot smarter about playing. We know when to play and not to play. We know when something will be useful. That's what I was trying to say about how helpful it was to have done two studio records in between the last live studio record and this record. Everybody in the band individually has grown as studio musicians. Now we're much more mature. We're older. We understand what works on a record and what doesn't work. In rare instances, I've muted parts. The idea is, obviously, that we never add anything. There are no overdubs. We only hear what was there, or less. I might have muted a certain keyboard double on a melody or a chord pad if I didn't feel it was working, but very rarely.
You did a number of nights, right?
Eight, yeah.
Were they the same set of the same songs?
