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The hope is to get everybody together and make something magical happen, and it requires audience, musicians and everybody to want engage in that. -Zach Gill |
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Photo by Casey Flanigan
Gill marvels at the dedication of the fans. "I'm blown away at some of the organization that some of these fans have. I think that it's really fun for the band and the audience when everybody participates. We've tried to keep an open policy for crowd participation in more ways than just like, 'I say hey, you say hey.' It makes me feel more comfortable onstage when I see other people getting crazy," comments Gill. "When you see a play - I think they call it the third wall - and the actor will come into the theater, will leave the stage and start having a conversation with the people watching the show - like in Ferris Bueller's Day Off - I love that and I think that's an element to the band we want. At times, I've thought how the name Animal Liberation Orchestra could be conceived, and sometimes I've thought that we're the animals and the audience is the orchestra. We're all just trying to make an event; music is just part of it. The hope is to get everybody together and make something magical happen, and it requires audience, musicians and everybody to want engage in that."
Steve Adams by Jonathan D. Nimerfroh |
Adams likens the relationship to a love affair. "We like to have people participate. It's like you meet someone, and sometimes the dialog is super easy and it flows, and it's continuous and they become your best friend. I think the dialogue with the SB Music Phreaks is kind of like that," says Adams. "They would directly ask to do things with us. Sometimes we would do things on our own that would speak to them. I think the dialog has been flowing in a real inspiring way I think, on both sides. When we fell in love with the Santa Barbara Music Phreaks, they fell in love with us."
Connecting with this web-savvy group of fans led to meeting other groups in San Francisco and other parts of the country. "This is part of the jam band culture," Lebowitz says. "People who love music, love a different show every time, love to talk about it, compare setlists and all that stuff. You kind of realize that there are pockets of communities all over the world."
Soon the band was playing to these pockets of fans, expanding its touring radius and playing every festival it could book, including a morning slot at High Sierra in 2003 featuring an onstage appearance by several SB Music Phreaks that cemented ALO as a High Sierra favorite.
With the band's extensive history in Santa Barbara, when the time came to record Roses & Clover (released May 1) it seemed natural to hunker down in a friend's barn in the hills above Santa Barbara.
"Our friend Jennifer Terran is a performing singer-songwriter who I used to play with, I'm actually on one of her albums. [She] has a ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara," Gill says. "She does a lot of house concerts and she built a barn on her property. Outside it looks like a barn but inside it's a music place. We kind of sweet talked her into letting us use it and moved in for a few weeks."
Gill says having the resources to properly record an album made it feel brand new. "It definitely feels like the first time we've been able to say, 'Let's make an album. Let's move into this barn and get in this vibe. How can we do that?' As opposed to in the past when it didn't seem like we had as many options. This was cool because it felt like this was the way we wanted to do it."
For Roses & Clover, the members of ALO shared much of the producing duties, though they did enlist the help of veteran producer Robert Carranza (Beck, Los Lobos, Ozomatli) and engineer Dave Simon-Baker (Eric Martin, The Mother Truckers), who's worked with ALO since 2005's Fly Between Falls. According to Gill, Carranza served as a guide for the band. "We'd be working for a few days and then he'd come in and make some suggestions or say, 'Hey, this is on the right track.' We put a lot of intention into the new album. I feel like we made the options happen for themselves. We had a little more of a clear idea on how we wanted to do things and we did what we could to make it happen," offers Gill.
Dan Lebowitz by Josh Miller |
Each member of ALO brought songs to the table for Roses & Clover and got down to the business of weeding through the 40+ demos. "We kind of do it differently each time," Gill says. "Because we all live in different places, initially we put them up on the Internet and let everyone hear them and pick the ones they feel pretty good about. There were some that we felt that we wanted to do, but once we got into a room together they didn't quite gel the way the other ones did."
Given the band's hectic touring schedule and geographic distance, the songwriting and demo process is surprisingly fluid. In a band where everyone sings and writes songs, a strong brotherhood is needed to decide things like what ends up on a record and who sings which tune.
"Generally the person who writes the song, sings it, but there was talk on this album about having other people sing things," Brogan says. "I think in the future we could get into it a lot more. That happens on the song 'Lady Loop,' which I wrote and Zach ended up singing."
For Gill, the songwriting is way of life. "A lot of what I write and sing is directed at myself as much as the audience. I need to write and sing to get myself to do certain things. I need to remind myself, and I do it subconsciously through my lyrics."
ALO |
Lebowitz relishes the chance to get in a room with his old friends to create new music. "Right now we're excited about sharing music with each other. If I bring a song into the fold and people want to work on it, we just go for it. We're also excited about collective writing. A couple [new] songs came from jams," says Lebowitz. "I try to not get attached to ideas in my head before we're recording because you can start hitting a wall. I like to think that we're four people coming together to turn this song into real life. Even if the core of it came from one person, the four of us are here to bring it to life. I think a lot of times that sense of discovery happens in the studio. A lot of the cool stuff is the stuff that happens all of a sudden. Someone lays [something] down on top that you didn't expect. It's so cool [when] someone opens a door. I try and keep the preconceived notions down. I feel like if I force that on the guys, then that's going to cancel out probably all this cool shit that might have come from the guys searching through the song to find their own parts."
"I think we have a good idea of what kind of tones we want to achieve with our instruments," Adams adds. "Like with my bass tone, I feel I got pretty close to what I was thinking, but you are always discovering something new with the process. With this record, I didn't hear it until it was halfway done but that was the great thing about it. There was so much exploring and discovery going on, a lot of surprises."
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