It's not every band that’s still staking out new musical territory and embracing fresh challenges more than 20 years into their career, but that’s the case with Blues Traveler. Having long ago graduated from the jam-band underground to mainstream stardom, the iconoclastic combo has consistently stuck to its guns and played by its own rules.
For their new release (and Verve Forecast debut) North Hollywood Shootout, the quintet ventured out of their creative comfort zone to explore some adventurous new horizons. The resulting album is a landmark in Blues Traveler's large and widely loved body of work, demonstrating the enduring strengths of the band’s songwriting while capturing the spontaneous spirit of their legendary live shows.
The aforementioned body of work encompasses eight studio albums and four live discs, six of them certified Gold or Platinum, with combined worldwide sales of more than ten million units. The band's best-known single, “Run-Around,” was the longest-charting radio single in Billboard history. Along the way, the band has played more than 2000 live shows in front of more than three million people.
"We’re still trying to reconcile the different things we do, and cultivate what we're individually good at into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts,” notes frontman and harmonica-slinger John Popper. “When we're all playing and it's working, it becomes this separate entity, and that's still the thing that we're chasing.”
North Hollywood Shootout — produced by Grammy-winner David Bianco, whose diverse resume includes work with the likes of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Ozzy Osbourne, Mick Jagger and Teenage Fanclub — makes a strong case for Blues Traveler’s timelessly vital writing and performing abilities. Such memorable tunes as the uplifting road-trip anthem “You, Me and Everything,” the playfully romantic “Love Does” and the elegant, evocative “Orange in the Sun” boast infectious melodic hooks while showcasing the interactive instrumental chemistry that originally endeared the band to its rabidly devoted fan base.
The new material also makes a strong case for the introspective side that's always been a key element of lyricist Popper’s persona. The heart-tugging lyrics of the opening track “Forever Owed” were inspired by the singer's recent USO trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, while the poignant “Borrowed Time” is a bittersweet meditation on mortality and transience, inspired both by the recent passing of bandmates Chan and Tad Kinchla's father, and by Popper's feelings for his beloved and aging dog. The album’s biggest sonic curveball is its closing track, “Free Willis, Ruminations from Behind Uncle Bob's Machine Shop.” The six-minute spoken-word sound collage finds the band jamming over an insistent drumbeat, while actor Bruce Willis, a longtime fan and friend, delivers a colorful freeform monologue/rant.
“Free Willis” is a particularly aggressive embodiment of the creative risks that the ever-restless quintet took in writing and recording North Hollywood Shootout. Rather than fall back on established routines, the musicians challenged themselves by adopting some new working methods.
As guitarist Chan Kinchla explains, “On the last few records, we concentrated so much on the craft of the songwriting and arrangements that we started losing some of the live spontaneity that the five of us created on stage. So on this album, instead of doing the usual pre-production process, where we really worked out the songs before taking them into the studio, we decided to go straight into the studio and do the songwriting there. We recorded all the parts as we were working them out, and then build the songs from there. We'd find a cool little pocket and jam on it, or there'd be a drumbeat or a guitar part that was really happening, and we'd take the best part of that and use it as the foundation of the song.”
"That was a completely new way of working for us,” Kinchla asserts, “but it was also taking what we do live and bringing it into the studio. For a long time, we thought of the studio as a completely different creative process than playing live, because we’ve never had much luck in trying to incorporate the stuff we do live onto a record. But this time, all the live improvisation we were doing in the studio inspired the songs.”
North Hollywood Shootout also found the band ceding more authority to Popper to create melodies to carry his lyrics. “The main thing that we wanted to emphasize on this record was melody, and I think that that aspect of it turned out really well,” Popper states. “The guys took a real risk in trusting me to run with that.”
