Interview | The Straight Dope On Dopapod
By Scott Bernstein Nov 19, 2014 • 9:00 am PST
Written By: Chad Berndtson
As much as the jam scene has changed over the last decade, at least one maxim holds true: if you can get people chatting, you can rely on word-of-mouth to heighten your profile.
That’s certainly true of Dopapod, among a handful of up-and-comers that affirms a younger jamband vanguard is forming as the scene’s titans grow into middle-aged veterans. They seem to be getting the right gigs –from festivals to opening slots to the “yeah, it’s time for them” headlining shows –but more importantly, working to capitalize on that renown: on the road all the time, putting their best songs forward, writing even better ones.
Dopapod’s new album, Never Odd or Even, arrived this month. It captures a good band right where it’s supposed to be by this time: aware of its strengths, surer in its execution, pushing some boundaries, embracing a more recent move toward singing and lyrics beyond the instrumentals on which they built their reputation. They still sound like a lot of things –you’re not wrong to reference Zappa or the Meters or acid jazz or prog –but more often, like themselves, not just a chops-heavy collection of “we can do this” and “we can do this” and “we can do this.”
JamBase spoke with guitarist/vocalist Rob Compa as the band –Compa, keyboardist/vocalist Eli Winderman, bassist Chuck Jones and drummer Scotty Zwang –came off a well-regarded set of shows opening for Umphrey’s McGee, and gears up for another stretch of East Coast shows culminating in New Year’s Eve in Massachusetts with fellow upstarts Twiddle.
JAMBASE: We started hearing about you years ago but it seems like in the past year to 18 months Dopapod has really hit its stride: bigger shows, more visibility. Does it feel that way to you guys?
ROB COMPA: Maybe, but that’s the kind of thing you can go a little crazy if you think about it too much. It’s like watching grass grow or water boil. I might not even be that aware of it because it’s happened so gradually. We just did a big tour opening for Umphrey’s, which was a dream come true for me, but most of the time apart from some cool opportunities you almost don’t even notice it happening when you’re playing one show to the next.
We do have experiences where we see a full room where not that long ago we’d be playing for five people in a little sports bar in Boston or something. But we just focus on moving forward, I actually deliberately don’t pay attention to that.
JAMBASE: Fair enough, but any particularly memorable nights over the past year?
RC: Oh yeah. This entire tour, almost every night has been really awesome. I think the shows with Umphrey’s were really cool, and as far as over the summer, Peach Fest was my highlight of the festival dates we did. That one really was awesome: we played for a really long time, the crowd was really into it, and there was a lot of reciprocal energy. But, man, I could think of a million memorable nights I feel like. It’s like when someone asks you what your top five albums are, and suddenly you go blank and can’t even remember what music you like.
JAMBASE: In the past year we’ve seen a move by Dopapod toward songs with more vocals and more lyrics. Why that shift?
RC: It’s not like we swore off instrumentals or anything, we just got a little bored writing the same formats of songs. We started writing lyrics in about 2012 and we just needed something different. You always have to find new ways to make it creative.
JAMBASE: Have you taken well to writing lyrics?
RC: It’s still a learning experience, definitely. You write as much as you can so that if you write maybe 15 finished songs, you can hope for 3 or 4 of them to be something you’re proud of, and maybe that’s even too high…maybe it’s just one of them. You’re putting in the hours and you have to be OK with a lot of things just not being good by your standards. I feel it’s exactly like that for me, but you have to be able to accept that and be willing to put in the time.
JAMBASE: Do all four of you guys write songs?
RC: Kind of. We all help in each other’s tunes. I think Eli is sort of the main writer; he definitely has the majority of percentage in writing credits, but a lot of what he writes will be a rough draft or a skeleton of a song that we can all work on. Eli is often the catalyst, but more often than not we all work on those ideas and the arrangements.
JAMBASE: Given that so much of your earlier songwriting was instrumentals, how often do you feel compelled to add lyrics and vocals now? Is that a difficult balance?
RC: I don’t think there have been any tunes written by us in the last two years where we didn’t say, maybe we put some lyrics on it. It didn’t always happen but we do suggest the idea, and then maybe someone will come up and say it works better as an instrumental and then majority rules [in the band] as we talk about it.
It’s almost like if you don’t put lyrics and vocals on it, you have an even greater obligation to make the music itself more up to snuff because you don’t have lyrical content to help carry the song. You put some more thought into the arrangements to make sure they’re interesting. A lot of the simplest songs in the world are so great because they have singable melodies, so I think you feel an obligation to make it a juicier melody –a really well-thought-out melody –if it’s instrumental.
It’s a funny thing for me to talk about writing music. I don’t consider myself much of a writer –I’m the guitar player in the band, that’s how I think of myself. Writing is still something I have to make myself sit down and do.
JAMBASE: Talk about the singing aspect. Are any of you trained or natural vocalists?
RC: I think that everyone sings when they’re alone, or in the shower, or stuck in traffic or whatever. But I actually did sing in high school musicals. I was in the barbershop quartet in The Music Man –I was the high tenor –and I was also the voice of the giant plant in Little Shop of Horrors. That was great; I got to sit on a beanbag chair with a microphone and read off a page, and everyone else had to memorize lines.
But before I considered myself a guitar player, I did sing songs and strum chords underneath them. You sing OK and you hear yourself OK, but then when you play in a loud rock band, you realize what a totally different ball game that is. You can’t hear yourself as easy, and you’ve got monitors, and you get on stage and you’re maybe in a room that’s boomy and you can’t hear anything. You don’t realize how out of tune you sing and then you do realize, all of a sudden, it’s like, “Man I gotta work on this!” It’s taken a long time. We’ve all made some big strides. No one is an amazing singer here, but we’re getting better.
JAMBASE: Is there any one song in particular on Never Odd Or Even that you’d say epitomizes what the band sounds like now? Where everything is represented?
RC: “FABA.” It has a little bit of everything we do in it, and it’s one of my favorite songs to play live, too. That’s a tune we’re all ready proud of. Every time it’s on the setlist it’s one we look forward to –a “yeah, that’ll show ‘em” kind of tune. That’s my choice right now but it could change tomorrow, or even 15 minutes from now.
JAMBASE: Given how much you’ve grown as a band and created a fanbase, how do you balance tending to the places where you know you can draw with the need to expand your audience and visit new cities?
RC: I think about that the same way I think about what you asked earlier about the gradual growth. We play show after show, we don’t worry much about where it is. I think it’s actually beneficial to think like that. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to go to a new town, find out there aren’t that many people there, and let morale drop and get frustrated. We have a lot of work to do as a band. But if you can play music and disconnect from that frustration a little bit, you’re doing your job really well.
All that matters for us is putting on a good show. You can hang up posters, and do interviews, and invite people via Facebook, and then people are going to show up or not. The only thing I have control over at a show is how much fun I have during that show and how well I play. We all play a little differently night to night, but if I can have a good time, I’m going to let myself have a good time. People see you having a good time, you’re putting on a good show, people will like it, and brings friends next time. I do believe that.
JAMBASE: I know ‘jamband’ is kind of a catch-all term these days but did you guys grow up in the scene? You all hooked up at Berklee but curious if you have that background.
RC: I did, definitely. I saw Umphrey’s for the first time in 2005, and I skipped my high school graduation to see Phish in 2004. Scotty was a big Disco Biscuits guy and Umphrey’s fan, all that stuff. Chuck, it’s funny, he kind of didn’t know a lot of that stuff existed until he met us. He grew up on the West Coast listening to Primus and punk and other things. Eli to some extent was into it, he would go to festivals.
I think we all have a grounding in it, but me personally, yes. This is the kind of music I always wanted to play.
JAMBASE: Now that those bands, Umphrey’s is a good example, are becoming the veterans on the scene and you and bands who might be considered your peers are playing to bigger crowds –you’re the ones on stage, you’re the ones headlining now too –do you see a rich scene like existed when you were first going to shows?
RC: I don’t know, really. When I was growing up I had to sneak into some shows because I wasn’t even 21 so it’s hard for me to assess what the scope of the scene was even back then. But from where I’m at now, I see some amazing bands coming up alongside us and they’re all great friends of ours. We’re fans of them. That’s amazing, when the other bands doing this are your friends, and that you’d also want to put on headphones and listen to what they’re doing. I definitely feel that way. There are some really good bands now.
JAMBASE: Do you expect to be this busy in 2015, playing hundreds of shows?
RC: We will be. There is definitely not going to be any shortage of shows for the next few years, I don’t think. We want to open up to the West Coast; we went out there really for the first time this year, actually, and it’s beautiful out there. It’s exciting to us to need to fly to shows based on shows we want to play.
But we also want to write a ton more music, and when you’re playing a lot of shows, you don’t really have much time to learn new songs. So over the next few years, we might scale back the shows just a little tiny bit for the sake of the catalog. We’re being patient: we want to write more music and also have a little bit more time at home, some day. And that’s about it.
Dopapod plays Ithaca, New York tomorrow night, New York City on November 21 and November 22 in Philadelphia before an East Coast tour picks up again in early December. The band’s New Year’s run concludes with Twiddle and others at the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then Dopapod will play Phish after-shows in Miami on January 2 and 3, featuring interlocking sets with The New Mastersounds.
JamBase | Never Odd Or Even
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