Jake Huffman Talks McLovins

Jam bands don’t blow up. It just doesn’t happen. The jam band world does not have its own massive amalgamation of blogs and publicists driving the machine full speed to help promote and elevate new and undiscovered talent. For jam bands , much to the chagrin of all involved, blowing up typically means about five years of thankless touring, playing triple digit shows per year (in front of soul-crushingly small crowds), self-financing your own recording projects, and living in a van that barely runs.

That is why the McLovins are among the fascinating stories in recent jam band folklore. They actually kind of blew up. Remember back to 2008, three kids from Connecticut ranging in age from 14 to 16 years old (Jake Huffman, Jason Ott and Jeff Howard) posted a series of videos of basement jams on ripping renditions of challenging tunes like Phish’s “You Enjoy Myself” and Eric Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover.” The internet exploded in response. The band initially drew attention from online forums and blogs like Phantasy Tour and Hidden Track, but before long the videos made it as far as Rolling Stone. Today, that original video of “You Enjoy Myself” has 245,000 views and the McLovins are essentially a household name for jam band fans.

Time flies. Since posting those videos, the band members have all finished college and have an average age of 22 years old. They no longer have to juggle music with education or any of the other commitments of being a kid – like curfews, homework and being underage in clubs. The format has changed somewhat over the past seven years as Jeff Howard left the band, and Atticus Kelly (keys) and Justin Berger (guitar) joined to fill his big shoes. In 2015, the McLovins are are full go for the band. Everyone in the band is in it for a career and despite the past flash of success, they are now on for the marathon and not just the sprint.

Last week the McLovins dropped their self-titled new album to ring in what appears to be the new sound of the band. The first thing you will notice is the vocals sound very solid. This record sounds nothing like a typical jam band album where the various instrumentalists effectively draw straws for who should sing. This instead is a notable vocal and lyrical improvement. Secondly, you can’t help noticing not a single song on the album reaches even four minutes long. The songs are stripped down and streamlined like an album should be. Finally, the sound of the band has changed in a significant way. You’ll hear a variety of styles here with the key feelings being relaxing soul, psychedelic pop, and even a bit of stripped down singer- songwriter vibe.

The McLovins 2015 are no longer the group of teenagers jamming away in the basement. They are a band that has solidified a sound of their own, developed a personality, and allowed themselves to grow up. Drummer Jake Huffman fills us in on the current state of the McLovin world.

Ryan Dembinsky: So we’ve come full circle here to some extent since the last time we spoke back on Hidden Track was in about 2010. That was quite a long time ago, so maybe to get started we could get up to speed on some of the changes that have occurred since then. I’ve followed along with the music, but I don’t think everyone out there really understands how things have evolved with the makeup of the band. Since Jeff [aka Axlovin] left the band, you since added two newer members and things have evolved quite a bit.

Jake Huffman: That’s true, really we are a completely different band from where we were then and there were a couple factors behind that. One is obviously that Jeff left the band, so that was changing from a three piece to a four piece and adding an additional instrument. It’s a totally different feeling where we are all able to sit back a little bit more and not play as much.

But also, we all started so young. I think when I did that first interview with you, I was probably 14 or 15 years old and just as a musician and really as a human, there is so much change in each year in those years. Those are really big years to grow, especially when you hit 18, 19 and 20. Those are some huge years in terms of the experiences that you have and molding you as a person and setting the track for the way your life is going to go. So, where we are now is miles and miles from where the band started. It’s different obviously because Jeff is gone and we have Atticus now.

I have known Atticus the keyboard player since high school around the time I knew Jeff and I have actually been playing music with him about the same amount of time. So, it’s been a few years now, but especially with Jason, we have really grown up and matured together. So, we are very much on the same page mentally and musically. Now it’s gotten to that point where we’ve realized we are all a bunch of songwriters stuck in a jam band’s body [laughs].

RD: So, not to dwell on this negatively, but I never actually knew why Jeff left. Do you mind just touching on that before we dig into the album and everything?

JH: There were a lot of reasons why it happened. We were getting to a point where we had to start going on tour and we had to start playing more. It’s one of those things where we had to choose: do we want to keep doing this and consume ourselves with this band? Jeff was so young, he’s actually two years younger than Jason and I, so he wanted to go to college and find out who he was and focus on more on school. Being in a touring band is really a lot to ask from a person. You really have to be into it 110 percent. When the band has to do something, you have to be willing to drop everything and that’s the mentality we were getting into as a band. We are all still really good friends and we still talk to him from time to time. It was a very amicable break up for sure.

RD: So, speaking more about the album – awesome job by the way – you said it best when you said “songwriters in a jam band body.” Even just looking right at the makeup of the tracks, nothing reaches even beyond four minutes long, which I imagine is totally intentional as a departure from the more shred-oriented early days. Is that about right in terms of how you wanted this to be portrayed?

JH: We decided that we were going to write these tunes, trim all the fat, and stay true to the bare bones of what the songs were supposed to be. A big thing was starting working with our producer, Bill Sherman, who is a Grammy and Tony-winning producer. He originally helped when we would send him demos. He would send back notes like, “Is this part necessary?” It wasn’t forceful, but he really got us thinking about the tunes. A lot of times with these songs, we write the tune, reorder it, scrap it, and then rewrite it until we got the perfect song. We waited until we had it exactly to the point where we would say this is exactly how it went in my head. We tried to take the jam band mentality of genre-spanning and we certainly didn’t want every song on the album to sound the same, but we wanted it to sound uniform. We knew we loved soul, we loved funk, we loved country, and we loved rock. A great jam band does that. Like Phish, they do it better than anybody. We wanted to make a really eclectic album that was really to the point.

RD: That segues to another question I had. Could you get into how the writing tends to work amongst you guys in terms of who contributes and how the pieces come together?

JH: It’s a very collaborative process and each one of us play an integral role on writing each tune. What happened with this album is someone would show up with the bones of a tune and would be like, “Hey, I have this idea for a verse and this idea for a chorus, but I don’t have a bridge.” So, we’d start with those basic ideas. Once we got to a point where we had the idea somewhat sussed out, we’d take out a big whiteboard and write down the form – whether or not we had the form totally finished. Then we’d try to play through it. After a couple times of playing it, we’d figure out what worked and what didn’t, and then we would demo it out.

Finally, we’d give our chops a break and demo it and listen to it that night. The next day, we would come to practice, decide what needed to change and demo it out again.

At that point, I would get a melody that worked, since I write the lyrics for the band, and then look through my notes and my diary and then work on the lyrics. Then we’d demo that out. A lot of times at that point, we would start from scratch and build it up again and a lot of times it would come out stronger. It was this really mad scientific process. There wasn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to it, but for whatever reason it worked. By the 12th tune on the album, the music just fell out of us. We had never worked like this before. On older albums, it was usually jamming around and saying, “Hey this kind of sounds like a tune,” and then we’d play 30 gigs and the tune would kind of form itself.

RD: This is really directed at you in particular as the vocals have come a really long way, especially on songs like “Regulars” or “Hold Up.” What have you done to solidify your approach to singing and what went on in the studio to strengthen the vocals?

JH: This is really where Bill came in handy. I hide behind the drums a lot, and I have historically thought of myself more as a drummer than a vocalist. With this album, we kind of flipped that around. I wanted to let my voice shine more and Bill was very firm about saying you need to think of yourself as a vocalist first and then a drummer. With that in mind going into this album, it freed me up to take more chances, and sing more vulnerably. I’m super proud of it. At the end of the day, I got to say what I’ve always wanted to say. Lyrically, I write from the heart. There is some fairy dust on some of the stories for sure, but for the most part the feelings and emotions are everything I’ve been through. It was nice not having to worry about being the drummer. It was nice dividing those into two different roles in the studio.

RD: You touched on the soul element a little already, but that was something that stood out to me was hearing the low end with you and Jason holding it down, and then the guitar and keys have like a Steely Dan, Chicago – even Michael Jackson kind of vibe to it. Are those in the right ballpark of what you were trying to get at on some of the more soulful stuff like “P.T.” or “H.T.L.?”

JH: Yeah, it really is. You know, Steely Dan is one of the biggest influences of our guitar player Justin, as well as for Atticus and Jason. They listen to Steely Dan nonstop. It’s always on in the van.

Atticus also just loves soul music. He and I used to play a lot of bebop and jazz in high school. He just loves older music. He’s brought a lot of this old soul thing to the band. He’ll be like, “Hey you should try something more like Bernard Purdie,” or he would tell Justin how to make his guitar parts sound older. Some of it just comes out of us because we listen to soul music more than we do anything else. I’m so glad you noticed that, because, like you said it shows.

RD: Broadly, what are your favorite couple of tunes in terms of the way things came out as end results in the studio?

JH: “Regulars” is definitely one of mine. I have a really close place in my heart. That tune is about how I moved to New York City recently with my girlfriend and I started bartending at a bar and she started bartending and we had all these crazy experiences. One day, I just kind of wrote out the tune and it really felt like a very real emotion that I had, and it turned out exactly how that emotion felt. It’s definitely the track I play the most.

There is an amazing bar on the Lower East Side called The Edge bar, and a lot of that song is about that bar. My girlfriend works there and I’m a “regular.”

Also, “Sick Of It” is one that I just love listening to. That is my favorite one to play live. It has this energy to it that I always feel we get the biggest reaction to. Immediately, people start nodding their heads.

RD: Going back to the original interview we did back on Hidden Track, I reread that today and got a big laugh when I saw “PT Reprise” on this album after we had talked a lot about PT last time around. Are you still pro-PT in general?

JH: Honestly, I haven’t been on it much in recent years, but what happened is we started playing “Purple Trees” again a year ago. We did kind of a reboot of it, and this was the jam that was always coming in the middle of the song. If you saw a show in the past year or so with “Purple Trees,” this was the jam. It was such a sick jam we had to put it on the record. That website really is such a part of the band’s history though, so it remains a tongue-in-cheek joke for us.

RD: What are some of the covers do you guys like doing these days?

JH: We just did “West L.A. Fadeaway” for the 50th anniversary thing that you guys at JamBase put out [], so we’ve still been playing that one. We play Uncle Cracker’s version of the Dobie Gray song, “Drift Away,” you know “Give me the beat boy to free my soul”? We got a big kick out of doing that recently [laughs]. That’s so fun to play. We also play songs like “Dancing in the Moonlight”. We try to keep 95 percent of our shows to originals and then have fun with the covers. Usually we’ll hear something in the car and say, “We have to do this tonight!”

RD: Finally, I’ve kind of made my own assessments and inferences here about the album, but from your perspective is there a theme or a narrative you hope people get out of the record?

JH: You know, normally I don’t like to tell people what to think about the lyrics but there are a bunch of emotions crushed into this album. What I think and I want people to take away from this is it’s a new direction. We were not afraid to try something new. There is a lot of excitement in the tracks and it’s so new. I finally feel like we have found our sound. We were kind of swimming in some nebulous spacey thing for a while and we didn’t really know what we wanted to be. We were kind of singers, kind of songwriters, and kind of a jam band. I see this album as us finally settling into who we are.