It's a bit surreal to hear moe. bassist Rob Derhak's laugh on the other end of the phone instead of from the audience. If you've spent any time seeing moe. play, you know it. In our candid conversation, there were plenty of laughs. Even as a self-proclaimed perfectionist, he doesn't take himself too seriously as we discussed all things moe.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LA LAs is the band's new record -- out now on Sugar Hill Records. It's a new direction for moe.: the first time they've worked with an outside record label in over a decade and they worked with producer John Travis. His experience working with artists like Kid Rock, Sugar Ray and Static-X, to name a few, would seem like an unlikely choice for moe., but according to Rob, that's the fresh perspective they needed on their songwriting.
We also got into it about improvisation, the crazy and funny things he sees from stage, and why he feels the band's performance at last year's All Good Music Festival was one of their best shows they've ever played. And, indirectly, I got a few parenting tips.
* * *
Mike McKinley: Good time to talk?
Rob Derhak: Sure. How's the weather up there -- get any snow?
We finally got a bunch. I'm actually hitting the mountain after we're done.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I said to Jim [moe.'s publicist], "If we could get this done early..."
Exactly. Speaking of snow, that's a bummer there's no snoe.down this year.
I know. We're all kind of bummed about it, but we just came to the conclusion that we couldn't handle it after Europe. So, we're going to put it off for a year. We love doing it. And my kids hate me because we're not doing it [laughter]. But, what are you going to do?
Well, you get to tour Europe instead. What's your take on playing in front of that audience -- is the experience a lot different?
We actually haven't done too much there, so it's going to kind of be a new thing. We did Amsterdam once before and the audience... it was for the "Cannabis Cup." So the audience was pretty much the same as the audience we play for here. About eighty percent of the crowd came over from the U.S. -- I probably recognized a quarter of them. And we did three shows in England once, and two of them were opening for Little Feat. It was pretty similar to American audiences there. Honestly, this is going to be a new thing for us -- we haven't hit it yet.
Congrats on the new record. This is a little bit of a departure from the way moe. has operated in the past -- you worked with a producer [John Travis], and Sugar Hill Records is putting it out.
Well, they're not a big, scary label. They're good, down-to-earth people there. So, we're pretty comfortable with them.
What was the decisions process like?
Umm... as much as it's great to have your own label and do it all yourself, there's a lot of extra responsibilities that come with it. It's a lot of work. And the man power required to do all that in an organization is just... it's hard to run a tour, run your own festivals and all of that, and still put 100% into a record label. And make that profitable and worthwhile. So, it got to be too much. Just even having storage [laughs], you know, just to the stock the things is a problem. After weighing our options, we had been talking about it for a while -- it wasn't like, "Oh, this next album, let's get a record deal." Every time for the past 5 or 6 years when we'd start to record we would think about it. And the fact that we were releasing live stuff, there's always some new thing happening. As it progressed, the responsibility became too much for us to deal with. We finally came to the conclusion with this record -- well the record didn't exist then -- that we wanted someone else to deal with all of that. That was one area that we wanted to back down on in terms of our musical output. We still have all the other stuff we do and we can focus more on that -- touring and all the other aspects of our musical career and make that work better instead of spreading ourselves too thin.
And these guys [Sugar Hill] are a great fit with us. To give you an example, if we were doing this with a major corporation, a huge corporation like we had done before [Sony], there would be hundreds of lawyers involved. It would have been a real painful process. We have a record coming out next week and we still haven't signed the contract. You know, we'll get it sorted out, but they're not killing us to get it done. We have to do it, but it's just not a huge pressure situation. When we get to it, we'll get to it. And they're fine with that.
Right. Their focus is actually getting the music out there.
Yeah, exactly.
What about having John Travis produce the record -- why did you choose him?
Anytime you bring a new element into our group, you have to feel things out. We decided, since we haven't used a producer in a while, to us anyway, that things were beginning to feel flat. And when I say flat, I mean that there started to become a process we'd use to make albums and to make our music. When you start getting used to something like that it almost becomes like a mindless task or like an assembly line or something [laughs]. We realized we didn't want to get into this... being in a rhythm is one thing, but if you're not really paying attention to what you're doing it becomes second nature. It doesn't necessarily bring out the best. So, we came to a conscious decision that we need somebody else to basically add to what we're doing, someone to say, "Hold on, you're just doing this because you always do it this way. Step back and think about what you're doing."