Jesse Elliott, lead guitar/vocals
Welcome back to these United States. How was your time abroad in Europe? Any crazy stories you can share?
Mountains! Trains! Rooftops! Canals! They got all the same stuff we got over here, right, but it’s just so much older, ground down polished, the lure of the exotic. We can’t disclose all the streets we staggered down, not until we see you in person. It’s just not safe. It could fall into the wrong hands. We can’t let just anyone know what a weird and wonderful world this is – civilians might not be ready for it.
I was reading that you have played over 600 shows. Congrats on that feat. Are you planning anything special for when the show mark hits 1,000, or will it just be business as usual?
Yeah, it’s almost 800 now, I think, though I’ve been forgetting to count the last year or so. I used to love to count this, count anything really. It’s like climbing the world’s longest staircase, no end in sight, but it’s a spiral pointed at the heavens, so it’s worth the sweat. 1,000 will be about one one hundredth of the way up, as far as I can calculate. We won’t rest on that stair, not for more than one show.
What has had the biggest impact on you as a band over the years? Have there been any technological advances over your tenure that have made things easier or more difficult for you?
The gasoline-powered automobile was pretty huge for us. Electricity helped, too. We keep trying to make the leap to carefully labeled Excel documents, but there’s just not as much joie de vivre in it, you know?
Thanks to Ford and Edison. Have your roles/dynamics changed in the band over time? How do you get to the final product of a completed song?
Absolutely. All the time, slowly but surely, gradually then suddenly. I write the songs, in the beginning, but that’s been the only consistent part of the creative process. Tom, Robby, Colin, Justin, me, we all write and re-write each others’ ideas for each other. It gets messy. Sometimes it gets better by way of messy. Easier overall, for sure, just cause we’re knocking on the same zen door, over and over, and no one ever answers, which is the whole point of that door being there in the first place, but know we know that.
Has there ever been a time that you’ve considered going your separate ways?
We get to wander off from each other enough every night. Emotions run high. People look for different things in the late hours. None of us find them, not totally, and we slink back towards each other in the morning. Living in 3 different cities helps, too.
Taking that to the studio, how do you stay fresh with material and avoid getting stagnant for yourselves and your fans, yet stay true to your roots?
Are we doing that? Hm. Maybe we should establish that premise first. It’s very hard to see these things from the inside. Maybe we are the world’s most boring band, and everyone we know is too polite to tell us. We should call for an independent audit of this enterprise! Do you know any pollsters who would give us a family rate?
What do you listen to when you’re on the road? Favorite new album/band?
Because it’s required of us by the zeitgeist, we listened to the new Fleet Foxes album yesterday. Great stuff them bearded beauties are making. Raphael Saadiq blew me away the other day, too. Powerful, smile in that music as big as music. The classics. Our friends. Dylan bootlegs. Books on tape. There are one hundred million hours when you enter the van. There is nothing we haven’t listened to, as a result. The universe has not yet been able to create an amount of sound that is bigger than the amount of time we spend driving back and forth in a van.
What can you not live without when you’re touring?
Sound.
How much of your live show is planned out and what do you just let happen naturally?
Hmm. Tough to answer. It becomes instinctual, which is not exactly either of those, right? You just know. Partly training. Partly improvisation. You are the Karate Kid, or maybe just Zoot from the Muppets, just part of that immaculate flow.
Have you ever had an audience that just wasn’t into your music? What did you do to try to win them over?
Yes. We tried to buy them off. But we didn’t have money, either. So it didn’t work.
Any pre- or post-show rituals?
Usually just collective bloodletting and a round of beers. Or just a round of beers, if it was a long night of collective bloodletting the night before.
Favorite band to play with? Favorite festival experience? Band/artist you’d most like to play with in the future?
Oh, man, they’re all great. You can’t ask us to pick favorites. How will the other kids at the end of the kickball draft feel? Well, OK, since I’m thinking now of their festival they’re putting on same weekend as Wakarusa, we’ll go Fruit Bats, at the moment. Big old winery out in California – we’ll be soaring straight from mountains to orchards. And those bastards are some brilliant live music bastards, believe you me. I think we’re all excited to play with My Morning Jacket. Amazing people, amazing musicians, haven’t shared a stage with them yet.
Most exciting moment as a band? Do you remember what you were doing when you first heard one of your songs being played on the radio?
We were playing at a radio station when we first heard one of our songs make it to radio. I think they were probably contractually obligated or something. Lollapalooza last summer was a highlight, just cause it was a kinda old stomping grounds where a few of us grew up homecoming kinda thing. Pickathon was amazing, too. Does Wakarusa have a sister festival? That should be Wakarusa’s sister festival. Pickathon’s mind-bendingly amazing.
Biggest musical influences?
Parents.
Question you’d least like to answer? Worst interview you’ve had?
Let he who has been without bad questions cast the first dumb answer. Or whatever. We don’t kiss and tell, that’s the point. Especially if it was a bad kiss. That’s just embarrassing for everyone involved. And gets you kissed less in the future.
What’s next?
Festivals! All summer long! Hillside in Toronto – that’ll be a grand old time on Guelph Island. Lotsa new recording going on at Secret World Headquarters in Kentucky, too.
So, who is the calming presence of the band and who is the "Animal" like from the Muppets?
Justin and Tom both play that first role. Robby and I tag-team the second, though if you twisted my arm I would be forced to admit that he is more through-and-through animalistic.
If this band didn’t exist, what does everyone think they would be doing instead of rockin the heads of the masses?
Watching The Muppets. That is not a joke. Being rocked, in the receptive sense, would be a close second.
Local bacon, micro beers, friendly vegetables, homegrown strawberries, eggs from just out back in the yard – we had all these things and some even more devious ones just in the last 4 hours, right outside of Ithaca. We just keep pumping fuel into ourselves. We are like some big hideous consumption goblin, very top of the food chain, Maslow’s laundry list having been satisfied, moving on to something to give all that constant craving and chomping a little bit of meaning – just guilt, really – just good old-fashioned Puritan work ethic god-help-us-all kinda attitude, you know? We owe the world a lot, whoever’s in charge. We know what the score is – we’ve seen the ledger. These are dark times.
Speaking of energy, what kind of energy or mood was the group in when in the making of this album? Any songs have an extra story behind the lyrics?
Well, yeah, OK, following on that last one, dark. It’s about drowning and death and then other deaths. It was made during winter. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye. There were some tense moments. Happy families are all the same – dysfunctional ones, you know, they bleed it out together differently.
There seems to be a heavy amount of soul poured into this album. Any particular influences on this album? How was the production of this album different from the ones before it?
Death, yeah. More death. It’s a life-affirming kind of death. One of the songs that didn’t make it, that hopefully we’ll get back around to one of these days, this song says “My diamond mama taught me life / my stoic daddy taught me death / which is a way to life your last breath / without knowing it’s your last breath.” You just never know when, so you gotta live like you just never know when. Production-wise, we in the band all took a larger role, especially our guitarist Justin – he directed a lot more bits and pieces this time around, along with an outside guy Dan Wise who was the one with this big gorgeous studio in the middle of the snowy eastern Pennsylvania winter woods.
One of the things that keeps me listening to TUS is the way that the vocals tell a story and the instruments help collaborate with a different voice of their own. For the most part, what comes first: vocals or instrumentation?
Well, vocals first, but it’s very chicken and egg, one builds on another, it’s a virtuous cycle, back and forth round and round again in an ever-upward spiral – which of course sometimes comes crashing back down, but often ends up suspended somewhere in mid-air, right where we want it, spin it around, look at it from different sides. The vocals and the instruments do this for each other – they’re like two blinded piñatas, each with his own bat, taking swings at each other in a very dark room suspended somewhere above the earth.
I enjoyed the blend of constant background distortion with a smooth up front melody in One You Believe. Was that the plan the whole time, or a serendipitous studio situation?
Hmm. Yes?
There is a certain quality about 'Just This' that feels like a ballad, though its much shorter. The guitar solo is raw, yet controlled. For some guitarists, they can play the same solo again and again. Others play it once and it will never be the same after that. How would you all characterize your solo styles?
As far as solos go, we tend towards constant crafting and refinement towards a collective ideal, rather than a more improvisational take. That solo you point out is a perfect example, in the sense that it’s not a solo at all. It’s actually three different instruments – Tom’s pedal steel, Justin’s guitar, Colin’s bass – plus a healthy heap of noise, all intertwining and building melodically on each other, one at a time, a little more pointing towards classical music with repeating overlapping of motifs, really. Those are our favorite ones, the ones that Tom and Justin build together, back and forth – they are more controlled and premeditated piñatas with bats than, say, Robby and I. We like that complement.
These United States has two sets at Wakarusa this year, both on Thursday. The first set is 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm at the Revival Tent then back at 9:30 pm - 10:30 pm at the Backwoods Stage.
Official Wakarusa Site
Printed in Glide Magazine, 6/1/11
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