Garcia Peoples interview

Garcia Peoples jam. Bam. Period. And in the last handful of months, they’ve released two live albums and the behemoth One Step Behind. Be sure to check the links after the interview for many opportunities to support the artists during these pandemic times. You’ll support yourself, too, for if you’ve never listened to Garcia Peoples blast off, how dreary your quarantine must be.

Bassist Andy Cush kindly took the time to respond below.

1. Music’s power to immeasurably enhance our lives has never been more obvious during these pandemic times, so thank you for your very recent release (March 19, 2020) of a very recent show (March 10, 2020), Garcia Peoples @ Union Pool.

a. How are doing? How are you spending your time during the covid-19 restrictions?

We’re doing well. As well as anyone can be right now, anyway. We’re a little spread out while quarantining: Tom, Danny, and Cesar in Brooklyn, Pat upstate, Derek in Chicago, and me (Andy) on Long Island for the time being. I think all of us are keeping occupied by playing music in our solitary ways. I’m playing a lot of acoustic guitar and working on some songs. Tom and Danny are playing lots of guitar too if their Instagram stories are any indication. Derek mentioned on a band check-in call the other day that he’s working on recording some demos. It’s weird not knowing when we’ll be able to get together and play again, even just to jam in our practice space. I think we’re all grateful we were able to squeeze in that last Union Pool show right before things got really hairy.

b. When I first glanced at the Union Pool setlist, my favorite song titles were “D Jam,” “Dminor Jam,” and “Jam.” I know that might read as smartass, but it’s really not. I knew I would be in for some treats. Is there any better, sincerer way to title such wonderful exploratory tunes? Will these jams exist forever in the forms heard here, as records of this particular show, or will they reappear and evolve into something else?

Generally, when we title something as “jam” on a setlist, it’s because we truly don’t know what shape it’s going to take, other than the key we’ll be playing in. There are certain rhythmic ideas we might return to because we know they make a good launch pad, but the goal is to be open-ended, to reach toward territory we’ve never explored before. Every once in a while, an idea will arise in a jam that we’ll hold onto and develop into something a little more composed, but more often they just live in their spontaneous moments and that’s enough. And if a taper happens to catch them, great.

The sort of jamming we’re doing after “Feel So Great,” where we take a breath at the end of the proper song and ease into something slow and feedbacky with lots of negative space, is something that just happened for the first time fairly recently, without any advance discussion about it. We’ve busted it out on the fly a few times since then, when the feeling is right.

c. The Union Pool setlist also features some seemingly new songs, titled and all. What can you say about their lifespans so far—age? Plans for the future?

Those three songs will all be on the next record, out late summer or early fall from Beyond Beyond Is Beyond records. They’ve all been around a little while, but “Crown of Thought” is the only one we’ve been playing live with any regularity. (If you’ve seen us in the last 6 months or so, there’s a good chance you’ve heard that one.) If memory serves, we were playing both “Terry” and “Deep Sea Dog” in front of an audience for the second time that night. We can generally expect a pretty friendly, intimate crowd at Union Pool, which makes it an easy room to try out new stuff. We didn’t know at the time that we’d be releasing the recording! But I think the new ones sounded pretty good.

2. Another recent live release is the Nublu, NYC performance of your album One Step Behind. In the Bandcamp notes, you say you were “searching at [the] boundaries [of the song ‘One Step Behind’] for previously undiscovered zones.” So much of that search must be intuitive, but are there certain “paths” in the song that you know open to new territory? And in what ways do these paths announce themselves?

You are right that it’s a combination of established pathways and intuitive searching along those pathways. If you listened to every taper recording of that song on Archive.org—you’d have to have some time on your hands—you’d find that there are certain sections that arrive pretty reliably. But what happens within the broad outlines of those sections varies completely from show to show. Sometimes, we’ll try new things with it in a deliberate, thought-out way—what if Pat played flute in this part?—and sometimes, something cool will happen while we’re playing and it will evolve more intuitively from there.

At the Nublu show, we knew we were going to try to stretch it out for an especially long time, and a lot of the exploring, at least on my end, came from an impulse of: OK, if we’re going to be playing this section for twice as long, what are some variations we can introduce to keep it exciting, for us and for the audience? And some of those variations have since become part of the
extended vocabulary of the song, available to us whenever we need them.

<a href="http://garciapeoplesbbib.bandcamp.com/album/10-10-2019-nublu-nyc">10-10-2019 Nublu, NYC by Garcia Peoples</a>

3. When you released One Step Behind in physical form, the sticker on the packaging made sure to point out that, despite the two-song track list, it’s a full album. How important is that distinction, that it’s not an EP or a single? (I’ve listened to it numerous times, and I’m fully aware of its grandeur—hell, you could call it a double album if you wanted. This is more of a theoretical/semantic question.)

Speaking only for myself, I don’t really care what people call it, and I don’t think the music cares very much either.

4. For all the glory of the song “One Step Behind,” the only other track on the album, “Heart and Soul,” does just fine holding up its end of the deal, with its dreamy, organ-y jamminess. Could you talk about how it works as the song that must follow the massive “One Step Behind”?

The first time I heard that song was as a demo that Derek recorded on his own, and it was already beautiful: the sort of worn-out-but-still-hopeful ballad for the end of a long night that you hear on the record. What it didn’t yet have was that jammy instrumental middle section, which came when we went to Black Dirt Studio to record the album version. Jason Meagher, who runs the studio, is a great friend to us, and a wellspring of musical ideas. He’s had an important role in the story of this band so far. (If any readers would consider signing up for his Patreon to help keep the studio open in these troubled times, it would mean a lot to us.) At Black Dirt, we realized we had some more time to fill on a standard LP than the original form of “Heart and Soul” was going to take up, and Jason pushed us to find a way to expand it. The resulting music comes from some combination of our improvisational instincts and his guidance.

Now, it’s hard to imagine the song any other way, and we try to expand it even further when we play it live. The searching and yearning of that stormy middle passage seems to mirror some of the searching and yearning described in Derek’s lyrics, in a really satisfying holistic way.

<a href="http://garciapeoplesbbib.bandcamp.com/album/one-step-behind">One Step Behind by Garcia Peoples</a>

5. You posted something recently about working with Matt Sweeney.

a. Since your leaps between albums are surprising and seemingly limitless, can you say anything about new recordings?

One thing to make clear is that the recordings we made with Sweeney are distinctly different from the aforementioned next GP album, which we recorded with the great Jeff Ziegler at his Uniform Recording studio in Philly.

Truthfully, we’re not quite sure yet when or how we’ll be releasing the Sweeney material. I can tell you that the sessions were a joy to be a part of: everyone was contributing ideas, the music was flowing smoothly and easily, the sandwiches were delicious, the weather was unseasonably bright. Some of the music is big and structurally ambitious, some is more straightforwardly rockin’. All of it emphasizes the communal group dynamic. You’ll hear lots of voices in conversation with each other, weaving in and out, with no one sound taking up too much space for too long.

b. Mr. Sweeney seems to be (according to his musical output and available internet data) one of the coolest human beings on the planet. Can you confirm?

Yes, Matt is exactly as cool as you’d expect him to be. When he arrived at the studio on our first morning there, almost before saying hello, he pulled a bunch of books out of his bag and laid them on a table in the control room: these arcane small-press paperbacks that were once intended as practical manuals for various criminals and other people living at the edges of society—books about how to shake someone down for money, or how to falsify paperwork if you need to change your identity. He encouraged us to page through them, with the implication, I think, that doing so would charge the sessions with a certain elusive energy. It totally worked. There’s a toughness to the music, even in its quiet moments, and the themes of disappearing and flitting through the shadows seemed to permeate the lyrics. Also, he laid down an insanely good guitar solo to close one of the songs like it was nothing.