Guster Ready For ‘Evermotion’

It’s been almost 25 years since singer/guitarist Ryan Miller, guitarist Adam Gardner and Rosenworcel formed the band while students at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Guster eventually grew into a quartet with the addition of Joe Pisapia, who left in 2010 and was replaced by multi-instrumentalist Luke Reynolds.

Now Guster finds itself just weeks away from the release of Evermotion, the band’s seventh studio album and the first since the release of 2010’s Easy Wonderful.  Produced by Richard Swift, the album was recorded in only three weeks – a new experience for Guster.  A joint release by Nettwerk Records and Guster’s own Ocho Mule label, Evermotion arrives Jan. 13.

A quarter-century after Rosenworcel took his bongos to college, he and his comrades might be a little older, maybe even a bit wiser, but everyone is still Guster to the core.

What can you tell us about the new album, Evermotion?

We seem to be on a cycle with the World Cup and midterm elections as far as album releases go.  We say we’re going to make an album and it will be a year or two between records and then it ends up being four, pretty much like clockwork.  But we had to wait until we had material that we were totally inspired by and we got the right guy to produce it.  We hammered out an album very unconventionally for us.  We made an album in three weeks whereas the last two took a year each. 

We got in there with this guy we trusted, Richard Swift, we did things his way, we believed in ourselves and we have this awesome, raw, psychedelic record that is surprising people.

Guster has worked with other producers and the band has produced its own albums.  What specifically attracted you to Swift?

We didn’t have a good experience with David Kahne, who produced half of the last record.  We had to take the record in-house, write a bunch of new songs and fix up the old ones.  We rescued that one with self-production.  So we weren’t thinking we were going to find a producer who was going to appeal to us more than doing it ourselves. 

We listened to this record by the band Foxygen and loved the production on it.  Then I started hearing this Damien Jurado record.  The last two Damien Jurado records, to me, sounded far and away better than what I knew of his previous material … and both were produced by Richard Swift. Our friend Eric [D. Johnson] from the band Fruit Bats was telling us, “Oh, man.  You got to get out here [to Oregon] and record with Richard Swift.”  So we were getting hit in all directions with this guy.

So we were into it and he was into it. It was a clash of cultures in a way and a perfect fit in other ways.  We went out to his home studio in Cottage Grove, Ore., and did it in three weeks in January.  That was almost a year ago, it’s hard to believe.

What does a producer bring to the table that makes a good fit with Guster?

We can get caught up in our own junk pretty easy and he didn’t let us.  He’s like the big picture guy who’s stepping away from the canvas, taking it all in and keeping us focused on the prize. Whereas we would stumble trying to perfect the tones of things or the performances, he was like, “No.  Keep those rough edges.  Just keep moving.  You’ve got the right vibe on this take.  You don’t need to re-record the vocal.”

What we have are full takes, things that aren’t overly thought out but … in a way sound musical.

It almost sounds as if you and your bandmates can get a little obsessive compulsive when in the studio.

[If it wasn’t for Richard] we would still be recording this album, today.  We did a good job with Joe [Pisapia] who is no longer a touring member of our band.  He took over some of the production in his home studio in Nashville when he was in the band on our last record, Easy Wonderful.  We did well, we worked together.  At this point we’re 20-something years in so we were actually a pretty functional family. So we can do OK, but Richard Swift, who is like a walking record collection and whose esthetic we wholly believed in, having him calling some big shots with us was really important.

Did you and the band learn something about yourselves by working with Swift that you might not have been aware of before?

Totally.  He pretty much was recording our band and throwing cool keyboard ideas at it and opening our minds.  He showed us that the raw version of us is good and doesn’t need to be perfected. There’s literally one drum mic hanging over the drum kit and one channel on the board that read “Drums.” You could push the drum fader up or you could pull it down (laughs). … I’ve been in records where there are 13 mics on the drum kit.  They’re mic’ing underneath the snare, they’re mic’ing every tom, there are four room mics, this and that, and the drums sound worse.  He pretty much knows how to do what he does and we just wanted him to do what he did.  So this is our Swift album.

When you finally had it down and could listen to all the tracks at once, what was your impression?

It always strikes me as so different because we’ve really undergone, in my mind, a substantial evolution from where we started. So every time we make a record, I’m struck by the fact that I’m so proud of it, I can’t wait to play this for my friends.  And then I’m like, “Our fans might hate this.”  If they’re tethered to the album that they first heard of Guster’s or if they’re tethered to any idea of what Guster should sound like, they’re going to be disappointed.  If they’re open and realize we’re an evolving organism, they’ll realize these are some of the deepest songs we’ve written with some of the most ambitious production we’ve ever done.  I think some people will get way into the album and some people will have to open their minds.

Do you think that’s common with a lot of long-lived bands and their relationships with their fans in that fans use that first record or concert as the band’s finest moment and they compare everything else to that initial experience?

Yes.  It’s absolutely true.  However, in our case, we’re getting better (laughs). … I think to myself “Why aren’t I jumping on the Wilco album the day it comes out, or Yo La Tengo album the day it comes out or the Spoon album the day it comes out?  These are the bands I was obsessed with.  Somewhere along the line, the songwriting didn’t bring me the way it did with the albums I started out on.  So I moved on to other stuff, new stuff, whatever else – Foxygen, Cass McCombs, Damien Jurado, you name it.  I think you have an emotional attachment to the album you got hooked on.  For [our fans] it was 1999’s Lost and Gone Forever produced by Steve Lillywhite where our instrumentation was a big hook, guitars, voices and percussion.  For a lot of people, hearing our evolution is like hearing Dylan on the electric guitar, or something like that.

And some bands will play to that concept.  The Rolling Stones, while performing a couple of songs from a new album, still fill the set with the band’s classic tunes that fans have loved through the years.

But then you hear a band like Radiohead where the new material is awesome.  Their fans are psyched to hear the new album.  I think it’s a matter of how hard you are working.  Not to say The Stones weren’t working hard on their last album, it’s just not going to compare with their older stuff. We have the benefit of our oldest stuff being regrettable college rock.  We could only get better. A lot of people would disagree and say our third album, Lost and Gone Forever, was our high point.  I’m definitely proud of those songs but I think we’ve added layers of depth to what we had then while still focusing on the song as the main thing.

During Guster’s first few years the band was considered somewhat of an underground indie band. With today’s social media outlets and musicians communicating directly with fans, is it even possible for a new band to have that kind of underground vibe you had then?

I don’t know. We were flying under the radar because the press was ignoring us and people were hearing about us through word of mouth.  We were kind of blossoming as the interest was blossoming. … I feel like a band, now, gets exposed pretty easily when they start having a following  We kind of spent 22 years under the radar, in my mind.  It’s been a long, steady relationship with us and our fans where we make good records and they continue to come out and see us.  Fans used to be college kids and now they’re 30 years old. … There are also … generations of Guster fans, people coming with their kids. I’m super-proud of that.  I’m not a demographically specific artist.  I like that everyone can appreciate us.

Was it always percussion instruments for you?

I played trombone in junior high school.  So when we were making this album, there is a song called “Never Coming Down” where in the middle I had to re-do a bout of whistling.  It was pretty evident that what was to follow was some mariachi sloppy horns.  Adam [Gardner] plays junior high, maybe high school level trumpet.  But I hadn’t played in so long. But Richard Swift’s daughter, who is 13, plays trombone.  She refused to perform on the record but let me borrow the trombone.  The longest we have ever spent on any overdub is me playing 10 notes or whatever it was, but it sounds pretty awesome.

I brought my bongo drums to college, put them on my dorm-shelf and didn’t expect anything to come of it.  Then I met these guys and started jamming.  We became like a coffeehouse acoustic band and got good at writing songs. So one thing definitely led to another.

Do you feel you and your bandmates have a closer relationship today than when Guster started?

Yeah. We’ve matured in the sense that we know how to give each other space, how to communicate in a way where we pick our battles, where we’re kind of looking out for each other.  When I think back to some of the fights we had in our 20s and trying to make the album Ganging Up On The Sun, we were at each other’s throats.  It came from passion. … We may have been closer in the sense that we lived together in Somerville, Mass., in a house.  I remember … four years in a van just feeling mad at my lack of space.  It was a strange closeness. Now we know each other, appreciate each other.  But when it comes to songwriting, we all take it really seriously, still. We all get in there and put our dukes up when we believe in something.  We’re better communicators now and we’ve taken on these roles with the lyrics, the instruments and leaving melody as king, always, that’s kind of one of our rules.  We get along well.  We all have kids so we’ve all gone through the same thing, adjusting together.

Back in the day we toured nine months a year.  We’d just be going in circles and circles around this country.  Now it averages out to four months a year, if that.  So we all acclimated to our domestic lives together and found what works.

What is the creative process like for Guster?

We pretty much get into the room and sweat out a song together.  There are a couple Ryan [Miller] brought in that were mostly formed.  The last song, “Farewell,” is one he pretty much wrote.  And there have been a few where he showed up and was like, “That’s a song.”  The rest of them, we got in there and just started playing.  We find a progression or groove we like, we remember it, someone works on it or sometimes in just 45 minutes there is a song that comes from front to end and it’s like, “Holy shit.  We just wrote a song in under an hour.”

It’s weird.  Some of our best songs come that way.  It’s like, “Why don’t we do them all that way?”  But some of our best songs come from three months of banging our heads against the wall.  It’s like, “I love this verse so much but I can’t get the chorus.” And after three months you get the chorus and it’s like, “That was time well spent because now we have the song.”  We go through all different ways of writing but as long as we preserve melody as the main end, I think we’ll always have our identity.  We’re a pop band that writes pop songs.  If the songs stop being good, then I don’t know what exactly we’re offering.

When performing live, are there times when you are so into the moment that you feel as if you can do no wrong?

I generally feel like I’m on the verge of a train wreck when I’m on stage.  I’m not very relaxed.  I do an impression of myself playing on late-night TV when you only get one take and the cameras are on and you’re trying not to make a drummer face, but you do.  It’s not usually as easy and fluid as a laidback jazz musician for us.  I’m always thinking … “OK. Here comes the bridge.  With my left hand I’m going to have to start doing this, with my right hand I gotta do this.”  We’re trying to cover a lot of parts. There are a lot of changes in our songs.

But there are moments when I do feel a certain swagger.  These songs we went into Richard Swift’s studio with, we were like, “Jesus. We’re 14 deep right here.”  If we come out of the basement after a day and it’s like we just wrote two ideas that are better than anything we’ve done in our career.  We have to flush them out. 

I definitely feel like we’re still in the flow as a band, we’re still on some vector where we’re heading to our classic pop record.

You write the band’s Road Journal and you have this piece written by a fan who describes the album being played for people at Camp Guster about three months before the release. Did they hear the completed album or a demo of what it might sound like?

That was the mastered album and it was the [LP’s] first exposure to our fans.  That event was a slam dunk.  We didn’t know how it would go over but everyone had a good time and everyone told us they liked the album.

Having the album completed, yet it doesn’t come out for a few months – does that build up anxiety for wanting people to hear it?

Yeah. It’s really annoying.  We’ve been trickling out a track every month for four months.  I was telling our manager how much I can’t stand it.  I guess it was because we figured out which label we wanted to work with for an independent release at some point, like in early summer.  At that point it was “We could rush it out for October but then we’re competing with blah, blah blah.” So they’d rather just put it out in the new year.  If you’re going to wait for four years, you might as well wait four years and four months.  It’s super-annoying sitting on an album for year. We could have made a whole other album in that year.  Instead, we just changed diapers.  Or I did.

How involved are you and your bandmates with the business of Guster?

We try not to get too entangled.  Ultimately it’s like, “How much can we afford to pay our sound guy?”  We all have to chime in about where our bottom lines are.  We used to be way more involved because we’re a homespun band who managed ourselves for the first years, sent out our own merch in cereal boxes.  We kind of always had a nose for the business end.  In the early days we had Guster reps who would each sell 10 CDs to their friends [and] people credited us with the first street-team style development.  I don’t know if that’s true or not but it’s close to it.  We all have minds toward [business] but I don’t think anyone wants to leave their head in there because we have other places our heads should be.  We’re about to embark on a pretty substantial tour.  We’re going to have to learn how to play these songs, which old songs to play.  It’s going to be a lot.

Relearning old songs for an upcoming tour – does that happen a lot?

For us, it’s we can play the song twice and it’s like riding a bicycle, and it’s as good as it ever was. But with old material that you’re tired of, you need to reinvent it.  Sometimes you just need to sound better, tweak a thing here or there.  This one song, “Airport Song,” we’ve kind of re-done.  It’s like a disco version just to keep ourselves entertained because the years are just going by and the old college esthetic isn’t working with the current show.

If you could do it all over again, would you still call the band “Guster?”

Oh, God no.  We started out as “Gus.”  I don’t know why.  We were 18 [when we were] naming our band and didn’t expect it to have any ramifications.  But when we graduated from college we found out about two other bands named “Gus,” one of them had just signed to Geffen.  That dude, wherever he is now, is the reason we added “ter.”  That’s a terrible band name story.  I need to come up with a new one, but that’s the truth of it.

I think it’s a really lame band name.  But we’re stuck with it.

With the internet and the abilities to communicate with fans, do you think these years are more interesting times for bands than for groups that emerged and grew before the internet came along?

If you read the biographies of these individuals, my answer is no. My VH1 Behind The Music doesn’t compare to Keith Richards.

I think Beck once said something about he wasn’t so excited about breaking down the fourth wall, which we all do now because the internet is there to help us to relate. He was like, “You know, I think everyone should be shrouded in a little bit of mystique.”  I totally get that because I became a huge fan of Pavement and there wasn’t even a photo of Stephen Malkmus available anywhere.  I just had to imagine what this dude looked right.

Beck’s right, if it was, indeed, Beck who said that.  There’s truth to it.  But I also don’t think Guster is the type of band that will thrive on mystique.  I think we’re going to thrive on connecting [with fans].  It works for us.

You have three kids.  When they get older, if any of them said they wanted to be a musician just like you, what would you tell them?

I’d say, “Fantastic.  Can I play drums?”

Guster’s upcoming shows:

Dec. 9 – Portland, Ore., Roseland Theater (KINK FM Jingle Ball Jam with Billy Idol and Spanish Gold)
Jan. 17 – Denver, Colo., Ogden Theatre
Jan. 20 – Anaheim, Calif., House Of Blues
Jan. 21 – San Diego, Calif., House Of Blues
Jan. 22 – Las Vegas, Nev., House Of Blues
Jan. 23 – Salt Lake City, Utah, The Depot
Feb. 4 – Houston, Texas, House Of Blues
Feb. 5 – Austin, Texas, Stubb’s Bar-B-Q / Waller Creek Amph.
Feb. 6 – Dallas, Texas, House Of Blues
Feb. 7 – New Orleans, La., House Of Blues
Feb. 9 – Birmingham, Ala., Iron City
Feb. 11 – St. Louis, Mo., The Pageant
Feb. 12 – Nashville, Tenn., Cannery Ballroom
Feb. 13 – Atlanta, Ga., The Tabernacle
Feb. 14 – Lake Buena Vista, Fla., House Of Blues
March 5 – Paris, France, L’International (Free Concert)
March 6 – Brussels, Belgium, Witloof Bar
March 8 – Rotterdam, Netherlands Rotown
March 9 – Hamburg, Germany Prinzenbar Konzerte Disco
March 10 – Berlin, Germany, Privatclub
March 12 – Cologne, Germany, Blue Shell
March 13 – Frankfurt, Germany, Nachtleben
March 14 – Munich, Germany, Orangehouse
March 15 – Vienna, Austria, Chelsea Club
March 16 – Zurich, Switzerland, Kinski Club

Please visit Guster’s website, Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel for more information.