Piano rockers Jukebox the Ghost played with Wheat and The Motion Sick at the Middle East Downstairs last Saturday night. The Daily had a chance to sit down with Ben Thornewill (keyboards, vocals) and Jesse Kristin (drums) before the show to talk about their new album, musical influences and the Book of Revelations:
Josh Zeidel: Last year, you released "Let Live and Let Ghosts" (2008) which came off sounding remarkably polished for an indie debut album. And yet you recorded it in only eight days. Looking back on it, were there things you wish you could have done in the studio that you didn't have time to do?
Ben Thornewill: Absolutely. It's funny because the record did sound pretty good … recorded in eight [days] and mixed in five or six. There's lots we wish we had done, but it's hard to look back and say, "We should have done this or that," because we're so used to the recording. But we're working on a record now; we've got a lot more time for experimentation.
JZ: And how's that process coming along? What will the new album sound like?
BT: The process is going great, we are four weeks in and we have two weeks to go. We're working with a producer named Peter Katis, who's worked on Interpol, The National, the latest Mates of State [album] … We're in Tarquin Studios, which is a beautiful studio. It's going to sound awesome and classic and big and more mature than our first record. And we have no idea when it'll come out, probably sometime in the spring.
JZ: A lot of your songs seem preoccupied with the apocalypse, and sometimes reference hypothetical, direct dialogues with God. Do you consider yourselves to be religious or particularly inspired by faith, or is it more a philosophical preoccupation?
BT: None of us are religious people, but Tommy [Siegel, guitar and vocals] spent a lot of time reading the Book of Revelations.
Jesse Kristin: Yeah, I think he was mainly reacting to the imagery in it, he wasn't mocking it or criticizing it, but he also wasn't so much inspired by it, as really interested in it.
BT: It's a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the Book of Revelations, which, taken out of context, has some pretty ridiculous things in it. But no, I'd say none of us are particularly religious at all.
JZ: What are your musical backgrounds like? Have you received formal musical education, and how has that affected your sound?
BT: I'm the only one with real formal musical education; I went to [George Washington University] on a classical scholarship, studying jazz and classical composition. Tommy in high school had his own band, played jam-band-type stuff. Jesse was a drummer in punk bands, and I led him away from that dark, dark path.
JK: And how has that affected my drumming style? I think it's made me much better, actually, not having a formal education.
BT: Because you end up writing more creative parts … you know a studio drummer when you hear one. I mean, Berklee [School of Music], right, there's a bit of a Berklee sound that a lot of the musicians coming out of that school have. They're very technically proficient, but often you can sort of predict what they're going to play in a given situation.
JK: For example, Apollo Sunshine is a band we really like a lot, and you can sort of hear their formal music education in their playing style.
JZ: Speaking of bands you like, who are your biggest influences? And what music have you been listening to recently?
BT: I've been really influenced lately by Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman both as songwriters and performers. Jesse's been digging a lot of The Avett Brothers.
JK: Yeah, and Tommy's been into Deerhoof. We kinda fuse punk, jam bands and classical and jazz piano.
JZ: As an up-and-coming band on a smaller, independent label, do you ever feel shut out by the mainstream music industry? Or do you feel that it's advantageous not to be on a major label?
BT: In our position, it's been pretty advantageous not to be on a major label — we're not even on a label right now; we have distribution through a label, but for the most part we've done it all ourselves in a very new-music-industry way. We have management and a booking agent, but we don't have any big, figurehead organization. Hopefully this new record will be on a label, either major or indie, but it doesn't really make a huge difference these days. Back in the '70s that would have been a big deal, because the industry then was entirely major labels, but it actually doesn't matter for a band our size and with our aspirations if we're on a major label or not.
