And luckily Asa from Electric Guest was in that room working on something else. So I stepped into this side room, and I just started playing that bass line. We were working on mixing “Live in the Moment” in one room at the studio, and I needed to take a break and give my ears a rest.
“Feel It Still” was not even a song we were working on that day. So what’s the story of “Feel It Still?” And how do you feel about it now? They were going in and recording a bunch of songs every six months. That’s all the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd were doing. You have a bag of tools, and you’re going to build a house. Did you think our job was that easy?” But he was looking at it from the angle of a carpenter. And he says, “Hey guys, what’s taking so long? Don’t you just pick up some instruments and go into a studio and record the songs?” And we looked at each other like, “What an a–hole. Zach and I are hanging out with my dad in Alaska, having a beer. We’re three years into this album, and we have 60 songs, ten versions of everything. It was a talk with my dad that actually brought us back down to earth. So it sounds like you needed to strip it back to the roots. That whole thing was just too much for me. It’s really hard to wrap it up if every day you’re getting up, and you have everything you’ve ever dreamed of. But it’s hard to finish a record when you’re living the rock star dream. We were out in Malibu recording at Shangri La, and we’re getting up every morning, drinking smoothies, living off the beach. That ultimately led me to throwing out the record. You don’t need the 1960s Gibson to make it happen. It’s not about having the state-of-the-art studio with the best gear. It looks like your mom’s garage or basement. One of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen was walking into the Beastie Boys studio in Brooklyn and seeing the gear: a mismatched drum set in a corner, guitars with broken strings. We went into the studio with two of the best producers in the world, Danger Mouse and Mike D from Beastie Boys. There was a three-year gap between your seventh album Evil Friends and this one. Let’s fast forward to this latest album, Woodstock. And that might be a part of our drive and our work ethic: we all come from working class backgrounds, and it’s all about hard work. I never thought I’d go to Europe, and definitely not Africa. Before doing this, I never pictured myself playing in New York City. When we started, we bought a mini van, a rice cooker and a five-pound bag of rice. It was realizing that you can play music for gas money, so you can travel and see the world. It was strange how the experience of seeing bands play for no money and no people made me want to play music. (Zach, Eric and I all grew up together.) I remember going to these shows for $3, punk bands playing for 20 people. I was coming down to visit Zach in Portland. It was actually hearing Oasis - “Champagne Supernova” on the radio on the way to hockey up in Denali - hearing a band who borrowed all these influences made me realize you could be a band today: just steal from the Beatles! Everything that I saw was just so - untouchable. The greatest music had already been written. I never played a lot growing up, because everything I listened to was so 60s era. So when did you first start getting into music? So everything that my dad brought with him was pre-1970, and all the records were from that era: the Beatles, Hendrix.
He came to Alaska straight after that, and lived off the land for three years. I think that’s where my love of music came from. The thing that I remember more than anything is, on our two hour drives to get groceries, we’d listen to Oldies Radio. We had to mush dogs to get out of the cabin to the edge of the road, where we parked the truck. When I was five years old we lived in a place called Icy Lake that was, literally, just a frozen lake. GOURLEY: I grew up moving around quite a bit.
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