It's
not every band that’s still staking out new musical territory and embracing
fresh challenges more than 23 years into their career, but that’s the case with
Blues Traveler. Having long ago
graduated from the jam-band underground to mainstream stardom, the iconoclastic
combo has consistently stuck to its guns and played by its own rules.
For
their new release (and Verve Forecast debut) North Hollywood Shootout, the quintet ventured out of their
creative comfort zone to explore some adventurous new horizons. The resulting album is a landmark in Blues
Traveler's large and widely loved body of work, demonstrating the enduring
strengths of the band’s songwriting while capturing the spontaneous spirit of
their legendary live shows.
The
aforementioned body of work encompasses eight studio albums and four live
discs, six of them certified Gold or Platinum, with combined worldwide sales of
more than ten million units. The band's
best-known single, “Run-Around,” was the longest-charting radio single in Billboard history. Along the way, the band has played more than
2000 live shows in front of more than three million people.
"We’re
still trying to reconcile the different things we do, and cultivate what we're
individually good at into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts,”
notes frontman and harmonica-slinger John Popper. “When we're all playing and it's working, it
becomes this separate entity, and that's still the thing that we're chasing.”
North Hollywood
Shootout —
produced by Grammy-winner David Bianco, whose diverse resume includes work with
the likes of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Ozzy Osbourne, Mick Jagger and
Teenage Fanclub — makes a strong case for Blues Traveler’s timelessly vital
writing and performing abilities. Such
memorable tunes as the uplifting road-trip anthem “You, Me and Everything,” the
playfully romantic “Love Does” and the elegant, evocative “Orange in the Sun”
boast infectious melodic hooks while showcasing the interactive instrumental
chemistry that originally endeared the band to its rabidly devoted fan
base.
The
new material also makes a strong case for the introspective side that's always
been a key element of lyricist Popper’s persona. The heart-tugging lyrics of the opening track
“Forever Owed” were inspired by the singer's recent USO trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, while the poignant “Borrowed
Time” is a bittersweet meditation on mortality and transience, inspired both by
the recent passing of bandmates Chan and Tad Kinchla's father, and by Popper's
feelings for his beloved and aging dog.
The album’s biggest sonic curveball is its closing track, “Free Willis,
Ruminations from Behind Uncle Bob's Machine Shop.” The six-minute spoken-word sound collage
finds the band jamming over an insistent drumbeat, while actor Bruce Willis, a
longtime fan and friend, delivers a colorful freeform monologue/rant.
“Free
Willis” is a particularly aggressive embodiment of the creative risks that the
ever-restless quintet took in writing and recording North Hollywood Shootout.
Rather than fall back on established routines, the musicians challenged
themselves by adopting some new working methods.
As
guitarist Chan Kinchla explains, “On
the last few records, we concentrated so much on the craft of the songwriting
and arrangements that we started losing some of the live spontaneity that the
five of us created on stage. So on this
album, instead of doing the usual pre-production process, where we really
worked out the songs before taking them into the studio, we decided to go
straight into the studio and do the songwriting there. We recorded all the parts as we were working
them out, and then build the songs from there.
We'd find a cool little pocket and jam on it, or there'd be a drumbeat
or a guitar part that was really happening, and we'd take the best part of that
and use it as the foundation of the song.”
"That
was a completely new way of working for us,” Kinchla asserts, “but it was also
taking what we do live and bringing it into the studio. For a long time, we thought of the studio as
a completely different creative process than playing live, because we’ve never
had much luck in trying to incorporate the stuff we do live onto a record. But this time, all the live improvisation we
were doing in the studio inspired the songs.”
North Hollywood
Shootout
also found the band ceding more authority to Popper to create melodies to carry
his lyrics. “The main thing that we
wanted to emphasize on this record was melody, and I think that that aspect of
it turned out really well,” Popper states.
“The guys took a real risk in trusting me to run with that.”
Their
knack for evolving musically has been a hallmark of Blues Traveler's output
ever since the group's four founding members — John and Chan plus bassist Bobby
Sheehan and drummer Brendan Hill — began playing together as high school
friends in Princeton, New Jersey. The musicians
moved to New York City
after graduating, and Blues Traveler quickly earned a local reputation for its
high-energy, heavily improvisational live shows, with Popper's soulful singing
and flamboyant harp-blowing matched by Kinchla's inventive combustible guitar
work and the rhythm section's propulsive punch.
Their inspired performances placed Blues Traveler at the forefront of an
emerging movement of rootsy jam bands, a vibrant community that also produced
Phish and the Spin Doctors. Blues
Traveler soon took to the road and won a reputation as a tireless touring act,
winning a fan base up and down the East Coast before they’d even released an
album.
After
signing a deal with A&M Records, Blues Traveler released its self-titled
debut, including the hit track “But Anyway,” in the spring of 1990. The album won the group a national audience
that continued to grow with the following year's Travelers and Thieves and the live EP On Tour Forever, and 1993’s Save
His Soul. In 1992, Blues Traveler
founded the touring H.O.R.D.E. festival, which became an influential outlet for
bands associated with the jam scene.
1994's Four became a
quintuple-platinum breakthrough for Blues Traveler, spawning the Grammy-winning
smash single “Run-Around” and the followup hit “Hook.” The in-concert collection Live from the Fall arrived in 1996,
followed by the 1997 studio effort Straight
On Till Morning. The 1999 release of
Popper’s debut solo project Zygote
was followed that August by the shocking news of bassist Bobby Sheehan's sudden
death at the age of 31.
Blues
Traveler eventually bounced back from the loss of their comrade, regrouping as
a reenergized five-piece with the addition of Chan’s brother Tad Kinchla on
bass and Ben Wilson on
keyboards. The new lineup made its recording
debut with 2001’s Bridge, followed by
the live What You and I Have Been Through. The acclaimed studio album Truth Be Told arrived in 2003, followed
in 2004 by Live on the Rocks and its
companion DVD Thinnest of Air. 2005's Bastardos!,
produced by ex-Wilco member Jay Bennett, reasserted Blues Traveler’s
experimental edge. 2007 saw the release
of Cover Yourself, a set of acoustic
reworkings of Blues Traveler favorites.
Also in 2007, Popper stepped out again to tour and record with the John
Popper Project featuring DJ Logic, which also included Tad Kinchla on bass.
As
their history demonstrates and North
Hollywood Shootout confirms, Blues Traveler have consistently managed to
avoid stagnation and continue moving forward.
“It's unavoidable that if you're around long enough, you're gonna fall
into ruts,” Popper reflects, adding, “We've been in several over the years, but
you fight through that and you overcome it.
We were little kids when we started, and we approached this like little
kids, and I think we've held onto that.
We've made mistakes, but we've never allowed ourselves to do anything
that we'd be embarrassed about now.”
“I
think you have to be constantly reinventing things and discovering new aspects
of what you do in order to keep things fresh,” Kinchla adds. “This lineup, with Tad and Ben, has been
together for eight years, playing over 100 shows a year for eight years. We’ve spent a lot of time sorting out
everyone’s role and learning how to listen to each other and get out of each
other’s way. It's funny, but right now
the band is feeling a lot like it did in the early days, when we were just
playing for the sake of playing and we were hitting on all cylinders and the
communication was fresh and alive. The
shows have been really kicking, and the new songs have been going over
great."
“You
have to be smart enough to know that you don’t know what you’re doing, and so
you give it your best shot by trusting your instincts,”" Popper
concludes. “The great thing about
knowing that you don't know what you’re doing is that there’s more to
learn. And I think that as long as we
have more to learn as a band, we’ll be all right. What makes it work is honesty. As long as you mean it, you’ve got the
potential to come up with something really good.”
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