Greg Lisher: From Camper Van to Circuitry Man
After decades of making alternative rock with Camper Van Beethoven and Monks of Doom, Greg Lisher took piano lessons, learned synthesis, and created 'Underwater Detection Method,’ an album that merges human performance with digital precision.
Today, the Spotlight shines On Greg Lisher, a guitarist best known for alternative rock who has leaned hard into electronic music.
Greg made his name playing with Camper Van Beethoven and Monks of Doom, but during the pandemic, he sat down at a keyboard and started exploring new sonic territory.
The result is Underwater Detection Method, a collection of instrumental pieces that blend synthesizers with live strings and drums. It's an album that started as digital sketches and grew into something much more organic as Greg learned to play piano and brought other musicians into the mix.
Greg's here to share how stepping outside his comfort zone led to some of his most adventurous music.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Greg Lisher's album Underwater Detection Method)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase Greg Lisher's Underwater Detection Method from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Follow Greg Lisher on Facebook and Bluesky
• Camper Van Beethoven
• Monks of Doom live at Moe's Alley - "Riverbed"
• Bruce Kaphan | pedal steel guitar
• Greg Lisher - "Zen and the Art of Long Distance Driving" (Official Video)
• Santa Cruz Guitarist Greg Lisher Changes Keys
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I was trying to think of other artists who have mastered one form and then began again in another style or form.
Greg Lisher: Yes.
Lawrence: I was thinking about David Lynch. He's gone from film and visual art to music.
Greg: Yeah, yes.
Lawrence: Joni Mitchell is a good one, guitar and painting. What's your experience been like? Is it exhilarating? Is it a new form of expression? What's it like to have such proficiency and identification with one area within music and then take the leap on these last two records into something quite new?
Greg: That's a really good question. I look at my solo records as an opportunity to do things that I can't do in my other bands. I did my first two solo records as singer-songwriter based works. After the second one, I thought maybe it was time to try something different, put the vocals aside, and just focus on the music.
When I was doing the singer-songwriter thing, I was singing and playing, singing a melody, playing a chord progression. If you took my singing out and the melody out, the music didn't feel complete. I wanted more from the music side of things. That's when I did my last solo record, Songs from the Imperial Garden. I decided to really just do an experiment, put the singer-songwriting thing aside, and try an instrumental record, moving in a totally different direction.
The majority of that record came from demos I'd been working on for years. I had a bunch of four-track demos, and I met up with David Immerglück, the other guitar player in one of my bands, the Monks of Doom. He's in the Counting Crows now. He's kind of like my musical confidant. I told him what I was interested in doing, gave him all the songs, and he was really interested in producing the record.
We started that one in 2010 and were finishing it up in 2012. As we were finishing that up, but before I was able to get it out, I got this new software that gave me access to synthesizers and electronic tools. I felt like it was another opportunity for me to keep learning, and I just couldn't stop myself. I wanted to keep going, keep learning how all this stuff worked, just try to keep focusing on moving forward and learning as much as I could.
Then there was the pandemic and other things that provided opportunities for me to focus more on my own musical creativity and learning as a musician. I figured with all this downtime, now was the time to do this. Because if one of my bands, if Camper starts up again and we start playing shows and touring, then the opportunities for me to do my own thing diminish. You have to schedule more and plan more.
Lawrence: When you talk about the learning process, is there a lot of experimentation in that, both with the tools themselves as well as the compositions?
Greg: Oh yeah, absolutely. I've always been able to fool around and come up with a piano part or idea for one of my songs, but I didn't know how to play keyboards. I didn't know anything about synthesizers. I had skills in programming drum machines because I used to do that a long time ago when I was doing these four-track demos for my singer-songwriter stuff.
I was always good at putting stuff together. This was like a whole new world. So all of a sudden, I'm making a keyboard-based record with synthesizers, and I don't know how to play keyboards and I don't know how to program synthesizers.
Lawrence: Kind of punk rock! (laughter)
Greg: Yeah, I figured it was like a cliff that I felt I wanted to dive off of. You get kind of punk rock in a third way, I guess. I did it because I wanted to understand how to do things in this realm of making music. I thought, now's my opportunity, let's dig in.
When I was creating these songs, there were no demos because everything started from scratch. I never knew where anything was going to go. The whole thing started by scrolling through different preset sounds and finding ones that I was attracted to. Those sounds made me play a certain way, made me write a certain way. They just drove my mind in whatever direction that would be.
Then I was programming drum patterns and coming up with bass lines and melodies and chord progressions and just started putting things together. I purchased a book on how to use Reason and went through it from top to bottom. It has exercises that are examples of how to use things to get you going. I was using these exercises to get myself started, and as I did, I started coming up with my own ideas. It's kind of a weird way of working.
As I started putting the songs together, working with these sounds, coming up with these ideas, putting these sections that would get arranged into songs, I started learning how to use the software. I started learning how to program synthesizers. And I started learning how to play keyboards. At a certain point in the process, I thought it would probably be a good idea for me to take some piano lessons. So I did. I got a piano teacher and started taking piano lessons.
It was a real growth explosion for me.
Lawrence: As someone who has played guitar for so long, what was that experience? Was it revelatory? What did the piano itself reveal to you?
Greg: It just helped me get a better understanding of keyboards and using keyboards as a tool for songwriting. That's what it really revealed. The funny thing is, I started taking piano lessons, but I don't think I've ever written a song on the piano. I usually just use that knowledge so I could apply it to when I was working with all these software synthesizers. It really helped.
When I first started this record, because I couldn't play keyboards, I was working within the MIDI sequencer. I was drawing out a lot of notes and doing a lot of cutting and pasting to put arrangements together. I'd never really worked that way before. I'd used Pro Tools before and knew I could edit things and create arrangements, but because I didn't have a lot of skills on the keyboards, it was very visual and I was really writing stuff out. There was such a big visual aspect to everything I was doing. The funny thing is, as the record continued and I started taking lessons and being able to play, before we mixed the record, I went back and ended up playing everything by hand.
Lawrence: Oh, interesting.
Greg: It just kind of redid everything. It's like going to school.
Lawrence: So really the original sequencer recordings in their own way served as demos.
Greg: Yes, I hadn't thought of that, but yes, exactly. (laughter) So I guess I just went back and kind of refined stuff.
Lawrence: There's something so fascinating about the idea of, especially with the synthesizers married to the sequencer, being able to play things that you wouldn't be able to play or being able to create music that you wouldn't be able to play. I can't articulate it, but there's a profundity in that.
Greg: Yes, yes. The sequencers provide that cool tool to be able to create a lot of stuff that's exactly what you're talking about.
Lawrence: If you didn't take the piano lessons and you went back and listened to the sequencer versions of the tracks, would you have released those?
Greg: Yeah, they weren't bad. It ended up not being super far off from what I had originally, but when you're drawing MIDI notes, I noticed I would draw chords right up to the next chord. When I went back to play it for real, there would be this space from the time it took me to pick up my hand to get to the next chord.
When I started playing everything, that's what really changed. All of a sudden, there started being all this air and space. When you lay your fingers down on a chord, not every finger comes down exactly at the same time as the other fingers. When I started, everything was very quantized and rigid and square, everything's square and almost computer-like to the grid. By the time I was able to get back into it, I knew what the music already sounded like. I just wanted it to sound human and not just constructed in a computer.
Lawrence: It's really interesting, the idea of where humanity meets technology. Not to necessarily over-philosophize about it, but it's a conversation that I've had here with other artists specifically regarding the early years of synthesizer music, or what we might identify from the mid-seventies to mid-eighties.
Greg: Yeah.
Lawrence: Before everything went really digital and completely MIDI controlled.
Greg: Sure.
Lawrence: The reason we go back to a lot of that music or that it resonates still is that analog aspect of it and the fact that you still had to play the synthesizers as opposed to them being totally programmed. The more people like you that I talk to and I hear these stories of wanting to bring the humanity into the technology-driven music, that thesis resonates more and more for me that those two together are really where the secret sauce lies.
Greg: Yeah, I'm with you. Software is great for being able to mock things up. I can mock up a drum kit and get an idea of how I would want a real drummer to play on the song, or what I would imagine the drums doing on the recording. Or if I wanted to create a string part or something, I could use string samples to mock that up. There's so much of it that's kind of a means to an end in a certain way, because I start by mocking things up, but then what I end up doing is getting real musicians to replace whatever I programmed on the drums, most of the time.
But I still like drum machine, and I still like combining the two elements of real drums and drum machine. I would never get a real drummer to play like a drum machine, and I would never use a drum machine to sound like a real drummer.
Lawrence: It's its own instrument. It's its own sound.
Greg: It's its own instrument. They all have their own strengths. The same thing with the string arrangements—I was able to get this guy down in Southern California to take the arrangements I came up with using these string samples, and he played all the parts himself with viola, cello, and violin.
At the end of the day, the only thing that was left on the recordings really was the software synthesizers. Then I added guitar. Originally, I just wanted to keep it all just software, completely, but as I went on and I started learning and interfacing with other people, they started saying, "Hey, what about doing this?" And I thought, "I hadn't thought of that."
We started adding some drums on the record, and then immediately I thought I should add real bass to this and double all the bass synth lines with real bass because that's just going to make it warmer and fatter. As we started doing all this stuff, the record started blooming. Originally, I didn't really want to play guitar, but one of my friends who's kind of a mentor to me and is a producer-engineer said, "Man, why sell yourself short? You could benefit from adding yourself as a player into this."
Lawrence: Oh, really?
Greg: And so, that's what happened. This mentor that I'm talking about, his name is Bruce Kaphan. He's a really great pedal steel player. He plays many instruments. He's known for pedal steel. He's a producer. He mixes. He has a studio that's about just an hour away from me. I went to him and said, I've got this idea, I'm doing this project, and I really want to learn how to mix, because that was something else I really wanted to do. He had a lot of experience; he's done a lot of film soundtracks and scores, and he knew MIDI. He said, "I think I know what you want to do, I've got a lot of experience with the stuff that I think you want to learn, and I'd love to help you." So, that was another part of this whole thing, working with him.
Lawrence: I'm curious, to revisit something you said earlier in the conversation. You mentioned your first two solo albums being more in the singer-songwriter vein, and I'm really curious how working without lyrics allows you to express meaning and intent. How do you think about narrative, or how do you think about meaning in the absence of lyrics?
Greg: That was one of the reasons why I wanted to try making instrumental music, because I knew that there was a challenge sitting there for me. Coming up with song titles is really hard because there's no lyrical content. Sometimes I have to use my imagination. It's like looking at a painting in a museum and thinking, "What does this make you think of?"
I feel like you spend a lot of time trying to make sure you're keeping the listener interested in what's going on. So you have to constantly work really hard to keep changing things and keep things interesting. When you take the lyrics and vocals out of a song, it automatically gets filled up with something else.
Even when making this kind of electronic music, my roots still lie in traditional music. On this record, there are still chord progressions, melodies, drum patterns, bass lines. It's not just soundscapes or anything like that. I'm trying to kind of merge everything because I'm a really big fan of some artists that make records that are much more abstract than what I do. I don't see that as being exactly what I do. I'm interested in it, but...
Lawrence: Slightly less nihilistic, I would say. (laughter)
Greg: Yeah. In some ways, I was kind of curious when this record came out, because for the people that know me for what I do, whether it's playing guitar in Camper Van Beethoven, or the Monks of Doom, or doing all this other stuff—I was thinking, "Oh these people, I'm kind of curious how they're going to react to it or what they're going to think," because I was thinking they probably don't know a lot of the music that I'm into or that I was listening to when I made this.
Some people were like, "Oh yeah, like Tangerine Dream." Or then someone else was like, "Oh, this is Greg Lisher's Kid A," referring to the Radiohead record. I hadn't seen that one coming, but that makes total sense.
Lawrence: Yeah, your reference points.
Greg: Yes, and it's funny too because synthesizers, especially in the seventies, have a role in rock music and they have a role in prog music. I feel like my other band, the Monks of Doom, we were touching off on a lot of prog. There were a lot of prog influences, not necessarily from me, but some of the other members of the band. But I feel like when I did this record, those prog influences came into this.
Lawrence: Guy takes a few piano lessons and now he's Keith Emerson. (laughter)
Greg: I know, right? I would never be able to do anything like that.
Lawrence: That's fun though.
Greg: Yeah, and it's like, I love dub and British art rock. I feel like I was trying to grab elements from all these different genres and see what I would end up making, not knowing what I was doing and just trying to create my own messed-up version of this music, and that's what I did.
Lawrence: You're adding to the canon, you're adding to the lineage.
Greg: Exactly.
Lawrence: I'm so curious about the role of song titles in instrumental music, and you talked a little bit about how you approach them and how you arrive at them. Do you ever start with a notebook with a list of potential titles, or does a title ever come up to you while you're working on a song? It's just a peculiarity of mine that I find it so interesting.
Greg: I have a list in the notes app on my phone that I've been running for years, and I've got three hundred song titles that I just come up with in my head. I'm walking around and come up with it, thinking, "Oh, that's a good idea." That happens a lot. Then other times, none of those titles will fit. I have to come up with something else. Some of this music may make me feel a certain way, remind me of something I've done, or if I can't draw from personal experiences, then I just have to use my imagination and see what I come up with.
Lawrence: On Songs from the Imperial Garden, I feel as though, whether or not it's an explicit concept, there are some motifs that conjure Eastern music and Chinese or Japanese sounds and melody. I'm curious about this record, again, noting some of the song titles. There's this feeling of space and time or distance and movement. Am I onto a concept there? Was this in your mind, or is this just retrofitting?
Greg: I didn't have a concept. It's funny that "The Illusion of Depth"—I was in an art supply store and I was looking through some book on how to draw, and they had this chapter called "The Illusion of Depth" where you're using shadows. I said, that's a great song title. So I pulled out my phone and threw that in my notes. "Finding the Future" was one of those songs where I just had to close my eyes and let the music speak to me and inform my imagination to come up with an idea.
Lawrence: Do you present this music live?
Greg: I would love to, but right now I don't really have a way to do it. I don't have a band to do it. So right now it's just kind of a studio project. I have a whole other record that's basically an addendum to Underwater Detection Method that's basically all ready to go. I just need to get the drums on it, get my bass, get the guitar, and mix it.
So I have another record just sitting in the wings. Like I said, it's kind of like an addendum to Underwater Detection Method, except it touches off on electronic subgenres that I didn't touch off on this record. This new record has some stuff that sounds a little more industrial, a little more gothy—I don't know if goth is the right word, but a little darker.
Lawrence: Might be right for our times.
Greg: Yeah. (laughter) Exactly. Oh, just in time. 2025.
Lawrence: Yeah, thanks, Greg. The soundtrack to 2025. (laughter)
Greg: That's kind of where I'm at right now. I would just love to get this record finished and get it out next year. I'm trying to get on a program where I can make a record and try to get it out every year, as close as I can. But all this time, from when I did Songs from the Imperial Garden and then doing Underwater Detection Method, making that, learning all the stuff—I just spent so much time learning. I didn't have the skills to do what I wanted. I was just trying to learn and experiment in the process of learning to try to gain all these skills. I'm still always learning, but now I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing and how to do it. So now I feel like I can start moving forward.
Lawrence: Yeah. I think people don't realize or certainly listeners may not realize that in addition to learning the tool, in addition to writing the songs, there's also the workflow component.
Greg: Yes.
Lawrence: You sit down and what happens when you're—there's a production element that has to be thought through.
Greg: Absolutely, and a lot of times nothing happens when you sit down and work. You just have to constantly be doing it to find things or get things that you like.
Lawrence: Are you workmanlike that way? Do you carve out time and say, okay, I'm going to go to the studio and work for six hours?
Greg: My home studio is just in my living room, so it's always there. Sometimes, I don't always feel like it. Sometimes I think I feel like it, and then I open it up and I'm like, "eh, not feeling it." Other times, I'll just wake up in the morning with an idea, and I'll just force myself to work. But one thing I've learned is, never throw anything away.
A lot of times, I'll spend time working on something that I'm really liking, come back and listen to it, and think it's terrible. Other times I spend a lot of time working on something only to just get dismayed and think, "This is not working, I'm going to give up on this." Then I come back and listen to that and think, "No, that's good."
You just have to keep doing it. A lot of times I need that space away because I'm just working by myself to get the stuff started and rolling before I can work with other people. I have to be able to get objectivity. I have to be able to step away from it—work hard on something and then get in my car and try to listen to other artists and other music, or classical music, or jazz, or whatever to try to cleanse my palate. So that when I come back, I can look at things with some objectivity, and then I can really figure out what's working and what's not, and what I need to take away or what I need to add.
Lawrence: Do you know anything about how the fans of your other bands receive your solo music? Do you look for, or do you receive any feedback from them?
Greg: With this new record, it was such a departure from anything I've done. Obviously, I wanted my existing fans or fans of my bands to come along for the ride. I hope they like it. There was part of me that was unsure if it would be accepted or if they would like it because it's just so different from anything I've done and anything I've been involved in.
At the same time, I feel like I'm trying to get my foot in the door in this whole other market, which is the electronic music market. I'm really interested in that, but I don't have any involvement in any kind of scene, and I don't really know a lot of people that are doing that at this point in time. So I'm kind of in a weird place. When I put this record out, I wasn't sure if the people that had liked what I'd done in the past would like it. And at the same time, I feel like I was just trying to get my foot into this other door and see if I can get these people to listen to this music, which is more what they listen to already.
Lawrence: Do you seek or do you have any aspiration to have collaborators in this space? A rock band, I think, is so highly collaborative, even if somebody has one vision for the music. You still need the other players.
Greg: Yeah, absolutely. I'm really interested in that. Working by myself so much was kind of intentional because I was just trying to learn how to put everything together and learn how to use all the tools and learn how to mix, learn how to play keyboards, learn how to program and do all that stuff. I needed that space on my own to be able to do that. Now, I'm still learning, but I feel like I've gotten to a point where I would love to work with other people. I just think that's one of the coolest aspects of music, being able to collaborate with other people.
