(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I can't help but notice, is it over your left shoulder, is that an array of pedals?
Joe Brent: Well, this is some of them. [laughter] There's never the correct amount of pedals. There's always the one you want next.
Lawrence: That's amazing.
Joe: This is my home studio, which is sort of a miniature version of the proper studio that I run out in Brooklyn. This is enough to do most of the things that I do, but then when I want to take it to the big boy room down in Brooklyn to top and tail everything, I have that available. I tend to keep the really expensive stuff over there because the insurance works out a little bit better.
Lawrence: Do you own and operate a studio? Is that part of what the label does?
Joe: Independently, I co-founded a recording studio called VHS, Vinegar Hill Sound, over twenty years ago. A lot of my gear is there and I get a cut of stuff that's there, and I get to use it whenever I want. The label is only three years old and completely independent of that. If I'm honest, I try not to tell too many people recording at the studio that I also run a label because then they all want to use the label. It starts to get a little crowded.
Lawrence: Well, there's a lot I'd like to unpack in that and I'll come back to that in a moment. But let me situate the geography a little bit. Is the studio literally in Vinegar Hill?
Joe: It is, yeah.
Lawrence: Such a bizarre and interesting little hamlet.
Joe: That's right. When we were first moving in, it was just industrial, commercial stuff. Now it's posh loft spaces, and the waterfront is completely renovated, beautiful. We have a joke that we always tell—me and the founder were outside smoking a cigarette in the early days, and you know, it's this sort of grimy commercial industrial cobble street. We saw a very well-dressed woman walking her pet potbellied pig.
Lawrence: Insane.
Joe: She had just walked right by us and the founder, the other guy, turned to me and he was like, "Yeah, this neighborhood is done, man." [laughter] That's how you can tell.
Lawrence: I had a company for a while that was based in Manhattan, and our lease was up a couple of years after 9/11 and couldn't afford to stay in Manhattan, pretty much like everybody's residential story. But there was a program born of 9/11 where if businesses moved out of Manhattan but stayed in the five boroughs, there were all kinds of crazy tax rebates.
That's when I really started to dig into DUMBO, much the same thing. It was completely industrial. The building we moved into hadn't really converted yet. It was all light manufacturing and silk screening and all that kind of stuff. But we moved in around 2005, 2006, and the neighborhood started to turn. I lived in Carroll Gardens at the time, so my commute was perfect. It was just a nice walk, half hour walk door to door, but roaming that neighborhood, I stumbled across Vinegar Hill. I had never heard of it, I had never seen it. But I do remember even back then there was a really good restaurant. I forget the name of it. It was like the only thing over there in Vinegar Hill.
Joe: Superfine?
Lawrence: Maybe. Superfine? Maybe.
Joe: Superfine's been there. 68J, which is really more of a bar, has been there since the beginning.
Lawrence: I remember 68J, yeah.
Joe: There was another restaurant on J Street, I believe, or maybe on the corner, just a few blocks down from the F train station, which was really nice and it closed. However, Vinegar Hill House has been there since day one, and that is actually a very nice restaurant.
Lawrence: Is that the place in Vinegar Hill? It's actually in the neighborhood?
Joe: In Vinegar Hill, it's like in the back end of Vinegar Hill, like you sort of have to know it's there. Really good, really cheffy kind of stuff.
Lawrence: I think that's the spot.
Joe: Yeah, my co-founder at the studio married a waitress that worked there and they moved to Oregon together.
Lawrence: That's amazing. And where are you in relation to like that Commandant's House, that building there in Vinegar Hill?
Joe: We're on Water Street, 46 Water Street.
Lawrence: Okay.
Joe: From the train station down a few blocks to the right, to the left, near the waterfront. Not quite where the main stuff is.
Lawrence: I love it over there, but DUMBO is insane. It's like a playground for—you would've not guessed twenty years ago that's what it was gonna look like.
Joe: We call it "Done-Bo." [laughter]
Joe: So I live in Upper Manhattan in Washington Heights. Do you know the building Castle Village?
Lawrence: Oh, nice.
Joe: Between 181st and 187th on Cabrini Boulevard. It's five buildings with seven acres of lawn, and it's overlooking the Hudson. Lin-Manuel Miranda lives here. Twyla Tharp, Tom Harrell lives here.
Lawrence: Wow.
Joe: A bunch of really wonderful musicians are in this building. Jennifer Koh, the violinist, is here.
Lawrence: Tom Harrell. Huh? That's crazy. That's amazing.
Joe: Oh, yeah. The founder of Pi Records lives directly above him, and he's also a good friend. Every once in a while I'll hear trumpet and drums just rehearsing in his studio or his apartment really downstairs. And I'll see Tom later on and it's like, "Oh yeah, it's Tom Harrell and Brian Blade just rehearsing downstairs."
Lawrence: That's an elevator I'd like to get stuck in for a minute. Oh my God.
Joe: Not bad. Yeah, pretty good.
Lawrence: I kind of lost the thread in your biography. You were born in New York, but you're not necessarily a lifelong New Yorker. Is that right?
Joe: Born in New York and moved to Florida when I was a kid, very young, and really was raised in Tampa, Florida. Then after that went to school in Indiana for a year and a half, and then moved to Georgia for about a year. I was playing in a band down there. My first school didn't take, like a lot of people. Then I finished up at Berklee, three years, finished in '99, and came back to the city briefly, but then was in Italy for a little while directly after that, finishing my studies. Yeah, and then have just been a New Yorker pretty much ever since then.
Lawrence: The classical mandolin, what tradition does it come out of? Is it the same sort of musical repertoire as lute music? Could you give like a capsule summary of what classical mandolin is?
Joe: Yeah, so to go back a little further—my TED talk on the mandolin. Essentially, the banjo came up from Africa centuries ago as a stringed instrument that was skin stretched over a gourd, some version of that with very many permutations, but all generally called the banjo and played by African griots. It came up from Africa originally, and the first place it went was to the east a little bit and was called the oud. Then the oud was picked up by France and England and called the lute, which is just the French word for the oud. I think a lot of people don't realize that.
Then it made its way to Spain and became guitarra and then eventually guitar. At roughly about the same time it was picked up in Italy—all the same instrument—and there it was called armandolino, which is Italian for "little almond" because the back of a bowl-back mandolin looks like an almond. Then from armandolino to mandolino, which in the early days, the instrument that Vivaldi was writing for, it was called mandolino, which is still what it's called, but he was writing for a six-string single-course instrument tuned G, B, E, A, D, G.
Playing Vivaldi on modern mandolins, which are tuned like violins, is actually quite difficult because the intervals don't quite work out a lot of the time. He was writing for orphans that just sort of lived in his church, a girls' orphanage. They must have been excellent players because the music is not always easy to play, but it's only become more difficult over time because the instrument has changed quite a bit.
It was changed in the early Romantic period, maybe sort of the end of the Classical period, to something resembling what the modern mandolin looks like, and it was done so that we could play violin repertoire. It's now tuned like a violin, but with double strings, so G, G, D, D, A, A, E, E, and you play the double strings at the same time. What they discovered was that those two strings are never perfectly in tune with one another, no matter what you do. There's always some beat in the waveform. Even if you could theoretically tune those two strings perfectly to one another, you're actually not hitting them at the same time.
It still passes from one to the other. And so the vibration in the string is never quite synced up. Even if you don't hear it as out of tune, you still hear the beat and the rub in the waveform, but it doesn't sound like an out-of-tune instrument unless it's just out of tune. It actually comes across as ping and resonance. There's a strength to that tone that's, I think, a little bit surprising—that a mandolin can be played with a symphony orchestra and be heard just fine, even though the volume isn't very high. The projection is really very powerful.
Lawrence: That's fascinating. I read somewhere in a conversation with you where you were talking about the mandolin being like a projection instrument and that one of the challenges when you're working with students, I'm going to botch the articulation, so please correct me, but was essentially hearing yourself correctly and playing at the right volume, right? Using the right dynamics, because by its very nature, the best sound is away from you, right?
Joe: Exactly. My instinct is to pull the mandolin down and show you, but that's not great radio or great podcasts. I'll try to describe this in a way that makes sense to a listening audience. Imagine you have a mandolin and you're holding it the way that a player holds it. The sound of the instrument is designed to pop forward and jump and leap out away from you towards the audience. So the sound that you get directly under your ears that's coming from the instrument itself is not really the sound of the instrument, which is designed to be heard in its ideal form, about ten feet in front of you by people who are listening.
And ten, twenty, one hundred feet in front of you because now you're getting the sound of the air vibrating and mixing and bouncing around in the room. But the sound that comes from the instrument directly up to your ear is not quite the sound of the instrument. Then it can sound less powerful than it actually is, and so what you're referring to is something that I tell all my students: you kind of have to learn to trust the instrument. It's doing what it's designed to do and project the sound outward towards people who are standing or seated in front of you in an audience. Instead of giving into the instinct of "I'm not making enough sound, I'm not projecting enough, so I'm going to overdrive the sound to try to push this out." And that's how you actually kill your projection.
We're getting really into the weeds of mandolin pedagogy very early on in this interview, but essentially that's what it is. It's like you really just have to trust that it's designed to do this task, which is to throw sound out in front of it. Yeah, it's really a trust exercise and a trusting relationship between you and the instrument.
Lawrence: I think what's important as a listener, when I hear you describe that, though, and the impact it has on me as a listener is it makes me appreciate really any dynamics in a mandolinist's abilities because you're almost—I'm sure over time it becomes more second nature and something that's more integrated, but the idea that to be subtle and to have dynamic range is something that you actually must really have to work at and develop a feel for.
Joe: You do. If you were to measure it, the actual dynamic range of the instrument is not great, certainly not like a piano or a brass instrument or something like that. However, what mandolin players and guitarists and basically any plucked string instrument player learns to do is to play with the way that your ear perceives sound rather than the actual volume of the note. A distinctive technique on mandolin is the tremolo, which is used in a lot of Italian music or Romantic music. The mandolin is trying to emulate a legato sound that a violin, a bowed instrument is capable of, or a voice, or really a wind or brass or anybody else.
Even when played very quietly, you're still playing dozens and hundreds of little notes. In your ear, each new note, your ear will grab onto it, even at a similar or lower volume to other instruments around you. The ear of the listener is still drawn to the sound of this tremoloing instrument with this very tremulous, literally a waveform that it's producing. So it doesn't take a lot of volume to accomplish the same thing that another instrument's fortissimo is able to do.
Another thing that the mandolin does very well is—there's not quite a difference in volume, but there is a very stark difference between ponticello and tasto sounds, which, for those of you who aren't string instrument players, is ponticello means to play near the bridge of the instrument and tasto means to play with your plectrum closer to the fingerboard. From the bridge, it's a very bright and edgy sound. And if you play then towards the fingerboard, tasto, it becomes a warmer, softer, more pillowy sound. I can use that to grab your attention. I can use that within a phrase even to modulate which parts of the phrase I want to accentuate. While doing that, I'm not really changing the volume of what I'm doing. I'm just changing the phrasing in such a way that emulates the thing that volume can also do.
On other instruments that are able to do that—and I would say that on string instruments, bowed string instruments, there is a ponticello and tasto difference, but not, I don't think, as much as there is on plucked string instruments. And certainly a vocalist, much less so, plays with these kinds of dynamics. The sound of the voice is the sound of the voice, and very infrequently do you hear in classical music a vocalist purposely making their voice more bright and brittle and edgy within a phrase to accentuate the phrase, because dynamics are so much more readily available to them.
The other thing that I will say is, going back to what I was saying before about how the banjo is really the root of the tree of all of these plucked instruments: The other thing that they also have in common, all having the same genealogy, is that wherever you see a plectrum plucking string or fingers plucking a string, folk music is what's usually—almost always—happening. These are instruments, in almost every single case, no matter how they wound up, that are used for dancing, to accompany songs, bards, songwriters. They're used for folk, secular connotations in every single case, much more so than you would see in bowed instruments or in instruments of other families.
Some of these sounds would be considered undesirable—the ones we're now talking about, where a ponticello or a tasto sound would be considered undesirable to other instruments that have more of a history of sacred or academic connotation. But to a folk instrument, it sounds just right. So when you listen to Bill Monroe, one of the original great—literally the original great bluegrass mandolin player, and then listen to someone like Chris Thile who plays now, Bill Monroe's original sound is very bright to modern ears. It's very plucky and twangy, to use the word that I think is overused a little bit, but it is a twangier, pluckier sound than the modern players play with. That's because he's coming from a folk tradition and he's playing an instrument that really has always been associated with that. So it's not out of place and it's kind of the special flavor of a plucked string instrument.
Lawrence: So when plucked stringed instruments started to be incorporated into classical or Romantic composition, was that profane or was that bold or avant-garde in some way?
Joe: I think it would have been seen as—I hate to use the word, but it's like schtick. So like in Don Giovanni, there's a very famous aria that Don Giovanni sings when he's wooing a girl from a window and he's down on the ground. The aria is called "Deh vieni alla finestra," come to the window. And a mandolin plays because it's supposed to be this very charming kind of nod to folk music in the middle of a comic opera, or, well, not a comic opera, actually a heavy dramatic opera. And, in fact, he not only has his way with the girl, he murders her father later on, so not to be mistaken for the comic opera.
Mahler used mandolin actually fairly frequently in the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies and in Das Lied von der Erde. He's making very explicit references to folk music that he would have been aware of from his upbringing in Austria. His life, he lived in Vienna for the most part until he lived here. It would have been a nod to that. So not necessarily avant-garde, although you could consider a folk reference used in capital-C Classical music as sort of an avant-garde thing or would have been thought of as that at that time.
The sticking point was that Berlioz wrote an orchestration textbook—and I really like Berlioz's music—but there's a chapter on the mandolin in Berlioz's seminal orchestration textbook where he said that the mandolin has a "poor tinkly tone quality" that is ill-suited for modern orchestral applications. I strongly disagree. [laughter] And thankfully, so did Mahler, so did Schoenberg, who wrote for mandolin quite a bit in his Serenade for seven instruments. And then more and more as it becomes less weird and less sticky to have an explicit folk music reference in capital-C Classical music, it's now really just seen as another instrument.
Certainly we're all aware of modern players who are on a par with the virtuoso instrumentalists of any other instrument. Most people know about Chris Thile, there's me and Avi Avital, and there's the younger generation coming up after us that had us as their baseline. There's a guy named Jake Jolliff right now, who's kind of terrifying. [laughter] And then in music from around the world, so like Brazilian music, there's a guy named Hamilton de Holanda, who's becoming fairly well known playing—you know, it's called a bandolim, but that's just the Portuguese word for mandolin. And he's playing a ten-string instrument, but it's a mandolin. And he is as much a virtuoso on his instrument as Heifetz was on his.
Lawrence: A few interesting things in there. One is that you talk about Mahler, you talk about Schoenberg, very modern where, when modernity entered the music, I guess would be one way to say it and seemingly like less qualms about integrating folk music, atonality—some of the criticisms of the mandolin as having a limited range or a specific tonal sound would actually have been appealing to those composers.
Joe: Absolutely. Very much so. And to new music composers. So take Caroline Shaw, for example, who is a leading composer by any definition of the new music world, the classical music world. But she's as much influenced by pop music and folk music as anything else. And it's no longer an explicit reference to pop music or folk music from a classical musician. She just is all of those things simultaneously. And so it's no longer a sticky reference to something. It's now just a sound that's useful and beautiful and unique.
I think it's well-timed that it's thought of that way. And mandolin had its uses before the Romantic era and the modern era. Vivaldi famously wrote quite a lot of repertoire for mandolin. Paganini did. There's a Handel oratorio—oh, gosh, the name of the oratorio is escaping me—but Cleopatra's aria in this is accompanied by mandolin because it's supposed to sound exotic, which I guess it would have been to Handel.
Lawrence: He didn't have an oud? [laughter]
Joe: Yeah. And even in Verdi's Otello, Desdemona has an aria where she's accompanied by mandolin in the score. It's written that she's accompanied by a Croatian instrument called the guzla. But to my knowledge, it has never been played on a guzla, always on a mandolin. And even at the time of Verdi, it was played on a mandolin. I think Verdi meant for it to be that way because Verdi himself played in a mandolin orchestra.
Lawrence: So how did you come to have one in your hand? It's not obvious, there must be a story.
Joe: There is a story. It wasn't dropped on my head or anything one day. I started on violin when I was four years old—lessons, proper lessons. In my family, there were always guitars and balalaikas and domras and all these instruments just kind of laying around. No one in my family is a professional musician, but we always had access to these things. They were always there. So I was playing guitar also just for fun the whole time that I was studying violin, playing piano, and then mandolin.
I don't even remember the first time I played a mandolin. I do remember being in my teens, roughly about thirteen years old, and deciding this is really the instrument for me because mandolin really, in the virtuoso repertoire, can do just about everything that a violin can do. A lot of the virtuoso repertoire for mandolin actually is violin repertoire—it's just been co-opted by us.
The other thing that mandolin can do is be a part of the rhythm section and either strum or play a percussive kind of accompaniment, which you hear very frequently in bluegrass, which is called a chop. To me, that is where I get the most enjoyment out of music—being just a part of a machine, a part of an ensemble. The musicians that really impress me aren't necessarily the most incredible soloists, it's the ones who know how to make other musicians sound good, because that speaks to a certain maturity and egolessness that I find very appealing and I kind of always had.
Lawrence: Oh, amazing.
Joe: Just being able to play a II-V and let somebody else solo for an hour is very fun for me. And every once in a while, I'm very happy to take a solo, but you know, I play in a band with Sarah Caswell, and no one wants to hear me play solos. [laughter]
Lawrence: Well, that sort of sensitivity and the egolessness that you talk about, whether it's supporting soloists or not, it's key for me to unlocking your—especially through 9 Horses—like this affinity for a chamber configuration, the sort of intimacy of that type of a configuration. And given that, you draw from, you perform in, like you create in so many different realms. Could you talk to me a little bit about what do you need to be good at? And I don't mean what does one need to be good at—I mean, what do you need to be good at to really thrive in a chamber ensemble versus being a symphonic player? What's the thing that makes you good at that?
Joe: That's a really interesting question, and I feel entirely qualified to answer it because that's really all I think about. For me, I think of 9 Horses as an improvising chamber ensemble. If you come and hear us and you think we're a jazz band, you're not wrong. If you come and hear us and you think we're a classical ensemble, you're not wrong. There are a lot of things that we could be called, but I think of it as chamber music because I really grew up understanding that the key to chamber music is your ears more so than your hands.
Listening and breathing together and having everyone move together and understand how the phrase is going to be—just starting a piece in a chamber music ensemble is something that takes years to get good at, just to play the first note together. Because it's not always natural for every musician to want to breathe and move with everyone else, because so many people want to be the soloist.
There's nothing wrong with that, but if you've ever heard a really good string quartet and then you listen to old recordings of Heifetz and Isaac Stern, and soloists playing as a string quartet, you understand what the difference is. Like everyone—Heifetz and Isaac Stern and Janos Starker, I think was in that quartet—obviously all incredible players, but the ensemble is different because they're all playing separate lines.
Playing as a group and the moment that snaps into gear the way that a bicycle will snap into another gear and suddenly you're just in a different speed and a different tempo—getting people to do that all together is sorcery to me. I don't always understand why it's happened when it's happened. But it elevates me in a way that I have never been elevated from listening to a really extraordinary soloist. Well, maybe that's not true, but it's never elevated me in the way that I've felt playing a solo.
And so listening and breathing and all the things that we work on in 9 Horses are the things that really are currency for me as a soloist. And I am also a soloist. I play concertos with orchestras all the time and I love it very much because the repertoire is often really exciting because so few people play it, and there's not a lot of centuries of pedagogical dogma telling me how the piece is supposed to be played. I still have a little bit of open field to run in with solo repertoire.
The music that I write for 9 Horses and the music that really turns me on the most is the stuff where two things are happening. One, I've written the piece in such a way that we're chugging along as an ensemble, not as three separate voices. And two, that I've also written it in such a way, intentionally kind of leaving it unwritten, so that Sarah and Andrew and whoever else we're collaborating with has a chance to put a little bit of their own individuality into the piece. And I don't mean just an interesting way to phrase something that I've written.
A lot of times there's nothing on the page. It just says like—and slashes—and just do the thing that Sarah would think of that I never would. Or if we're collaborating with someone, it's never because I just need a drummer. It's because I've thought of some specific musician who has ideas and has a voice and has a way of approaching music that I hear as a part of this piece. And so because of that, when they come in, I intentionally will underwrite a lot of this music.
Like on one of the tunes on this record, we have a drummer named Jason Treuting. So percussion, they play with Caroline Shaw quite a bit, as a matter of fact. And I know that Jason is not only an extraordinary classical musician, but within a parameter, I don't know very many musicians who are more creative and will think of more different sounds and textures and things. And so the part was just kind of "Do Jason stuff," knowing that he would. And so as a composer, I get to take credit for that, even though I had very little to do with it. To me, that's the essence of chamber music—when it's individual voices blending to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts.
Lawrence: That's so interesting. Like I, as you were saying that I was thinking, you could write a line for an instrument, or you could leave a line for a very specific player, and the player is your instrument in your score. Yeah, you're playing Jason.
Joe: This will sound familiar to anyone who's ever studied Duke Ellington. It's like at the top of the alto sax part, it didn't say "alto sax," it said "Johnny," because he was writing a Johnny Hodges alto sax part. And so on, and all these parts just had the player's name at the top, because he thought in the same way. It was like the best version of this piece is the one where everyone has some really load-bearing creative input into the formation of the piece.
There's the classical—or let's say there's the composer school of thought of the composer always being right, and what you're hearing is the product of one person's imagination. And that's great if that's the way that you write, but that is the opposite of the way that I write. And it's the opposite of the way that I think about music. I really depend on my collaborators, in a way that is closer to the jazz world, I think. And I think also a lot of classical musicians are coming around to this point of view, whereas the really interesting thing happens when the musicians are really properly in dialogue with one another, even at the moment of the formation of the piece itself and not just in the performance. And to me also, that is chamber music.
Lawrence: I hear a lot of contrast between the last two 9 Horses records. Obviously, Blood From a Stone has just more electronic textures and elements and contributions. And Strung, I don't want to say it sounds more throwback, but it just has the, your more likely instrumentation. I don't know how to say it without bringing baggage that I don't mean. Acoustic. Yeah, sure. That's fair. Outside of just pure experimentation, what's the genesis of a concept for 9 Horses and how deliberate is something at the outset?
Joe: Well, in this case, it was a little bit deliberate. So Blood From a Stone is the EP we did just before our album, Omega. And Blood From a Stone, I like to call sort of the sandbox that we used to play around with some of the ideas that went into Omega, which was the full-length album that came right after that. Omega is very heavily textural—a lot of the textures are electronic textures and synth textures and stuff borrowed from electronica and modern rock, even.
And I love all of that, and I love the album Omega. And I think a lot of other people love the album, thankfully. But for this one, as I was writing the tunes, I discovered early on that I was writing them on acoustic instruments. Not with an intentionality at that point, just I was just strumming on acoustic instruments and coming up with these textures that were playing on the sound of this very quickly repeated thing, which is what a strummed instrument is.
I got about halfway through writing the album, and I liked not only the texture itself—and it's something that goes back to the very beginnings of my musical life, strumming on an instrument—but I liked the way it made me feel to go from one tune to the other and still have that connection of one tune to the next, that they all share this kind of texture of a strummed instrument. Usually in the background, but providing kind of that mid-register sonority and density to the texture that other instruments also sound really good when they're playing against or on top of or with or something like that.
During the time that I was writing this album, that's the sound that I was really attracted to. And it wasn't necessarily that I was like, "Well, I want to go from an electric album to an acoustic album." It was just, this is where my ear was at at the time. And so all of the songs—the record is called Strum. I couldn't help myself. [laughter] It was right there. The record is called Strum, and it's really a reference to, at some point on every one of these tunes, you're going to hear no matter how complex the arrangement is, in the center of it is the sound of a strummed instrument.
Lawrence: And there's something very somatic about it as well.
Joe: Yeah. Mandolins are played by your uncle on a porch somewhere, and guitars are played by your friend in dorm rooms. I think a lot of people play guitar or have learned a couple of chords on guitar and know that feeling of learning two chords—and now I can play a song even if I only know two chords—and there's something very satisfying about that. People have an actual personal experience with that kind of satisfaction.
And so then when you hear, even in these very complex textures, right in the middle of it is this strummed instrument. Whether you realize it or not, you're being put into a place and connected with something that's, I think, really at the center of ourselves.
Lawrence: Something that occurred to me this morning when I was listening to Strung one more time before our talk was that the tracks that resonated the most for me actually could have had synthesizers on them—like had the effect of synthesis, that to use the sort of probably overused word had the cinematic feel, of almost a score.
Joe: I'm not offended by that word "cinematic." I like that when people say that the music is—
Lawrence: It's just, it's there. It's a fact like listening to the record a lot. I think this is a score for a movie that's not been made yet.
Joe: I'm very happy to hear you say that because I'm very influenced by film music and film composers. I'll be completely honest.
Lawrence: Anyone in particular?
Joe: Well, you may not hear it so much in the compositions themselves, but man, John Williams—why not? Come on. He's the best. He's the GOAT. There are so many other incredible film composers: Bernard Herrmann and Alex North and modern film composers like Jonny Greenwood. He's got a band as a side project, but he's an incredible film composer.
And all of these other modern composers like Mica Levi, who wrote the score for a couple of recent movies, Hildur Guðnadóttir, the Icelandic composer who wrote that amazing score for Chernobyl. She also wrote the score for Joker and the new Joker movie that's coming out soon. But the score for Chernobyl, she went to an actual decommissioned industrial factory and just sampled the sounds of metal being beaten in this ghost town factory and used it as the basis for the music and the score—and it's amazing.
There are so many people working in the film music genre who are doing such incredibly interesting stuff that I steal outright all the time. I steal from the best—I'm still trying to chase with a lot of this music the feeling that I had. If you've ever seen the movie E.T., from the moment that E.T. is discovered—spoilers for an old movie—the moment that E.T. is discovered, he's not dead, he's actually alive. From that moment to the end of the movie and then all the way through the end credits is one cue.
Lawrence: Wow.
Joe: And it's roughly a half hour of music. And it's the greatest thing in the world. If you actually just get the score for E.T. and listen through it, Spielberg actually cut the movie so that it would sync up with Williams's score, not the other way around for that movie. Because what he recognized was that Williams was storytelling in his own way and playing with this stuff.
And the moment that you think that they're trapped and then E.T. makes the bikes take off and they start flying away, the score goes to this completely different place. I saw the movie four times in the theater in the early eighties, and I've been chasing that feeling ever since of just being utterly transported by a score, by an accompaniment to a visual that existed. But there's no reason why I can't create music that you can come up with your own visuals that you think should accompany it. And when I do and people recognize that, they say, "Well, this sounds cinematic," and that's why I actually take it as a great compliment because what it tells me is that you're seeing visual accompaniment to this music and you feel like—hopefully—that you're being told a story, which yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to do.
Lawrence: Wow.
Joe: Yeah, there's something evocative going on. [laughter] I hope so.
Lawrence: Elsewhere, I heard—I read you speak about this idea of like reverse engineering moments, thinking about the outcome you want for the audience or you want for an emotional experience and then trying to write your way there or perform your way there. And that sounds very much like what Spielberg did around Williams's score.
Joe: Very much. Absolutely. To a film composer—and I'm working on a film score right now, for a film that I can't really talk about yet because I have an NDA—to a film composer, there's this very delicate balance of you don't want to get in the way of the story being told through visuals. And yet also sometimes making music that is an ironic counter to what you're seeing is just as effective as sort of Mickey-mousing it, which is what they call it when the music perfectly syncs up with the action on the screen.
But one way or another, you know what the outcome is going to be, and you have to write music that gets you there and helps the audience understand what's being communicated by the visuals that are on the screen—maybe accentuates and elevates the emotional connection that you're supposed to get from this story being told on the screen and never detracts from it. But also the music can be its own storytelling. And I wouldn't necessarily say that the visuals are always in a place of primacy over the music.
I'll give you an example: I once saw, when I was in college, a tribute to John Williams in the Boston Commons—because I went to college at Berklee—and Spielberg came out and they had a big movie screen behind him. And he's like, "Let me show you what Jaws looks like without John Williams." And it's a shot of the water and nothing happens. And then Roy Scheider kind of jumps and then you see nothing, and then there's another shot of the water and absolutely nothing happens. And it's an avant-garde movie about nothing. The story is being told through the music cues that are telling you what's happening, even though you can't see it and you're not seeing the shark. You're just seeing water, but because of the cue that's happening, you know the shark is there and you know that Roy Scheider knows that the shark is there, and you're terrified on his behalf, even though your eyes are telling you nothing.
Lawrence: Yeah, I love that.
Joe: And that's its own form of terror. Kind of like what Hitchcock was saying about how if I show you a scene of two people talking across a table for a minute and then a bomb goes off, that's not scary. But if I tell you there's a bomb there and they don't know it, that's scary. And so the music can be used as a storytelling device in that way, and in which case I would say that the visuals are there really as an accompaniment to the music.
Not too many people do it that way, but they are on equal footing and a lot of this is a storytelling device. And that's what this music is meant to evoke. This is a film score in search of a film.
Lawrence: I love those anecdotes about people who see rough cuts of film before the score is in it, and they hated it, or a director gives a composer a cut of the film with other music in it to convey the vibe of what—I mean, basically anything that speaks to the role of what the music does to the visual is fascinating. It's fascinating. What do you look for when you're covering a popular song, like a rock or pop song? What snares you?
Joe: It's got to be a song that I like, because if I don't like the song or it's a band that I don't really like, then if I cover it, I feel like I'm actually parodying it. Sorry, everyone listening, if you're a Coldplay fan, buckle up, because I don't like the band Coldplay.
Lawrence: It's a Coldplay-free zone. [laughter]
Joe: The Coldplay station. So if I covered a Coldplay song, there's no way that I could do it without also making fun of the bits of Coldplay that I don't like. Sorry to use a very specific example of a band I don't like, but we all have bands that we don't like and that just happens to be mine.
However, just liking the band isn't enough for me to cover a song. It has to be something that I feel like I could say something in the language of that song that's unique to me and also communicate something that I am trying to communicate in addition to what the original songwriter communicates. So, 9 Horses covers "Mercy Street" by Peter Gabriel. We do it at a lot of our concerts. I love Peter Gabriel. I love that song. But we wouldn't have done it if we were just doing a note-for-note transcription of it.
We recognized that song offered us an opportunity to create a canvas where it still sounded like us. It's just like we're borrowing the melody and the chord progression that Peter Gabriel wrote. But we're trying to communicate the same thing that we all always try to communicate through this music where when we perform live, it's just the three of us. And so we're a small sonic palette trying to communicate big ideas, and "Mercy Street" was a nice vehicle for us to do that.
And then in my solo concerts, I'm covering—I used to do shows of just Flaming Lips tunes because what I discovered was not only are Flaming Lips tunes great, and I love that band very much, but at the time when I was doing a lot of that, I was also using them as showpieces in my solo concerts, meaning like trying to turn them into virtuoso repertoire. And turns out Flaming Lips tunes are great for that, and it still sounds like a Flaming Lips tune even when you're getting up and down on the instrument.
Lawrence: That's amazing. Along similar lines, is there a thematic thread or could you point to a common element amongst the artists that you sign or that you work with through the record label?
Joe: Am I allowed to curse on this?
Lawrence: Oh, please. The more the merrier.
Joe: The common thread of artists on Adhyâropa is it's shit I think is cool. We have put out a cappella pop operas and soundscape data sonification albums, jazz and classical chamber orchestras, and singer-songwriters and bluegrass and just about every genre there is, and it's all just artists and music that I think are cool because the function of the record label—and we can really get into this—9 Horses started Adhyâropa Records, the record label you're talking about, as what's called a boutique label for us, meaning originally we were just trying to put out our own stuff and own it and control it.
We do a lot of academic residencies at colleges, and as part of our talking to these students, we had for years really stressed that the music business is not what it was. The financial relationship between artists and record labels, artists and distributors, artists and venues, and on and on and on has over the years become worse and worse for the artists in every case. And so it's important for artists to take a more proactive stance on owning their own music and deciding what are the contexts that this music can be used. If you can own your own masters, that's great. And that's the point of starting a boutique label.
The reason smaller artists don't do that is because it's front-loaded with a lot of work and a lot of expense. But we wanted to practice what we preach, so we did that. I run the label on a day-to-day basis. I never intended for other people to be a part of it, but after we released Omega, my friend Sam Sadigursky from the Philip Glass Ensemble was putting out a solo record, or a duo record with Nathan Koci, accordion player, and just on a lark, I was like, "Hey, I got a record label. I'll put your record out."
And that went really well. And that's the last time I actually reached out to another artist informally, formally, or otherwise to say, "Hey, I'll put your record out." Everything else since then has been word of mouth. And we're about to put out our ninetieth album in three years.
Lawrence: Wow.
Joe: It's been way more of a success than we ever possibly conceived at the time. Or I thought of, and I used the word "success," but I don't even know if that's the right word for it. It's been way more of a popular idea. And it turns out creating a financial structure that's much more favorable to the artists is popular with artists. How about that? Who would have thought?
In my conception of what a record label should be, the record label itself is a contractor. You call in to fix your roof and do a job that you are unable to do yourself for any number of reasons, whether you just don't have the time for it or whether you don't really trust the sort of music distribution services that are out there—and you have good reason not to trust them. I won't name specific names on that.
Because of that, there's really no reason why we can't be a genreless record label or that any record label can't be a genreless record label because it's just like come in and do the job, and we can do that job as well as any record label. And I'm including the big boys.
The old financial arrangement between record labels and artists was they come in, they fix your roof, and then they own your house for at least five years. And we don't think that's right. We think a record label should be someone who comes in and does a job. And in exchange for doing that job and doing it well, you get a little cut. But the old record labels didn't take a little cut. They were essentially giving you a loan that you had to pay off. And if your album didn't do very well, you never paid that off. And I think in a lot of cases, the album could do actually very well—you still never paid that loan off. You were just in a constant state of debt.
And that's the death of the middle class of the music industry—if people are just always struggling to stay at water level. And so if this concept has been successful or popular so far, I would say, great, every record label should look like us. I would also say record labels are hurting just as much as artists these days, and they're reluctant to change their approach because this is just the way that it's always been, but the music industry isn't that anymore.
And so for record labels to stay healthy, they need to become more like us, I think. Not only that, and I'll go even further—sorry, again, welcome to my TED talk—I think the real change in the industry has to come from the record label side of things. Because the distributors, meaning Spotify, they're doing great. Why would they change anything? Why would they care about the health of the music industry? They're trying to replace us with AI anyway.
And the artists really are not well positioned or empowered to affect real change on the industry because we're not organized in the way that other artists are. So when the actors and writers went on strike, they did it together and they got a lot of the stuff that they wanted because they're organized in a way that musicians are not. I'm not in a union with Taylor Swift. The guy playing a corpse in CSI is in the same union as George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and they all struck together and they got what they wanted.
Musicians don't work that way. But record labels are kind of in it together, even if there's no financial structure tying one to another. Certainly we all understand implicitly that the bottom line is reflecting what the music business actually is. And so the labels themselves have to be the ones that need to be more progressive in changing the way that things are done. If the labels don't do it, then there just won't be a middle class of the music industry, and then at some point there just won't be musicians.
Lawrence: Yeah, I talked to a lot of independent artists on this podcast and a lot of artists do in fact own their own labels or are in cooperative-type environments with other artists for labels and are carving paths that look very similar to yours. A question I ask—it's very hard to get a consistent answer, but a question is: What is a label from where you sit? What are those services that you can come in and provide? That's question one. Question two is, on your business model, and I'm not asking you to show me your term sheet, but do you provide the banking part of what traditionally labels have done, or do artists show up at your front door with a finished master and then you take over?
Joe: When we began, we were not in a position to actually be printing physical media, like CDs and LPs, which is really what a label used to be. The old record contracts used to say, "such and such record label, in the business of selling CDs, LPs, et cetera, is hereby contracted to" blah, blah, blah. That's very little of what record labels do these days because people are buying less and less physical media. Digital media is really where it's at.
So what a record label is—artists come to us with a finished product. And what I learned, because we weren't printing CDs and then essentially selling them to the artist, is that the artist makes more money if they print the media themselves. The way our contract structure works is we have a storefront, meaning our website and Bandcamp. We handle the digital distribution and the promotion of the album on a limited basis.
We recommend that you also get a PR person to help out with that because we have limited ability, but we certainly pitch to the playlist curators on all of the DSPs that we send stuff to. And we pitch to sync supervisors—dozens and dozens of them—for placement. Artists collect one hundred percent of their sync royalties. They collect one hundred percent of their performance royalties. We only take a tiny cut of mechanical royalties. And since you're the one printing the CD and the LP, when you go out on a gig and sell it, you keep one hundred percent of that too.
A record label should be handling distribution or partnering with someone who does not use TuneCore or CD Baby, but an actual distribution partner. They should be handling promotion, meaning pitching to DSPs, and they should be—maybe this is where it starts to get less of a popular idea—fostering a community of artists. A record label doesn't have to be a jazz label or a classical label or anything like that. You can be genreless like us. However, the Adhyâropa artists are a family of artists who understand that a rising tide lifts everyone's boat.
Another thing that I tell kids at these academic residencies is that twenty people who come to all your gigs is worth way more than having twenty thousand Instagram followers. I would hope that Adhyâropa is really a family of artists supporting one another. I have done everything I can to create an environment where that's the case. We do showcases. We're trying to put together an APAP showcase to save artists money on doing an APAP showcase here. And we do a lot of cross-pollination.
I think that's the only way that any of this works—if we're not just mercenaries out for ourselves. The only way it works is if we're raising everyone else's boat.
