By: Dennis Cook

ALO by Jay Blakesberg

One of the functions of music is to help us process emotions and life experiences. If music is to become a soundtrack to our lives it must carry some verisimilitude and hold an honest mirror up to our lives. So, it seems no accident that the opening verse on ALO‘s new release, Man of the World (arriving February 9 on Brushfire Records and currently available as a world premier on JamBase), on the stunning, moody, philosophical “Suspended” is as follows:

Lost the plot, but we found it again
It’s a mirror in which we all blend
Shades of darkness, shades of light
Everlasting, with no end in sight

The first time I listened to this album I was in a foul mood. At the ass end of one of those days where despite one’s best efforts the world vexes and befuddles in countless ways, I put on Man of the World and by the fourth cut I realized this was music custom made for bad days. Where some of this S.F. Bay Area band’s past efforts have been a touch too sunshine-y (or just plain goofy fun) for my taste, here I was awash in music that reminded me of Fleetwood Mac and Crowded House – wonderfully executed pop-rock built upon the shared reality of people living hands deep in the suds, scrubbing away at the dirty work of this world, wrestling relationship entanglements, and struggling to find good reasons to get out of bed in the morning.

The new album finds the quartet – Zach Gill (keys, lead vocals), Dan Lebowitz (Lebo) (guitar, pedal steel, vocals), Steve Adams (bass, vocals) and Dave Brogan (drums, vocals) – exploring some heavy themes – hopelessness, the persistent urge for going, the past and how we live with it in the present – and while the material has a pleasant sheen and catchy character, there’s ink black edging that gives this set honest, substantive weight.

“You have to because that’s a reflection of true life, at least for adults. For kids, it’s maybe not all lights and pretty colors, but it should be! As an adult you don’t want it to be all rainbows and leprechauns,” observes Dave Brogan. “There’s darkness and art that doesn’t reflect true life or some experience of true life, well, I don’t know. It’s questionable to me. You have to have some dark edges, and I think we have a better balance on this album than in the past.”

“Some people that follow us don’t want dark edges in ALO music because they perhaps want an experience slightly akin to a childlike experience with our music. So, they’re looking for a little escape from their dark corners,” continues Brogan. “But, I don’t think we really escape our dark corners, no matter how much Ecstasy you take or how happy the music is. And if you can deal with this darkness in the music it’s way more helpful and positive than shutting that stuff off and watching Teletubbies for four hours straight. We all struggle everyday. It can be as simple as someone cutting you off in traffic and you want to kill that person. It’s not tragedy; it’s just life.”

Meet Zach Gill

Zach Gill by Susan J Weiand

What is your favorite word? So many good ones, but I’ve always enjoyed “onomatopoeia.”

What is your least favorite word? Stupid.

What turns you on? Intellect and creativity.

What turns you off? Flakiness.

What sound or noise do you love? My daughter singing.

What sound or noise do you hate? Piercing feedback.

What is your favorite curse word? H E double hockey sticks.

What is the craziest damn thing you ever saw? My daughter being born.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Professor of something along the lines of history/anthropology/art/mythology/psychology or… a professional dancer or…

What profession would you not like to do? Anything that felt like a dead end.

What is one album that you never tire of listening to? Recently I’ve found myself listening over and over again to Regina Spektor‘s Soviet Kitsch.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Something along the lines of, “If you thought that was fun wait ’til you see what’s next.”

Working With Jack Johnson

Man of the World is ALO’s most egalitarian effort yet, with all four guys taking a bigger hand in songwriting, arranging and even tackling lead vocals on at least one cut each. Where often the group has been weighted a bit more towards Gill’s side of the stage, this album reflects an ALO where four gifted, strong personalities shine very brightly.

ALO w/ Jack Johnson :: Oahu, HI by Dave Homcy

“We all feel this album is the most true to ALO of anything we’ve done. The playing and even the messages are just true to where we’re at as people right now,” says Lebo. “We have so much to play with from this album! The first day of our new tour [beginning February 11 at the Belly Up Tavern in Solano Beach, CA - full tour dates here] will be the second time we’ve played ‘Suspended’ and the first time it’s ever actually been played in its entirety with the vocals [laughs].”

Another big change was bringing in another strong personality to help helm the recording process, namely longtime ALO pal Jack Johnson, who brought the boys to his studio in Hawaii and pitched in on everything from guitar to congas to lyrics and arrangements.

“We’ve known him for a long time. We lived in the dorms [at UC Santa Barbara] and tracked recordings with him there, and we’ve talked about doing something like this together for a while. We’ve put out records on his label but we’d never actually worked with him on a project. And it was really natural,” says Lebo. “We’d never really worked with a producer and had heard all the producer vs. band horror stories. ALO is very collective. A lot of the time you’ll have two people who like a thing and two people that don’t, and you spend a lot of time sorting that out. It was great having a producer, a fifth person, we trusted in these sorts of situations. It kept things moving much faster than in the past. Being in his context, his studio, he had a lot of ideas to contribute. We have our way of working together with the four of us but it was great to have his take on things, too.”

“When we played the Byron Bay Blues Festival [in Australia] a few years ago, he kind of became the fifth member for that set, where we alternated between Jack’s songs and our songs. It was like, ‘Really? Wow, that’s a good band!’” says Brogan. “We kind of have the same background and everyone has known each other for a long time. Working with him was great. He was very involved with all of it; he plays on a lot of the songs, especially on ‘Man of the World’ [title track] where he and Dan are playing different parts. That alone was pretty magical. In the past with recording we’ve always missed someone in the producer role who can take everyone’s input, process it and then say, ‘Okay, let’s do it this way.’ We’ve always been pretty leaderless in the past, and this made everything a lot easier. And we had our trusted helmsman Dave Simon-Baker [engineer]. I kinda can’t imagine making an ALO record without him at this point. He’s got a great personality for the studio and great engineering skills.”

“Jack had a lot of enthusiasm for the project, and we fed off that a lot,” adds Lebo. “Usually he’s in the studio working on his own thing – where you have your own history of what people like and pressures from labels, etc. – and I think this was just a very creative space for him. It’s different when your job is to help others craft something.”

Meet Steve Adams

Steve Adams by Susan J Weiand

What is your favorite word? Hola.

What is your least favorite word? Duh.

What turns you on? Patience.

What turns you off? Typos.

What sound or noise do you love? Paul McCartney on vinyl.

What sound or noise do you hate? Piercing feedback.

What is your favorite curse word? Blast.

What is the craziest damn thing you ever saw? Rolling our van on tour – the whole sliding, tipping and rolling, plus the aftermath of broken gear and band flyers floating down the road. Easily the craziest most surreal firsthand sight for me ever.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Cafe owner (with awesome food, art and music).

What profession would you not like to do? Anything that would confine me to an office cubicle for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and require a painful commute. I’m not even sure what job that would be, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like it.

What is one album that you never tire of listening to? Wildflowers by Tom Petty. Close runners-up: What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, Rumors by Fleetwood Mac

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Hola.

Continue reading for more on ALO…

  I don’t think we really escape our dark corners, no matter how much ecstasy you take or how happy the music is. And if you can deal with this darkness in the music it’s way more helpful and positive than shutting that stuff off and watching Teletubbies for four hours straight. We all struggle everyday. -Dave Brogan  

Photo by: Jay Blakesberg

Meet Dan Lebowitz

Dan Lebowitz by Josh Miller

What is your favorite word? Carpaccio. I’ve never eaten it, but I love the way the word sounds.

What is your least favorite word? Doofus.

What sound or noise do you love? The Purring of a late 50′s Fender tweed deluxe.

What sound or noise do you hate? The sound of a hammer hitting a nail puller (cat’s paw).

What is your favorite curse word? I reserve this for the bedroom.

What is the craziest damn thing you ever saw? ECMO.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Lutherie. It was my trade before the music got me, and if the music ever let me go, it’s likely where I would return.

What profession would you not like to do? Wouldn’t wanna be a Hit Man.

What is one album that you never tire of listening to? Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “Just in time for dessert.”

Live Or Something Like It

“The method we used this time related a lot more to our live method. A lot of it was done [with all four of us in studio at the same time]. Fly Before Falls (2004) was a lot more overdubbing and Roses And Clover (2007) had a lot more of that layering, too. We’ve all wanted to do it more ‘live’ for years and finally with this album we did,” says Lebo. “Basically, we were all in a room together. My guitars are all over the drum mics and the drums are all over my guitar mics and the piano mics are… well, it’s all just blended all together. It’s not like in the past where your amp is off in the other room and maybe you’re tracking together but you think, ‘Oh, I screwed that part up but I can fix it.’ This time we needed to get it ALL together because we couldn’t change it.”

This kind of unfolding moment – without a thought for erasers and second guesses – is somehow picked up by the tape and digital coding, creating an immediacy and intimacy that captures some of the eye contact and non-verbal communication that occurs when music evolves in close physical proximity.

ALO by Jay Blakesberg

“I feel, too, that there’s a difference of mindset when you’re playing this way. It has the potential that each take will be ‘it,’ and there’s a different intensity in the way you play, at least for me,” says Lebo. “If I’m just overdubbing alone I’ll just do each part just the way I want it. It doesn’t matter if I mess it up; I’ll just keep doing it over and over until I get what I want. With this [live oriented approach], these guys might be about to have their best take ever and you don’t want to be the one who screws it up. And I’m watching them in the same way, like, ‘I’m having a good one right now. You gotta pull on through!’ It’s really powerful. The other cool thing is things make it on to the recording that you didn’t intend. With Pro-Tools and editing you can go back and change all these things you did, but this way – even though it can be sculpted in different ways – it captures what I did not necessarily know I was trying to do. This is a more real version of me, and while there’s things I maybe wish I could have done differently, it’s real.”

Man of the World is a warm grower that welcomes one in an active way, eager to bridge the divide between performers and listeners. It’s definitely the closest ALO has come to harnessing their considerable live charisma and energy in the studio.

“It was the most laid back process we’ve had. It was relaxed. We didn’t put a lot of pressure on it to be anything in particular or do anything for us. It’s really about going in and getting some songs together and recording them,” says Brogan. “We took off all the pressure we usually put on ourselves doing this one, and maybe that’s what you’re hearing in the warmth. It was recorded more live than any of the past [albums]. The thing is, we weren’t trying to make a well-crafted album [laughs]. Natural is what we were going for.”

Not every group could open an album with a nearly seven-minute empathetic simmer like “Suspended” but ALO makes the slow boil work, keeping a steady pace but painting the skyway with flashes of color and light as the piece moves. This is a glimpse of the soundscapes they regularly conjure in concert but finessed in a way that thrives in the studio.

“That song, for me, is a really special tune, and not just because I like the melody but because of the process of how it came to be. We’d never done a tune in the way this came to be,” says Lebo. “We did the record over three weeks in Hawaii and this was about midway through. In the beginning, you’re all excited and ready to start, and then it dawns on you that your time is wrapping up and you need to capture this thing. You know you don’t have all of it yet and you’ve only got like seven days to get the rest. It’s not a lot of time and the magic has to happen.”

“About a month before we went to Hawaii we’d gone into a room and just recorded a bunch of ideas. A lot of the tunes on the new album came from those sessions, where someone would lay something down and the others would come up with something on the spot or people took the jams home and worked on them,” continues Lebo. “['Suspended'] was one that’d kind of been forgotten, just this progression, this kernel of an idea, and it was late one night in Hawaii where we were wondering if we were going to have an album and we decided to play around with this cool thing. We came up with this really basic arrangement and just recorded it. What you hear on Man of the World is that. We forgot about it for a few days and then realized we had something and started working on lyrics, and we just laid the vocals down over that first take. It’s such a neat way for music to happen. It came from a feeling that we wanted to have something else on our album, and this how we reacted to that feeling. There was some debate within the band about starting the record with ‘Suspended,’ some worry it might turn some people off, but this IS us. If they don’t like this then they probably don’t like us.”

Meet Dave Brogan

Dave Brogan by Susan J Weiand

What is your favorite word? Something they say in Brazil: belleza. It means ‘beautiful’ but they use it like we use the word ‘nice’ when something goes really well.

What is your least favorite word? Morsel. Makes me wanna hate chocolate chips.

What turns you on? Feminine energy.

What turns you off? Wealth with no intellectual or spiritual foundation to support it.

What sound or noise do you love? Water dripping from trees.

What sound or noise do you hate? Car horns.

What is your favorite curse word? Poo poo.

What is the craziest damn thing you ever saw? A stuffed squirrel made to look like a horse with a mane and hooves glued to it sitting on the head of a trophy buck. I have a picture of it on my iPhone.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Outcast genius who works as a janitor at MIT, solves an impossible math equation written on a chalkboard in the hallway, gets taken under the wing of the head of the math department, can’t make it happen because he doesn’t have the social skills but ends up going to this really brilliant therapist who works at the community college and starts dating Minnie Driver.

What profession would you not like to do? Head of security on a planet called Pandora. It’s 175 years in the future. I’ve seen a lot of action before and never got a scratch, but when I got to Pandora one of the ‘natives’ gave me a nasty facial scar. All I can think about is getting revenge by destroying their whole civilization. That sounds like soul death to me. Although, I would get to say things like, “Pandora will eat you for lunch and shit you out with zero warning.”

What is one album that you never tire of listening to? Ambient 2: The Plateau of Mirrors by Harold Budd and Brian Eno. It’s the soundtrack of my soul.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? “I don’t blame you for doubting me.”

A Touch of Mystery

On the sleeve of the new album and in general the band has been using the acronym ALO instead of the elongated Animal Liberation Orchestration, a name that sometimes feels a touch cumbersome for the lithe, poppy quartet. Condensed to three letters, there’s a touch of mystery that suits guys able to play pretty wide and hard while simultaneously (and successfully) working in the odd Wang Chung or primo soft rock cover.

ALO by Jay Blakesberg

“What I really like about using the shortened version nowadays is that AOL [America Online] is pretty much dead, so we don’t get that mix up quite so often. That helps,” chuckles Brogan. “I always wanted to use ALO with ‘Animal Liberation Orchestra’ in parenthesis because I think ALO is like a little brand. We got tired of having to explain that name all the time. It got to be a drag, and the name ‘Animal Liberation Orchestra and the Free Range Horns’ is sort of a tongue-in-cheek name for a college band, and for better or for worse, we stuck with the name. The way it is now, it could spell anything; it’s sort of a symbol.”

This quiet embrace of open-ended interpretation carries into the spirit of Man of the World, which doesn’t fully reveal itself for a few spins, but when it does you may find yourself tickled in places you didn’t suspect, laughing about things that are no laughing matter, lost in the glorious peels of pedal steel or Gill’s terribly inviting voice, and feeling like things might work out after all.

“There are albums that you listen to and just love the first time through but by the third spin you’re just bored. The difference is often some mystery. Albums with no mystery are the easiest thing to like right away, but it only peaks your interest because there’s not much to ponder,” says Lebo. “The ones that you put on and can’t figure out immediately are the ones that end up being your favorite albums.”

“I was sitting around my house the other day, listening to music, and the player went onto the next album in alphabetical order and it turned out to be an ALO album we’d done in college. It came on and I hadn’t listened to it for years and years, or even thought about it. It was cool but it’s NOTHING like what I’d make now. It was fun to listen to this band that I barely related to though. Had we not gone into the studio that weekend to make this music it wouldn’t exist, and I thought it was cool. I could never make this music today,” says Lebo. “It’s so important to just go and record music. A year later it’s not going to be true to what it was at the time. It’s kind of a life lesson beyond music. Everyone has ideas but there are few people good at manifesting their ideas quickly. Sometimes you’re driving down the street and you have this idea and let it go. Then, a year later you see it out in the world – somebody had the same idea and made it real. Just think of all the ideas that never get to be real because you left it as a thought in your head. It’s kind of your responsibility, in a way, to the world, to your place in the world, to make your ideas real.”

The questionnaire used in this feature was taken from James Lipton’s TV program “Inside the Actors Studio” and inspired originally by the Proust Questionnaire.

ALO tour dates available here.

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