On September 25th 2008 The Daily Californian published an interview with Bo Koster, done by Rajesh Srinivasan. The original interview can be found here.
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My Morning Jacket, who played at the Greek Theatre on Friday, have become one of the America's most popular indie bands. The Daily Cal phoned the band's keyboardist Bo Koster to talk touring, success and the mixed reviews that the band's latest Evil Urges received.
Daily Californian: How has tour been so far? You just finished the first leg of it, and you're coming here to Berkeley on the 19th. How have the songs played out on stage?
Bo Koster: Good. It's been interesting seeing the reactions to older songs and new songs and stuff like that. Seems like the band is in a good groove � I don't know, it's hard to say. Are you talking about fan reaction, or what it's like for us five musically?
DC: Just the experience of playing these songs on stage. I know you played a lot of Evil Urges in South by Southwest, but now that it's been released all the fans know the songs. How is that experience, and how are they reacting to the new sound?
BK: It's such an interesting phenomenon after you put out a new record. I remember when Z came out, the first tour that we did was the month right after it came out. It came out in October and we toured right away, like the day the record came out. I remember the Z songs being a little like � not as spectacular as maybe they would have been later on, or not as energetic because people were still getting used to the Z sound, whereas It Still Moves and At Dawn tracks like "Phone Went West" and "One Big Holiday" were really like the big crowd-pleasers. But when we went back the second time when Okonokos came out, it seemed like the Z stuff had kind of taken the place of the older stuff, where people had really gotten used to the songs. But this time, with Evil Urges, it seems like from the first couple shows, you hear people singing along to the new songs in different ways. Then there are some songs where it seems like half the crowd is singing along, half the crowd is just listening. It's been a little weird. It's been a hybrid kind of reaction to the new record. In some ways it's been received the most quickly and energetically since I joined the band, but in other ways it's also been divided a little bit. It's interesting.
DC: I noticed that when Evil Urges came out, it came out to fairly positive reviews, but unlike Z there were actually some negative reviews out there. Z was universally acclaimed-I think the Metacritic rating is 90 out of 100, which is one of the highest scores on the entire site. As a band, how do you react to that? What is the feeling like when you release a record that is immediately lauded, and the next album is received in a different manner?
BK: Well, it's so hard, because when you play in a band it's supposed to be pretty much a creative, artistic endeavor. It's hard to care what people think, especially critics, because that's a dangerous path to go down: to start really being concerned what critics say and so forth. At the same time, you want people to like what you do, so it's a crazy double-edged sword. When Z came out it was like, "We don't care what the critics think!" And then all the critics loved it. It's hard not to put that in your hat and wear that as a feather in your cap and be like, "Wow, we made a record and all the critics loved it." Then when they don't like it, you're like, "What do they know?!" [laughs] You know what I mean? It's been interesting to see the different reactions. You get "I love it!" or "I hate it!" There haven't been a lot of mediocre reviews, which is interesting. You normally see a lot of those 3-star, this-is-a-good-record, ho-hum, doesn't-blow-me-away, doesn't-bother-me kind of reviews. Seems like with Evil Urges, people either really love it and applaud the new direction or are like "I don't get it � 'Highly Suspicious' is weird." But it's kind of interesting, and I think it's good. It's good to elicit any sort of reaction, whether it's good or bad.
DC: Would you rather make a record that got those mediocre reactions, or would you rather have a record like this, where it's some really positive and some really negative, but either way you're evoking a strong reaction?
BK: Yeah, I prefer the latter personally. What's the point of making the same record over and over again? That's weird. That's chasing something you can never achieve again.
DC: My Morning Jacket has always made an effort to make every record sound as different as possible.
BK: Yeah.
DC: You joined the band in 2004, and the record before Z was It Still Moves, and Z sounded nothing like It Still Moves. It was really an amazing thing to hear a band change direction so quickly and progress like that in just a couple years.
BK: Yeah, I think it's good that albums can stand alone, by themselves. I think maybe that's a blessing and a curse for our band, because I feel like if you listen at each album in a vacuum � I think they work. It's so hard when people ask questions about the band. I'm afraid if I say "I like it, I love being in the band, I think we're awesome!" it sounds like you're being cocky or whatever, but I wouldn't be in the band if I didn't love it. And I think that The Tennessee Fire and At Dawn and It Still Moves-those records that I wasn't really a part of-I think they stand on their own as records. If you've never heard At Dawn before, and you put on The Tennessee Fire, it would stand alone as a good piece of work. Same with It Still Moves. I believe that with Evil Urges as well. I think that that's maybe the conundrum of the band as it grows older: There's these unrealistic expectations by people. I'm guilty of doing that too. I'll love one part of a band, and they'll come out doing something new, and I'll be so biased to what they had done before that I can't really appreciate what they've done new right away. I feel like with five different-sounding records, you have five different sets of expectations now. It's only natural for people to be taken aback a little bit if it doesn't have the reverb of At Dawn. But I'm sure those people are going to fall in love with "Highly Suspicious" and "Touch Me Pt. 2" and they're going to want that every time out. So you can't please everybody, you just kind of do what you can and try to be honest.
DC: But as a whole, My Morning Jacket are getting more and more popular. I believe Evil Urges hit 9 on the Billboard charts. How are you receiving this difference, where you're becoming more popular? Is it a blessing or is it a curse?
BK: I'm in such a vacuum of playing shows and doing band stuff that it's hard to kind of reflect on that at the moment. I think the more people that get exposed to your music the better. It's hard to say. There's a certain kind of like middle ground that happens with popular bands. You see things that are really popular are fairly inoffensive and fairly without risk. Things that automatically do well seem to travel that middle of the road [commercially]. I don't want to mention any names, but you can look at records that have sold a ton. They're kind of that middle of the road. It's an interesting place, because I don't know if we'll ever really fit into a place like that. I don't know if we'll ever do that because I think we'll always be kind of changing. It's up to a lot of factors: Jim's songwriting and stuff like that, and the band's direction and how we grow. I'm not quite sure I know what the popularity means at this point. It's nice to have some success, it's nice to be able to play for a lot of people and nice to be able to play a big rock show, where you can just like have three or four or five or 10 thousand people know your songs and they're singing along. That's kind of the power of rock 'n' roll. And you can still have that power if you're playing to 50 people or 10 people that you can have with 5000, but it's kind of nice to be able to do both.
DC: I just saw Feist a couple of months ago. I don't know if you keep up with Feist's music�
BK: Yeah, I love her.
DC: Earlier when she was here she would play in smaller clubs in San Francisco, but when she came to the Greek Theatre it was a completely different experience.
BK: It's interesting. Certain styles of music work better in small places or in big places. We have songs that are totally conducive to big stadiums and crowds. And we have other songs that are really conducive to a tiny acoustic setting.
DC: Jim James said that with Evil Urges the band was trying to mold the sound off their live shows. So are these new songs made for the stage?
BK: Yeah, I think we always try to play as much live in the studio as we can to create that kind of energy and magic of the live performance. I think that's important, because you can play the same song 15 or 20 times in a row and take the drum track one time and the guitar track another time and the vocal track from another time and put them all together and build it like a building, but I think you lose that certain kind of intangible, unexplainable magic that can happen during a take. Maybe the take isn't perfect, but it has just that certain kind of magic. So I think we're always chasing that in the studio. But at the same time, on this record, each song, we took a different approach. With Joe [Chiccarrelli], we kind of tried to approach each song differently even with the drum sounds. If you listen to certain tracks, the drums are super tight and they're compressed and tiny, like a Radiohead record, and on other tracks they're big and boomy and have a lot of cymbals crashing. We tried to kind of approach each song separately and treat it as its own entity. Like "Touch Me Pt. 1," we almost kind of tried to play a drum machine like thing with that song, even though we did play it live. Patrick and Tom did a good job wearing all those different hats, which wasn't an easy thing to do in a four-week period. But it worked out pretty well.
DC: Which song do you feel most attached to on the record?
BK: There's a few of them I really like. I guess "Smokin' from Shootin'" is the one that I really like. I really liked "Wordless Chorus" on the last record and I like "Smokin' from Shootin'" on this record. I can't say why exactly. It was kind of something that came up at the last minute and it had an interesting feel to me with that kick drum going with the lyrics and the awkward kind of part at the beginning of the song. The verses are kind of � not stale, but very sterile � kind of methodical. And then the end, when it kicks in, it's just this huge kind of orchestral thing.
DC: When you listen to a My Morning Jacket song, do you hear the entire song or do you hear specific instruments or do you focus on one thing? Paul McCartney was asked a question like this during "The Beatles Anthology"�
BK: Oh yeah.
DC:�and he said he heard both the overall sound and the different elements.
BK: It goes through different stages for me. I think when you work on creatively on something, it's easy to get stuck in the minutia of it all, or details. You all of a sudden start hearing things that you wouldn't normally hear if you approached it with an open mind or a clean plate. When I get the demos from Jim, I try to listen to them from a total blank slate, like a kid-like state, and just enjoy it. I really just try to hear the song for what it is and enjoy it and not judge it � and see what it makes me feel. Then I'll sit down at the piano with the demo and just tinker a little around, or maybe I'll just listen to it on my iPod on walks and stuff. When we go into the studio it gets a little bit more clinical, sometimes for good reasons and bad reasons. Sometimes I can be a little bit too much of a perfectionist in the studio and that can take away from hearing the thing as a whole. But once we get done with it, I don't listen to it for months. I don't think I've listened to Evil Urges since we've mixed it. I do hear a couple songs on the radio now and again, and it's interesting. It's kind of like looking at a photo from high school. It feels like so long ago that we did that.
DC: Do you go back to listen to Z or records that were produced before you joined the band?
BK: When I first joined the band, I listened to those records quite a bit. I really fell in love with At Dawn and The Tennessee Fire when I first joined the band. It was weird. I could kind of distance myself from the whole thing. It didn't feel like it was band I was part of when I listened to the records. When we played them live, I felt like I was part of it. But it was nice to sit back and get into the heart and soul of the music at the time. I listened to Z maybe once in the last year. I have it on vinyl-I bought a new record player, so I listen to Z on vinyl. I like listening to records on vinyl at this point; it's the only way I want to listen to music. But yeah, I don't know. It's hard when you're so close to it. It's hard to be objective, and I guess I'd rather listen to other stuff than listen to my own stuff. I do once we first do it, and I'm really into it, but for the most part, I don't.
DC: I was reading an interview that Jim James did with the A.V. Club yesterday. They pointed out that most of the media attention was focused on him. He said that it was unfortunate, because the sound has always been a reflection of the entire group, not merely him. How do you feel about most of the media attention being focused on Jim James?
BK: Personally, I think it's warranted to a certain extent. He writes all the songs. He's kind of the creative leader of the band. We fill some gaps here and there, but the creative inspiration, the words, the melodies-all that stuff is coming from Jim. And he's an amazing guy to work with, all that considered. Because if you or I had a band, and we wrote all the song and all the lyrics and it was our creative inspiration that was the result of all the songs � it would be hard to share that with people and then have them take it and change maybe what you originally thought it was going to sound like and still be open and retain control over your art and inspiration. In that sense, it's Jim's thing, so we're just kind of members of the team. I always think of basketball when people talk about this stuff-he's definitely our MVP, our LeBron James or Michael Jordan. The other pieces are important. I'm not to belabor that Patrick [Hallahan's] drumming isn't important to the band and Carl [Broemel] and Tom [Blankenship], and I hope I contribute some stuff and help him achieve his inspiration as best as he can. I think it's healthy in the band to know your role and not let your ego get in the way of the music. So that kind of stuff doesn't bother me at all. Sometimes I feel weird even answering questions about the band, even though I've been part of it for almost five years now. I always just feel like I'm playing my role, so to speak.
On the other hand, if you put five guys together and play music, it's going to sound one way, because there's the energy between those five brains and five hearts and bodies. If you take away one piece and put another piece in, it could be drastically different. You can't really put your finger on why. Playing music my whole life, I've played with so many combinations of people, and each group of people creates this sum of all parts. It's like if you're in a relationship with a girl, it will never be the same way it was with other relationships. So it's totally different when you put two people together and they're in a relationship, so it's also the same way with five guys playing music. It's just a unique thing. In that sense, yeah, we're a part of it.
DC: When you came in with Carl Broemel in 2004, it was definitely a different sound.
BK: Yeah, it's an interesting question and interesting discussion. You don't really know how you're effecting-maybe you're not, maybe you are, maybe just the fact you're sitting in a room with somebody and you're like "I love that!"� that can like change the whole direction of something because he's like "Oh you do?" "Oh you love that? "OK let's follow that path," or if somebody plays something and everybody's just like "Oh that's cool..." and you kind of don't go down that path. It's kind of an intangible thing. We don't really talk too much about music. We do a lot of like playing something, and we'll look at each other like "Hmm?" and the other guy is like "Yeah!" or when you look at somebody and you're like "Huh? What do you think?" and they're like "Ehh�" and you just kind of move on. That's kind of the way we work. We're less verbal than most bands.
DC: What direction is My Morning Jacket going to take? Do you have any idea of what direction you're going in or is it something that just happens?
BK: It's more of something that just happens. We don't talk about the direction of the band musically. I don't think we've ever talked about it. I think it starts with Jim's inspiration, and I've heard him say recently-I don't know if I was in an interview with him-but he said something like, "The songs come out of me, and those are the songs that come out of me." We follow that inspiration. Then when we get together we see where we can make it. I think he describes it as he bears the fetus, and we make them into real boys. [laughs] In that sense, I don't think we'll ever talk about it. I think the one thing that we try to maintain is open-mindedness and a pure love for music at its root. We'll always just try to make good music in any way we can, in any style or any form, and be open to anything, just making quality stuff. Thinking about how people will react to the music, or thinking about we should go this direction ... I think that is stuff that gets in the way of making music. It's more just about going with your heart and your gut and being open to it and letting it flow.
