The Shore : Interview

After releasing an EP and a full-length album in 2004 and headlining a series of dates at high-profile venues like The Troubadour and The Knitting Factory, The Shore is hard at work on their next album, with several new songs already posted to their Myspace site. Since releasing its last album, The Shore has gone through some big changes of late, leaving Maverick Records and adding its touring guitarist Wayne Faler as an official fourth member of the group. Mish Mash recently caught up with lead singer Ben Ashley, bassist Kyle Mullarky, drummer John Wilmer, and Faler to talk about their affinity for Captain Beefheart, how to properly drive over speed bumps, how old they really are, and why Ashley will probably never forget Brian Wilson’s birthday.

MishMash: It seems like there was a split in the critical response to your last album, in terms of some aligning you more with Britpop and some people aligning you more with older Buffalo Springfield-type stuff. Do you feel like you lean one way or the other, or do you feel like there’s a way to reconcile that?

Ben Ashley: Yeah, we don’t want to reconcile any of that. That’s kind of where we collectively come from – both the new stuff and the old stuff. We like older American music, as well as modern British, as well as…you know.

MM: What other kind of American stuff?

BA: I mean, as far as the 60s stuff, like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, and just all that kind of California country pop stuff.

MM: There’s a little bit of Bread in there, too.

Wayne Faler: I like Bread a lot.

BA: We love Bread.

MM: I heard a lot of Bread in there.

BA: “Waiting for the Sun”, in particular. That kind of 70s America and AM Gold stuff was an influence to a degree. But also newer American stuff. When we were all young, we listened to indie rock. I mean, you go through so many phases in life and music just kind of goes with that. So it’s all in there.

MM: Well, it’s funny because I grew up listening to Bread, because my dad listened to it a lot. Then you go and do your own thing – in high school or whatever. But then I kind of came back to it. They came out with some anthology or something several years back and I was listening to it and I thought I really like this stuff.

BA: Yeah, there’s some really good stuff. Actually, one of the guys in Bread produced Captain Beefheart. And some of us like Captain Beefheart. He actually wrote a song for them. So, those guys knew what was up.

MM: You’ve also talked about bringing back the old ways of emotional, soulful music.

BA: Well, yeah, if you look at any sort of popular music these days, it seems to be really absent. There’s no emotion, there’s no feeling – at least when I turn on the radio, I don’t feel anything that makes sense to me. It’s like saccharin. When I said that, I was referring to the fact that we want people to feel music and be passionate about it in the way that they either are with new bands or old bands. But we want to be part of that collective feeling.

MM: Who else do you feel is doing that?

BA: As far as American bands – Wilco or Doves or Spiritualized. I mean, it’s like a religious experience, you know, for the fan or the listener. So I guess we’re trying to go after it in the same way.

MM: Most accounts of the way the band has developed creatively talk about how you guys had an instant chemistry. Is that pretty accurate?

BA: Well, we were lovers for quite awhile.

MM: That always helps.

BA: It’s just like any band. You get together some cats that don’t make sense to you, and other guys…like that (he snaps).

John Wilmer: It’s kind of like a language. With like minds, there’s not much of ‘No, no. Don’t do that.’

Kyle Mullarkey: It’s moving forward and not standing still. When you get in a situation where everyone goes in the same direction, at a steady pace, and there’s not too many speed bumps or roadblocks -

BA: It’s not tug-of-war.

KM: So that’s what we’ve been striving to do forever with this band. Make it go creatively and run smoothly. I don’t slow down for speed bumps. (laughs) The faster you go, the smoother they are.

BA: He gets great distance.

MM: Listening to the album – I’ve listened to it a hundred times now because I really do like it – I haven’t pinned down exactly what it is I like about it. It’s like you were saying – there’s a spiritual, positive message that’s more visceral. I’m actually anxious to hear you guys play live, because I’ve heard a lot of stuff, and read a lot of stuff, about how your live performances offer something a little bit different. Obviously live performances in general are a different experience, but do you feel like there’s something that comes out in them that you couldn’t do in the studio?

BA: For me, it’s a little more of a psychedelic experience. Because on the record we have so many strings, and a lot of keyboards, which we aren’t normally able to have on stage.

KM: The other thing is that in the spot of the record, everything’s just right there, you know, perfect the way it should be, but live it’s just like, you do whatever you want within that box of the song. When you’re a musician and you play the same song a hundred times, every time it’s different. So it’s one of those things: the time that you play a good show, you get a song that’s different and totally comes out of what it was before to the listener to what it is now. And to a whole different experience, as far as their vision of that song, their perspective, or what they thought of it in the first place.

BA: Well, just the arrangement changes, too. And tones change, rigs change. Every musician I know is constantly changing gear and evolving in that way, too. So, it’s always going to sound a lot different live. And that could be better or worse – depending on the listener. And I think musicians have good nights and bad nights, too. I mean, sometimes you’re listening to the drummer…sometimes you’re not at all. But you’re sort of there.

JW: And to see that we are true performers. That we really know how to play our instruments. There’s a lot of trickery in the studio. There are some drummers who can’t play. There’s a lot of doctoring. Our record’s got some good production, but when you actually see us and go ‘Wait a minute, this is the real deal.’

BA: Some people think we play to a click track or have samples running -

JW: Because I wear headphones to protect my hearing, so often people think that I’m listening to a click track or playing the backing tracks, but we’ve never played to a click. We’ve never played backing tracks. We saw Coldplay – after they released their record, they did a live thing on MTV and our jaws were dropping because they are such good performers. There’s no smoke and mirrors. I mean, you can play or you can’t.

BA: I’ve also seen them play a bad show. (all laugh)

JW: Well, the shows I’ve seen, they actually were really good. Maybe they’re getting better.

MM: So, you guys make a conscious choice not to try to constrain yourselves by the recording that you’ve already done, but just to be more fluid.

BA: Absolutely.

JW: To be more in the moment, with the people.

MM: Because not every band does that. I’ve gone to shows where the band not only plays the recording as you hear it on the album, but they played the whole album in -

BA: Oh, in consecutive order?

MM: Yeah. (Ben laughs) So, I could have stayed home to do this.

WF: I feel like a lot of bands do that right when the album comes out ’cause they’re so stoked on it and it takes a lot of time putting in sequence. So, especially if you’re trying to get a vibe across. Just go with the work that you’ve already done for a year in the studio. But eventually you get tired of playing that song. By the 50th time, you’re just like ‘Alright, can’t play that song anymore! So let’s put this one in. let’s change – ‘

BA: We’ve always tried to mix it up, as far as the order -

KM: I don’t think we’ve ever once played our whole record, all the way through.

BA: Not in the order, at least. (he laughs)

KM: Not in the order.

MM: That makes sense, because certainly a lot goes in to constructing an album and the narrative that you’re creating with the order of the songs. But it seems like as you become comfortable with that, you start experimenting with different kinds of narratives -

BA: Right. That’s where the magic really starts happening…live.

JW: We’ve made up many songs live. In between segues, we’ve done -

KM: Yeah.

JW: A riff starts, and all of a sudden, three minutes later -

BA: We’re off to Jupiter.

JW: The bands we’ve been opening for have noticed. ‘What was that thing you guys did…?’

BA: We don’t know -

JW: We’ve never heard it before. We made it up. (all laugh)

BA: We turn into the Grateful Dead. We just start flying off.

MM: I’m assuming you guys have been involved in some other bands, other projects before coming together on this. What are some of those projects and how do they inform what you’re doing now?

BA: Well, we all worked with the Moody Blues for -

JW: For 25 years.

BA: (laughing) For 25 years.

MM: You look great for your age.

BA: Thanks. They pickled me.

JW: Ben and I played together before. Just in an L.A. band we know. Whatever.

BA: A bunch of bands you’ve never heard of -

JW: Yeah, yeah.

BA: – that lasted a month…or two.

JW: I was in a band with the producer of The Shore. Rick Parker and I were in a band three years before we kind of called it quits. We’d released a record. Nothing really happened.

KM: It’s a lot of that that happens, you know. You get out and you try and you do the record and you do all the touring and all the legwork and then it just goes nowhere.

JW: And, you know, we were good enough friends. There was no hard feelings. It was just back to the drawing board. He ended up producing a record for his wife – Miranda Lee Richards. And when that record was released, he called me up to do the tour drumming. And then somewhere in between, (indicating Ben and Kyle) he had met them – in between the Miranda tours – and said ‘I met this kid and he’s unbelievable. Best thing I’ve heard for a long time. You better show up to the studio. You gotta hear him.’ He’s like ‘I found the singer we should have had in our last band.’ But, unfortunately we found him late. But he brought me into it. That’s how I entered the picture.

MM: That’s very cosmic.

JW: It is very cosmic.

BA: That’s the way it goes.

MM: Actually, the name of the band comes from some Carl Sagan quote.

BA: Because we’re living on the edge of the cosmic shore.

JW: Is that the very first episode of Cosmos?

BA: Yeah, it’s the very first…chapter, I guess. That’s about as much as I’ve read, too.

MM: Does the name of the band, where it comes from, have an impact on the vision of the music?

BA: I think, subliminally, it’s got to affect us somehow. I mean, I never consciously thought too much of it, but it sits there in the back of our heads, I suppose.

WF: I think it’s pretty California. I mean, it might be pretty apparent when we go into another town. It’s like ‘Oh, those guys are from California.’

JW: Or the Jersey shore. We get a lot of Jersey people saying ‘Are you guys from the Jersey shore?’ But then they take one look at us, and we’re Cali.

MM: Right, there’s nothing Jersey about you.

BA: Or Joisey would be the proper way to say it.

MM: What was the songwriting schedule for the album? Were the songs written specifically for this album, or were you drawing on songs you’d been writing for a while?

BA: About half the record, I already had. And then the rest of it I wrote as we were working on the record. And how it worked, on this record at least, was I would just write the songs quickly on acoustic guitar and then bring them in. And then we’d arrange them and color it up. I just had the blueprints. They’re the builders.

MM: Do you find that the songs change significantly? (to Ben) If you lay out the blueprints and then (to John) you come up with a drum line, and then that changes -

BA: It depends, yeah. Sometimes it’s plain as day, ready to go.

JW: It depends on how strong your opinion is of what you need to do with the song.

BA: Yeah.

JW: If you’re just like ‘I got this cool idea. What do you guys think?’ Or if you come in and are like ‘Okay, were doing this!’ It depends where you are with the song.

BA: It’s about being diplomatic about it.

MM: You’ve talked about the Smile album, which I think is an incredible album. I’m a huge Brian Wilson/Beach Boys fan.

BA: Yeah, we’re fucking nuts. My dad has the same birthday as him.

MM: I thought it was interesting what you said about the bootlegs still being something -

BA: Yeah. I mean, I love the new record. I got the DVD of it, too, and it makes me feel amazing every time I listen to it -

MM: But there’s a always a feeling of somebody singing Beach Boys songs.

BA: Yeah, I mean, I really miss Dennis and Carl and Mike’s voices. They’re just a lot more -

MM: Well, Carl’s voice is incredible.

KM: Especially at that point, too. After Pet Sounds.

BA: He really came into it there.

KM: That was his prime, probably.

WF: Whenever old bands do that – like when they did the Beatles Anthology thing, and they finished those songs, it was so different.

BA: I still liked them, yeah.

WF: Yeah, they were good in a different way.

MM: Well, and his voice has obviously aged a lot. But still, the magic of that music comes out.

BA: I went and saw that Pet Sounds tour at the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago -

MM: I saw that.

BA: – and we were all crying in the back, just going ‘Oh my god! It’s live!’

MM: I saw him at the Disney Hall.

BA: Oh! You saw that show? I think we were on tour when that happened or something. I remember being really bummed that I couldn’t see that tour.