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Tortoise shook up their recording process to create
the new Standards.
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James Brown may have the Show Business belt firmly in his grasp, but the members of Tortoise are closing in fast on the title of Hardest Working Men in Indie Rock.
Consider some of the bands that lay claim to the Chicago quintet when they take a busman's holiday away from Tortoise: Isotope 217, Chicago Underground, The For Carnation, Brokeback, Eleventh Dream Day, Pullman. That doesn't begin to address the production work, the sessions, the film scoring and the touring that accompanies their individual projects. Their planning calendars must look like a graduate student's physics notes.
"We know that Tortoise is only going to be busy for six months every two years," says Doug McCombs, Tortoise co-founder and bassist. "We can always work around each others' things."
McCombs is one of the busiest of Tortoise's members during his off-time, as he continues to serve as bassist for Eleventh Dream Day (a position he's held since joining the band in 1985), Brokeback and Pullman, in both recording and touring capacities. He understands how it must look from the outside, but to him it's not really very unusual.
"There was a point, and I think it happened for all of us at the same time, where we just decided that the only thing that we wanted to do was be musicians," says McCombs from Tortoise's New York sound check. "We were prepared to have day jobs if it was necessary to support ourselves playing music, but at the same time not wanting to have that distraction, and just be able to concentrate on playing music all the time. Right now it's working. We can make a living doing this. It might not always be that way, but, at least for now, we're all busy. And we're all in a particularly creative period when we have enough ideas to sustain all of this activity."
Tortoise began in 1990 when McCombs and drummer John Herndon joined forces to play together and to express their love for Jazz and Prog Rock over a hushed Alt Rock melancholy. The band's numerous singles and trio of full-length releases have all benefited from Tortoise's rather organic process in the studio, as the band members assemble every couple years with song fragments in hand that can be shaped and massaged by the entire band.
For their fourth album, the recently released Standards, the band decided to shake things up slightly as Tortoise began the cycle of coming up with material for the next album. Instead of using the studio as a sixth member to manipulate and refract the band's disparate sounds into its trademarked jammy and meandering songs, Tortoise made the decision to write ahead of entering the studio and to actually rehearse the material prior to recording. It was a radical departure for the band that was different in almost as many ways as it was the same.
"Even that left us with some unfinished songs," says McCombs of the rehearsal experiment. "We did try to work them out in the practice space, and a little bit by playing them live. They were still relatively unfinished until we sat down in the studio and worked them out. But it helped a lot. It helped us push them into a direction."
With Standards doing steady business and garnering positive press, Tortoise's roadwork looms large over the next few weeks as the band hits the highway to support the album. Having already completed a European jaunt, and with the U.S. tour just underway, the spring and summer are fairly well mapped out for the band. Some possible South American, Australian and Japanese dates will precede a couple of well-deserved months off.
Of course, it would only be a vacation if the band actually took time off, but it would appear that each member of Tortoise has some project that will involve them and presumably chew more time off the clock. With so many projects and sonic directions, it would seem difficult to keep all of the different players and sounds in order, and even more difficult to segregate the songs and ideas from one band to the next. McCombs says that, as time has gone by, all of the members have become a little better at compartmentalizing their songs and distinguishing a possible Tortoise song, as distinct from a project song.
"Sometimes it may be obvious that a song is really appropriate for one band or another," says McCombs. "Some of us -- mostly me and Jeff Parker -- do things more compositionally. As time goes on, I get better insight into things I write that seem appropriate for one band or another. In the past, it might not have been as obvious. I might have tried a few different things with a few different groups, until I figured out which ones it was working best with. Maybe it never worked."
As for the material that winds up in the Tortoise slot, McCombs notes that now, unlike the early days of the band, the songwriting is much more communal.
"Over the course of 10 years, we started to learn each other's strengths and weaknesses, but that's just a matter of being together as a group for that long," says McCombs. "The actual concept is still in place, which is that we operate as a democracy, and each person is invited and encouraged to bring material to the group. We try to make that seed material as unformed as possible so that each member of the group can have an opportunity to work their own ideas into it. Each song is as much of a collaborative effort as possible. We try to discourage the fully written music and encourage the collaborative aspect of it."
McCombs divides his non-Tortoise time between the well-established and well-regarded Eleventh Dream Day, the sparse and airy delicacy of Brokeback, and the rootsy acoustic (and now electric) Pullman, the latter two of which will have new albums out this year, and which will presumably tour in support. It seems nearly impossible that McCombs can accomplish so much in a single year, and yet he's making plans for his two summer off-months and beyond to be spent with his other musical concerns. It is, by its nature, less than the wildly spontaneous act of crazed Alternative rockers.
The end of this Tortoise tour will find the band members comparing notes as to all of their side projects, and coming to a consensus about when the right time to reconvene for the next phase of Tortoise activity.
"We learned that the hard way," says McCombs about the long term scheduling. "We had opportunities to do stuff, and we couldn't do it because we were going to be gone or whatever. We missed opportunities to go somewhere cool, things that we could've done three years ago that we didn't get to do until last year. We've learned to plan ahead."
In the end, Doug McCombs explanation for all of his outside band activities that stand toe-to-toe with all of his equally time-consuming responsibilities for Tortoise over the past decade.
Without a trace of irony, McCombs says, "I just try to stay busy."
TORTOISE perform at the Southgate House on Friday with U.S. Maple.
